It was almost dead when I moved into the new place, but it resurrected itself when I gave it water. But what is it? Curious penguins are.... curious!
-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin
1 day ago
Monday, June 21, 2010
What kind of flower is this?
17 comments:
Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.
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I believe I know the answer to that:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffid
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
From the picture, it looks like a gerbera.
ReplyDeleteAaron -- it didn't get up and walk to where the lawn sprinklers water the dirt, so I think we can rule that one out :).
ReplyDeleteMC: Yes! I kept looking at it and saying "That's a daisy of some sort," but the leaves didn't look like any daisy I'd ever encountered before. But indeed, it's a gerbera daisy. Now here's hoping I can get more than one flower out of it...
- Badtux the Gardening Penguin
It is a pink flower.
ReplyDeleteJerry beat me...
ReplyDeleteI was going to say a nice flower..
I agree with Minerva Cathubodva. It looks like a Transvaal daisy (Gerbera). There are over thirty species of gerbera scattered across tropical Asia, Africa, and South America. They are related to sunflowers.
ReplyDeleteThe Transvaal daisy comes in many other colors besides pink such as red, orange, yellow, white, and even chocolate brown. Striped and multicolored varieties are also available.
I used to have an orange one when I still lived with my parents and before they seperated and sold the house. Needless to say, I miss not having a garden and my apartment only has one tiny window facing towards the north making it unsuitable for window boxes.
Great minds think alike, Tim.
ReplyDeleteBad Tux -
ReplyDeleteGive it some water and fertilizer, and you will have flowers all summer long, and it will return next year.
They love the weather in the Santa Clara Valley.
Regards,
Tengrain
Judging from the deep green of the new leaves, it already has plenty of fertilizer. Glad to hear that I should be getting more flowers though, this one lonely flower looks... lonely :). It had some other flowers when I moved in, but they were wilted and crispy like those leaves on the edge due to the previous tenant not watering the plant, so I cut them off. Seemed the right thing to do at the time...
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Flower-nursing Penguin
Tengrain..."it will return next year"!!! You mean it migrates???
ReplyDeleteHere in supposedly hot & dry central Texas we've got flowering trees, flowering bushes, flowering, uh, flowers, all in our backyard, and it's the middle of June! Some years we can go 90+ days w/o rain, other years inundated. And they say, something about changing weather patterns or whatever.
ReplyDeleteAnd now back to the World Cup, the only thing that matters this time every 4 years.
Oh yeah, flowering cacti!
My dad was an avid gardener in the central valley, and he could grow damn near anything... except gerberas (which he loved). At his funeral I commissioned a mixed floral arrangement, but insisted there be no gerberas; it felt too much like they'd be laughing at him.
ReplyDeleteSorry, that's California's central valley. I knew what I meant. :-)
ReplyDeleteWhen you said "the central valley" I knew what you meant, I live in California, after all :). This gerbera appears to like its place there next to the foundation, now that I've given it some water it's put on a lot of leaves and now this one flower. Hopefully there will be more, but if not... (shrug). Next year. After all, it had a near-death experience (eep!).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Silicon Valley Penguin
I pegged this as a gerbera daisy before I checked others' comments. Just planted one myself that looks remarkably similar, right down to the color.
ReplyDeleteIn SE Ohio. it's an annual, but maybe you can coax it to return next year too? Love it, feed it, water it, and keep TMF far away from it.
Glad to hear you spared this cutie in your Roundup bombardment. We've got poison ivy, which calls for Roundup bigtime, but I generally prefer to avoid the big bazookas.
Sungold, the stuff that got Roundup was stuff that I could clearly identify as a weed growing in places where things aren't supposed to grow (like, in cracks in the patio pavers). Everything else is getting manually removed as needed, and I'm pretty sure everything's a weed that I'm removing. The neighbor even agreed that they were weeds :).
ReplyDeleteReading on the Interwebs, it appears that in locations where winter temperatures don't fall below 20F (i.e., the Santa Clara valley), gerbera is a perennial. That is, it'll die back and go dormant in the fall, then come back in the spring. At least, that's the theory. Guess I'll find out what happens in practice :).
Next thing to think about is whether to give Gerby the Gerbera a buddy. There's space between Gerby and the rose bush that needs something. On the other hand, it needs something a bit taller than Gerby... maybe a clump of lavender or something. Hmm.
- Badtux the Gardening Penguin
Lavender doesn't tend to grow well in the Santa Clara Valley except in containers or raised beds. It requires really good drainage, and most of the valley (at least, the valley floor) is pretty clayey.
ReplyDelete