Tropicals & Tender Perennials: Who are we? Can anyone help?, 1 by Kaelkitty

Kaelkitty wrote:
Dear Mike,
What colour flower did your Dracunculus have? There are two species - D. vulgaris, which has a deep purple/maroon flower which does smell pretty foul - just not as badly as the Amorphophallus species do! - and D. canariensis which I have never seen, but which is supposed to have a yellow flower. This latter species is one I seriously covet by the way, but it seems to be truly rare, as I have never seen anyone one the forum mention it.

The leaves on your plant seem paler than they should be to my way of thinking and this may be due to excessive sunlight. I have discovered that my plants react badly to large amounts of sunshine - the leaves stay small and often curl up at the edges, and the plants may not flower at all. I now grow them under the drip line of a large evergreen shrub (Melaleuca) in big 3.5 gallon/15 litre tubs. They seem to really like this location and are absolutely stunning looking this year.

I dig and replant my tubers every year because they are quite greedy feeders, with a habit of throwing off masses of little offsets, and they would get far too crowded if I left them in the pots for more than one season. In addition our summers are just too hot and I have found that tubers left in the garden beds tend to shrivel up to nothing over their dormant period in our Australian summers. I took this photo today to show you my plants, bearing in mind that it is still very early in their growing season. - this pot holds my 5 largest tubers and I expect them to flower in mid to late spring. I have two more pots of the same size to hold all the juveniles as well - I replanted about 60 tubers in total this year. (eep!)