Does anyone have any experience with this beautiful begonia? It's a shrubby sort-of-Richmondensis type with lovely burgundy foliage and white flowers with a pink tint. I can't find much information on it. The tag said the grower was Proven Selections, but even on the Proven Winners/Selections website, it didn't say much. I don't want this beauty to die on me!

Looks to be correct to me, too. Crassula ovata obliqua. I really enjoy this plant. It is a fast-grower (as far as Jades go), it has a unique trunk color, texture, and bark, and also has hairy nodes! Regarding the 'Hobbit' - yes, most likely the colored tips are a result of nursery/greenhouse growing with higher light levels. Josh

Thanks, Teatree! :-) Thanks, Sir Andrew, very interesting! By the way, it's good to see you at the Forum again. I bought the Silver Dollar Jade at a local nursery where they're always in stock. I selected the tallest specimen with the most branches, and then I promptly removed a branch. I rooted that cutting for a friend, and then I removed another branch and rooted it for myself. (I like to make duplicates of my plants for insurance purposes). I look forward to the day when my plant has a beautiful peeling golden trunk with new bits of pale green leaves emerging. The following two pics are from when I bought the Silver Dollar Jade (I apologize for the blurriness). And here's how the Silver Dollar looks now. You can see the old scars where I removed the other branches. And you can also see the two new branches growing from lower on the trunk. Since the new branches are growing in the direction I want, I can finally chop the head off this thing and bring it down to size. That top piece is going to make one hell of a cutting. Josh

My friend said a lot of smooth trunked eucalypts are still standing in her area after the vic fires. Wish I could grow grevillea rosmarinifolia , but the kangaroos eat them down to nothing. We had a fire lit by a fire bug around midnight a week ago after a very hot day, with fierce winds blowing through the valley. Luckily I was still up and noticed the huge orange glow above the forest and rang it in - it was a kilometre away, very scary. I've been researching fire retardant plants and tearing my hair out, the lists are so contradictory, especially now that I've found the Tasmanian government site. They reckon many of the plants listed as fire retardants are in fact highly flammable eg acmena smithii (lilypilly), casuarina cunninghamiana (river sheoak), elaeocarpus reticulatus (blueberry ash) corymbia maculata (spotted gum). But I've spoken to someone who said fire swept through a friend's vineyard and was stopped by a line of lillypillies. Also I tried burning fresh lillypilly leaves on a big bonfire one year and they didn't want to burn. Surely there's a reliable list out there somewhere done by someone who knows their stuff? For now IÂm going by the ACT government list (type in Âfirewise home gardensÂ) and the Country Fire Service of South Australia list, in the hope that after their bush fires, theyÂll have done some decent research. If anyoneÂs interested, I have compiled a list of most commonly mentioned fire retardant plants, with a code indicating who recommends them, whether the Tassies reckon they are flammable, and whether they are weeds  an amazing number of them are! Do you want me to post it? These are the other results I got testing plants on my bonfire. Acacia iteaphylla (flinders range wattle which many lists say is fire retardant) burnt pretty easily. Acacia vestita and acacia elata (cedar wattle) were slow to burn. Acacia floribunda and a. cognata both flared up very quickly. The needles of casuarina cunninghamiana flared into flame quite quickly but immediately died, and the wood didnÂt seem inclined to burn. Eucalyptus leucoxylon took quite a while to catch, then just kind of melted  however it often has quite a few dead branches on the tree so this could be a fire hazard. Corymbia/euc maculata burnt like leucoxylon. Callistemon little john and c. dawson river weeper didnÂt catch quickly, and didn't burn with a whoosh. Hakea laurina (pincushion hakea) didnÂt catch very easily. Leptospermum nanum (red) flared up very quickly. Japanese bamboo was terrifying, it exploded, sounding like gunfire going off all over the valley, although admittedly it was dry, as weÂd cut it down during an evacuation alert. Does anyone know if rosemary actually is a good fire retardant? I've seen it on quite a few lists; some say only the prostrate form is fire tolerant.