Viewing comments posted by arctangent

Plants of the World online says:
"100 million people in parts of tropical Africa and India depend on pearl millet as their staple food source."

Also:
"The grains can be boiled or steamed directly, or ground into a flour to make bread, porridge or couscous.Pearl millet and pulses can be seasoned to make delicious snacks popular in Africa.The grain is also used in the making of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Millet beer, for example is often considered a staple of religious and social life in Africa.Pearl millet is high in protein which makes it an excellent feed for poultry and other livestock."

The stems of the plant are used for fencing, thatching and building materials. The red and purple varieties of pearl millet are used for making dyes for leather and wood. "

Also:
"Pearl millet also has a number of medicinal applications. In African traditional medicine the grain is used to treat chest disorders, leprosy, blennorrhoea and poisonings. A decoction made from the roots is used in the treatment of jaundice and the vapour from inflorescence extracts is inhaled for respiratory diseases in children."

Finally:
"Pearl millet has been found to be effective in suppressing root-lesion nematodes ( Pratylenchus penetrans ) and is being used as an alternative to soil fumigation in tobacco and potato cropping in Canada."
All in all, an extremely useful plant.

This is a bunchgrass that grows in small tufts of short leaves, a few centimeters in length. Under certain conditions the plants produce woolly masses of fine white fibers that form when excreted solutions of mineral salts evaporate. Hence one of the common names, woollygrass. It is native to the U. S. desert southwest.

I haven't been able to trace the exact parentage of this cultivar, but one source describes it as 'A hybrid rhododendron with close ties to the PJM group'. It is even sold as 'PJM Aglo'. Another source simply says it's "an inter-species hybrid'. From the Missouri Botanical Garden page for it, "PJM Group is a series of rhododendron hybrids that resulted from crosses between R. carolinianum and R. dauricum var. sempervirens."

Confusion between two dahlias named 'Mary Jo'.
The one described here matches the one listed by Dahlia Addict and offered by Swan Island (a miniature orange/pink or light blend semi-cactus), and the photos here agree with this description. The problem is that the date of introduction (given here as 1976) and the hybridizer/introducer (Abellara) seem to belong to a different 'Mary Jo' dahlia. Piecing together year of introduction from Swan Island, who sells the Min SC form, 1968, and the information in Dahlia World's master list, I deduce that the 'Mary Jo' in the garden.org database is 'Mary Jo(I)' in Dahlia World's list, and was introduced in 1968 by Franz. The other one, 'Mary Jo (II)' is a large, orange SC introduced in 1978 by Abellara. I didn't want to offer a data change for year of introduction and name of the introducer without explaining the basis for this change.

The Dahlia World master list has ten entries under the name 'Enchantress'. This garden.org entry gives size/form/color data for that matches one of these, the one attributed to Hacek (a large red formal decorative cultivar, number III on the Dahlia World list), but most of the photos seem to be of a semi-cactus, dark blend cultivar. In the Dahlia World list, there's a similar entry (number VIII) that is attributed to Swan Island, and Dahlia Addict's entry under 'Enchantress' seems to be of the same or a similar cultivar. There is also an orange water lily form (Dahlia World number VI for 'Enchantress, attributed to Miller). This explains the different types of flower form and the different colors specified in this single garden.org entry. They describe three different cultivars!!!

This mixed database entry for 'Enchantress' is very confusing. Honestly, I don't know the best way to handle the situation short of creating different entries for the different cultivars of the same name. Somebody, help!

This is the earliest blooming non-Asian tree peony every year at the Peony Garden, Nichols Arboretum, Ann Arbor, Michigan The blooms last only a few days.