Anybody like weird plants?

How about this one I have growing in a pot, It's an Arisaema and they are called Cobra Lillies. It's hardy and will grow outside as well but will flower in mid June.

I have a few different types of these Aroids but not all as dramatic as this one

Is it carnivorous?

And this one in Paris this year

Not quite so exotic but did manage this from seed, its took five years and I get loads of tubers but so far only one flower

Not Carnivorous but they use flies to pollinate it, Here is a Youtube of another of my plants, a Helicodiceros also called the dead Horse Arum and you can see flies all over it

Edited By vic newey on 10/05/2023 14:32:08

Here is a fully hardy Arisaema Tortuosum which can reach 6 feet"

After nurturing and growing the leaves on the top of a pineapple fruit for three years, I eventually managed to grow a pineapple. The plant is very big and it was a lot of work for one fruit. We do well in this country to be able to buy them for about £1 each.

Seeing as we have become Gardeners World, can anyone come up with a way to get rid of bindweed?

Bindweed?

If you don't want much else to grow in its place.

Take a shanpoo bottle T(Clean and dry ). Drill a m1/8 or m3.16" hole in the cap and fill with salt., and pour onto the bindweed, before hte heavens open.

It should shrivel and die. But be careful to concentrate the salt on the weed.

Howard

Dig it carefully (try not to break up the white roots) and pick out all the bits. Do it again in another couple of weeks and you'll find more that you missed first time round.

The point of doing this is to make less plant to kill.

Let any stems grow, encourage them up canes or sticks to make them easy to handle and keep them out of things you want.

Once they reach a good length,with some full leaves, carefully coil them up (still attached to the root), put some rubber gloves on and wet them liberally with a systemic weedkiller* and seal them in a plastic bag with a rubber band round the neck.

Let them 'stew' for a while to let the chemicals kill the root.

"Weedol" do some strong products - they will neutralise on contact with soil so you can replant quickly.

Be careful to observe safety precautions and don't get the Weedol on anything you want to keep, even splashes of it..

Repeat until defeated.

Speedy builder 5 your morph is very similar to dragon arum which seem to grow like weeds in my garden and when flowering they stink to high heaven .

I like the look of the Arisaema, I'll have to get some bulbs for next year.

Not so sure about the Dead Horse Arum, though I daresay my carnivorous plants might like it as a neighbour.

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I have four of the Dracunculus Vulgaris plants in the greenhouse and due to open the flower in a couple of days, unlike the Amorphophalus they are very hardy outdoors

It looks cool. I never thought that it's so beautiful. Anyway our platen is unique

Nice plants.
Exotic is a relative thing. I did grow some bananas in Surrey as well as pineapple but it gets impractical apart from the challenge and the winter heating bills got silly.. I had dustbins of soil with successful strelitzia that did well with modest winter help and then got even more daft when I picked up some white strelitzia seeds cheap - which germinated well but no way could I cope with a plant that grows 20-30 feet tall and had to let them die over winter when they got too big for indoors in Wales.

pgk

Word of warning, beautiful as they are and some of the plants shown can be stunning, if you have cats then please be aware that all lilies and the exotics featured are highly poisonous to cats and can cause death. I have four cats, one an Abyssinian will eat any plant so we are very careful what plants we have around, he even goes into the garden and eats daffodils when they are in season, needless to say they are on the list of poisonous garden plants, he usually proceeds to vomit the consumed plants which I suppose is his body’s way of countering the poisons he has ingested. So far his diet has not proved terminal. Dave W

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I'm not sure if you are referring to my Arisaemas? which although are called cobra Lillies but are not related to the Lilly family in any way. In some parts of the world the tubers are cooked and eaten

Apart from that, you clearly have an unusual cat because that's not normal behaviour is it so issuing dire warnings is a bit unfair, Our cats occasionally eat grass as do most cats but I've not seen them eat anything else.

Vic

You are right our cat is pretty unusual, he is as thick as two short planks but a beautiful loving cat and at 6 kilos is no small size, he has always eaten any plant life he comes across but this is not unique behaviour for cats, there are some breeds that will sample any plants they come across, hence my warning, there are lists of plants that it is advisable to keep away from cats, lilies come near the top of the list. Anyway to digress we have another cat who delights in eating swarf that he finds in my workshop, so far as we know he has only sampled aluminium swarf which he subsequently regurgitates, he is now only allowed in my workshop when I am present, he is deaf and follows me everywhere and is content when in the workshop with me to sit on the workbench next to me or he will curl up and sleep there. Checked with our Vet and his opinion was that aluminium swarf is relatively soft and would transit through the gut with no problems so not to panic. Dave W