A First for Our Jungle Room!

This Sunday morning when I opened the door from the house into the greenhouse, aka Jungle Room, so I could water the plants, I knew by the wonderful fragrance that something was blooming. The first thing I saw blooming was not where the sweet smell was coming from though. It was a banana flower! This is the first time any banana tree has bloomed for me. I've had this hardy banana for many years. Alas, hardy bananas don't produce edible fruit. But it's exciting to have it flower at last!

I kept searching for the source of the sweet smell and found it by the south window. One of the ornamental gingers is in bloom. Our greenhouse smells like Hawaii... temporarily.

A few other plants are blooming right now, including this pretty tuberous begonia. It is hard to get a photo of the whole plant as it is draped all over lots of other plants. (This is, after all, a jungle room.)

Tuberous begonias given to me recently by friend Dorothy don't need flowers to be spectacular. I didn't realize there were two different kinds in the same pot. They are easy to start from leaf stems and Dorothy must have stuck two leaf stems from two different plants into this pot. A search on the web told me these are Rex begonias. The one with the snail-shell curved leaves is called, appropriately enough, Escargot. The other one, with the purple edging and highlights, may be Fireworks.

It's nice to have flowers to see without having to go out into the hot sun to water them. And really nice to have a banana flower!