It's something very strange about L.squamigera not blooming for so many years. Yes, they don't particularly fond about being moved and may skip a year or two, but 17 years... Tina brought a banch of them to last year spring swap and some people reported blooms in the same year's fall. Mine skipped the last year, but finally just finished blooming. There are basicly three reasons for them to become a non-blooming plant: a) overcrowding (which is definitely not the case with the fresh planted bulbs), b) too good soil + too much water, though neither one of those conditions singularly could prevent them from blooming, c) leaves had been discarded consistently for several years before they ripen off or planted in a very shady location. For me the longest non-blooming plant WAS a lilac. After 4 years it was given to a friend and I'm hoping that his grandkids will see it blooming.

As I run out of space, so too do I run out of patience. There are so many lovely plants out there, so why put up with duds? I mean, ok, a slow grower is one thing. My Buff Beauty is growing so very, very slowly, yet it's healthy and attractive otherwise. Something like that, I can have all the time in world for. My first love was and is peonies, so it's not that I lack patience - I've waited six years for one to bloom and no sign yet, but it'll get there. I've seen other posters talk about this and it's something I used to neither understand or agree with, but I'm coming round to their point of view - there's a difference between a dud rose and a slow rose. It may be inherently dud as a plant, or that individual plant, or just a dud for the specific garden, or place, but it doesn't really matter. A dud will be a dud right from the get go and never really changes. And as my garden slowly matures, I'm seeing it hold true. Because I was broke when I started, I couldn't afford to replace things so I held onto them like grim death, moving them in attempts to find the 'right place, right conditions' that I believed would redeem even the weakest of perfomers. Because I did that I've seen that sometimes, no matter what I might do, a rose is just not going to be suited to my garden and I'm acquiring a degree of tentative confidence about identifying much much earlier which roses they are. There's still room for some sentiment of course - I'm going to be heartbroken when the cooking apple tree dies - despite the fact that it's biennial and the apples aren't that great, and the fact that it has the single largest footprint of any single plant in the garden for relatively low return - I still love it.

Ha ha, I think I will have a cookie instead

Thanks Rick. My adeniums have not had the best growing season this year unfortunately. The adults came out of dormancy rather late (trial and error since this was the first time for me), and the seedlings did not get enough light and attention as the building of the greenhouse took longer than anticipated. For now I'm focusing on getting everything through winter again, and hopefully next summer I will have more pictures to show again here.