"plenty of rostrata. If you can pick up in Tampa I can load you up".... does this mean someone in Tampa wants to give away some lobster claw???..... I am in Tampa! I would love to have a lobster claw! ... crossing fingers I have not miss read.

Thanks all! Laura: P.P. is a 'must-have', in my opinion. And you will have the heat down there to get the nice coloration. I may have an extra. Will see how my cuttings do. I had some breakage from winds. I don't think 'Red Samoan' is a registered cutlivar,...just what somebody named it. It's a nice bloom, but the plant does get big. Alex: The Clerodendrum is in a pot. It is a tropical .. or at least zone 9 I think. It has large fuzzy leaves. Mine has four bloom inflos right now. It makes a nice colorful addition to the deck plants.

Hey Jaxtropix, that's exciting, I can't wait to see what it's like. I moved my heliconia red angusta ouside a month ago. I thought it suffered a little because of the heater inside the house. the leaves were showing sign off dryness so I brought it ouside for more humidity. last week, I noticed a green with red line color bud coming from the tip of the plant. it's bulgy and has a tiny leaf at the end. is that influorescence? if it is, I'm surprised considering it has been exposed to near freezing point twice. yesterday was 0.2 in the morning for 2 hours, and it hasn't shown sign of damage yet.

H. scheideana blooms every year for me here in Berkeley, and is certainly evergreen in a wind protected and dappled shade setting, with lots of fertilizer and water as long as it doesn't freeze. It truly is adapted to our cool winter weather, because it pushes both flowers and new foliage for me even when temps get down into the hight 30'sF. There are also several other more commonly available species that will also do as well outdoors as long as the foliage doesn't freeze. These include H. latispatha, H. spissa, H. bourgeana, H. aurantiaca, H. matthiasae. Some of these can be bought online from suppliers such as Aloha Tropicals, or Stokes Tropicals in Louisiana. There are a few other suppliers in Southern California, but they don't ship. For those here in the SF Bay Area, getting the H. scheideana thru Monterey Bay Nursery is probably the easiest solution. Don't count on any of them flowering if you can't get the plant through the winter without freezing, as we just don't get hot enough to get blooms on new growth in less than a year, like they can in south Florida. Anyone growing 30 kinds of Heliconia in California has quite a collection, but I am willing to bet that over half of those varieties need a lot of help to get through a wet/cold winter, and are even less likely to survive year round outdoors here in northern California. If you stick with the kinds from higher elevation cloudforests in Southern Mexico, you can have thriving blooming clumps. Check out the Palmetum at Lake Merritt in Oakland to see a large clump of H. scheideana in bloom now. I do have some friends growing them in Sunset zone 15 conditions rather than 16 or 17, but you risk losing them to frost and never seeing them bloom.