it grows here in anniston. there is a nice one growing at the berman museum next to the anniston museum of natural history. C. gilliesii is a hardy deciduous shrub for z8a. the other species (pulcherrima) is more tropical/tender. they should be easy from seed. just give them full sun and a well-drained soil.

ileea 1 - that's good that you're sure :-) I was just wondering because most of the ones I see growing have many more leaves, even the ones I see growing as houseplants in our frozen north. But they're also much shorter - so you may have a less common one. Or it may leaf out like crazy this summer! A couple of ideas to help them take off and bloom - do you know when the last time they had the soil changed was? If it was a long time ago, they might benefit from being unpotted and having as much of the old soil gently removed as possible. Then replaced with some new stuff with lots of added perlite. They like well draining soil, and messing with the roots a bit will often trigger a growth spurt. What size pot are they in? Too big a pot will tend to discourage blooms on most plants. And don't fertilize them with a high nitrogen fertilizer. Look for something like 8-10-10, or 5-10-5. It doesn't have to be exactly that - just a low first number and a higher second one. If people in your building are likely to walk off with them, then you'd better not leave them out at all unless you chain it somehow (through the pot?)! It's such a nice plant and if it does bloom, you can be sure someone will be tempted to 'help themselves'. I had a four foot tall grapefruit tree stolen one day. I had my back to a window and the plant was ten feet away from me. I heard the back gate and turned around in time to see it disappearing. Unfortunately I was in my skivvies at the time (it was hot!) and by the time I threw some clothes on it was out of sight. daynatews - bird of paradise seeds are not easy seeds to germinate. They are slow, they require quite a bit of warmth, and they sometimes need to be nicked or soaked in GA-3 or something similar. They also need to be fresh. They are large tropical plants and can be grown as houseplants if you have a bright sunny window. They can take hot Florida sun just fine, so they can certainly take our Canadian summer sun :-) They do need to be acclimated slowly though, if you put an indoor plant out in full sun, it *will* burn as the leaves have not formed the protective layer of cutin. BP

Yeah, I'm still wondering about the avocados. I had trouble growing them in my back yard when I planted a tree in the ground because my soil does not drain properly, but there is an incredibly huge avocado tree just down the street from me. Anyway, I ended up planting one in a whiskey barrel planter so that I could control the drainage better, and it produces avocados. However, I noticed a few months ago that the soil level was lowered by about 6-8", and I thought the tree had used up all the soil. Last week we transplanted it to a new whiskey barrel planter, and what had happened was that the barrel had rotten at the bottom, and everything just sank down. The tree was not root-bound, but now it has a lot more new soil. Anyway, you can get avocados from trees in planters. Mine is a dwarf.

Good Morning Y'all, Well, I hope it is discovered and documented, but not on our place. When we had the male/female pair roaming our pastures here in southern Love County several years ago, we assumed they were a breeding pair but never saw any young ones. We didn't see them on our property, but we saw them in two different pastures about a quarter mile north of us, and so did several of our neighbors. I hope the cougar doesn't come back here. We have a huge deer population....I see them in the yard several times a week, if not quite daily. Still, something has been getting our poultry, which are no longer free-ranging, and it/they have been getting the poultry since January. We also lost a 1 year old male Maine coon cat back in the winter. We have everything here most years, y'all, including an occasional alligator that presumably wanders up from the river to somebody's stock tank, although the closest alligator to us has been found in a stock tank about a half-mile away to our southwest, so I am not real worried about finding one of those here. The feral pigs scare me more than the rare cougar sighting. One guy out west barely got away from them year before last--they chased him until he got to his ATV, hopped on it and turned it on. The pigs are a lot more common in our county than cougars, especially along the river and on the more remote ranches west of town, but there's only been one year that we've had them on our property. I am feeling a bit calmer now. Yellow Cat returned home this morning after being gone for 36 hours, and in a big way. I'd let three dogs out to "patrol" the property and chase off any wild things that might be around. It was about 5:30 a.m. While the dogs were off and running through the woods, chasing something and barking, I'd called and called Yellow Cat but didn't see him. Suddenly, the dogs reversed course and came running out of the woods, yelping and carrying on and with their tails between their legs. I thought "Oh crap, something is chasing them." And something was and it was Yellow Cat. LOL Now that I know these three dogs can be chased by an old yellow tabby cat (admittedly a very muscular and aggressive one because he was feral for so many years), I don't know that I'll trust them to keep me safe from any varmints that are running around. Scott, my best guess is that this juvenile male might be from the cougars that have been prowling the rocky hills along the Love County-Carter County line about 17-20 miles north of us. There have been numerous reports of them in that area this year. There's a big rock quarry there and some hills with small caves, etc. and lots of missing pets the last few months, etc. It is an incredibly rugged area. Almost all of our big winter wildfires were there and it is such rugged land that often the firefighters couldn't get up into those rocky hills off Oswalt Rd. except on foot so they'd have to wait for the fires to burn out into the more open areas. Of course, the cougar also could have traveled the river. The river and its thousands of acres of bottomlands seem to serve as a "highway" for all the wild things. When our creeks here dry up, as they often do by mid-summer, the coyotes and bobcats seem to travel the creekbeds too. Fred told me last week his creek is already dry, but ours still has water, so it shouldn't be serving as a "roadway" yet. We had tons of coyotes a couple of months ago but we don't now (as evidenced by all the cottontail rabbits that are all over our yard at night), and I don't know where the coyotes have gone. (I'm not complaining.) I do know a lot of ranchers were shooting them during calf season (for obvious reasons) because one of the ranchers who lives slightly north of us told me he shot 5, and I think 3 of those were in one week. I don't think anyone here shoots the coyotes just to shoot them, but they were killing calves. I hope the only wild animals I see today are the cute little ones like squirrels and rabbits. In general, I like seeing all the wildlife. Seeing the occasional ringtailed cat is pretty cool because they are so reclusive. I think bobcats are beautiful animals and I even like seeing coyotes, and love hearing their howling at night. It is a little harder to appreciate the cougars because they have the potential to be so dangerous. I have noticed a huge decrease in the number of possums, armadilloes and raccoons the last couple of months, and we've hardly had any skunks at all, so I've been wondering what's happening to all these smaller animals. Dawn