Mike, Bob and our Rottie family
We do love our critters, so we thought we’d share this image of the newest member of the furry family. Just a few weeks ago, Athena, one of our Rottweilers, gave birth to little Loretta. Bob’s holding her, Papi Thor is on the left and proud Mama Athena is on the right. We expect her to grow up to be a big girl just like her dad.
Not to be outdone, sweet Samba has been posing lately. Here she is, waiting to be repotted as she dreams of being a catt-leya.
And what kitty doesn’t love a box? Our customer Sara Singer sent us this image of her gorgeous Siamese snowshoe kitty Echo posing in one of our boxes this week. A most beautiful cat in that box! Thanks, Sara, for sharing this with us and giving permission to share him with all our readers!
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Now Showing
Some very interesting things are blooming right now, including several that aren’t in the garden proper.
Out in the back of the nursery, by the dog kennels (not a public area of the property, sorry), we have an African “sausage” tree – Kigelia africana — in flower right now.
This amazing tree’s flowers are pollinated by bats! And, right in front of Bob’s and Mike’s house, our plants of the gorgeous orange ginger, Hedychium coccineum, are in full bloom. This is one of the “butterfly” gingers, and we have plants of several other butterfly ginger species in the garden. Sadly, the Indian clock vine (Thunbergia mysorensis) is finally at the end of its bloom cycle; we can’t complain, it bloomed for more than six months, starting in January!
Kigelia africana
We have quite a few orchids flowering, too. Of course we always have plenty of vandaceous orchids blooming (too many to list, honestly), but we also have magnificent displays on most of the specimen Schomburgkias/Myrmecophilas. These are some of our summer-flowering favorites, with gorgeous clusters of flowers at the tips of very long stems (some of them 5-6 feet in length!). And our specimen Brassavola nodosa is showing the first of many flowers. Beautiful as the flowers are, the main attraction of this orchid is the blow-you-away night-time fragrance, which garden visitors, sadly, can’t experience. (Another reason to have this in your own collection, so you can enjoy the only-in-the-dark perfume for yourself!). Our native Encyclia tampensis flowers at this time of the year, too.
Hedychium coccineum
We hope you can join one of our free weekend garden tours to see all of this, and lots, lots more. Every weekend, weather permitting (read: not raining) we escort walking tours of Bob’s and Mike’s private garden at 11am and 3pm. This is an escorted walking tour and takes about an hour. No reservation is necessary, but we do ask that you be here on time (a few minutes before start-time is fine), and that you meet your guide at the bridge. We can also arrange private graden tours for groups, on other days; we do charge a nominal fee for these private tours (they affect our staffing for the day), and they must be arranged in advance. Contact us for more information, and to schedule a private tour for your group.
Hot Stuff
Looks like many of you will be under that “heat dome” this coming week, with record high temperatures. We just wanted to remind everyone that orchids (and other plants) are living things, and should never be left unattended in a hot vehicle. You wouldn’t leave a child or pet in the car, so please don’t leave your orchids in the car, either. Just in the past two weeks we’ve had to diagnose heat damage on several customers’ plants. The symptoms include leaf burn and flower damage. It only takes a few minutes in a hot car to fatally cook the plants! And we hope everyone stays safe in these awful, dangerous temperatures.