That clump of weeds. (LOL)

Stella D'oro(sp?) daylillies.......Three years ago I planted 7 itsy bitsy clumps (carefully divided from 3 purchased 4" pots) surrounding a tree in my yard. This year they are GINORMOUS!!!!! They'll need dividing this fall.

MG,

LOL!! I started the Inula from seed a couple of years ago. Last year I saw this giant of a plant grow beyond anyone's imagination!! I had 13 of them. I am now down to 3 due to their size... Amazing! Love the foliage - not too fussy about the flowers.

Angelica Gigas is another nice one. Here it grows to 5.5 feet, and the leaves are such a wonderful sight. Nice green, and a fair size. The flowers are again of the not too fussy variety, but the way they attract the bees is fabulous. Last fall the bees literally covered the flowers, and since the weather had started cooling off therefore making the bees lethargic, we got to 'pet' the bees. Neat!!

Love the post! I'll be watching for other plants!

I planted a one gallon sized Eucalyptus nitens 3 years ago. It was about 18" tall. Now 3 years later, it stands 20 feet tall. It's the fastest Eucaypt (so far) I have from about a dozen species.

Cheers, Barrie (Vancouver Island)

Ten years ago we were given a cute little hibiscus - it was about six inches tall. It now stands six feet tall, and would be even bigger if I didn't hack it back in the spring.

I just divided a Boston fern for the fifth time - when I brought it inside last fall it sat on a stool, and measured five feet from the bottom of the lowest frond to the top of the tallest. It also measured four feet wide! I bought it six years ago as a dying 99 cent discounted fern in a 4" pot at Canadian Tire.

Bringing these guys inside in the fall is quite the instant jungle :-)

BP

I almost forgot about the geum. We would see these occassionally on HGTV gardening shows. Cute little things, 8-10 inches acroos with tall stems of flowers. We put in a red one and a yellow one which were all of 2 inches across in the fall of 2003. In 2004 they were about 8 inches across and fit perfectly in the space. This year the red one is about a foot across, still managable. However the yellow one is about 4 feet across and muscling out the plants on all sides. Who knew it would get that big? It will have to be chopped extensively or moved. Has anyone had success shovel pruning them? By that I mean digging vetically around the plant to remove the excess not to destroy the plant ;-)

Cheers,
MG

My geum has been dug up, split into two, potted one piece of it, chopped it back, now I'm going to put it back into the ground. I can't seem to kill it, maybe if I was really nice to it??? I don't imagine that shovel pruning would hurt it at all.

Here is a pic of the Inula magnifica. Started out as a small plant in a one gallon pot, two years later it is 7 ft high and 12 ft across.

{{gwi:530895}}

Cheers,
MG

BonniePunch:

I'm curious about the hibiscus. It's got to be in a pot right? I'm guessing from your zone information.
I've got a hibiscus in a 5 gallon pot (approximately). This year, it lost all of it's leaves except for some new growth near the tips of the branches and new leaves are showing. Looks like a poodle right now. It's about 2.5' tall. I'd love it to grow as big as yours. Any suggestions?

Mitanoff - mine's in a pot, but it's outside right now. It's been there since mid May, and it'll stay there untill the first frost warning in the fall. I leave it right next to the window it spends the winter in, so that the change in light levels isn't as severe as it would be if I summered the Hibiscus in a slightly sunnier spot.

A five gallon pot sounds a bit big for a Hibiscus that's only two and a half feet tall - it might cause it to be too wet and develop root rot. Here's a pic of mine (well most of it anyway, there's a bit on the top I didn't get into the photo)- I left my flip-flops next to the pot for some scale:

{{gwi:530897}}

Mine always loses leaves during the winter, and it seems to finish losing the rest of the previous years leaves right about now. It's already put out tons of new leaves, so you can't really tell the old ones are going. By September it will be about twice as bushy as what you see now. I could really use a slightly bigger pot, but then my plant would get bigger - it's at the maximum size I have room for, so I don't want that. I do root prune the plant every couple of years though (in the spring) - I could do it every year, but it's too big of a task for me to deal with every year! It makes a huge difference. I cut the plant out of the pot, lay it on it's side, and remove as much soil as I can (having the plant in soil with a lot of perlite makes this much easier). I remove many of the bigger roots, and about a quarter of the other smaller ones. I repot it with fresh soil and away it goes. This isn't a root pruning year, and I can see it's not nearly as quick to fill out, nor does it have as many flowers as in the years I do it.

I also fertilize it quite heavily once May rolls around.

BP