Variegated shell ginger, aka Alpinia zerumbet, was the only
ginger on sale at our local, privately owned (not big box) nursery. It is not
Culinarily Acceptable, it’s a decorative ginger, but I wanted a ginger in my
garden, so I bought it. About 12 months ago. It was bigger then.
In my neck of the woods, if you can’t stand 100kph winds and
salty, corrosive sea spray on a weekly basis, you’re toast. Plants that survive
here are tough customers.
Poor ginger. We had 2 tropical storms hit last summer, and
it barely survived. I put up this little plastic headstone after Halloween as
an ironic commentary on gardening on windswept sand dunes…and ginger grew!
Turns out the headstone acts as a windbreak and now ginger looks like any other
native plant- windswept, brown around the edges, close to the ground, and TOUGH
as nails! I think it will survive this year’s storm season. GIP (Grow In Peace),
Gingy!
what a great discovery!!!! I just moved a honeysuckle after finding out that some trash plant on the other side of the fence is toxic (everything it touches dies). I'm hoping the honey comes back - it looks pretty dead. Then again, so did the apple sapling I stole from Walmart because they left it out of the pot to die. It looked completely dead - but is now coming back. Nature tends to want to survive, it seems...
ReplyDeleteOmigosh, you rescue plants from the trash, Musette, you are my Biopod Twin! ;-) Seriously, I've got some amazing plants in my garden that I've hauled out of somebody else's trash (when they couldn't see me doin' it!). And I have a hedge in my yard that, though lovely, kills anything it touches. I know that we see plants as peaceful creatures but the reality is sometimes much more violent than we can perceive at a short glance...I remember trees in the Alps that spewed poison from their roots so nothing could germinate within 3 meters of their trunks.... I remember honeysuckle from my DC childhood- we used to gather buckets of it at recess and suck out the nectar before the bell rang....
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