Showy Sedum
(Hylotelephium spectabile)
These specimens have established well in the new garden. A good autumn flower standard. Mom was just yesterday talking about dividing her specimens in the front garden. If we do I think we’ll add the divisions into the new garden with these here for more autumn ka-pow.
I’m sure this is a hoverfly (a BIG one) though idk what species/genus… I need to sometime Google around to get some leads. It was quite content feeding on the New England Asters.
I have heard of many kinds of gardens in my time, but an ethnobotanical garden? I am almost aghast that I’ve heard of this type of garden only now.
Cyclamen hederifolium is a species I still wanna get my grubby hands on but corms are so damn expensive and getting seeds requires HAVING THE PLANTS (plus collecting seeds for those lil pretty trolls is it’s own challenge).
Why must you be such a tricky autumn flower..
Sparingly collected these fertile Christmas Fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) fronds from the neighbor’s woodlot I got to walk in yesterday. I don’t have fancy expensive equipment like petri dishes or a microscope but I can at least do the drying of the frond/spores step. Already made the mistake on the first step which was to place the collected fronds into a paper envelope, instead I did a plastic bag.
If I succeed I will have my first ever attempt at fern propagation succeed + have another native plant species added to the gardens AND have available for selling in the greenhouse. If I fail well… not sure I’ll be so fortunate as to encounter this species again in that difficult-to-navigate forest, and for that matter during ripe spore season for it.
Me: *googles how to grow ferns from spores*
Tutorial: “store the spore-filled frond in an envelope not plastic, the moisture in plastic is bad for the spores”
Me: Welp first step failed
TutoriaL: “Sterilize the fronds with ___ or ___”
Me: …….
Tutorial: “get a Microscope to examine the spores”
Me: I don’t have a-
Tutorial: “After cleaning the spore from the chaff, sow in a petri dish”
Me: Do you HAVE to use a- ….. I am way over my head aren’t I.
“They [the autumn colochium] should be planted as soon as you dig them up!“
I WOULD plant them as soon as I dug them up if I knew HOW MANY BULBS THERE ARE AND HOW MUCH SPACE THEY’LL TAKE FFS!!! I need to know if I can get away with planting in individuals in some planting holes or if I’ll have to bury groups of bulbs to be sure they all get in the ground, and I can’t tell with that unless they are in my hands on out of the thistle infested grounds! Don’t be overbearing me on my own jurisdiction.
I DIDN’T FORGET THIS ASK FOR THE PLANTBLR NUMBER THING, IVE JUST BEEN STUMPED FOR SEVERAL MONTHS TRYING TO THINK OF SOME GOOD ANSWERS IM SO SORRY!!! I still don’t have good answers for these two questions but I’m gonna force answers outta myself anyways.
I have pondered on this a lot as to how to interpret this question for the most interesting answer; my struggle with Musa/Ensente, my opportunity to try to grow Asmina from seed for the first time leading to my obsession to continue seaching, tulips in bloom relative to my birth. After a lot of think, I settled to go for my currently-oldest houseplant, my senior of the collection who has endured some abuse and was the start of my explosion of houseplants;
My good old Crassula ovata Jade Plant.
I think this is the oldest picture of it but I’m not sure as I was searching through the blog for these pics and this one did not have my old-style “photographed on this day” note. Originally called “Jadey” by me back then, it was an apartment warming gift from my former highschool EA teachers, and the houseplant that pushed me to considering indoor cultivation more (before this fella I had many plant deaths on my hands including bromeliads, Pepperomias, and particularly African Violets).
Anyone who knows this plant will know; Jade plants are very trouble-free so long as they get tons of sunlight and are not overwatered, and this girl was no exception to the rule; It has been the one houseplant that shrugged off my leaving for holidays and even enduring the Neglectathon when the plant collection and I returned to the farm for permanent residence- but I’m getting ahead of myself. During college it thrived, to the point it got pruned, propagated and shared throughout the Horticulture Tech Class (I may have even given some to @omgplants but I genuinely cannot remember).
But one winter 2013 in the apartment, I wasn’t watchful, and I inadvertently killed a large amount of branch-to-trunk due to cold conduction from the windowframe to the plant itself.
The damaged plant material was cut off with a knife (which was over half of the bottom trunk) and given an application of Cinnamon as an attempt at anitfungal protection.
A firsthand proof to me that plants, houseplant or not, can be rather tough cookies.
Unfortunately misfortune befell it once more; its lovely open branch arrangement lead to getting caught onto the curtain and then toppling over from its window as the curtain was being pulled over the window. With that, it got an unplanned prune up to fix the mess that was left behind.
From there any posts for it specifically never really popped up, however it did get odd cameos in group plant pictures/posts to further the documentation of its journey;
By 2015 you could see in cameo in the plant tour of the time, when I returned to the farmhouse and brought my gargantuan plant collection with me. By this time it was growing leggier from the change of light conditions and grew painfully topheavy along with its variegated relative.
From there was when the great plant dying (ie- the winter colds triggering the slow death of the African Violets) followed by neglectathon began. As I grew doom-and-gloom with my own mind and trying to resettle in space that was shared rather than mine and mine alone, plants were forgotten to be tended to (mainly watered, they were watered scarcely if at all) as they were scattered across the different small windows of the house (unlike the apartment where I only had two windows which I walked by every day, the farmhouse had windows in very out-of-the-way spaces) and even the toughest of houseplants started to struggle even more.
By 2017 the house addition mom so wished for this farmhouse was being put together and a call of opportunity, a second chance; among the features of the addition, large south facing windows to almost rival even the apartments of London. My bedroom was moved to the new basement floor to give me more freedom and space, the plants too would get a similar treatment. While in none of the photos, the Jade was part of great houseplant bathtub soak and relocation. Given more light and a little more water (to this current time of this ask I am still fighting to return semblance in my life/routines again, watering being one I still struggle to reclaim for the houseplants) it thickened with water and grew a little better, but started to lean out of its pot and still showed severe leggieness (curing legginess requires more than a change of light, it also means they need to be pruned, something I felt it would not tolerate after the neglectathon ordeal). It is one of the few “leggy succulents” left in the collection.
This autumn of 2018 old Jadey got to cameo in a tweet with other houseplants once again (tumblr mobile makes photosets not as easy as twitter so my apologies for no updates on that here yet). After far too long, she has finally gotten the repot she so painfully needed, and a light trim to begin fixing her wiriness and reshape. Currently her rootball is almost nonexistent (ripped apart to give her a chance in fresher, albeit peatier potting soil) and needs to regrow her roots, as well as branch/bulk up her branches. A tradeoff currently is that she has been exiled from the plant-shelf spaces due to her height and being in a fragile clay flowerpot, but I’m hoping she’ll continue to live on with her houseplant juniors and continue holding the trophy for oldest owned houseplant.
Always a question that I can never answer with just one flower.
My default answer has always been a tie of 4 plant genera; Trilliums, Liliums, Lavendula, and Dianthus.
Since the new garden additions and struggle to grow certain favourite species (the first two in particular) new plants/flowers may come to soon wear the rivalry crown of “favorite”; New England Asters are becoming my favourite autumn queens while Northern Wild (Senna hebecarpa) has come to impress me for its bee-attracting qualities and mildly exotic charm in the midsummer.
That being said I’m surprised that most of my planttwitter following has been from either the Europe or Australia….. is, is Ontarian plantblr in twitterside that scarce??
It’s such a scarcity that it almost worries me? Ontario (and for that matter Canada) has different plant groups and societies, hort programs and educations. I’ve seen some of them on facebook but their presence on a large online platform such as Twitter as null, is just strange.
Kihaku-Gato's Garden Blog (tumblr import) 