The One That Started It All

This is a picture of the African Violet that I saw and had to have! My grandma grew AV's for years and they were just your basic purples and I had never thought much about them. Then my cousin was complaining that she had lost her favorite violet, one called Summer Carnival and I decided I would find it for her and buy it as a gift. So I started looking at Violets online and this one popped out at me and I fell in love. I ordered it from Rob's back in January of this year and it came as a little bitty baby but it has grown up now and it makes my day each time I look at it. Along with the dozens of other gessie's I have found since then!!
This is Victorian Ribbon's...

Another view of my Victorian Ribbon's Chimera. I have to look at my cheerful plants right now cause it's snowing outside today : (

Oh my goodness.....too gorgeous....I ordered a few of my very first chimeras last night on line.....but when it comes time to propagating i am going to be a pain on this forum......learning how!!!!

We are loving this show, bmedel!!!

Oh that is beautiful!

It's snowing where you are in JUNE????
I have an extra room if you need to escape.
I'd be in a mental institute with snow in JUNE..lol

Show us more beauties!!!
MsC

I thought she was in zone 5, but she is in zone 3..............yikes.............that is cold!!!! i wouldn't mind some snow right now...........in this Texas heat in June!!!

Good grief, sister, SNOW?? Is that normal for you to have snow in June??

But...with a plant like that to gaze upon, who cares what the weather is? LOL I love the Chimeras, but haven't gotten brave enough to try one yet. I concur...more pictures, please. :o)

LOL Thanks for the offer of a room MrsC there are times during our long winters when I'd truly love to take you up on it!!!! It starts snowing in September off and on and then by the first week in November it's sticking and piling up and there it stays until about the middle of April, no green to see on the ground, just white. Which is another reason I decided I must get green into my house and so got into the gessies with a bang this winter. This is pretty normal weather for us and in the 18 years I've lived here I've seen it snow twice on the Fourth of July!! This past Saturday, Sunday and Monday it was 80 degrees here and I was in heaven, then today with a high of 44. Crazy place to live, huh? But it is beautiful and other interesting things happen too. I'll take your advice here Gail and post my visitor from this past Monday evening. He's not an AV but still a sight to see : 0)

Here he is leaving my flower bed after checking out my sprinkler. It was almost dark and I took these through the window so not the greatest. But I take pictures of bears from inside!!

SNOW???? IN JUNE???? WOW! We are having temp's in the low 90's right now! Too hot for June! I can just imagine what it's gonna be like in August & September, our hottest months! The Humidity is slowly creeping back in too, which makes it pretty miserable to be outside! We did get some much needed rain this evening! Hooray! ****** My Plants and I are soooo happy *****


Kinda neat to think someone is getting Snow right now! What is the temp up there in Idaho??

Lovely Chimera Violet, by the way! ..... I got kinda goofy thinking about Snow in June and forgot to mention how Beautiful your AV is! :)

Ok, one more and then I'll get back to AV's : ) This is a picture from the fox den my husband found just on the other side of the driveway this spring.

How Cool is that? Snow and Black Bears too! We have Black Bears here in Florida, but the only place I've ever seen them in the wild is when we vacation in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee! Occasionally there's a story on the news showing a Bear in a tree in some neighborhood over Orlando way ... usually in the Wekiva River area. Sometimes they have to tranquilize the critters and relocate them to deep woods, but usually by morning they are gone. We hear of them being hit by cars sometimes too.

Little Fox Babies ... Love it!

Fortunately for our bears it's more sparsely populated around here although if they start reeking havoc with peoples trash cans in town they will do what's necessary to move them on. I regularly have deer and elk through my yard. The deer even come up on the back deck to eat out of my container garden flowers. Doesn't make me happy but I tired a lot of things to stop them and so far I can't! So my inside flowers are very rewarding! Here is my Massen's White Strep. It has been a prolific bloomer for me.

Oh, That is one Beautiful Strep! I have never seen a white one .... Gorgeous!

bmedel, from the beautiful wilds of Idaho, welcome! Did you know your streptocarpus 'Maasen's White' is a sport (mutation) from the old classic strep "Constant Nymph'?

shown here-
http://www.gesneriads.ca/strept10.htm

This message was edited Jun 6, 2007 11:30 PM

No Snowrose, I didn't know that! It is amazing to me that this beautiful white plant could have started out as that amazing purple plant. I am so new to all of this with so much to learn. Please continue to fill me in whenever you can!! That big plant reminded me of this one I have that is getting it's first bloom. I'm trying to remember where I got it but I'm drawing a blank. Anyway it is called King of Kings and this picture was taken with it next to other streps and as you can see the leave on it is truly BIG compared to my others.

Here's a picture of King of Kings today. The bloom is partially open and it is so pretty inside! I tried to get a picture of the different purple colors inside but didn't succeed. I'll have to try again when it gets more open.

Yes, King of Kings in time will grow very large and that's an understatement. A very good name for this strep I think. It was hybridized by Jonathan Ford who has done a lot of great work hybridizing streps of all sizes.You have some lovely happy looking plants there. While the trend lately has been for nice compact smaller growing streps, it is still such an impressive sight to see a large one in bloom.

BM you live in absolutely fascinating place, snow, bears and foxes, how could you beat that. Love your plants especially the streps and it looks like you have the perfect window for them.

Oh my goodness, Kind of Kings is Awesome too! I had no idea any Strep had leaves that large, but I am very new to these plants!

Looking at your lovely plants shows that you have a very green thumb! Great Growing!

fun seeing all these posts!!! Snowrose, only you would know the heritage of plants....................all I can say is 'amazing' and so helpful to all of us!!!!

I went ahead and bought King of Kings after reading about the fact that you can trim the leaves on streps and not harm the blooming capabilities. If it ever gets out of hand I could trim it back some but I don't want to! I want to see what it will do. It came to me with one leaf about 5 months ago and the one leave has grown and grown and now it has popped a couple of others out. I was able to get a pretty picture of the open bloom this morning. It is so rich a velvety looking inside.