Tropicals & Tender Perennials: May Flowers, 1 by plantladylin

plantladylin wrote:
Aha, a greenhouse! I was going to ask how your Hoya's survived the cold of Gainesville winters. How big is that Bauhinia tree? Do you have to prune it occasionally to keep it in check? H. loherii has such a cute bloom! Love that first photo too, a beautiful chaos of plants! I see Orchids, Epiphyllum's, and is that a Cordyline I see peeking through?

Gothqueen has my kind of jungle except for the snakes. I would love to have a tropical jungle again, but without the snakes! Twenty five years ago I had a huge greenhouse and it scared the beejeebies out of me when I would see a snake, especially if it had bands of bright colors. Until I learned the difference, it always worried me that it was the deadly coral snake, which gets confused a lot with the scarlet king snake. I'm out in the yard a lot and when I see a snake I run the other way! I won't kill a snake unless I know it's a poisonous one. It bothers me when I see one going after a birds nest for the eggs or babies and the adult birds are screeching and going crazy but I guess that's nature. I've been known to run around the yard flailing my arms and yelling at Hawks and Swallow Tail Kites that go after baby birds but snakes are another thing ... I don't want to be near them! A year ago we killed a couple of coral snakes, I was worried they would find a way into the screened pool area and get the cats. When my neighbors were unboarding their windows after the 2004 hurricanes they found 2 pygmy rattler's behind the boards on their bay window! They killed one but the other got away into the shrubbery. I see black snakes and garter snakes around at times and they run the other way ... and I run inside! My husband keeps telling me at least the coral snakes are not a striking type snake, they just get ahold of you and chew and keep injecting the venom. Yuck! I guess rattle snakes give you some warning before they strike if you hear the rattle. We also have something called legless lizards .... ick, they look like snakes, slither like snakes ... so to me they are snakes! I thought my husband was just teasing me when he told me they are lizards, he had to pull up a picture on the internet to convince me. I saw one in a flower bed yesterday and I went the opposite direction!

Uhhh .. enough about slithery, creepy critters. I found H. brevialata (I think) blooming yesterday. This is an EA plant I bought in 2006 and it wasn't labeled correctly but I think someone on here told me it is brevialata?