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It’s amazing how they just show up in random little places and survive

Part of the title of this is "progress" for stuff i have gotten since moving in, and its been overdue for a while. So its time to update with a video of the plants in the greenhouse. There are a lot of plants now, and many have grown quite a lot since they arrived. More alive and well than have died, and i leave the imperfect leaves as reminders of oppsies made and lessons learned. The rest of the yard is looking not so happy; the drought and hot weather are making even irrigated plants slow or stop. no need for sound its just fans running. VID_20260425_185334794.mp4

Yes, it came from GreenLife nursery. Finally took a drive out there to see if he had imported anything interesting this spring, when I stumbled across this tree name I recognized. Also, I had just removed a couple palms from the yard, so had some open space to work with. I guess we'll all see together how well they can adapt to the Arizona extremes. 🤞 aztropic Mesa, Arizona

https://eureka-farms.com/products/phoenix-reclinata-single-roebelinii-date-palm-hybrid?variant=49427836109081 This site seems to have some, but I dont have any personal experience ordering from them. I have actually been meaning to make a post to see if anyone has bought from them in the past becasue i too would like one of these hybrids

Hey Scott- where did you pick that up? Shamus’? That’s a pretty nice specimen. I’d considered growing it from seed, but that’s a pretty good headstart.

Not mine. Located at Ann Norton:

Any guesses on the ID of this little gifted pup? Possibly a big ask at this stage!

Talking to myself here I think, but we seem to be having a second summer right now...very weird, but I'll take it! These temps could be any week between December and March but unusual at the end of April.

They are beautiful palm, and they are very dry tolerant palms. They will also drink as much water you give them, so the best of both worlds with this palm, give it water and it’s quite happy and if it is in a dry spot it’s just as happy.

Wow, what a brutal climate. It offers so much promise for a few years, then pulls the carpet out from under you in a couple of nights. I hope you have better luck at the new place and that the poor old Cocos gets a new lease on life...always nice to see a bit of sentimental optimism take precedence over cold hard pragmatism!

That's interesting that you mention incarnata because my first thought when I saw your post was to wonder if it was a hybrid between the two - that would certainly explain the hardiness. It seems there are records of that hybrid being made in the past: https://growingfruit.org/t/hardy-edible-passiflora-hybrids-pedigrees/69650 Either way, I would happily trial some seeds but, as you mentioned, we might not get sufficient summer heat here. Pure incarnata struggles here and isn't reliable but some of its hybrids are.

You need to try harder Richard...there's another 400 species to collect!

Ha! Funny, my wife and I travel to London, staying for a few weeks at a time, for work pretty much every 3 months or so. Not sure what part of the UK you are in, but I’d be more than happy to send some seeds this year. I’m fairly certain that’s how these ended up around our back yard this spring anyway, through seeds dropped by birds or squirrels, I just don’t know how they could’ve made it through one of the most severe winters in memory, that included 2 weeks or so of 15cm of ice. It usually doesn’t ever stay cold long enough for snow to last a day, let alone ice that thick. I’m not surprised by how many sub-tropicals/tropicals do well in the UK—I’ve seen many looking great in the parks around London. The only thing I’ve noticed about Passiflora Edulis is that it seems to accelerate its growth when it’s most disgustingly hot and humid. We do get at least 3 solid months of that here, and the last couple years it was the time the vine fast expanded throughout the back yard trellises and fence, flowered as fruited, continuing until our first true freeze, typically the first days of December. Sometimes I don’t think the fruit would come out as consistently flavorful (or at all) without that period of unrelenting heat and humidity. All things considered, we seem to have just the right amount of growing day (barely), and just enough heat and humidity at the peak growth period. Id love to see how they turn out in the UK. It’s worth noting, we also have native Passiflora Incarnata (Maypop) in the area and in our yard. They can tolerate lots of cold, and typically start sending out new shoots from the ground, at random, and relentlessly, around May. It’s borderline invasive, and unless you pull all the shoots as you see them, they will take over any space. Last season Edulis and Incarnata competed, and overlapped in several locations in our yard. I don’t believe there’s any way they could hybridize, but nonetheless, it’s weird to see the “Edulis” popping up all over in a way they haven’t before.

I dug this pair out of the wild, forgotten corner of my greenhouse recently. The label has completely faded. I was thinking B. eriospatha because of the green colour of the leaves, but is this striping on the boots common at this young stage? Any ideas? Hybrid??

New frond on my smaller one.

Beautiful plants - my favourite genus!

Maybe you have an extremely hardy variety there. Fancy sending some seeds to the UK for us to trial? 😜

The everglades palm is doing really great. Cleaned it up and you can start to see some trunkage

Now sprouted with new shoots where the main, thick trunk took off when originally planted.

0.24" this morning. A light rain but a soaking rain. Need more like that. There's about 0.75"-1" in the forecast for the next 7 days. Pattern favors chances for at least scattered showers and storms over the coming weeks in the Panhandle.

azalea flowers!

I've never seen or even heard about a single example of this tree in the Phoenix area, so my experience will probably be the first documented. Looks like I picked a promising tree for a new opening I just created.😄 As with palms, I was the guinea pig trialing many different subtropicals to figure out which ones could survive our extremes. Turns out, species native to the Caribbean or Mexico are the best adapted to our hot deserts. Species like Copernicia, Coccothrinax, Hemithrinax, and Pseudophoenix just keep plugging along,year after year. I love to grow palms from seed, just to watch them grow. I'm probably responsible for getting some of these species into Phoenix gardens, as I have sold many plants over the last 30 years. Pseudophoenix has always been one of my favorites, so I am always starting new batches of those.👍