This new seedling's blooms have a most unusual look to them.  They have some major re-curve going on and from a distance the blooms are unlike any blooms I have seen before.  This seedling is from a cross of Mountain Treasure x New Orleans Lady.  As you can see, the blooms also have a quilted pillow look to them from below.  As the blooms aged they had a hint of apricot to them.  I'm sure they will color up more when the weather cools off.The blooms were just unusual enough that i ...

This petite little beauty surprised me when it started blooming last week.  The blooms measure less than 3" across and there were lots of them.

After planting seeds from about 40 immature brugmansia seed pods I'm excited to report that about 1/3 already have seeds sprouting!  I'm sure more crosses will sprout in the next week or two.  This is way cool because I had some important crosses I was afraid I might have lost in the freeze.  There are at least 30 more seeds pods that were damaged in the freeze that I plan to plant next weekend. My guess is that I have about the same number that did not get damaged that are still growing on ...

After several year's of relatively mild winters, the dark side of mother surfaced again this month.  In January we had a hard freeze that brought temperatures down to the mid 20's for a couple of days.  Now, just a few weeks later we are back in Mother Nature's deep freeze.  All I can say is that I hate cold weather!!!!!!!!   I know this is going to be a major setback to my hybridizing program.  My motto in times of crisis has always been, "deal with it and move on", and that's what I will ...

It has been six months since my last post, but I have a good excuse for not writing. Tending to my thousands of baby brug seedlings takes precedence over blogging.  Since my last post I have started seeds from over 150 new crosses.  That equates to about freshly potted 3,000 liners, 75 four inch pots of seedlings waiting to be moved up to liners, 30 four inch pots of seeds recently planted and waiting to sprout, and over 1,000 liners that I just moved up to 1 gallon pots.  Add all this to ...

Today I was able to assess the actual damage my plants incurred from our holiday freeze. My brugmansia are all sprouting new growth and in many cases, buds are beginning to form as well.  Out of the 1500 brug seedlings I have, I think I only lost one.  Almost all of my in-ground brugmansia survived too.  I had at least 75 individual  plants planted in the ground and every single one of them survived. Most just had damage to the tender growth, but a couple of the younger ones were beat up ...

I know I have been fairly quiet on my garden blog the past couple of weeks.  The primary reason is that my work and travel has been keeping me real busy.  It did not help that our recent freeze brought my hybridizing program to a standstill leaving me very little positive things to report on.  While the work and travel part is not going to change much in the immediate future, I plan to be getting back on track with my hybridizing projects by the end ...