Texas Gardening: does anyone grow texas tuberose? or african hosta?, 1 by dmj1218

dmj1218 wrote:
I'm going to revisit this thread today for some of the "watchers" of this thread who have emailed me (not dmailed) to please elaborate on some of my experiences and research with these species (and closely related ones) on my blog. This is a bit too many pictures and rather uninteresting for my often daily blog which tends to be a bit more "colorfull". So I will put the info here since it is closely related.

This information applies to all these species--all of these are one year old seed raised, seedlings only. While I have older, more mature specimens of all these plants, my work this morning was done with an emphasis on how these plants survive winter dormancy/inactivity in lovely humid, often winter wet, unincorporated, west Houston.

The seeds of all these species were obtained from the original plant explorers/collectors with exacting provenance identification data. The fellow seed siblings of these species are either growing in 2 Botanical Gardens in Texas (as the case with the Manfreda maculosa) or 3 Botanical Gardens in South Africa. There is no doubt on identification on these particular seedlings as Botanical Gardens have very exacting requirements. They also funded the expeditions for collection of these, as well as many other species.

My source of information (other than the collectors and Botanical Gardens themselves--and they also use this resource; among others) for all the African species is Aluka (of which I am a member):
http://www.aluka.org/page/about/historyMission.jsp

Aluka also has a free to the public feature from now until June 30th (I'm not certain on this date)--I highly recommend trying it as it is a wonderful resource for a number of subjects.

Working with African species first; let's look at Ledebouria luteola.

While this species is not in PlantFiles (I'll make an entry later), or on the PBS WIKI (I'll make one there also later) or IBS Gallery (I also publish there); it is an accepted species with great garden potential. Remember, these are only one year old seedlings--how nice of it to give me a bloom soon though. This is one of the species under this "umbrella" of study. While this one likes it (so far anyway) on the dryish side--its tolerating a fair amount of winter sun and is hardy here. I do not give any of these examples any special treatment--that's the point, to study their adaptability. Next week many of these will be planted in different conditions, in the ground, in different locations on the property.
Aluka link:
http://www.aluka.org/action/showMetadata?doi=10.5555/AL.AP.S...