Friday Fabulous Flower - early bloomers, but very cheerful

 Here is another harbinger of spring.  The Phactors have many dozens of bulbs in our gardens, many of them varieties of Narcissus, and most of these are fairly good at needing fairly little attention.  Some have the yellow perianth and corona that we would call "daffodils", but others are more exotic with orange colored flower parts that are not necessarily in evenly spaced whorls.  

Friday Fabulous Flowers - Peak Blue

 

Once you get  a bed of Scilla siberica  established you will basically have it forever.  Someone planted some of these little bulbs sometime during the last eon and then ignored them, allowing them to continue to seed themselves until the entire lawn is blue with their flowers.  The first bulbs to bloom were back in early April  but then it took another 3 and a half weeks for them to reach peak flowering, peak blue.  This is a true harbinger of spring.  Unfortunately it will takes several more weeks for the leaves to die back, before what passes for a lawn can be mowed.  The leaves contain a sort of mucilage and if mowed while still fresh the result is a green slime. To rid a garden bed of the bulbs just about requires than the soil be sifted though a screen to remove all the little bulbs because the blue can overwhelm other small plants like some of Mrs. Phactor's species tulips which are all a bit on the small side.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Cactus

OK in an effort to get a day/date disconnect resolved, TPP thought why not do something unusual like do a FFF on an actual Friday.  People won't expect that.  One of our favorite house plants is in full bloom and it is so very cheerful,  Hatiora salicornioides.  This is a epiphytic or orchid cactus that used to be in the genus Rhipsalis.   The specific epithet is sort of interesting because it means it looks like a well-known halophyte Salicornia.  This particular plant has gotten big, probably 50 lbs big and the largest and oldest stems are quite woody.  At any rate there are hundreds of drooping stems and each one bears a golden yellow flower at its terminus.  Each segment has a slender portion and then a thick succulent portion.  

Now here's an image of some Salicornia growing in a salt marsh at low-tide.  It doesn't look like this very much except for the many segments and the succulence.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Last Magnolia of the Season

It has been a pretty good year for Magnolias; no late frosts and plenty of rain, almost too much.  When the gardens finally get to June, the Magnolias are just about done flowering, except for the sweet bay, Magnolia virginiana.  In our area this species never grows into a full-fledged tree and generally grows as a largish shrub. Some genotypes have trouble with the winter cold so choose your nursery well, preferably to your north.  Ours does not produce a big floral display, but rather a few flowers at a time, and you are more likely to notice their stunning fragrance than their visual display.  The floral odor is a sort of musky fruity fermenty mix that little beetles just love.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Crested Iris

Our gardens look pretty good right now. Lots of flowering shrubs, lots of wild flowers.  And sometimes little things tend to get overlooked like today's FFF.  This particular native plant has been in our garden several times, struggles, and then dies, and we replace it when opportunity allows.  It's tough to know what this particular plant needs/wants.  At present it is doing as well as ever in a corner of a front garden bed.  Sunny, but protected from afternoon heat; well-drained, but watered regularly; no competition (important TPP thinks); and lightly mulched.  Why bother?  Well, it's quite a lovely little thing, a small native, Iris cristata the crested iris.  The falls have a crest of tissue under the colored portion, this plant's alternative to a "beard" of hairs.  The whole plant is only a few inches tall and the flower about 1.5 inches in diameter. If you have luck with this species in your garden, let TPP know what you think it likes.

Friday Fabulous Flower - bloodroot

This is a totally up to date posting because bloodroot is flowering presently in our woodland gardens, a bit late as it usually flowers in March, and without any doubt this is a favorite simply because it is so dang cute.  For the longest time only one small clump of bloodroot grew in our shady areas.  And the clump got pretty big, then after a number of years, bloodroot is suddenly coming up almost everywhere.  Apparently ant seed dispersers are doing their job.  
It also is an early flowering species, a true harbinger of spring, although another wild flower has that name locked down.  Sanguinaria canadensis is a member of the poppy family and like many members it has colored latex, in this case a bright orange-red.  It's possible that the name derives from the old doctrine of signatures, the blood color a sign or signature of the creator to indicate the plant's use or value to humans.  Lots of plant names bear witness to such beliefs.  

Friday fabulous flower - Harbinger of spring

The weather is not exactly warm, but all things being relative, it's a cool, sunny day.  Just the right sort of weather for early spring bulbs.  Little patches of spring flowering bulbs pop up all over our gardens in a very delightful way and most were sort of volunteers anyways in that we didn't plant them, but there they are.  Since our little patches are all asexually propagated from an original progenitor, they all have the same flower color within the patches.  These are very early Crocus, a name derived from and old middle eastern name for saffron which comes from the three branched orange stigma of a fall blooming crocus.  Such bright clusters of color are terribly cheerful as spring slowly arrives.

Friday Fabulous Flowers - Snow drops

Here and there around our gardens are little clumps of early spring flowers, the ones that pop up and bloom anytime the temperature gets above freezing. The weather has be unsettled of late, rain and wind, so generally nasty.  How TPP managed to get a non-blurry image with the wind blowing except maybe taking the shot in between gusts.  So these little bulbs and flower stalks are only a few inches tall, but after a longish winter, they are very cheerful.  Freezing and even some late snow don't seem to bother them at all.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Flowering early?

The local fall weather was pretty mild and so our tropical houseplants stayed outside a bit later into the season than in the past.  And then November turns cold and includes several snow events (none really serious).  As if it isn't confusing enough a warm front moved into our region on Friday and the temps got very mild, while we got treated to thunderstorms and tornadoes.  Although tropical plants are often day neutral, the longer cool nights seem quite capable of inducing flowering in quite a few of our tropical house plants.  Both the so-called Christmas cactus and the Easter cactus promptly produced a huge flush of buds and began flowering. The induction period in most houses must take a bit longer such that the cacti more or less flower near their namesake holidays.  Now of course commercially glass houses can be manipulated to bring plants into flower at the appropriate season for sales.  But with house plants you take more or less what you get. So, yes, a Christmas cactus flowering some three weeks before Christmas.
Fridays have turned out to be pretty busy days in our semi-retired/retired lives and TPP if finding it tough to find time for blogging.  So please indulge the irregularities.

Friday Fabulous Flower - What the heck?

TPP has been in South Florida for one more look around before the area submerges.  Both McKee (Vero Beach) and Fairchild (Coral Gables) are botanical gardens worth visiting. But be warned traffic sucks in the entire Miami area.  As the climate there is subtropical, they can grow things we can't.  It had been quite awhile since TPP has seen this tree in flower.  It's pretty  spectacular (= fabulous) with dozens of inflorescences emerging from its massive trunk to produce these rather amazing-looking flowers. This is the nearly legendary cannonball tree, a reference to the fruits that quite resemble cannonballs.  Couroupita guianensis flowers almost look as though a sea anemone has taken up residence in the flower.  A ring of numerous, small anthers located around the pistil (note upper right where perianth and androecium have fallen off) produce fertile pollen, while this hood-like structure bears big anthers that make sterile pollen (a reward for bee pollinators). The  flowers are strongly scented at night and early in the day.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Tough little guys

This long cold spring had better make a turn for the better soon.  TPP estimates that flowering dates are now delayed nearly two weeks from average dates.  It was really cold last night, a good night for having beer & pizza with friends in a little old Italian bar/restaurant.  But TPP is getting seriously depressed about spring.  Today's FFF are tough little guys that handle snow and quite cold night time lows without showing any damage.  And are these cheerful enough for you?  This is one of the dwarf daffodil varieties, standing only 5-6 inches tall.  They form large dense clumps that just beg you to divide them after a few years.  They produce a lot of flowers and make a great low growing front border.  Right now this is just about all our gardens have going on.  They are also a nice contrast to the blue of the squills.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Crested Iris

One of the ways to get lots of plants in your yard is to find little places to stick in little plants.  This particular one has been difficult because it is so small, and the thin, wiry rhizomes are so shallow growing that the tree rats keep digging it up, except when growing in a rock garden situation.  This is Iris cristata, the crested iris, because it has crests on the outer tepals.  It's usually has a blue perianth; this is a white variant. Our wild-type blue one keeps getting dug by the above mentioned rats, and it has more striking markings and generally is prettier.  This plant stands about 3-4 inches tall at this stage, and it won't get markedly larger.  It's really a cute little thing, and if undisturbed it can spread into a decent sized mat.  It is easily overrun by weeds, and easily over buried with leaves, and easily over looked.  So it needs your help. This is a native of Eastern North America in somewhat open woodlands. 

Friday Fabulous Flower -Rue those anemones

Today's FFF is a great little plant (and here too), but really wish the taxonomists would leave the names alone, of course TPP can never remember if this was the rue anemone or the false rue anemone.  Sounds like which ever came first claimed dibs.  This particular variety 'Shoaf's double pink' hardly counts as a native, but it's terribly cute. In this case it means developmentally stamen primordia have switched to producing petal-like flower parts, so the flower has that "rose" look to it, rather than having a single perianth surrounding multiple stamens and pistils. And then both the foliage and perianth have a nice pink tint to add to the cuteness. 
When first teaching about spring flowers way back in the early 70s, this plant was Anemonella thalictroides, but this species has now been submerged into the genus Thalictrum, so it becomes Thalictrum thalictroides.  Thalictrum was the genus of meadow rues, and it would help if someone knew what rues were.  These are members of the buttercup family, not the Rutaceae, the rue family. So no help. Although now TPP bitterly regrets bringing this up. Soon you will get to see another rue anemone whose name has been changed too.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Pretty in pink - Loebner's Magnolia

Three years ago TPP got this Loebner's magnolia (Magnolia x loebneri) 'Leonard Messel' from a big-box end of season sale for $20. It was a great bargain, and in very good shape considering its pot confinement and summer vacation in the garden shop yard. The tree is now a bit over 7 feet tall and growing very well.  It's not quite as early to flower as one of its parents, the star magnolia, which allowed it to avoid this year's mid-March freeze with very little damage to its flowers.  Although some star magnolias are pink, TPP wonders if they have some hybrid ancestry? This one's flowers are definitely pink with fewer, broader, shorter tepals than star magnolias; quite handsome in our sea of blue. In terms of growth and foliage, it looks quite like its star magnolia parent.

Friday Fabulous Flower - dwarf daffodils

They are just so darned cute!  Just like the kittens of the spring gardens.  This particular daffodil or narcissus is only about 5-6" tall, but any variety under 10" is sort of a miniature.  Here's a link to several varieties of these little ones.  These (tete-a-tete) flower at about the same time as my earliest standard daffodils, but they make thick foot wide clusters in just a few years producing a large number of flowers.  You got to have these in the front of your garden beds.  Basically trouble free.  TPP is early this week because field work tomorrow.

Friday Fabulous Flower - HA Tropical Botanical Garden

OK, TPP admits to being a bit jaded about tropical ornamentals. So when you encounter something new especially it it's a bit different, then it's a great thing.  So here's the FFF from the Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Garden (see precious post for more info).  All the previous plants in this genus have been quite large herbs with big bright pink/purple inflorescences, and this species, presently unknown (Medinilla sp.) is small and charmingly delicate.  For the uninitiated this genus is in the Melastomaceae, the Melastoms, one of the easiest of families to recognize. The label was partly obscured so no idea even where this species comes from, but it isn't. M. speciosus of the Philippines. Any ideas out there??
The leaves were quite succulent almost hiding the characteristic leaf venation pattern, and usually when an inflorescence hangs down like this you think bat pollination, but these are not bat type flowers in any way.  Isn't this a pretty thing?  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Palm flowers

It's a gray day in late January, and for other reasons TPP is feeling a bit depressed. However, nothing cheers us up as much as flowers and it is a Friday.  Time for some tropical attitude adjustment!
When walking the forest trails in Costa Rica, every now and again you come across a snowfall, a white, snow covering you path. A palm flowered above you day/night before.  Palm flowers are small and numerous in general, in many palms a large inflorescence of many (hundreds) of flowers comes wrapped in bract. Although technically, subtending the inflorescence, in many palms the bract forms a canopy presumably shielding the flowers from the frequent rains. Palm flowers tend to be white or cream colored and they are usually fragrant with the odor often having musky overtones.  This particular palm, and without his trusty field notebook handy TPP fails to remember exactly which palm this is, fits most of the general palm flower characteristics.  Anyone recognize this palm?
Features of note: While the inside (upper surface) of the bract is smooth, the outside (under surface, up in this view) is extremely spiny and the spines are so sharp the weight of the bract is enough to inflict damage (handle with extreme care).
The primary floral visitors and presumed pollinators are stingless bees (wings folded over their backs); a few flies are also present. Usually after just a day, or a night the, perianths fall to make for the snowfall.
And don't you like the general tropical feel?  The green, the humidity, the foreign country?  Oops, bad thinking crept in a bit there at the end. 
Sorry, citizens of Earth who do not live in the USA. Today our country begins to inflict on everyone else The Donald, our would be dictator.  As for my fellow citizens we have no one to blame but ourselves. 
Now to upload an image and feel better.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Tropical fruit version

Spent an hour this morning cleaning off a large book shelf, a well built book shelf, ca. 1976.  Deciding what to discard, keep, and give away was a challenge such that the thought of drastically downsizing into a retirement flat is a horror nearly beyond comprehension. But you do find good things too, like pictures from long ago.  Here's a nice basket of tropical fruit, a gift on a trip to Thailand some 30 years ago and we still have the basket.  See if you can identify all five of the fruit.  And tell us how many you've actually eaten. Note in one case the seeds are eaten and the fruit discarded.

Friday Fabulous Flowers - Tropical Fruit - Jackfruit

Fruit are flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, so FFF is going to get stretched a bit. At no previous time have you had access to more produce more of the time than now. Just a few decades ago many fruits and vegetables were seasonal. Strawberries were available in June. The only lettuce available during the winter was iceberg head lettuce. Now people take year around strawberries for granted, and some of them, improved varieties, actually taste pretty good.
Now even some very exotic tropical fruits are showing up in our markets.  TPP has a long list of exotic fruits he's sampled over the years, but many of those do not travel well and are of dubious quality. Not too long back some lychee showed up that were actually edible; previously they were too old with dried brown skins, and rambutans have made it to markets too.  But what do most people know? 
The smaller yellow papaya that show up in our markets are generally under ripe and terrible; but the larger orange fleshed papayas (below center) are not too bad in some cases and actually taste OK.  Mrs. Phactor likes her passion fruits and mostly they are OK but 10 to 20 times more expensive than in the tropics, or when you have them growing on your back fence. Even when the skins are wrinkly, they may taste just fine.

Pomelos arrived 3-4 years ago. They look exactly like giant grapefruit, and this species, Citrus maxima, is one of the two parents of the hybrid that is grape fruit. The taste is like mild grapefruit, not quite so juicy, but not bitter at all. The fruit wall will peel away with some effort; it's rather thicker than grapefruit. The sections can be separated and peeled relatively easily (a long thin-bladed knife helps), and in SE Asia where it's native the peeled sections are eaten as a refreshing snack. Just last week pomelos were sitting next to grapefruits and had one nice little woman quite confused about which were the "large" grapefruit.
The two latest fruits to show up are pepinos and jack fruit.  Pepinos are a nightshade (Solanum muricatum) looking a little bit like a slightly larger pale, cream-colored plum (but pointy at one end) with purple streaks. The flesh is firm, somewhat melony, but with maybe eggplant highlights. The skin may be a bit bitter.  They have a small seedy core.  They taste OK, but are not one of TPP's favorites. 
The other newbie is Jackfruit (above right). They are a great big old fruit with a green-brown knobby skin, basically a giant tropical mulberry, a close relative of the historically more famous breadfruit (mutiny on the HMS Bounty).  The edible parts are a fleshy layer (aril?) around the rather large seeds, which also are used for some dishes in SE Asia, but TPP has never had the seeds.  No idea how good these jackfruit are having travelled from Central America or Mexico where they are grown now, but at a dollar a pound, it'd cost $20-25 to sample one and what a waste if you don't like them. Again not a TPP favorite, but some have been OK. Apparently they sell 2-3 a week at this market, probably to SE Asians delighted to see something familiar. If every one stops buying them, then they are truly no good, but TPP doesn't know anybody to ask. Any readers care to share their experiences?
Questions about exotic fruits can be sent along to TPP. 

Friday Fabulous Flowers - Reliables

OK it's a bright shiny new year 2017, so TPP wants to start out on the right note with a FFF posting that is only 2 days late.  For long time readers, sorry, we're revisiting some old favorites.  At any rate several of our long time tropical plants, ones that summer outside, tend to flower right around New Years, perhaps in response to the long nights.  They tend to be very cheerful and welcome additions to our holidays and some of these plants have been flowering for us every year for a couple of decades, or even more. 
The absolute best one is a bromeliad commonly called the Queen's tears. It's just so exotic.  It's been a FFF more than once, here and here. It displays such a unique combination of colors and in particular the green petals with a blue edge. They don't last long so you just have to enjoy them when they are present.
Another very cheerful winter flowering plant is an epiphytic tropical cactus.  And it's been a FFF before too.  The plant is quite large now and several hundred of these 1 cm long gold-yellow flowers is quite a display. This poor plant got savaged by some of our tree rats 2 years ago, but has quite recovered now. This is such an easy plant to grow, but while in a hanging pot, it's too heavy now for a ceiling hook, even a well secured one.