I love my Charlie G also, Lynne, and now that the weather is cooler, his blooms are getting larger with a much deeper color. He blooms for me no matter what - maybe that is why I love him.
Ruth, my CG has never had less than 20 blooms at a time and usually about 50.
Last year on his last big flush, I counted 88 blooms. I hope yours blooms again also.
C. Grimaldi is probably my favorite yellow/gold/orange brug. It is prone to get stem blight, but worth taking the chance. This was the first flush of blooms on mine after babying it all summer in 2003. It died the next spring when I brought it out of dormancy. Must have been a bit too cool for it in the garage that winter.
ChSam (Shirley Morr)
Chariton, Iowa
Zone 5
This message has been edited by ChSam on Sep 6, 2006 10:02 AM
Lynne...wouldn't it be fascinating if we could trace all the parent plants your 2 CG's came from...back to 1 plant?! Knowing who has owned them and where the lived would be really cool.
Shirley, what can you tell us about Stem Blight? What it looks like? I assume incurable, so the plant must be destroyed?
Patrick
Brug Moderator
USDA Zone 8b
Heat Zone 3
Sunset Zone 5
SeaTac, WA...one cool place
Stem blight or Stangelbrand are one and the same, I believe. This is a disease that gets into the soil and you cannot plant brugs there for some time. It affects mostly yellow multihybrids, but can hit others. What it looks like is a blackening around the nodes that grows until it is horrible looking and eventually dies. You don't want to leave it in the yard if you get it...just destroy it quickly. I've heard that CG is a good signal plant for determining if you have it around you. It will get it quicker than any other plant. Isn't that exciting? This can destroy your collection quickly, so be very sure of who you get your plants from.
There are viruses that we can't detect quickly enough at times and they will slip through. Nothing can be done about it. Tomato wilt is common as are tomato and tobacco mosaic viruses. It can be easy to send cuttings and not know the plant has the virus. Generally they can live with some and I've heard that all brugs do have a virus. They will show up when the plant is stressed. Sucking insects transfer viruses from one plant to another. It is always best to keep new cuttings in quarantine for several months, if possible.
This was supposed to be a pink suaveolens, but it could have been anything since I didn't get to see it bloom. It came to me with SB or Stangelbrand, and I was able to get rid of it before planted and the dirt from the pot contaminated my outside soil. You need to always be on the lookout for disease and viruses. If you do get SB in a potted plant, throw everything away, including the pot. Hope this helps some. I had thrown the original picture away, so had to go retrieve it from Daves Garden.
Oh my goodness, I had no idea there were so many illnesses for these beauties.
Thanks, Shirley - this will certainly help me be on the lookout for this brug destroyer. That is very sad when you have to destroy everything, but certainly not worth taking a chance on contaminating another plant.
my cg has a decent sized bud on it prob another week or so till it opens and have two blooms on an unkown peach i am thinking it may be a versicolor it opens white than turns peach over time not much in the way of blooms the last few months all this rain is nto helping right now either
in gardening there are no failures only learning experiances unless of course you give up mikey in fl
the cg i have has a few blooms opening these are tonight first day open a little bit of color but not much darker than yellow but it looks like it is darkening a little prob have more color tomarrow i had a little bit of pollen saved from my unkown peach i think it is some sorta versi color but i pollinated the flowers with that if it makes a seed pod it will be my first seed pod ever on a brug
in gardening there are no failures only learning experiances unless of course you give up mikey in fl
Onr think I love about Brugmansia is their everchanging hues from startinng to drop down from the calyx to the colours the end up as they are dying....... always changing.
Wayne, pretty much, yes. Although the one I sent to you came from a different plant, I can't tell the difference between them. Here's a midnight picture, during the evening, morning, and daytime the flowers look like the ones in Mike's pictures. I tend to take more pictures when the sun isn't around and the flowers are fully extended.
They really do change quite a bit, not only during the life of each flower, but also from flush to flush... this last time around they tried to confuse me by starting off dark orange and ending really dark orange. Unfortunately, in the transfer from plant to camera to computer, they went from looking really dark orange to kindof peachy.
Oh yeah... I had a pod developing on CG, it was crossed with Peaches -N- Cream. A lovely gust of wind blew the plant over onto the pod, broke it right off... MN's way of telling me, "Hey, put this plant in a bigger pot!"
Lynne
USDA Zone 9b
Heat Zone 10
Bradenton, Florida
Michele, there is that story of the sea-level rising causing trees along the west coast of Florida to die. University of Florida news article.
They're saying that it's because of exposure to salt water, which probably wouldn't have anything to do with the drainage here. But we are really close to the Manatee River, so if the sea level is rising, the river level is rising, and the level of the ground water would be rising too. That would explain why several years ago it took a strong high tide combined with a storm to get the water this deep but now the high tide only makes it deeper.
We can work around it for now, nothing important is going in the ground. I'm hoping we drain and dry a bit over winter and next spring. If next summer starts looking like it's going to be this way, we'll invest in some nice sturdy blocks to set the pots on, raise them up out of the water. I'm concerned with what's it going to be like 5 years from now, or 10, but pushing that thought back to concentrate on taking care of them now, we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it, or trudge that swamp, or whatever, lol.
Lynne
USDA Zone 9b
Heat Zone 10
Bradenton, Florida
