If you’re careful, and lucky, and plant pretty things, sometimes you can get a surprise for your birthday. Back in April, I wrote about one of my new plantings, a vine called Jacquemontia pentanthos. Our south Florida native plant bible mentions that the vine is infrequently cultivated “and unsightly when out of flower.” So for much of the summer I had to be very careful when weeding that backyard patch, because the invasive groundcover and the native vine were a bit hard to separate to a hot, sweaty gardener.
But this week the vine started to turn on the flowers, and now it would be pretty hard for someone to mistake this sky-blue jacquemontia for anything else:
The flowers are popping up almost everywhere, from the sprawling bits on the ground to the climbing bits on the fence. Now all I have to do is try to make sure that all the vines that share that back fence play nice, and don’t grow too far over onto my neighbor’s side; he’s pretty zealous with those pruners, and I nearly lost the lovely Virginia Creeper vine at several points this summer. I patrol it weekly now to be sure everyone stays on my side.
PS: taking pictures of flowers is hard! They’re three-dimensional, and small, and it’s hard to get the whole darn thing in focus. My respect for those “boring” flower-picture-takers just went up several notches.
Will this grow in Soutern Calif?
Here’s what one article says about it:
I suspect it needs the humidity of the Caribbean to do well, and it would probably be pretty hard to find in desert-like SoCal.