furballs

I'm trying to convince my girlfriend,who just bought a new house, to get rid of most of the lawn, which is badly neglected anyway, in favour of no mow plants and garden spaces. If I ever have a home of my own, grass will have only a minimal presence. A copy of this book would be super to help my friend see what she could do with her yard !

Now known as Bryophyllum, this one might be B. pinnatum, formerly K. pinnata. Aka Air plant, Life plant, Mother of Millions. The mother of millions name is pretty common for many plants in this family, as with some others that produce little rooted plantlets on their leaves like this one does. Certainly tough, and you'll never run out, even if all you have left is one leaf ! I can remember having one leaf of this pinned to a curtain for months before it finally gave up, dropping babies all the time, seemingly living solely on air, hence the Air plant name.

I remembered the name of the cultivar I thought I recognized in this pic. It's the 'Get Mee' series, a cultivar of the Dalmation Bellflower, or C. portenschlagiana. The double Get Mee is uncannily similar to the pictured one. This link shows a pic of the double Get Mee in white, if you'd like to look at it. http://www.flickr.com/photos/90985255@N00/2201415669/

There are a great many sites with varying information on campanula species and cultivars, such as this one from Fine Gardening. http://www.finegardening.com/plantguide/genus/campanula.aspx.

Unfortunately, I could not find anything that had a picture of the flowers that looked like this, other than Get Mee. So now I'm very curious about this ! Just how tall is this plant ? Any chance of a picture showing height and form beside a ruler or some other frame of reference for size, along with the leaf and flower ? Might make it easier to ID. Just an idea.

Oops, I missed part of your description, just the bit about height and the width of the flowers :-). Must have been a temporary brain freeze :-).. The one I'm thinking of isn't really tall, perhaps 8 inches for a large plant. I'll still check the nursery and see what their information is, might be they'll know if there is another cultivar that's taller. The flowers in your pic look identical to the one I was thinking of, but on the one whose name escapes me, the flowers are very small, no more than 3/4's of a inch across, not 2- 1/2 inches. Sorry my enthusiasm got the better of me.

Does this plant have quite small leaves, kind of bushy growth ? If so, I know what is is, but I'm just wracking my brain trying to remember the cultivar name. It's relatively new, and is sold as an annual here in zone 6, or else with instructions to winter indoors, as it is too tender for our winters. It comes in that lovely lavender blue and also in white, some of the flowers are so double they almost look like roses. The same series has single flowered forms too, both cuplike and with separate petals. Next time I'm at the nursery I can find out the cultivar name for sure, if I can't remember it before that. It's a lovely plant, for sure, and so far as I recall, perennial in warmer zones than mine. I can likely find out the zone info too once I have the cultivar name.

Boy, that's a tough question. There are so many varieties of small peppers, both ornamental and cherry peppers, and new ones coming every year.

From this picture, it is somewhat hard to tell what shape the fruits have. Are they round, or pointed or something else when they are mature ?

Many of the ornamental types show more than one colour as they mature,so you end up with multi colour fruits as your pic shows.

I had a quick peek online, and I found a site selling pepper seeds that has a cultivar listed with multiple fruit colours. The site is : http://www.pepperjoe.com/cgi-bin/web_store/Library/web_store.pl?page=seeds.html

The cultivar they listed is as follows. I'd guess they are round :-) at maturity by the name.

5 COLOR MARBLE
You harvest tons of these novel Hot Peppers in an explosion of fancy colors. From cream to white to yellow to purple to orange and then red. This gorgeous plant is the real show stopper! Very beautiful and very different. Compact growth makes it perfect for container gardening. You can grow this as an ornamental pepper as well.
$3.99 (10 seeds)

No problem.. I know how frustrating it can be to not know what some plant or other is. Earl Grey used to be my favourite tea too, but I switched to green tea and now I can't stand any other kind. I tried a green tea with bergamot and didn't like it either. sigh. I guess tastes change with time. Good luck with your search.

Too bad you lost it, it sure was pretty. There are many cultivars of Bee Balm, so yours could have been a cultivar or even a hybrid that may not have been pictured online. Flower forms can be quite different from one cultivar or hybrid to another. I don't know that the flowers are all that fragrant to us, but they have loads of nectar that attracts bees and butterflies, hence the name. One species of it is grown commercially as a source of Oil of Bergamot, which is used for a variety of things, perhaps most notably, bergamot is the flavour used to make Earl Grey tea.

It looks exactly like Hoya multiflora, also known by the common name of Shooting Stars, because of the unusual shape of the flowers. Typical Hoya flowers tend to form in a a sort of ball shape, while Multiflora shows off more. They can produce quite a bit of nectar, as you have noticed, and it can attract insects who like to feed on nectar.

Clearly it's a very happy Hoya if it is flowering so well for you for so long, so be proud of the good job you've done growing it. You may not know that you should never remove the little stub that's left after the flowers are done, because that's where new blooms will form the next time. If it gets broken or cut off, you won't get any more flowers at that particular spot. But it looks as though your plant likely has plenty of them, so if one gets broken, not to worry. Lots of people who grow Hoya are not so successful getting them to flower as you have been and for them the loss of a flower stub can be a disaster !

Now you have a name, there is loads of information about Hoya of all kinds, including Multiflora, online. Just Google the name Hoya multiflora and you'll see lots of pages of info on them.

If you go to the following URL, you will find some pics of Bee Balm. The one on the right closely resembles your picture, so I think I might have been correct that it is a Bee Balm plant. http://altnature.com/gallery/beebalm.htm

Well, I've seen this before, but sadly, I don't know what it is. The blossoms remind me strongly of monarda, or Bee Balm, but I can't be sure that's it.

But I do know, it is absolutely NOT any kind of Kalanchoe. Kalanchoe are succulents, which this plant clearly is not. Kalanchoe's leaves are very fleshy, often very thick, usually quite long and strongly 'arrowhead' shaped and their flowers are very different, usually a cluster of downward facing 'bells' that close up to a tiny mouth at the bottom.

If there is any chance you could get a clear closeup of the blooms it might help. Are those flowers fragrant, by any chance ?

Are the flowers fragrant, by any chance ?

If you were living in Ontario and found this growing wild, and picked it, you might well be arrested ! A white Trillium is the provincial flower for the province of Ontario, and as someone commented, their habitat is threatened with development and so they are not nearly so widespread as they once were. It is real treat to walk in a woodland in early spring and see them popping up everywhere out of the leaf mold, before the trees have much foliage out. They are cultivated of course, and you can buy them for the garden from garden centres, but you must not touch them if you find them growing wild in Ontario.