Teresa,
The first picture is a dragon arum (Dracunculus vulgaris) that bloomed by the walkway to our front door this past week. The triangular magenta part is the spathe, the black rod is the spadix, and the actual reproductive parts of the flower are hidden at the base of the spadix, deeper in the flower. On this one, the spathe and spadix are about 18 inches long. Two other smaller ones are blooming on the other side of the walkway. Besides the size, the unusual thing about this flower is that it's pollinated by flies... so the spadix smells really bad on the first day it opens. To my nose, it smells like hot spoiled milk and a gas leak, with a base of dead rat. We invite neighbors to come smell it every year.
The other pictures are of our hybrid Echiums in the back yard, a cross between the shorter tower of jewels (Echium wildpretii) and the taller tree echium (Echium pininana), both from the Canary Islands. They're both single-stalk plants; the first kind has red flowers, and the second has pale blue flowers, so the hybrids can be red, pink, pale fuchsia, or pale blue. The pink one that's blooming is just under 10 feet tall. The individual flowers are on stems that extend outward with new flowers, so the skinny shape gets a bit bushier. The other one that's just starting to bloom (more of a fuchsia color) shows some of the hybrid variability, with several branches and an inability to support itself, and it's a bit more than 10 feet tall and still growing. (The side branches break off under their own weight while blooming.) These plants are biennials, and they die after blooming and setting seed. In the full-length photo of the pink one that's fully blooming, you can see what a 1-year-old plant looks like behind the poles on the left side: a low rosette of leaves. We have six that are at this stage scattered across the yard, and hundreds of new seedlings started this past winter.
Randy_B
#FB00670
My thanks to Randy and other "Frog Applause" readers who are helping me keep "Frog Blog" afloat while I temporarily struggle with content...
