You are and yes most in a colder area like yours keep them dormant. @deepsouth doesn't even give them a single sip during winter time. Mine are all outdoors and I lost a lot last year due to our wet winter. Next year they are going to be kept in my camping tent. Our winter is very short though.

romalu said:

By the way, does anyone keep theirs fairly cool and dormant in winter? I'm going to have to keep this beast in an unheated spare room next winter for lack of anywhere else to put it. It stays around 55° F most of the time. I have wintered cacti and an agave in there, with no problems; I just hardly ever water and they go dormant. Will that work with an Adenium?

yes ...adenium will go dormant during the winter months ....will survive just fine if brought indoors and placed under lights, or near a south, east or west facing window ....
have gone as long as 180 days without watering ....but the trick here, is to saturate the potting mix before bringing indoors ....
after 180 days, water lightly ...less than *half* the volume of pot
while in dormancy, adenium will get what it needs from its caudex .... about mid winter you may notice the caudex & stems shrinking & wrinkled (like a raisin) .....there may even be a "gap" in the potting mix between mix and the caudex ....
adenium may retain all leaves, drop all its leaves or keep half ....keep an *eye* on stem tips ...dormant adenium stem tips will appear "bald" ...... dormancy "breaks" when new growth emerges from the stem tips - when this happens resume watering

Check out these links for more adenium information:

https://adenium.tucsoncactus.o...

https://www.desertmuseum.org/v...

One more question… This is my smaller Adenium. It seems to be healthy and it has bloomed well, but in the four years I've had it, it has grown very very little, and the leaves have always been weird and stunted like this. I've never figured out why.

stunted / curled are "folded" leaves are a watering issue (lack of) ....when possible, move outdoors, water more often (saturate) and place plants in full sunlight - at least 6 hours direct sun worth ....... except in winter months

a repot once every 3-to-4 years, using a fresh potting mix will usually kick plants into new vigorous growth

deepsouth said: stunted / curled are "folded" leaves are a watering issue (lack of) ....when possible, move outdoors, water more often (saturate) and place plants in full sunlight - at least 6 hours direct sun worth ....... except in winter months

Ok. I water pretty regularly but I have a tendency to stop short of really soaking my plants out of rot paranoia, lol. I do put it outside in summer on the shadier front porch where it gets around 5 hours of morning sun. The back deck is south facing, no shade, blazing hot sun all day — would that actually be preferable? How often would you water in that scenario?

adenium thrive in hot, blazing sun conditions and want more ......100° is nothing to them

In the summer months treat adenium like a tropical plant ....in the winter months treat adenium like a cacti

water until it drains out of the bottom of the pot ....when its hot ...step up water
80's to 90° ...water once every 7 to 10 days ....above 90° water every 5 days ...100's every 3 days

@romalu , if the above recommendation from @deepsouth is not working for you, then you may try to force the plant to go dormant and let it wake up again. You need to completely unpot the plant, wash its roots from the soil, let it air dry for one day, then prune all the leaves and small roots. Then hang the plant in bright shade area for a week or two before replant it in fresh soil, gradually introduce it to direct sun, just sprinkle some water on it. Once you see new growth, then it has wake up and you can start water it. Hope this will work for you

@kaktus -- I haven't really done what @deepsouth suggests yet. My small one has never had full sun, and I watered weekly when it was outside when it sounds like it needs twice that at least. So I'm gonna put them in the back porch in the heat this year, soon as I can (I'm doing some acclimating now but the weather is still erratic here), and soak the little one daily when it gets hot and the big one 2-3x a week, and see what happens!

I have not done what @Kaktus have suggested too but it would probably have benefitted my root bound adeniums that succumb to root rot. I will try to do that in some of mine that could benefit from it before the rainy season starts. Maybe hang them under my mango tree so my neighbors will not get alarmed to see that I am hanging up "some things". That's how rumors get started.

@romalu , hope the additional sunlight will help.

@GigiAdeniumPlumeria , don't hang them under the mango tree or any places that has the risk of direct sun or rains, that will increase the risk of root rot.

Tracy is now repotted. Her roots were fine. I haven't seen any troubles with the other branches, so maybe, maybe, maybe I caught it in time.

I worry that it might have been my attempt to pollinate that caused the branch tip to rot. I might have punctured the flower with the toothpick and let bacteria in. I had tried to pollinate two flowers on the affected branch. Now I'm scared to try again. Sometimes, the flowers go brown in the centre, as if they choke on their own petals because there are too many petals and not enough room for them all to open. It never seems to happen to the weirdly shaped flowers that are a bit off centre and open widely, but quite often to the ones that are more rose bud-like.

I repotted all the plants in the same window today (I hope I didn't kill the Ficus microcarpa - the old potting medium was really hard and it had been standing in a pot that was too large so that while the top of the soil was super dry, the bottom was soggy). Two of the other Adeniums had a bit of fungus in the soil, but all the roots were healthy. Two of them had broken their pots and two had way too little potting medium for their size, so I'm hoping to see some growth now that their feet are not cramped. I put all of them in terracotta pots instead of the plastic they were in before. They might lose all their pretty buds and flowers, but I had already waited too long.

It is probably not something you did via hand pollinating but a stem rot just seem to happen with no warning. As for the open wide flowers, keeping my fingers crossed but I took advantage of it and pollinated CD 01 because I could see exactly where I could place the pollens! So it looks like I have the beginning of seedpods! I will post a photo once they are bigger.

This one is a beauty in person. I self pollinated today. This is tall and lanky and I have 2. I pruned one to get multi tip and this is actually tall but the tip got attacked by spider mites and the branches above the graft have small beautiful blooms:



So the long branch (not pictured here) will be air layered.

Happy Mother's Day from my garden to yours:

I've had my first 5 desert roses in 2014, my daughter and I named them all: MD Addie, Chickie, Pinkie Pie, Sweetie Pie and Sceptera's Momma (my neighbor fell in love with her). Then I had mostly roses, orchids and plumerias.

Then in 2021 hubby and daughter brought me to Lowe's to pick my Mother's Day gifts. I ended up with these, which started my adenium addiction.



And here are a few of the currently blooming ones:





Sorry a little bit messy as I was busy hand pollinating via self or cross pollination.

I really want to go to your Lowe's...

I updated my photos -see above. I admittedly was disappointed ☹️ We went too late and they were all gone. I think it is getting popular now. We went to 2 Lowe's one didn't have any and the other one has 3 grafted that I already have and 2 seedlings. I just picked this adenium obesum x crispum hybrid seedling:

for the s and the tip @Floridian hope gorgeous Big Red will give you a lot of seed pods!


Were you able to successfully grow cuttings from Big Red as back ups?

Hope your other Adeniums are blooming too! Happy Mother's Day!

Oh wow I was browsing through the links below, not sure if legit site @deepsouth might know and has a link to buy some rooted cuttings? I don't know anything of this site and don't buy online (I'm old school) but I love to browse photos of Adeniums and what's being sold online. So when it hits my local store, I know them right away.

https://www.dimmittadeniums.ne...

https://www.sascactus.com/dimm...

Happy Mother's Day to All!!!

Some Adeniums from my collection
NOID, rescue

Thai Yellow

NOID, bonsai training

Mystery triple grafted in 2022, mother died

Big Red seedling, planted fall of 2022, survived root rot

NOID, rescue

Seedlings in multipacks - Big Red, MS Red single, Gigi Variegated, and Thai Yellow, other seedlings are Ugly orange and succulents.

Big Red - found root rot last Thursday, emergency clean up, during peak bloom time too, and it had just recovered from being repotted in February. Removed most leaves and lots of blooms, hoping that I can repot in another week or so and not loose all the blooms.