Hawaiian Post!

A lot of the plants in my yard are inspired from tropical places that I've visited and want to recreate. Most of my inspiration comes from the subtropical landscapes of Central Florida, but some of it comes from a trip to Hawaii back in 2010. 

My plumerias are blooming very well this season after taking a break last year. I haven't seen blooms this strong in a very long time. Plumerias always do well in terms of growth over our summer months, but sometimes the timing of the blooms is too late in the season so they don't develop properly. This year everything started developing early which is great! 

I was promised Plumeria "Crazy" would well... bloom like crazy. It lived up to the hype and then some! This plant started blooming INSIDE by a bright window back in January/February. Getting a plumeria to keep it's leaves indoors is impressive enough, getting them to bloom is almost impossible without grow lights and even then it's hard to get healthy blooms. Well this one bloomed by a window without any help and over 6 months later it's still blooming with no signs of stopping! I mean I've never been so impressed and it's throwing up more inflos. If I lived in the tropics this plant would definitely be blooming all year long without breaks despite it still being small. Highly recommend this one! 

Plumeria Jeanne is a nice bloomer too. The flower heads get huge. This one is still young but it might be more impressive by September.

Plumeria "Divine" is an old timer in the yard. Will never get tired of it and since it's a dwarf I never have to worry about running out of room for it either!

I hope this one gets a chance to bloom! It's small enough to throw under growlights which I will do when the nights return to the low 50s in October.

Another Hawaiian inspired plant is my butterfly gingers. I got these from the island as tiny tourist plants. They are usually reliable fall bloomers by me blooming from September until about Thanksgiving (whenever first frost is). This year it looks like it's going to bloom early and that's especially impressive because it had a slow start. I accidentally left it outside bare-rooted during a very hard freeze into the low 20s last fall (it was below freezing for over 12 hours)

This is a really cool plant too. It's called Pua male in Hawaii, more commonly known as Stephanotis. Very nice fragrance and very easy to care for. Grows similarly to Hoyas and they have similar growing requirements. 

Thanks for looking!