Hi Greg,
Man, your sooo lucky! I just had family go down to the Tampa area. Now I am kicking myself for not asking them to check Lowe's out and buy me one!! But then again...don't think they would know what to look for. My collection has grown large enough this year anyhow.

Congrats on your 'Elsie'! I bought an unrooted cutting of Elsie this year from Sonia. She sent me a very nice 1 tip that rooted and also produced a huge inflo. Flowers are really something and the fragrance also is very nice!

I wish I could help you on the noids but I don't have enough experience to tell you what they are.

Cannot wait to see them when they bloom though. Good luck with all your newbies and keep the pics coming! I know everybody would love to see them bloom!

Andrew

Greg - if it's Elsie, it will have distinctive thick leaves. Great plant! Check the others for writing on the trunk. It's often enough to figure out if it is a named one or not. ..diana

Hi Andrew and Diana,

Andrew, I should stop buying plants too, but I just can't seem to! LOL The thing about the Jungle Jack plants at our various Lowe's is that until yesterday, I had only ever seen for sale the 3 varieties that I mentioned at the top of this post. To see 'Elsie' AND 'Inca Gold' on that table was just too much--my wallet practically flew out of my pocket by itself.

Diana: unfortunately, no writing on the trunk. These plants are identified by the small white tab stuck in the soil, like the one in my pic. Because JJ's potting medium is so loose and the plants get shuffled around so much, I think many of the ID tabs simply fall out. As a matter of fact, at one of the Lowe's I visited, the dozen plants for sale there had been moved inside after obviously having been devastated by whiteflies; adding insult to injury, many of the plants looked as though they'd been toppled and sloppily re-potted--at least half of those plants were missing the ID tab. I bought one of these plants, not more than 15 inches tall with a whopping 6 tips--and it has an inflo, so we'll find out what it is yet this season. I'll post a pic of 'Mystery JJ Plumie #2" in this thread soon.

I believe you're a friend of John's, so you would know better than me, but I would tend to think that John would not send out noIDs to the FL wholesaler. Perhaps if irun from St. Pete reads this thread, irun can tell me the name of the wholesaler--no one at my store could tell me.

At any rate, it's all for fun. I will be sure to post pics of all the new plants when they bloom--hopefully the flower will make the mystery plants' identities obvious! In the meantime: JJ plant w/ slender, upright growth habit, and pointed (not rounded) leaves? Anyone...anyone?? I'll entertain guesses!

Great finds!

My Lowes also had some marked just as "yellow/white hybrid." One was in bloom, it had a nice, soft yellow to white fade. I asked the grower but they said they didn't know the cultivar name (if it actually has a name.) (So I'm not sure it was necessarily even a JJ, or that everything in the square brown pots with white stick tags are JJ's.)

The inflos on my Inca Gold were basically stalled until this week, but now they're starting to gain size and hopefully will be opening soon.

lots of good questions... are noid plants 'ugly kittens' (hint: there's no such thing) that are not good enough to name, or are they plants without tags and sold wholesale? Does JJ have a FL grower?

The plants in CA are never in square pots, and never have white plastic tags....hmmm Even his growing grounds are all black nursery pots. I know he sells cuttings to overseas nurseries, such as Oz and Italy, but East Coast? Given the problems with unscrupulous Customs in LA, are cuttings being shipped from Thailand to another grower? hmmmm

I do know that I've gotten some amazing ugly kittens at HD. Plumies change, so a plant that is so so in Chiang Mai may be incredible in Upland. All the better for us!

I wish JJ used a 'shipping' soil mix instead of a 'rooting' soil mix. If you've ever seen a C Stars plants, the soil is really dense and rot prone outside a greenhouse. Big box stores move the plants by picking up the trunk... bad news. I repot everything I buy for that reason.

Are any/all of JJ's cultivars patented?

The plants at my local Lowes were grown by Better-Gro in Arcadia, FL. They seem to be nice folks, mainly an orchid grower. I'm waiting to see what the stock next :)

Well, there's part of the mystery solved. Thanks, irun, for that information.

I can tell you that last year--summer '10--my local Lowe's had a stock of plants in square planters that were all JJ cultivars, AND had that Jungle Jack tag with the little man-face wearing a safari hat (you can see this tag in pics posted in this forum from the JJ Open House). So, one might conclude that John had or has some kind of licensing agreement with Better-Gro. But who knows? Gosh, I hope that my noids don't turn out to be noids! LOL "yellow-white hybrid?" Been there, done that!

But a 15" plant with 6 tips has to be a JJ cultivar, I would think. Most noids just do not branch this densely, but on the contrary tend to be lanky growers--at least the ones I own.

Agree- I'm learning that name or no name, a lot can be inferred from even a small rooted cutting if it is large though to show branching. For example, all the Better-Gro plants (even the "yellow-white hybrids") were apparently rooted as multi-tip cuttings and the tips are blooming or have recently bloomed.
Compare this to buying a 24" single stick with no signs of anything happening! I used to think that commercial growers had secret powers and could make things bloom on command but I'm not sure anything short of divine intervention can make a tip bloom if it really doesn't want to.

The other characteristic that I've been watching with interest is the number of branches that form. Some plants seem to consistently branch 2 ways after blooming while others typically branch 3 ways. I am wondering if this is at least partly genetic. (no doubt poor plant health could lower the amount of branching.)

It is always possible that genetic variation from a seedling could result in characteristics superior to those of currently available named varieties, but from what I have read, it takes a great number of attempts before this becomes statistically likely. This is true of many plants that don't come true from seed.

I too notices that at the end of April I bought 2 cheap plumerias obviously left over from last season at Home Depot. They were both Jungle Jacks, which I had not seen in the store before. So far this season, the plumerias that they have are not JJ's. I wonder if it depends on the buyer for each Home Depot or Lowes. I got a "Premium White" and Thumbalina. The Premium White had 4 branches growing, and the claws had just started to develop into leaves. No blooms this year by the looks of them, that that is OK for the price!