Speaking of crazy flowers
Imagine our surprise when the neighbor's longsuffering banana plant turned out to be Strelitzia nicolai. Especially because they're only supposed to grow in zones 23-24.
Labels: Strelitzia nicolae
posted by Anonymous at 1:48 PM
4 Comments:
Great picture! It looks like two babies peaking out.
Also [minorly] interesting, a common name for S. nicolai is Wild Banana. Now I wonder what a Strelitzia fruit looks like.
Holy christ, those are crazy all right. What are the odds of being able to eat some wild bananas? And pomegranites? Do they have time to ripen fruit?
I doubt the birds of p. will set fruit. I don't know that I've ever noticed fruit on the normal ones (S. reginae). There's a picture of the fruit here.
Kew explains the flower morphology. I would think that this is a pretty pollinator-specific setup. The analogous local birds probably take one look at this thing and fly the fuck away as fast as they can.
The pomegranate is dropping most of its flowers, which is good because I'd prefer it to focus on vegetative growth until next year. But at least one flower appears to have been impregnated (I have yet to spot a pollinator), and I may have to leave it on just to see what happens.
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