Maple Tree Blooms

So our Red Maple Acer rubrum is blooming right now.  Soon it will leaf out and be covered bright red leaflets and seeds.

This tree is native to eastern North America, and I am at the southern edge of it's range. (zone 9) While it can grow as tall as 75' it tends to not grow so tall here.

My husband planted this tree before we moved into our house in 2000.  When he planted it it was less than a foot tall, and probably a seedling from the same year.  Now it is about 15 foot tall, and starting to provide shade for our house during the summer in the evening.

Deciduous trees are good for reducing your heating and cooling bills, by providing shade in the summer and dropping their leaves in the winter, allowing more sunshine to help warm your house.

Catching Up

So I missed a few days.

Here is a picture of some lovely roving from the Unique Sheep.

It is Cultivated Silk and Merino Wool in a 50/50 blend in the color Everlasting Evergreen.  I am spinning it up into a lace weight yarn and knitting the Silver Bells and Cockleshells  shawl pattern by Melissa Lemmons. 

Here is a picture of the yarn spun, plied, washed, thwacked, and dried.

This is the first 56 yards, I am still working on the first of 4 oz of roving.  

And here is today's picture: a bloom from my Louis Philippe Rose.

This a bourbon type rose.

Here is the description from the Antique Rose Emporium, which sells this and many other Antique Roses:  "The flowers are double, deep crimson with a touch of blush at the center and like all old Chinas exhibits an occasional white streak through the petals. This rose is often confused with ‘Cramoisi Superieur’. The only differences we can detect is that ‘Louis Philippe’ is more compact and the color varies. A Texas statesman, Lorenzo de Zavala, collected this rose during his 1834 stint as Minister to France and planted it at his home in Lynchburg."

An Antique Rose is defined as any rose bred before 1850 when the first hybrid tea rose La France was bred.  They tend to be more vigorous, and disease resistant than modern roses.  This one also has a fantastic classic rose scent as well.

A Spice of Life

I read somewhere, (The Glutenfree Goddess) that you should have a signature/secret ingredient.  I have chosen Ginger Zingiber officinal for mine.  So, I decided maybe I should grow some.  I bought some fresh ginger root from my local grocer about 2 weeks before Christmas.  I used one tuber, (actually ginger is neither a root, nor a tuber, but actually a rhizome or underground stem) and set the other one aside, hoping that the bump was an eye, and that I would get a sprout and Voila!

If you look closely at the bulbous form at the base of the sprout, you can see little pre-roots forming.  That is my signal to plant this soon.  I am going to keep it inside because it is a vigorous plant, which is a nice way of saying invasive, and also because I want to keep an eye on it.

Kew gardens says this plant is possibly native to India, and it also does best if the ground is wetter than dry.  YMMV.

In Full Bloom

Here is the same bloom as yesterday, but fully opened.

The scientific name for this plant is Schlumbergera truncata.  The first part of the name is for a collector of cactus Frederic  Schlumberg who lived in on the outskirts of Rouen in southern France.  The namer  of the species was Charles Lemare, and the collector was Allan Cunningham who under the employment of Kew Gardens spent the years between 1814 and 1816 collecting plants from the Rainforest of what is now Brazil.   The second part of the name refers to the fact that the "leaves" are really a segmented trunk, which is botanically called cladodes.

Their specific origin is the Rio de Janeiro.  And they also are pollinated by humming birds.  Like many plants they must be cross pollinated with another plant that isn't closely related.

The best article I could find on the internet discussing this plant is on the blog Plants are the Strangest People.

Project 365 Day One: Christmas Cactus

I am going to try project 365.

That is to take a picture every day for a year.

Here is my first picture:

It is a Christmas Cactus that I bought at Publix two weeks ago.  This is one of the few blooms that did not fall off.  Unfortunately, when you move a plant, it goes into shock, and this one was extremely dry when I bought it.  

How dry? Well it is losing at least one or two leaves from being so dry.

Christmas Cacti are native to South America, where they are epiphytes in the rain forest, even though they are cacti, they do not tolerate extremely dry conditions, nor do they like soaking wet feet.

Happy New Year