Indoor "Gardening"

OK, not really gardening, per se, but still...

My house doesn't have a lot of glass to help brighten the environs in the winter, so I bought a couple of Amaryllis bulbs to "force" indoors. Forcing is what you call planting bulbs way out of their normal season in pots to grow indoors. Normally, one does not expect these poorly treated bulbs to be good for more than one season.

I planted these two bulbs months ago and left them out on the deck for a week or two to get a little chill. Then I brought them in and let do their thing. The first one to bloom was the all-red-all-the-time one. The flower stalk was nearly three feet tall!

(Trying something new with embedding Flickr's HTML: editing the heck out of it!)

These flowers were seriously-freakin' RED. The "red bulb" started blooming in early March. The fourth (of four) flowers opened just before I left for Spring Break. The Red & White bulb started blooming the day I got back from Spring Break.

As you can see, the stalk on this one was only about half the height of the red one's. But still, it's quite the cheery picture on a dark weekend, like this last one. :-)

Something I hadn't figured on -- because I've never seen it -- is that one of my "Corn Plants" decided to bloom!

The so-called "Corn Plant" (do-o-on't ask me why) is actually one of the many species of Dracena (of which I have a few... species, that is). I've never seen one bloom. Never. 

I mean, it's not like I've never had the thang in the house for the winter. Even for protracted periods. Like last year. And those little flowers? OMG!!! Do they smell SWEET! Like, knock you over, sweet. Like, if you had the flu, you might have to hurl, sweet.  However, since it's sitting on the hearth, behind other things, in a large room that is open to other large rooms (hall, the rest of the house), in a house with forced-air heat, the wealth is shared and reasonably dilute... unless you go over there to turn on the TV. (Oh, yeah, you can see the tips of the leaves of the Dracaena marginata tricolori to its left. And you can see the tips of a Dracaena marginata at the top right.  Told you I had more species.)

Another stunner is that the "Wax Plant" (Hoya carnosa) I brought in for the winter is also blooming! This sucker normally doesn't even start setting buds until late spring or early summer. And here it is a-bloomin'!

What looks like little drops in the angles of the center stars is nectar. It's not strongly scented (like the Dracena flower), but it's exactly the right concentration of sweetness for the hummingbirds! The little buggers come around all summer to taste the nectar from these. Oh, and if you grow them as an indoor plant, you can look forward to cleaning up the sticky mess under the plant all summer. (Been there, done that when I thought they were only a houseplant. It turns out they're fine down almost to a solid freeze.)

Not actually growing, but I also have stalks of cymbidiums from my mom's garden submerged in a ginormous tubular vase and a small vase of daffodils that were a gift.

It's getting to (mostly) be plenty warm enough out (tho' near freezing this morning) that I should probably be moving most of the "houseplants" back out to the deck this week. That means that the space in my living room and dining room will quite suddenly double!

Woohoo!