Austin Tropicalesque

Sometimes my attempts at tropical flowers don’t work – my Brugmansia/Angel Trumpet still looks like a big weed, unwilling to bloom the way Hanna’s did on July 8th. Other exotic flowers are happy in my garden. Here are a pale yellow Plumeria flower , a rose-red Plumeria flower, a Hawaiian white ginger/Hedychium coronarium bloom and a Loquat tree/Eriobotrya japonica. The Plumeria flowers are also called frangipani and both colors smell wonderful. The white ginger smells wonderful. When they bloom in winter, the flowers of the Loquat smell wonderful. They all have big, tropical leaves, and make sitting on the patio seem like a vacation.

When the temperatures approach freezing, the Plumerias leave the patio, moving to their winter quarters in the garage, fasting and abstaining from fluids until spring. The ginger will usually die down to the ground, and sleep until April, protected by mulch, but the Loquat tree can take cold weather to 10º F. We’ve been lucky enough to get flowers every winter, but getting fruit is very chancy – just one dip into the mid-20’s can be the end of that year’s loquat crop. It would be cool to get the fruit, but we like the tree whether we get any loquats or not.