Herself’s Houston Garden

I’m told this plant was used in religious ceremonies by Zulu priests and that if you smoke the dried leaves it causes euphoria. I don’t know any Zulu priests so I couldn’t verify this information.

Lion’s ear can reach 6′ in height and 3′ across. It needs little water once it is settled in and many locals lost theirs with all the rain this past summer. So find a relatively dry location for it.

I’m told hummingbirds, bees and butterflies, love this plant. They had already migrated through here before this plant bloomed so I’ll know better next year. I’ve also read it attracts many wild birds.

I picked up mine at the Conroe Extension office sale a few months back. After about a month in the ground it began to bloom. It will happily bloom in sun or shade, just less often in the shade. You will want to prune it back late winter to early spring to keep it looking nice, otherwise it will require little care. It will lose its leaves after a frost but should recuperate nicely.

There are many more photos in the photography section.  Go to photos and search for ‘Lion’s ear’.

despite the 3 month drought we have a bloom coming July 22 '09

Aug 17th 2009 - a bud but the drought has effected quality

Pine cone ginger is named for its pink-green pine cone shaped flowers . The flowers appear mid to late summer, start out green and turn red. Small cream colored flowers appear on the cones. The flowers come out of the ground on their own stalks separate from the leaves. Blooming time is supposed to be fall so perhaps I’ll have some flower pictures to post here soon.

Foliage is variegated. Variegated varieties reach about 4′ tall, non-variegated about 7′ tall.

This ginger is easy to grow, clumping and propagated by division. Pine cone ginger is fast growing. It prefers moist soil don’t let it go totally dry. It prefers more sun than shade as do most variegated plants.

The milky substance in the flower cones is used in many shampoos. In medieval times ginger root was so loved it was set on the table nightly as we do with salt and pepper today.

This plant dropped about half its leaves when the weather first went under 40′ and the rest of them when we had the frost earlier this month.  It’ll either come back in the spring or it won’t.

This ginger did come back it has about 3 stalks now and I’m still waiting for my first bloom.

See also:Variegated Shell Ginger

I receive a fair number of people who wander to my website looking for information on toxic plants. It is my opinion after gardening down here for almost three years that every plant in my garden that doesn’t have thorns is toxic. And some of the plants that have thorns are toxic as well. I try to cover topics that bring people to the website that I haven’t already covered. But there is far too much conflicting information on which plants are toxic and to what degree for me to feel comfortable writing about it.

Some excellent, reliable sources of information on toxic plants are:
The army medical site list of toxic plants. There is extensive information here.

Utah Poisonous Plant Guide is an extensive database with pictures of the plants.

We’ve only had one problem with toxic plants and pets. We had an English mastiff. She was a beautiful dog, but all looks and no brains. It came time for her to be fixed. It was January, snow was on the ground and it was cold. We brought her in for her operation and she spent the day throwing up plant material at the vets. He sent her home and wanted to know what we had let her eat the night before. Nothing of course, she was due for surgery, and just about everything outside had died back for the winter. We rescheduled a week later.

She again went to the vets and proceeded to upchuck plant material all over the office. Again she came home with stern warnings from the vet to quit feeding her toxic plants. ( And what kind of idiots were we anyhow? )

The third time we didn’t let her out of our sight and she managed to get fixed. We never did figure out what plant she had been eating the nights before vet appointments. We never had another problem with her or any of the other pets eating toxic plants in the yard. Go figure.

{Freya in her usual spot hiding under my desk.}

For the houseplants site I’ve been reading a great deal of the new scientific discoveries we are making about plants. We’ve come a very long way in what we know about plants. Some of the discoveries will remind you of the 1960s studies about plant life, namely the Kirlian Photography.

Plants prefer to be grown in the same conditions as mom. Seeds are typically dropped near the mother plant and so grow and adapt to the same conditions. So even if your plant is a sun lover, if mom grew in a partly shady area, baby will prefer that also.

As a general rule of thumb Plants that are larger live longer.

Plants communicate with each other using chemical signals. They warn of insect attacks allowing nearby plants to strengthen their defenses. They do this using voc ( volatile organic compounds ) which are released into the air by one plant and recognized by another. They also swap viruses this way as well.

Plants also poison their neighbors. ( And you thought the garden was a nice quiet, well behaved place. )

And smart flower bulbs bury themselves deeper. If you don’t plant your bulbs deep enough they will dig themselves down.

These studies have gained enough ground that an Italian research group has opened a plant intelligence study lab. They hope to make robots and other artificial life based on plants the way some groups have done by mimicking insects.