Doug Hill seems like such a nice guy; why do I want to scream at him?

Don't meteorologists know we need rain sometimes?Are we, the gardeners, the only people who notice when it doesn't rain!?! Again we are suffering from an extreme deficit of precipitation and yet we have to listen to the meteorologists on the local news cheerfully assuring us that we don't have to worry about those clouds out there because they aren't going to produce any rain. And the weekend will be sunny and dry. As if that were a good thing when our gardens are wilting two days after we water them! I bet it bothers farmers more than it does me. But maybe they're more used to adversity than gardeners.

I suspect that we are at a place where professionals pretty much all live in condos with maintenance crews or have irrigation for their landscapes, so the absence of rain, if they even notice it, just isn't anything that resonates with them. When we do finally hit official "drought" conditions they are so all over it that you get sick of hearing about it. Roofs are good and walls, heating is good and insulation. Don't get me wrong, I love air conditioning. I remember not having it growing up, uncomfortably awake in the middle of the night longing for for a breeze or a thunderstorm to cool things off. I don't know why there weren't more murders. But is it good to be so divorced from nature that we don't notice farms, parks, and gardens drying up? I guess that will make us better able to adapt to life on generations long space voyages, or in sterile abiotic living quarters on hostile worlds. And eventually our agriculture will be all hydropinics and chemical synthesis. But for now....

George Washington filmed part of Jurassic Park here....I swear

Wherever you go in the tropics, at least in my limited experience, eastern hemisphere, western hemisphere, whatever, some part of Jurassic Park was filmed there. I love all plants, but must admit that I had always though of the Ti Plant, Cordyline terminalis, as too much; cheap, gaudy, tasteless. No one's right all the time. Snobbishness is probably not a good impetus to accurate judgement. Anyway, along the Road to Hana, a spectacular drive along the coast of Maui, is a wonderful garden, called presumptuously?, The Garden of Eden, where part of Jurassic Park was filmed. I'm sure. Damn, I'm doing it again. Cordylines everywhere. Beautiful plants everywhere, interspersed with views down forested valleys to the Ocean. I changed my mind about Ti Plants. They work in this garden.

At some point after this experience, I availed myself of a nice 10" 10 $ pot from Home Depot. It (now a 14" pot) lives in a bathroom window in the winter and outside in the summer. Every year I break off a few of the taller shoots and stick them back into the pot where they root almost immediately. It adds to the tropical ambiance of the back deck surrounded by gingers, passifloras, and Gordon the giant Ponytail Palm. Its easy, functional, and I have grown quite fond of it.

Something goes on with the foliage of these plants as the plant ages. Leaves on the young plants are usually flat with a dull surface. As the stems age, the leaves get larger, glossier, and darker with more interesting variegation and recurved edged. I haven't seen reference to this anywhere but I haven't spent too much time looking. If you do look a little online you will learn that there are dozens of cultivars with different forms of variegation. While most of these are available in more tropical areas, I have seen the odd block of unusual plants in Garden Centers locally.