December 2010 Archives

Another great surprise and certainly a nice way to end the year was spotting these Angel Trumpet blooms on a seedling from Brugmansia Hawaiian Double White x (L'Amour x Day Dreams).

This seedling was carried over from 2009 and finally came back in bloom after a near death experience in last year's freeze.  The calyx is normally not dry and crispy as shown in the photo, that is just the effect from our most recent freeze.

These blooms have a very strong resemblance to Brugmansia Day Dreams.  The biggest differences between the two are that the tendrils on this seedling are slightly longer, and the corolla tube on the bloom is skinnier and a bit longer than you will find on Day Dreams.  One of my goals for 2011 is to take lots of comparison shots of blooms when I find similar flowers in bloom at the same time.  You can be assured you'll find this one lined up beside a bloom from Day Dreams.

While prepping my Angel Trumpets yesterday for yet another freeze, I discovered this beautiful new double orange seedling.  It was like having Christmas all over again! This seedling is from a cross of Brugmansia Ludger's Windsong x (Color Point x Double Dark Rosetta) 6.

This cross may sound familiar because I featured one of its siblings in this blog post last month.  It was a super sized single orange that quickly earned keeper status. I'll be anxiously waiting for the next set of blooms on both so I can cross each back to each other.

With two winners out of this cross already, I'm really looking forward to seeing the remaining seedlings from this cross bloom.

I guess I must have been a good boy this year because I have a great new bright orange Brugmansia seedling in bloom.  This beautiful Angel Trumpet bloom is from a seedling from a cross of Ludger's Windsong x (Ludger's Summer Dream x Creamsicle).

As you can see by the photo below this seedling is a nice triple.  The bright Orange color is consistent throughout the bloom.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this seedling develops. I'm already watching a couple of other seedlings with Ludger's Summer Dream x Creamsicle as the father and now I can ad this one to the mix.  The Ludger's Summer Dream x Creamsicle plant that was the pollen parent of this seedling is still in my hybridizing program.  I recently made a few crosses with it as the pod parent and it looks like the pods are sticking. 
    .    
2011 is going to be a great year for brugs!

This week I had one of my second generation crosses involving Brugmansia Lizzy bloom.  The cross is Lizzy x Orange Zest, both of which have "The Chief" as a father.  .

Lizzy came from a cross between Brugmansia Rubirosa x The Chief, and Orange Zest is a Jacayna x The Chief cross.  Both  were introduced and registered this past year.

I was hoping some of Orange Zest's color would transfer over to a Lizzy style bloom, but instead the outcome was a rather simple double white Angel Trumpet.  The blooms are nothing spectacular and medium in size.

I have several more seedlings from this cross yet to bloom so perhaps The Chief's elusive twin will still appear.  :)

While working on my brugs today I came across this seedling from a cross I made between Brugmansia Orange Zest x Genevieve.

This is the second seedling from this cross to bloom.  The first one was snow white and I posted a photo of it earlier this week here.  At least this one has a hint of color, but it could certainly use a few more color genes from it's mother, Orange Zest.  The bloom was quite large and would look great in yellow or orange. This bloom was actually buried under the foliage so I did not even see it until I was out pollinating tonight with my headlamp on.  I'm always amazed as to how I can miss seeing blooms during the daytime even when they are wide open. 

I pulled this one aside and will most likely cross it back to Orange Zest to see what the second generation brings. 

I'm not a big fan of cold weather.  I'm a Florida boy and my body and brain start to shut down when the temps drop below 40f.  :)  Even in my athletic days I would not bike if it was below 50 and unless I was racing I would not run when the temperatures dropped below 40.  As a nurseryman I hate cold weather even more.  I recently discovered I have Posttraumatic Freeze Disorder, or PTFD for short.  PTFD can be defined as a condition characterized by intense fear, helplessness, or horror resulting from the exposure of your nursery, garden or plants to a hard or severe freeze. 

I finally discovered there is hope for those of us who have this disorder.  The best treatment I have found is to find beautiful blooms like these a day or two after the big freeze!

The picture above is of a promising new Angel Trumpet seedling I am trialing. All these photos have been taken within the past two days, following our recent hard freeze.  Below is one of my favorite seedlings from 2010, Brugmansia New Orleans Lady x (Angels Flight x Charming).


Here is Angel Trumpet Bernstein, one of the brightest single oranges you will find.  The final color will be much darker than what is pictured below.

It is hard to find a more beautiful medium pink double Angel Trumpet than Brugmansia Day Dreams, a Monika Gottschalk hybrid grown from seed by Shirley Morr.

I had hoped to pollinate all these blooms but the bees beat me to it while the plants were covered with frost cloth and poly.

Brugmansia Inca Sun did not let the cold weather stop it from blooming.

Here's a new seedling I'm working with that has the largest blooms of any multi-skirt white I have encountered.  It is not uncommon to see blooms 16-18 inches long and 10-12 inches wide.

Here you see Bernstein in the front with a cluster of blooms from Brugmansia Jessie Noel in the background.

Another golden Angel Trumpet that really colors up in the cool weather is Ludger's Summer Dream.  Notice the tiny seed pods forming between the blooms.



More to follow!

How can you not help but feel better when Langenbuscher Garten is in bloom?


Here it is again with Brugmansia Angel's Exotic in the background.  Angel's Exotic blooms nearly red in the in the summer, but in winter the blooms are a light pink.

Here's a promising new white Angel Trumpet from a cross involving Brugmansia Orange Zest x Genevieve.

Brugmansia Flame has beautiful blooms, but it could use some additional color.  I have seed pods forming on Flame that could give these blooms the additional color they need.

Angel's Goldface is a brugmansia cultivar that has a unique flower face and beautiful deep green foliage.

I was hoping these blooms would have waited a few days to open as I had big plans for them.  I was able to catch a couple before they opened and dust them with pollen.

Herrenhauser Gold is loving this cool weather as well.  The blooms take on more orange as the weather cools.

Going into this weeks freeze I was concerned about the 100+ pods that have already set on my Angel Trumpets.  The pods are in various stages of development, from a few weeks old to 6-8 weeks old.  I have some great crosses going this year including these using Brugmansia Lizzy as the pod parent.  Here's a young Lizzy x Angel's Gold Face pod.

After two back to back frigid winters, I am determined to keep my plants alive this winter.  This week's hard freeze brought the temperatures down to the mid-20's.  We also ended up having 6-8 hours of below freezing temps both nights.  As you can see, this Brugmansia Lizzy x Herbstzauer pod came through in great shape.

Brugmansia rarely set pods in the heat so we cannot successfully pollinate the flowers down here until October.  By May the success rate falls rapidly down to about 0%. This year I had very few seed pods because by the time my plants rebounded from the freeze and started blooming again, summer was already here. I'm working on some really great crosses this year.  I'm also making lots of crosses so I can help stock the iBrugs Seed Bank.  Here's another Brugmansia Lizzy cross whose pod may contain some winning seeds.  This time Langenbuscher Garten is the father. 

These are just 3 of about 15 successful crosses I have made with Lizzy this fall.  This winter should be Podatstic!
 

Winter rolled in early this year in Florida.  Typically we may have a slight chance of frost in December, but if we are going to encounter sub-freezing weather, it usually comes in January or early February.  This week we are in the midst of a hard freeze.  Last night the temps here dropped down to 25f.  As I am typing this at 2:00am Wednesday morning it is already 26f in my brugmansia growing area.  I'm sure it will drop 3-4 degrees more before sunrise. 

To protect my plants from this sub freezing weather I opted to cover as many plants as possible with commercial grade frost, cloth followed by a layer of clear poly.  Pictured below is one of the larger groups of brugs I covered.  This area measures 35ft x 75ft and contains many of my 7 gallon stock plants inter-spaced with lots of 3 gallon pots of my watched seedlings and the majority of my hibiscus collection.

The irony of this early freeze is that I plan to build a hoop house and shade structure to protect my plants during the holidays.  To get ready for winter I was also planning on culling seedlings, something I had unfortunately put off for the past montht. My Angel Trumpets were just getting ready to enter a big bloomapalooza phase and I bet 20-30% of my new seedlings would have been culled and tossed into the compost pile.

The photo below shows several other groups of protected brugs. The larger group in the back center is made up of 10ft tall stock plants.  Within that group is at least 100 seed pods in various stages of development.  The trailer on the left is used for storage of supplies, but now it has been gutted and is full of many of my favorite plants.  it is also the only group of plants that has heat. The poor 3 gallon brug in the center was one that had rooted itself deeply in the ground and wasn't special enough to protect.  You can see the beating it already took in last night's freeze.

Had just a light freeze been in the forecast, then most of these plants would have remained uncovered and I would have just ran the overhead sprinklers to protect the plants with a layer of ice. Once the weather forecast changed to a hard freeze i knew I had to take more drastic actions.

At least now I'll have a jump start on some of my spring cleaning.  Many of these seedlings are a couple of years old and were just growing on top of the ground.  All the new seedlings now grow on ground cloth to keep them from rooting into the ground below.  This large area was scheduled to be cleaned and covered with cloth in spring.  Now I can move that task up a few months early.   

To cover as many plants as possible in the smallest amount of space, plants were stacked diagonally pot to pot. The one covered group in the front center of the photo above consisted of over 1,500 gallon sized pots.  Many of these plants were getting ready to bloom for the very first time.  I still have not figured out what my strategy will be when I pull the covers off on Thursday.  It is impossible to keep a 5-6ft tall plant in a gallon pot in an upright position on its own. :)

Here are a bunch of 3 gallon seedlings stacked and ready to be covered.
 
Only one group of plants did not receive the protective layer of poly. The group below just received a double layer of frost cloth. This group contains some of my oldest and tallest seedlings.  Many of the plants were 12 feet tall and taller.  They were all knocked down close to the ground to make it easier for me to cover them. 

As a friend and I worked diligently to prepare several Brugmansia plants for tonight's predicted record breaking hard freeze, I stumbled across this beautiful new Angel Trumpet seedling.  It is from a cross of Brugmansia Day Dreams x Ludger's Windsong.


Lucky for this Angel Trumpet its beautiful golden yellow blooms quickly earned it a warmer place to spend the next couple of nights.  I'll be watching this one closely next spring. 

This guy looks like he's ready to take off on this Angel Trumpet bud!

Anyone who has grown Angel Trumpets for more than a season understands how environmental conditions can have a major influence on a bloom's appearance.  Brugmansia Angel's Golden Dreams is a great example of this.  Here's a photo of what the typical color of AGD blooms look like during our warm growing season.

Now that the temps have cooled off during the day and night, the blooms have turned a nice yellow/orange color.  This color deepened even more when the nighttime temperature dropped down to the 30's.

The cool season is a great time to trial white Brugmansia. It is amazing how many whites actually show cream or light yellow/orange coloring in the cold weather.  I only have a few white keepers that stay snow-white all year. 

I finally was rewarded with some color from my cross of Brugmansia Orange Sunshine x Pink Smitty.  This new Angel Trumpet seedling has a striking resemblance to Brugmansia Jazzy.
  
This particular cross was one I decided to grow the entire seed pod out so I could see the diversity in a single cross.  Out of the 20 or so seedlings that have already bloomed, most have been white.  I have only kept one in my watch zone so far, a double light orange.  I think I'll carry this one over as well and perhaps cross it back to its double orange sibling.

I know I have at least 30-40 more seedlings from this cross yet to bloom so maybe that gem still awaits me.

This past week I have had several new yellow/orange Angel Trumpet seedlings bloom that show promise.  Here's one that made it to my watch list.  It is from a cross of Brugmansia (Bert x Unknown) x America.

Unfortunately I do not have additional photos showing how the bloom matured because I sliced these open to harvest their pollen and then dust them with some other pollen. The final color ended up being a nice rich orange color.

I have other seedlings from this same cross that should be blooming soon.  I'm still hoping for a yellow or orange version of Brugmansia America.  :)