The heat and humidity have gone into hyperdrive here. Highs over 90 (F) / 32 (C) for the next few days. The dog days of summer are here and my dogs have the right idea, reclining in air conditioned comfort. Not a good time to be in the garden, though I am thankful for the shade trees.
My first image today is a tree planted to shade my driveway about seven years ago, starting to really take over now. This is the fruit and foliage of Gumbo Limbo (Bursea simaruba)
The Gumbo Limbo has a hard cane Dendrobium orchid growing on its trunk. My neighbor brought this to me and it is just starting to root into the trunk. It should bloom in the winter with 4 or 5 foot long sprays of flowers. I am really looking forward to seeing this! The tree is sometimes called the Tourist Tree – because the bark looks like peeling, sunburned skin. I tied in onto the tree with pantyhose, you can see these on the right side of the image.
Duranta “Sapphire Showers” is a reliable summer bloomer. I planted this for butterflies, they love the nectar.
A new plant in the garden. Meet Aerva ‘Red Velvet’. I like a bit of burgundy foliage in the garden and it is a difficult plant to find that will grow in frying sugar sand. This is a ‘native’ of gravelly sand from India and a medicinal herb there. I am not going to eat any, but have taken several cuttings to propagate and spread throughout the garden.
This is Allamanda, creeping over from my neighbor. These are pretty – and very hard to get rid of. The sap from the vine is supposedly used by tribes in the rainforest for poison darts.
Interesting foliage today is the new growth on a Piecrust Croton (Codiaeum variegatum) The older foliage eventually is black with green, yellow and red varigation.
That’s it! Six plants and one dog image. From South Florida. To see more Six on Saturday posts visit Jon the Propagator at http://www.thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com
Happy Gardening and stay cool!
The Shrub Queen 
I had an Allamanda that my sister-in-law sent me from Réunion island. It survived 2 years and bloomed but didn’t resist the winter 2019-2020… Good memories seeing the flowers again.
Thank you also for presenting us the Gumbo Limbo that I didn’ know; the foliage and the fruits are very pretty!
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The Allamandas are interesting..have you seen the seed pods? Gumbo Limbos are hard to resist.
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No I only had flowers.. I googled and saw that the seed pods looked a bit like those of leonotis that I had grown .
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It does look like Leonitis and they rarely make seed.
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Has Duranta always been available? I thought we learned it in school, but then never saw it again. When my colleague got it, he thought it was something new. I reminded him that we learned it in school, but now I am not so sure.
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Duranta is really common here. It was used as an annual for charteuse foliage in Atlanta.
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That chartreuse color just looks sickly to me. It is neither sufficiently yellow, nor sufficiently green. Brent’s has green foliage. He really likes it.
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I have both..the chartreuse is doing better.
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There does not seem to be much information about the various cultivars, which is weird for something so trendy. My colleague has two with green foliage, but one is shrubby while the other is more of a vine. They look the same to me, except that one climbs.
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It is weird, I tried to figure out what the botanical names are and couldn’t find them. Some of the more tropical shrubbery has a tendency to climb like that, another weird thing.
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That seems to be the way of modern nomenclature. What was designed to be a reliable and stable system is now often changing, and modern cultivars commonly lack species designations. It is silly that old names change because some botanist determines what their lineage really is, but the same botanists do not seem to care about the lineage of new cultivars.
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Indeed. I agree. Calling Coleus Plectranthus – Bah humbug.
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Hey, I am just now writing about that for next week! (I know I just posted an article about it, but that was an old recycled article.)
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Looking forward to the post
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Hot and humid, icky! Stay cool!
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Icky and sticky
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That is warm! Your garden seems to be thriving on it though (with much help from you of course). That Croton has amazing foliage colours.
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Indeed, I think August is the worst! Croton foliage is amazing. Another favorite is called Sloppy Painter.
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So many of your garden plants are completely unknown to me. Just goes to show how diverse our little Earth is.
I particularly lile the Allamanda.
Hope that you’re taking care in the high temperatures, a chara. We had 27°C two weeks ago and we baked. Crikey 32 is melting!
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What grows here continues to amaze me. I am melting! It cools in October..
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