Tropicals & Tender Perennials: Tropical Plants and Gardens #120, 4 by Hikaro_Takayama

Hikaro_Takayama wrote:
Dzzypxxy: I didn't know that Milkweeds of any kind grew in Florida... The one you have in your pic looks a lot like the local "Butterfly Weed" species... Three out of the four types of local milkweed grow at the place I'm living at now: Dogbane (a.k.a. White Milkweed), Common Milkweed and Swamp Milkweed.... They usually play host to multiple Monarch Butterfly caterpillars, some kind of Milkweed moth larva, Milkweed Bugs and Milkweed beetles.

Candela, your ginger's looking good. ;)

Anyways, I apologize for not posting the pics I've promised yet, but I've been busy spending quality time with my fiance. ;)

So, without further ado, here they are:

First is the Musa basjoo I got at my favorite local nursery last year (Snavley's Garden Corner), and re-potted. I was hoping to have a place purchased and moved into LAST summer, but that didn't happen, so I ended up overwintering it inside my computer room.

Second pic is two of my Rhodea japonica, a.k.a. Sacred Lilies. The leaf damage you see is NOT due to cold or insects, but rather rabbits munching on them during the worst part of winter. As you can see, they've managed just fine for the past 4-6 years outside around here (two of them are even starting to bloom).

Third pic is my one surviving Windmill palm (I thought I had two, but it looks like this is it). As you can see, it is getting entirely too much shade, yet it's trucking along nonetheless. If I can ever get it to set seed, I have a feeling people will pay good money for it since this particular plant is cast-iron tough to survive growing in this kind of climate with the level of neglect it's been subjected to over the past three years. I'll be potting it up soon, in anticipation of moving it to its new home.

Fourthly is a pic of the Yucca recurvifolia that I overwintered outside in a 3-gallon pot. The Y. Recurvifolia is on the Left... The Yucca on the right is some kind of weird, unidentified hybrid that I got from Brian Williams (if anyone remembers him around here) back in 2007. His father got it from some guy in Italy, and he thinks that it is a hybrid between Y. gloriosa and Y. Filamentosa or maybe Y. Aloifolia and Y. filamentosa... It definitely has attributes of both (i.e. stiff leaves with sharp points, but thready leaf margins, like Y. gloriosa, but it flowers in June, like Y. filamentosa)... Anyways, both those plants were in severe decline due to too much shade where I had them planted, but a soon as I dug them up and moved them to the pots and put them in the sun, they started growing like gangbusters.

Finally, here's a pic of my first Trifoliate Orange, which, again, you can see is growing in entirely too much shade. When I planted it in 2005, it was along the edge of a sunny clearing in the woods behind the house, but over the past 7 years, all the trees around the clearing have arched their branches over it, shutting out most of the sunlight. The Trifoliate Orange, however, has managed to soldier on, but it's not growing nearly as fast as it should be. Again, I'm going to be putting it in a pot sometime over the next week or two (along with my other three Trifoliate Oranges and some other plants) in preparation of moving to the house that I'm in the process of purchasing.