Thank you Toni. This plant did not have one leaf left on it. I was shocked to see it pull through!!!

A canna of some sort. Related but not a ginger (in the same plant order, zingiberacea with gingers, bananas, heliconia etc). There are a few species of Canna, and tons and tons of hybrids. Tim Chapman

Hi Bernard, I hope I don't repeat something because I only got about halfway through this thread before I got sick of reading and decided to go ahead and post. #1. I don't know where the idea come from that calloused roots are good. Callouses can't absorb water. It's dry scar tissue that keeps in/out moisture, thereby protecting broken stems and so on. When a plant's roots are partially exposed by wildlife digging, etc., the exposed portion callouses to keep the plant from dehydrating, but that calloused portion will never absorb water again. We don't want roots to callous (except maybe Bonsai growers who like to expose some roots over a rock or something). Putting a root system into dry mix is never good for it. I challenge anyone to prove how dehydrating or callousing a root system can possibly be good for it. The previous poster who said the dry mix will dehydrate the plant is correct. Always use damp mix for re-potting a healthy root system. If the roots are dead, it might be a different story. #2. As you've already learned, it's easy to under-water gritty mix. Since it's pretty close to impossible to over-water grit, I'm with the posters who say to soak it deeply and often. If you're paranoid, soak it daily, or even twice daily, but then give the pot a quick, little down-up motion to dislodge any perched water. That way it'll always be just barely moist. If it were mine, and planted in grit, I'd just water every day or two until the roots are well-established. As one who has killed off whole, healthy root systems by under-watering grit (once weekly), I feel confident in telling you that you're extremely unlikely to drown a plant in grit. I'm watering my succulents daily right now, and some are STILL too dry. BTW, Danny, I think mentioned he prefers soil for jades. I don't disagree with him. The one I have in soil has grown much better than the ones I have in grit. Furthermore, the Aeonium I had in a 1:1 soil:pumice mix has a huge, beautiful, healthy root system. The big one in grit has puny roots. These aren't experiments with standardized variables, so something else might be going on, but for now, I'm also not certain that grit is always a better medium.

Can't say I disagree with any of that. And if, by being in perhaps a bit too much of a hurry to explain myself, I gave the impression that any non-native plant is therefore a weed, well, I also didn't mean that! In my conception, weeds are annual, biennial or perennial plants which are here in N. America solely due to man's influence-primarily agriculture-and which depend upon the constant disturbance that is human civilization for their success. In this conception, a dandelion is a weed. Try to picture the fate of that species if today-right now-all human activity ceased: Sure, there'd be dandelions all over creation, and probably for years to come. But in time, the increasing height of whatever vegetation was left to take over would shade out the surface and make life impossible for dandelions. Maybe not the best example since seeds would still be around for quite some time, and whenever wind or fire cleared an area, dandelions could recolonize that spot. But even seeds don't last forever. In the complete absence of human activity, in time, dandelions would die out. Now I will readily admit, the existence today of so many non-native, exotic invasives all over the place will tend to distort this neat package. I don't believe common buckthorn, for one example, will ever be totally gone from the continent. It's just way too shade-tolerant. So there's that, and I do certainly consider common buckthorn to be a weed, as well as a scourge and a few other choice words I could sprinkle in here! Meanwhile, the 6 or 8 thousand Norway spruce I've planted up on my land in N. Wisconsin, along with other tree types....I do not consider weeds. So, somebody sure could poke holes in my definition. But again, in my conception-and it's not just "mine"-weeds are associated with agriculture...not having had any other mans of getting here, let alone becoming so successful. One of the things I do for my job is work with our city's stormwater engineers, helping to manage our large number of sites. Before I got onboard with this group, they had been led down the "native vegetation" pathway, which at least in the upper midwest always means only one thing-prairies! So even though this part of Wisconsin was heavily forested prior to European civilization getting here, quite a number of practitioners can't think of any plant community type when the words native vegetation are uttered. So a huge part of my goal has been to expand this concept. We plant pockets of things like tamarack and N. white cedar trees, we install red-osier dogwood shrubs-all things that are, in my conception, far more "native" than the prairie plant community which after all, is really more a southern or central plains thing. There were pockets of prairie up here, not so much where I'm at, but to our south and west, but these were ALL here because of the practice of Indians setting the land ablaze. So, what's really "natural"? I better quit. Obviously, I could write about this stuff all day! But I was going to say, to many of the folks viewing one of our prairie plantings (not prairie "restorations", please), all they see are weeds. They are not correct, just because they don't understand what they're looking at. +oM