We have Stapeliad plants (Carrion flower) and this is a giant one in the process of opening. I would guess it’s about 10 inches across when opened. The picture on the left shows the bud, the picture in the center shows it opening; the one on the right shows it open and attracting flies.
Two Cabbage butterflies mating. At first I thought it was a deformed one, until I looked closer and saw the second one attached. They even fly around like that.
This puffball of a cactus (approx 3-4 inches diameter) looks surreal with all the dew after a long rain.
Here are the paper cups in trays with rooting for next year.
Usually they have a symmetry of 5, like a star. Don’t know what happened here! The variety is Flying Saucer.
As I was adding some new Coleus pictures, I realized that I had a whole bunch of photos that were taken a year ago that I never posted, plus an old draft of a post! So here it is…sorry for the belated posting: “On August 21, we visited the Denver Botanical Gardens where they had art installations…
I apologize for not keeping up with this blog. That is not to say I haven’t been keeping up with the Coleus. I just haven’t felt like typing it all out. It is almost too overwhelming at times. Last fall I had surgery for melanoma on my arm, which prevented me from lifting trays of…
I’m continually amazed at my hybrids, especially the colors on this one, Heart Beet. It is neon carmine red and brilliant magenta. Sometimes digital cameras seem to accentuate the brilliance of red and pink hues a little too much, but this is pretty accurate to the real deal.
It seems that the mosaic or variegated Coleus varieties sport the most. Last year my Solar Spectrum sported a solid light green stem; this year it sported a solid red stem. One of my oldest Twist and Twirl plants, probably from 2011 or earlier, made two stems: one green, one reddish. I’ve kept it like…
This is the time of year when all I want to do is scour the greenhouses for plants. Unfortunately, things are a little off this year due to unanticipated problems. This past winter I was diagnosed with skin cancer, and had two operations, one on my forehead (Moh’s surgery) and one on my upper arm…
It’s been about three months since I gave my plants haircuts and brought them indoors for the long Wisconsin winter. I have seen my plants go from big, healthy mini-bushes to sticks and stumps. The soil has gone from overly-saturated (it rained a lot before I brought them inside) to winter-dry. I’ve seen the main…
There were so many awesome Coleus this year, but the most drop-dead gorgeous show-stopping one of them all is most certainly this Kong. It started out as a slightly unique Kong I found at Koepke’s, and labelled a “Mosaic Kong.” It didn’t look like the typical Mosaic Kongs, the ones with splotchy whites and red/roses.…
While we were gone on our trip, a pot of unintentional seedlings grew quite a bit. We don’t intentionally try to pollinate our Coleus, on the contrary, we try to remove all flowers or buds as we see them. However some will slip by us, and one pot of perhaps a sadly deceased coleus (probably…
When we came back from our trip, our Coleus had grown to really big, healthy sizes. A week later, we started cutting them down to about only 6-8 inches high, prepping them to go indoors under lights as soon as the weather gets below 40 degrees at night. Cutting back exposes the undergrowth of smallish…
The Titan Arum was in full bloom and stink today at the DC Smith Greenhouse on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. It was smaller in size than ones we’ve seen previously at various locations in Madison. Must be a young one.
In the past, we would bring the Coleus indoors for the winter and put them on the floor in front of windows in a room upstairs. We had maybe 20 plants at the most back then, and most of them would die. After that, we would bring them in and give them haircuts so the…
My Coleus 
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