Tropical and Subtropical plants for Southern California

The Queen's Flower tree, Lagerstroema speciosa, a fast growing, deciduous tree with beautiful lavender blooms is thriving and growing in the ground after one full year in coastal Southern California. Both in containers and in the ground, it lost it's leaves on schedule and put out gorgeous new foliage. The Queen's Flower trees are doing well even after the lows of the last winter (28 degrees ) .

Alpinias such as this Kimi Raspberry only survived in the greenhouse (minimum temperature 48 degrees). All the large plants outside in full sun and in the shade house (overhead protection but no heat) are dead.

However, the Indonesian Wax Gingers seem more cold hardy but still would not recommend overwintering in temperatures below 45 degrees.

Dwarf Yellow Poincianas are growing vigorously from seed but have yet to go through a "normal" winter here in coastal So. Cal.

Cymbidium season recap

It's a lazy hazy summer with new cymbidium growths making good progress. The last cymbidium season gave a moderate number of spikes but very clean, bright colors and good flower size overall. The rains in late winter and spring were really well spaced (every week to 10 days) and the cymbidiums loved all the good water.

We observed less than usual damage from slugs, snails, mites and other pests. A little physical damage from the moderate to heavy winds that came in with the rain storms. The petals and sepals showed a little bruising where they rubbed together.

The three or four day temperatures in May that touched 90 degrees did little to harm the blooms but the season ended earlier than last year.

Looking forward to the next season and trying to keep the plants in good shape and still conserve water.......no rain for us here on the coast......the inland folks got almost an inch in May from one random storm.....lucky for them.