Yellow Bells

Now that the weather has grown cold it is time for some summer memories of warmth and bright flowers. One of my favorite tropical plants is yellow bells (Tecoma stans)! This is one of the easiest plants to grow and gives so much for so little work.

Yellow bells have a cluster of one to two inch lemon yellow trumpets at the top of the stem. My plants always freeze to the ground but by Memorial Day are 2' tall and beginning to bloom. The blooming season last till the first killing frost and I then cut them down.

I must let you know they grow fast and get 6' to 7' tall! The common type from the wet tropics grow a number of tall stems that are wands capped with flowers. A more refined look is the desert variety Tecoma stans angustifolia. This type has smaller flower clusters but the plant is bushier and each stem branches more often for a fuller look. The leaves are much finer cut and shinier making the plant more garden worthy than the tropical type. Best of all it is less likely to set seed and thus is not loaded with 6" bean pods by the hundreds.

The picture is of the desert yellow bell!

Textures

As a plant nut I usually worry about if the plant will grow here ,not what it will look like and because of that I`ve spent a lot of time moving things around. There are happy accidents where everything turns out right and not because I tried.

The pond is a small 20+ gallons that a friend found in a trash pile. I placed it near another small pond at the edge of my woodland garden so it would get some sun part of the day. It`s an ugly plastic thing that I used resurrection fern to hide the edge. The only plant in the pond is a veriegated Acorus.

The bright colored Acorus shines against the dark water and at the same time contrasts with low clustering ferns. Along side the pond the golden Sedum picks up the color of the Acorus and the texture of the ferns. On the backside of the pond the fern Phlebodium aureum 'Blue Crisp' adds a new color while continueing the fern texture on a bigger scale.

Oh the happy mistakes!

The other plants in the photo are some radiclis palms, Aspidistra and Agapathus. The Blue Crisp has proven to be not only winter hardy but with an overhead canopy is evergreen.

A Male Medusa

He is always ahead of the rest, anxious to be the first to leaf out and often he is burned by the frost. This year he is late and the leaves will be undamaged but he is still the first.

This fabulous plant is a Cycas taitungensis! A huge fast growing plant that regularly put out three spurts of growth a year. The first growth has always been a set of leaves the second is always a cone and it is definitely a male cone.

The leaves are up to 5' long and a deep green in color. As you can see from the picture they brown in the winter some, more from wind damage than cold. It has a growth rate that puts Cycas revoluta the common sago to shame.

In the garden give this plant plenty of room it is huge and quick growing if fertilized regularly. A common mistake is to plant it in a spot that will cause it to looked cramped in the future because people think that it will grow just like the common sago.

Sweetgrass

These two birds are a perfect match for my wildlife photography skill level- posing patiently in their bronze glory while I take thirty different images right up in their faces. I'm not sure who they are supposed to be, great blue herons, maybe? The pair, in their sweetgrass nest, mark the entrance way to a new development next to my neighborhood. The developers put in all the infrastructure, including retention ponds and landscaping, before being stalled by the housing slump. What can I say? There loss is our gain as we now have a combination stroll park and dog park and are all loving it.

Isn't the sweetgrass surrounding the birds almost unbelievably frothy? Sweetgrass (muhlenbergia capillaris or muhly grass) is a workhorse most of the year, surviving with little water, providing a bit of vertical accent but not much wow factor. In the fall, however, when the sun is lower in the sky and shines through its delicate blooms the workhorse becomes a showhorse.

Our town has mass planted sweetgrass in the median of the main drag, maybe in part a tribute to 'the basket ladies' who have for decades made sweetgrass baskets at roadside stands on the same road, practicing a craft handed down from enslaved ancestors who worked the rice plantations along the coast. There is a bit more history and some pictures of baskets here:
http://www.cofc.edu/sustainability/sweetgrass%20brochure.pdf




I found this little sweetgrass basket (hold on a minute while I get the glass cleaner for that mirror) in a neighbor's trash! Any locals, or tourists, who have ever priced the baskets know what a true find that was. A day in the trashpile left it a little lopsided but otherwise none the worse.

Just this fall I put 15 clumps of sweetgrass in a ridiculously sandy, dry, and sunny strip outside my fence where nothing else will grow. Hopefully in years to come it will thrive and put an end to my multi-year quest of what to do with that space. So far, so good.

SunTolerant Caladiums

Sometimes things that seem too good to be true are, well, true! Thanks to a nudge and a shove from brilliant hybridizers, caladiums have finally come out from their shady hiding places and are happily flashing their colorful selves in sunny settings all over the South. The caladium in the picture above, Red Flash, sits in a corner of my yard that gets over 10 hours of sun a day in mid-summer and it still thrived without requiring any more irrigation than the surrounding plants. Some of the cultivars that experts claim do well in full sun are:

• Aaron
• Carolyn Whorton
  
• Festiva
• Florida Cardinal
• Florida Elise
• Florida Sweetheart
• Galaxy
• Gingerland
• Grey Ghost
• Pink Beauty
• Postman Joyner
• Red Ruffle
• Red Flash
• Rosalie
• Rosebud
• White Queen
• White Wing

Texas A&M has an extensive list on their website http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/extension/newsletters/hortupdate/may05/Caladiums.htm which lists even more varieties as well as identifying which ones are the most sun-tolerant and which ones are the least. Several online vendors carry sun tolerant caladium but Caladium Bulbs 4 Less http://www.caladiumbulbs4less.com/servlet/StoreFront
makes it easy by listing sun-tolerant varieties as a category.

With cooler fall temperatures, my Red Flash isn't quite as stellar as it was even a month ago and in my zone 8B/9A garden its winter hardiness is marginal but I'll definitely order more next year for their easy care and super showy colors.