Xanthorea is an Australian native tree, known as a grass tree or black boy.
These plants thrive on neglect, in fact they will even survive a bushfire and bounce back to life as if nothing ever happened. Of course, if they get too much water, they will rot and die.
I'm proud of this one because it's sprouting a flower, a spike that rises from it's middle and keeps rising to extraordinary heights. This is only the second flowering in six years.
who
ReplyDeletebut lexcen
would have a tree
in his garden with a name
beginning with the letter X???
here on the western canadian prairie we have a native flower, a black-eyed or brown-eyed susan like thing that grows wild at the edge of highways -- never in nice soil, mind you, but in rocky, oily, dusty, scratchy gravel that nothing should be able to live in...
they get about 2-3 feet tall with lots of lovely, bright yellow flowers, bloom all summer in 100 degree heat with little or no water and virtually no care whatsoever
you can pull 'em out by the roots, throw 'em on the ground, and they'll re-root and just keep on going... like they are indestructible
the wife and i snag 'em and plant 'em here in the yard, where they provide maintenance-free beauty all summer long :)
/t.
You couldn't get further from reality than to say that they thrive on neglect. Most plants in nursuries are taken from the wild. Big ones with trunks of a meter or more are hundreds of years old. Most die. In the bush around me, where mountain bikers, hores riders and motorbikers are busily building tracks, the fungal disease phytophora is being spread and is killing of all the Xanthorea. I tried moving a small one from the bush to the front of my house. It was a 20m move between spots with identical soil and I brought a cubic meter of earth and root mass with it. It slowly died. Seedlings do better, but people don't want to wait a hundred years to get a trunk, so they prefer to buy the wild collected ones.
ReplyDelete