I collect any & all I can! :) addicted! Love, love your irises, aquawise. Now, I have some more favs I want to get because of you! lol I bet your iris beds are beautiful! I have an iris that it seems to look just like the oldest one I saw on the historical site & someone had posted a pic! So, I guess there is someone else out there w/it & I know I've given plently of babies away. Don't know how to find out if it is the same one! I have a lot more of the heirlooms too! I like them all! They are all beautiful in their own way! Getting very addicted to the new ones though. Can't get enough of them! :) Kay

Stacey, are they the little "heads" just barely poking out of the ground? If so, this is normal. Many perennials will sit just at the soil surface waiting for the warmth and longer periods of sunlight. You will be tempted to cover them up, but don't...they know what they are doing. Sedums are one of the toughest plants to kill. Too much moisture will do them in, but otherwise they are extremely hardy. My dogs have torn one of my NOID's out of the ground a few times...had gotten some stems from a house we are demolishing and layed them under the mulch. I kept putting them back...they are trying to grow...hope they make it. The majority of sedums will form a complete new mature plant within two growing seasons from one single cutting, or sometimes one leaf.

The one with the narrower leaves is shepherdii. Sometimes called "string bean hoya". I'm a fan! They are additive like Pokemon cards. Once you get one, I promise you will want more! They don't grow as fast as Pothos. But maybe that is part of their charm, the anticipation! One little leaf, one little bloom, it's all a thrill. And there are so many varieties! Get one! Get two. :-) Go down the rabbit hole and keep on going.

Thanks for all those great pictures, Petrushka. My brother lives in Homestead, has an acre of the coral rock ground you talk about. I always marvel when he says he has a friend with a humongous drill on the back of a tractor come and drill holes so he can plant trees or shrubs, etc. I don't know if I'll ever get back down to that area, but if I do I'd definitely visit this Pinecrest Gardens. Regarding your photos, the pink petioled one is Pink Goddess, the one I mentioned that was hybridized by Nat DeLeon possibly in the 60s. The next pic, the ag with white petioles, is Brilliant. Not sure, this could be one of Dr. Brown's hybrids. And yes, next is Peacock, a beauty. It has a cool little spotted ag as a parent, which gives Peacock it's unusual pattern. Dr. Brown told me he called that ag 'Frog', but I got my example from Glasshouse Works a lifetime ago as Echo. I believe it might be a type of picta, perhaps bicolor. The last pic with the silver ag, this is alumina v. armandii. There are very subtle areas of green mottlings that are overlaid by the silver-gray color, you have to be up close to see the beauty of the mottling. Dr. Brown named this silver ag for his Filipino guide Armando Cruz. I believe this is one of the hundreds of silver ags that were found in the jungles of Luzon Philippines about 1980 by 2 local picnickers with family, who happened to be nurserymen and realized the importance of the discovery. This huge group of ags was called a "hybrid swarm", wherein many ag species naturally hybridized and cross-hybridized over an unknown number of decades, never disturbed being hidden in the jungles. Brown traveled there in 1980, collected and brought back hundreds of specimens to his then home in Indialantic Florida. Later he bought acreage in Valkaria Fla and set up a hybridizing program using those ags he collected, plus others he found in travels to Indonesia, Thailand and return trips to the Philippines. His program kicked off a huge commercial interest in ags and the result is all the fine and beautiful hybrids available today. Regarding those berries that almost all the ags have, as you probably know, the little berries are very common on ags but they just turn yellow and fall off. These are about 1/8 inch across. The berries with seeds are large, at least 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch across. Of the ags you've mentioned, the only one I've seen seeds on is Pink Goddess. In that stand of Pink Goddess in your pic, it's likely that there are a number of russet-petioled forms mixed with it. Pink Goddess offsets the russet form fairly regularly for me. The russet color is formed simply by green tissue overlaying the pink. This russet form seems to grow larger than Pink Goddess, leaves are bigger and wider, and don't have the yellow midrib accent that adorns Goddess. Apparently Nat didn't name this russet variety, probably thinking it wasn't commercially viable. But I think it definitely deserves a name as it is beautiful in it's own right. Perhaps Russet King as it seems a masculine ag to me, darker, bigger and more robust than Goddess. The leaf blade on the russet looks very much like pics I've seen of Manila, Nat used Manila and Tricolor to produce Pink Goddess. Maybe too much info here for most readers, but I find this stuff fascinating.