Flowering welcome
|June 18, 2014|
It’s no secret that I have a weakness for odd plants. And a while ago I posted images of my front entrance, the thing that sold me on the house from my first step in the front door. But the house still manages to surprise me. When I got back from a trip to England last month, one of the plants—an asparagus fern that’s also known as a Ming Fern—was in full bloom.
Welcome home, Laurie.
Posted in Garden, Just muttering
So pretty – I didn’t even know that asparagus ferns had a bloom!
Be wary of asparagus ferns — while the blooms are dainty and the red berries interesting, they re also wiry and have thorns!
I remember seeing red berries on my asparagus fern, but, blooms?? Cool!! Welcome home, indeed!
I have one of these too, and yes – it has very sharp but quite small thorns, which are not easy to see unless you know to look for them. Be warned that if it gets too big for its current pot, getting it out to repot it may be quite a challenge. My daughter had four of these in huge pots hanging from a (very sturdy) trellis, and the ferns were so root-bound that she despaired of ever getting them out without breaking the pots. Her teenage son came up with the solution: a Sawzall electric reciprocating saw. He cut the plants in quarters in the pots and they got them out with no difficulty. They repotted them and they are all growing happily, If your fern is in a pot that it is outgrowing, and if and it sits where it could get a lot of rain in the winter, don’t be surprised if the pot explodes with a loud “CRACK” one raint winter day! This happened to me some years ago with a hanging fern. The pot was in pieces, but the root ball of the fern was exactly the same shape that the pot had been! The roots have pods which store water, similar to seaweed pods, and if these get too full – BANG!
This is totally off topic, but I’ve just hit upon your site and can’t find any other way to report it:
In the sidebar, the cover art of _Dreaming Spies_, which links to the page for that book, (still?) has the hover text “Click here for more information on Laurie’s next novel, The Bones of Paris”.
Hi Mark, thanks for point it out, I’ll have my web ladies fix it.
This is nifty. My asparagus fern doesn’t do it, but it’s outside in hotter SoCal. Many thanks to Tigger for the advice re potential exploding ferns!