New Plants (and one Walkaway)

Here are the plants of interest from the trip to Cedar Rapids on Sunday, including the supercool one I was so excited about on Monday.


I bought this first one at Lowe's, because I thought it was an orange bird of paradise, Strelitzia reginae. I've been looking for a decent S. reginae for quite a while, so this was exciting. What got me thinking that it was a reginae (even though it was tagged S. nicolai, the white bird of paradise), was that a couple of the leaves have sort of orangish midribs, which I knew happened with reginae but I didn't think happened with S. nicolai, plus the leaf texture was a bit heavier and stiffer than on my nicolais at home. True, the tag said otherwise, but since when do we believe the IDs on the tags at Lowe's, right?


So I was pretty certain I had a reginae when I bought it, but the more I thought about it after getting it home, the more I was like, don't the orange BOPs have grayer leaves than this? And narrower? And it was tagged as a white. Maybe the leaf texture is just because they're grown in better conditions. This could be a white BOP after all.

But! I had noticed that the UPC sticker said that the plant was produced by Costa Farms, a company in Florida who I sort of knew, by virtue of following their account on Twitter. So I thought, okay, I'll just harness the power of social networking and tweet them the question and we'll see if it's plausible that I could have a 6" orange BOP, easy-peasy.

So I tweeted, and their first response was to tell me that they thought I had a Heliconia. So then I had to send another message explaining that no, it didn't actually have orange flowers on it, I know it's a Strelitzia, I'm just trying to figure out which species of Strelitzia. And then while I was waiting on the response, I realized that they surely had a website, and I could just look at the website and see whether they grew orange BOPs and find out that way. So I went to the website, where I found . . . "Strelitzia reginae [White Bird of Paradise]." Which is to say, they had mismatched the names, so I still didn't know.

And then they tweeted an answer to the effect of, "Yes, we sell white bird of paradise" and asked me to refer future questions to an e-mail account, which made me think I was probably pissing them off, so I let it drop there even though that didn't answer my question either.

So but I still don't know. Do Strelitzia nicolai plants grown in high light get orange midribs? Are Strelitzia reginae leaves always grayish, or can they be as green as nicolai? And does Costa Farms produce both species in 6" pots? Just the white? Just the orange? These really shouldn't be difficult questions to get answers to, but my whole day was like that on Monday.

Even if the new plant is just another white (I already have three of them, so a fourth is really not necessary), it was crazy cheap ($8-something), and there are four plants in the pot, so it was a good deal. And it's a plant I like, see above re: already had three of them. So whatever. But I do kind of need to know whether I should continue questing for Strelitzia reginaes or not.

Anyway.

The one notable walkaway from the trip isn't pretty or interesting so much as bizarre and unpleasant: it's a cigar plant (Cuphea ignea) with white flowers.


To me it looks ten kinds of wrong. I mean, Cuphea ignea is pretty worthless without the flowers (and even more worthless indoors, by the way: I'm having a really bad experience with it so far, and it's not thrilled with me either), and the flowers are so tiny that they have to be a bright, screaming color in order to be noticeable. This just wasn't a good idea at all.

But it's different. So now you've seen that.

TANGENT: Speaking of plants in wrong colors, has everybody seen the picture of the dark-purple Catharanthus roseus at Greensparrow Gardens? Equally wrong, but I really like those. They're very nearly cool enough to make me forget that I hate Catharanthus roseus intensely and for many reasons. (Bad work experiences.)


And then finally, we have the plant I was so excited about. I'm not thrilled with the way this picture turned out, but it's as good as they got:


It's a Dracaena deremensis 'Malaika.' I'd had it on the want list in the sidebar for a long time, because I'd seen pictures on-line and thought it was neat, but I'd never seen it for sale around here and didn't think I probably would anytime soon, and anyway I have a gazillion variations on D. deremensis already so what do I need with another.

But Frontier Garden Center had one. For way cheap, too (it was $9.73 after tax). It's sort of a backwards 'Lemon-Lime,' or a yellowish 'Warneckei:' the margins are very dark green, with a gray/chartreuse center. The picture doesn't really do it justice. This is maybe a little better:


The plant's tag had a link to a website in the Netherlands, which I think may be the least helpful plant-related website I've ever seen. More animated dragons per page than any plant-related website I've ever seen, and so few plant sites think to include a page for children to color anymore, so I appreciate that. But in terms of finding out anything about the plants, disappointing. Monday was just a bad internet day, apparently.