Last week I wrote about all the unseasonably early bloom times of many plants this year thanks to the record-setting mild winter and hot spring weather here in SoCal. With all the early blooming I have seen, there is one plant that has still managed to stay on schedule. It is the same plant that even after…
Back in 2007 I purchased a small seedling of a type of Jacaranda that I had never heard of before; I purchased it from XOTX-Tropico. I was told it had the darkest purple flowers of any of the Jacarandas, so of course I couldn’t pass it up. Once I got it home I checked on Google to…
In the summer of 2010 I went on a flowering tree buying spree. I wanted to add a few hard to find, but even harder to grow, flowering trees. One of the plants I acquired was a small Fernandoa magnifica that I purchased from Top Tropicals in Florida. Other than a few photos found on the Internet, not much…
We must be getting close to spring time. Like clockwork my Cymbidium orchids are in full bloom and one of the highlights of a garden in transition. The winter-flowering plants, like many of my succulents and aloes, have finished their show. I am still a few weeks away from the spring-flowering plants taking center stage. So…
‘Ohi’a lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) is the most common and variable of all native trees found in Hawaii. Because it is such an extremely variable plant, this plant in its native habit ranges from a large shrub to a towering tree that blooms in shades of red, yellow, orange, salmon, or even pink. I grow Metrosideros…
Today I was presented with some good news on the seed germination front. When I popped the lid on one of my germination chambers I found that my Radermachera ignea seeds had started to sprout. This is my third attempt to germinate seed of this beautiful tree. I believe the first two failures were due…
How can something as beautiful as Lobelia erinus be a weed? OK, so perhaps “Lobelia weed” was stretching it a bit, but based purely on the definition, Garden Lobelia is indeed a weed in my garden. Back in 2007 I picked up ten regular purple garden-variety Lobelia plants to add some color to an otherwise boring border….
One of the main reasons I started my blog was to introduce new plants to people and hopefully give them a few more brushes from which to paint their landscape. Back in the spring of 2007 I was lucky enough to purchase my first Meryta balansae. At the time no one was known to be…