John&Jacq~s Garden

Garden surprises in June 2009

Bauhinia kockiana has always been a baffling vine for us. It is most elusive. Grows fast and vigorous with beautiful bright green and luxuriant foliage yet rarely flowers! We seldom get to enjoy their blooms in large stunning clusters, that are so often seen in most home gardens around our neighborhood or elsewhere. Just have a peep here and you’ll know why we’re so green with envy! ;)

Sad to say, thus far we’ve got rid of one non-flowering B. kockiana vine and another that had stopped flowering. They definitely weren’t happy being container-grown and thus confined! Alas, that’s all the comfort we can offer since a major part of our garden had been paved.

This June, the only remaining vine currently in our garden sprang a lovely surprise! It was just a young 30cm-tall plant in November 2007 and has finally decided to put a wide grin on our faces!

Blooming for the very first time ever and displaying inconspicuously just two flowers, a far cry from its characteristic large flower head. Strangely out of form, nonetheless pretty and admired all the same, but without that wow exclamation from us!

Anyway, it does deserve a place in our garden journal too, yes? :D

Another delightful surprise is the angelic-white Hymenocallis caribaea (Caribbean Spiderlily) that exudes a wonderful lingering fragrance from dusk to dawn.

Wow! We were captivated by its beauty and scent less than two months ago and now again in June…how marvelous! Could be a first-time bloomer too from one of the three bulbs housed in the same pot…just not sure!

More info on the Caribbean Spiderlily here.

Something else captured our interest too.
We noticed a lovely maroon-colored and glossy berry on our Ixora coccinea ‘Dwarf Red’. In fact, there are two of them. A first time for us, we’ve never seen ixora berries before! These have now turn into black seeds.

Should we try to propagate new plants from these seeds, we wonder. Well, maybe out of curiosity just to see what happens?

This beauty below, Dieffenbachia bowmannii ‘Carriere’, no more surprises us! We’re so used to its flowering schedule which it repeats every third month year-round or after the emergence of a set of 3-4 leaves! Very regimented in its blooming. We can somehow anticipate the flowers appearing. How wonderfully rewarding, growing it!

On the other hand, the other Dieffenbachia species like D. maculata and D. amoena ‘Tropic Snow’ that we grow too have never flowered for us. Probably, they are non-flowering species?

Last edit: June 2, 2016

Tags: flowering plants, green, orange, our garden, perennials, variegated plants, vines, white