I loved all the personal stories this week about the plants we were discussing. Keep sharing your own personal experience with them.
Candlestick plant or Candle bush is Senna alata or Cassia alata, the Latin names are synonymous. This fun plant is not winter hardy in Arkansas. If you have a greenhouse, the plant can be moved into the greenhouse where it can stay green year-round.
If you don’t have a greenhouse, you can save seeds to start new plants for the following year. It does help if you can start the seeds indoors and then plant outside once the soil has warmed up and there is no frost. The plant can grow up to 8 feet tall or more in one season. Starting in mid-to late summer and continuing into fall, large spikes of bright yellow blooms
grace the plant, looking like candlesticks. It has large compound leaves with up to 14 sets of leaflets per leaf. Once it gets growing, it grows quickly under warm conditions. But save seeds, because it will not come back from the roots.
Hoya carnosa or wax plant
is an old-fashioned houseplant that has been around for years. The vining plant produces thick, waxy leaves,
in solid green or variegated, and a twisted or contorted form.
The vining leaves are attractive, but when it blooms it is a showstopper.
Flowers appear in clusters of star shaped blooms which are highly fragrant. Once a bloom is finished, don’t cut it back, as the base of the flower section is called a peduncle or spur, and it is from that structure that will produce the next group of flowers. They do best in bright light and can be moved outdoors for the summer, but they are not winter hardy. Years ago, I had another variety called the shooting star hoya, Hoya multiflora. It bloomed non-stop but the white waxy flowers were not fragrant. Because it has thick, succulent like leaves be careful that you don’t overwater it or the plant can rot.
I saw this plant
at my friend’s garden and she didn’t know what it was. I had decided it had to be a Cyperus and the closest I could find was Dwarf umbrella sedge –Cyperus alternifolius ‘nana’. In researching the plant, the pictures I saw of C. alternifolius did not look exactly right. I kept looking. I think the plant is Cyperus albostriatus ‘Variegatus’ with a common name Dwarf variegated papyrus.
While most Cyperus are often used in a wetland garden or at the edge of a pond, my friend had this growing in regular garden soil in a shade garden.
The small greenish brown tufts on the top are the flowers which appear in the summer. It grows no taller than 12 inches and it is not as aggressive as the C. alternifolius. I cannot find it for sale anymore online, but it was a very interesting plant.
Ming fern – Asparagus retrofractus
is another houseplant for us, but it thrives outdoors in the shade during the summer. There are several more common “asparagus ferns” from the lacy sprengeri
– Asparagus densiflorus to the spike forming foxtail ferns,
but the Ming fern grows on woodier stalks and has small pompoms of foliage which can look like miniature pine trees.
They are actually ornamental asparagus but are called ferns because of their fern-like foliage. None of these are hardy outside in the winter in Arkansas and all can be poisonous to pets, so beware. The foliage is often used in flower arrangements and corsages.
