Ground cover and recalcitrant canines

Okay it has been a while. First I moved in before work on the house at Alafua was completed. Although the contractor and his men have been gone a while now they have not quite completed all what they were supposed to do so the place is not exactly all ready. The main problem is the wiring as well as the lights and electrical outlets of the kitchen, bathroom and toilets have yet to be installed among a few other things.

However, that is all out of my control so I have been busy with the "landscaping" which at the moment means planting as many of the plants that need to be transplanted into the ground (rather than other pots or poly bags). It also means planting a hedge or rather several hedges and plant barriers between the various neighbours, the road front and the access road that runs down the back of the property to the creek.

I started by transplanting Flame violets (Episcia) as ground cover around the side where the bedrooms are and along the front of the house that looks out down the street. I have two varieties one with green leaves and bright red flowers
and another with burgundy leaves and pink flowers.

I have had to put cocoa wire over them to keep the four resident dogs (the owner has not come to take them yet) from digging the plants up. I had to rake and remove a whole lot of stones, bones and other rubbish from the area. The dogs were used to digging the soil up and making themselves nice soft beds there as well as all around the house. So far the cocoa wire has kept them off the plants and most have not only recovered but are flowering and look on their way to establishing a nice ground cover.

Unfortunately for some reason the burgundy leaved Flame violets do not seem to be doing too well. Admittedly I did not have that many of them to start off with and very few of those were in top condition. I suspect that the fact that the area these are in has a lot more sun may be a factor.

I also took some Heliconia and Hedychium from Malifa to plant at Alafua.

I planted them both on the side of the bedrooms along the fence with the Helliconia along the fence and the Hedyciums further in. The Heliconia were Heliconia caribea which are the giant ones. One of the varieties I am certain is a cream and the other I am not so sure but is alot more showy than the cream. Once they grow into a decent sized stand they will provide a tall leafy  screen and produce nice flowers as well.

For the Hedychium I have three varieties so far and decided to plant the Yellow Hedychium (Hedychium flavenscens) in this location because they have very big flower heads and a strong scent. The other two varieties seem to be Hedychium coronarium since it is white and the other is sort or salmon coloured but I have not been able to identify it yet. I think it is Hedychium augustiflolium "Peach" I will also plant these two at Alafua although I am not sure when or where. I may try planting some along the creek bank which has been greatly eroded over the last 20 years since I used to go swiming and exploring there.


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Glorious Lilies

I bought one plant about a year ago now. Since then it had new plantels and I divided it transplanted them. Now two are flowering. Sorry I have no idea what they are called.

I have moved since my last post and have done quite a bit of planting since then. I had to move all the plants I had at Fagalii Uta to our house at Alafua.

I had planted some pink Zepheranthes and Flame violets (Episcia) in the ground at the house at Fagalii Uta. I had intended to leave them for the next tenant but then thought that knowing how some people operate they might weed them out so I decided to take them out. Unfortunately on the day that I was going to dig them up the people who look after the property i.e. take care of the grass etc who had been in the process of mowing the grass and trimming the hedges had added a new thing to their activities: spraying the strip around the house with herbicide!

I guess it makes sense as it kills those hard to reach plants against the houses. Unfortunately this included the strip of Zepheranthes I had decided I should remove. I guess my prescience was correct but I did not act in time.

To make it worse there are cats and dogs in the neighbourhood and when my neighbour who has three dogs and a cat complained they ignored her concerns that the pets might get poisoned as well.


Flora and Fauna - Plants and Critters Blog by Vincent Albert Vermeulen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://plantsandcritters.blogspot.be/.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://plantsandcritters.blogspot.be/.

Glorious pink Zephyranthes among other flora

When I went to the back porch to let the cat Felonious Feline yesterday morning I was quite delighted by an unexpected and astonishing view of a whole slew of pink rain lilies Zephyranthes in bloom. Scratchit was of course oblivious to this and made a beeline for her bowl while I went out to admire them. Two of the pots have about thirty flowers in each (yes I counted them). Three other pots have one to four and one of the little poly bags has a couple.

I went to get the camera but the battery was low because in spite of the label "heavy duty" these ones did not last long. Apparently you need to buy special batteries made for use in digital cameras. I don't get it. Heavy Duty should mean heavy duty not heavy duty except if you use it in your digital camera.
Naturally I was so excited and anxious to take some photos that I messed up the pictures and managed to take four blurry shots before the battery died.


I forgot to buy batteries and today they are looking as if the flowers will not last much longer. I suppose I should have held of pollinating them but all I could think of was how this many flowers could translate into tons of seed heads and a gazillion itty bitty black seeds that would grown into more Zephyranthes and produce even more dazzling floral displays.

I used a most unsophisticated method possible which consisted of bending the long stems and making the flowers kiss each other. In the meantime here are some photos I took not too long ago of other plants.

 

This is a Blue Iris which was from a huge clump that I divided and transplanted only a few months ago. Amazingly they have already started flowering. These flowers look a bit raggedly because they are all wet from the rain. Also to catch them at their best you need to get them in the morning soon after they have opened up. Towards the afternoon they start closing up and do not look as spectacular.

Here you can see some of the blue iris plants. As you can see they are quite small still and yet amazingly they are already flowering. They belong to the Iris family ( Iridaceae). I think these ones belong to the Neomarica genus but I am not sure. I have a similar plant with smaller yellow flowers which are definately Neomarica. Neomarica are also known as Walking Irises or Apostle Plants. this is becasue the flower stalk has numerous flowers (supposedly twelve hence the name) which eventually become little plantlets. As these grow the stalk dips until the plantlets are able to take root which gives rise to the "walking" bit. Here you can see one where the little plantlets are growing where the flowers were.
Unfortunately the big blue ones I have do not do this. However, there are pictures of other Neomarica species that look similar and are also non walking. the closest that I think resembles this variety is the Brazilian Iris (Neomarica gracilis or caerulea). This site has a picture. They look very similar even the three flowers on one stem but the stems of these ones have never ever bent down and taken root.

Here is one of my favourites a Hedychium which is also known as butterfly ginger. I have four varieties; white, salmon and a creamy yellow and a buttery yellow. The one on top is the creamy yellow one. Hedycium are native to the foothills of the Himalayas and have an intense and divine fragrance. Anyone who has gone over the Vailima cross island road in the evening or at night will have smelt them as they get over the top and descend toward Lotofaga as there is a huge patch growing along the road in one of the cattle farms there.

I also remember an even more intense encounter with these on Kauaii up at Waimea Canyon. It seems that the scent is stronger in cool weather because when I was up at the Waimea Canyon it was in the middle of the day and it was very cool. Up at Afiamalu it only gets cool at night unless it is a rainy or overcast day. The ones I have growing at Malifa only smell strongly in the evening. During the day you have to practically stick your nose into the flower to smell it.

This one is the buttery yellow Hedycium. I think it is Hedychium flavescens. I will be planting a whole lot of Hedychium at Alafua along the fence which runs along the side of the house where the bedrooms are. I have not decided if I will plant just one variety or all four in blocks. I will be planting them in other locations too so it is more a matter of aesthetics than of planting one variety or another. The buttery yellow one seems to be hardier and have bigger flower heads so I might put those in by the bedrooms

At Malifa I planted some Hedycium at the base of some of the Avocado (Persea americana) and Moso’oi a.k.a. Ylang-ylang (Cananga odorata) saplings to protect the trees from careless idiots with whipper snippers who kept going to close and damaging the young saplings in one case stripping the bark of and practically ring barking one of the saplings. I also planted some teuila aka Red Ginger (Alpinia purpurata) around another avocado sappling

The Hedychium Genus belongs to the Zingiberaceae Family which is part of the Zingiberales Order.  Strangely most of the plants that I have belong to the Order Zingiberales and most of these to the Zingiberaceae Family. These include the Rattle plants (The Marantaceae Family) and the Helliconias (family Heliconiaceae), Torch Gingers (Etlingera), Beehive Gingers (Zingiber spectabile), Tumeric (Curcuma), Ginger (Alpinia) and Ginger (Zingiber officinale) from the Zingiberaceae Family.

There are so many stunning species available in the Zingiberales Order and the Zingiberaceae Family in particular. Whenever I go anywhere I notice what plants are there. Its amazing how often people are oblivious to what they have growing in their gardens or on their property and worse how often precious and not easily obtainable species are chopped down, pulled out and thrown away or burnt all in the guise of "cleaning up".
Every now and then I have been somewhere and been able to anticipate the destrution and managed to rescue a few plants.
Actually I saw some exquisite little plants growing down by the river at Alafua which I fear are in danger. I am not sure but they could be May flowers they have flower clusters with tiny little white bell shaped flowers. I need to ensure that they are not decimated by the vegetable garden planters there at the moment clearing land.

I transplanted some Tumeric in the front yard at Malifa and they were growing fine but they all withered and died down. I am hoping that the rhizome is still viable and will resprout as it did in the past when I had them in big poly bags until Ninja Cat started using it as her litter box. I am still not sure if it is the variety that is used to produce tumeric but the rhizome certainly smells like that and stains your fingers yellow if you crush it.

The Ginger that I have growing in a few locations is the edible variety. I am only certain of this because they grew from rhizomes I bought from the market and stores specifically so I could grow some.

More Hedges

Here are some of the other hedge cuttings I mentioned earlier are a varriety of green and yellow varrigated leaved plants.

This type has long thin green leaves speckled with yellow. I am some along the fence between the adjacent property which is empty except for a small rather over grown banana plantation. Unfortunately one of the plants that is growing there is the fua saina or mile a minute and the other tougher creeper. At least the mile a minute has some medicinal uses. The other plant is a real pest and climbs up the fence and onto the plants on our property.

You need to constantly pull them off as they will very quickly cover the plants blocking off sunlight and choking them. The giant helliconias, beehive ginger, Golden Torch Helliconias and even the Moso'oi (Yalang Yalang) and esi / pawpaw trees are threatened by this fast growing creeper.

I have noticed that in some cases when they are not getting enough sun they go green.

These are pretty much the same colour scheme but broader shaped leaves. Like the first type it has hard glossy leaves. Neither of them flower but they are quite striking especially when they are big and bushy. A whole hedge would look quite nice.

These are another variety which looks really nice especially when it flowers. The flowers have purple inner petals and white outer petals.

These are the ones that the furry black caterpilar loves too. Colin and I made some cuttings filling two cell trays using the itty bitty cuttings method.

they are looking rather sad and bedraggled at the moment. But I am sure that they will recover. Once they develop little rootlest they will perk up. Then maybe in 3-4 weeks they should have sufficent roots to transplant. I like to wait until they have a nice ball of roots so that when you pop them out of the cell tray or poly bag the soil does not all come pouring out. The cuttings that are transplanted when they have reached that stage of root development tend to recover from transplantation much faster and start growing.

Here you can see the road front with the purple-black hedge being grown. Its very uneven at the moment because the section that is growing all nice and bush was the section planted first and from which cuttings were taken to establish the other sections.

Pink Zepheranthes, Demonic Chickens and wanna be Wolves

There  are several major differences between living at Fagalii Uta and Alafua. The primary one is the noise factor. Aside from extremely noisy neigbhours there are the chickens and the dogs. The Neighbours range from the type who turns their radio on all day a top volume so practically ALL the neigbhours can hear it to neighbours who have built their house right next to the boundry which means you can hear everything they say. The worst part is that this is right next to the bedrooms. Hence the thick plant screens that I have been planting along that boarder.

The other problem is that some of the neighbours have chickens. I always thought chickens crowed in the morning. I remember when we had the poultry farm here ages ago (when there were far far fewer neighbours) the few roosters that had managed to elude identification (and execution) when the pullets were transfered to the laying sheds, would serenade the dawn (until they grew up and their big combs betrayed them and they ended in the cooking pot). These roosters though are demonic creatures who do not seem to understand the concept of crowing at dawn. No they crow good night, they crow at midnight and throught out the wee hours of the night and morning. But it does not stop at that there are several and its always one that starts and then you hear another in a distant location responding and then another then its bedlam.

To add injury to insult the neighbour's chickens root around on our land and seem to take great joy in industriously digging up anything I have planted. I assume they appreciate my having loosened the soil but after finding that they had dug up and scattered a whole bed of pink rain lillies I was not amused. The fact that I do not really want them eatting the resident earthworms is just another point against them.

On top of that our street or rather I should say our neighbourhood is repleat with dogs as in every variety and size of mutt under the sun and at night they will start up a chorus of howling. Like the roosters one starts then that family's dogs will join in then another pack and another until all the dogs in the street and along the main road are howling along. I have not yet discovered just how far this phenomenon extends but I can imagine that it rolls in waves all around the whole Alafua - Sinamonga and Lotopa areas. Someone who lives along the main road quite a distance from the turn off onto our street verified my suspicions when he said that the dogs along the main road are part of the chorus.

I have resorted to putting cottonwool in my ears at night to try and block out the noise a bit. And to think that when I was at Fagalii Uta Undertaker and his two friends used to drive me nuts with their occassional swearing matches with the other dogs!

Well I have had to cover the zepheranthes with cocoa wire too. I think that once they are established I should be able to remove it. Having a yard full of coco wired covered plants is definately not what I envisioned. I will need to sort out some alternative to the cocowire covered Flame violets because I think that as soon as I remove the wire the dogs will be digging them up. Maybe some sort of wooden picket barrier might work?
I still need to remove all the stones as well as some plants and rubbish from the front area of the house where more Flame violets will be planted. I intend to plant Blue Irises in front of those.