Wow, that puppy is gorgeous Mj. Look at all the flower scapes! Yeah, all the gingers seem to love lots of water.

Mine don't like the well water too much, the high pH makes them look terrible. This spring it hasn't been an issue because we had enough rain I didn't have to irrigate much.

Looks like the first flowers on my Hedychium 'Dr. Moy' will be open tomorrow. I like it just as well for the great foliage as the flowers. This one has the fabulous perfume, too.



Another random start from a friend a few years ago grew into Zingiber collinsii, which I nicknamed my corduroy ginger. The leaves really do have a corduroy texture. This one puts up little flower scapes like the pinecone gingers, from the roots. Another month or so for those to show up.

Elaine, the Zingiber collinsi is in ground and seems to be doing great. Glad you mentioned the time when they would bloom I'll be on the lookout.

Gorgeous pictures, everybody! Love the globbas...I only have winitii, which does well for me in pots here in Indiana. Now I feel like I need to get some more!

Elaine, I love your Rainbow Costus....haven't seen that one available by mail order, but I'll be on the lookout. As far as your Hedychium greenii plantlets, I potted a bunch of them two years ago and found that they were very popular as a plant to trade...the red-backed foliage is beautiful. I traded for some nice tropicals with them in 3" pots.

If you decide you want some fragrant hedychiums, I have about a dozen that I grow in pots and have to throw away my 'extras' every fall to get them back inside. If you want a list, let me know......here's a couple of my favorite, healthy ones:


BTW- my family loves Sarasota. We always stop by the Selby Gardens there when we're on vacation. We love seeing all the tropicals when we're down there.

On my evening walkabout I noticed that two of my Hedychiums will be blooming in a few weeks. They'd probably bloom sooner if I watered them more ... pretty much depending on rain to do that. I'd love to live in a zone where I could leave all of them in the ground.

Yup, you'd probably get way more stems before the cold weather comes as well if you water them more, Anne. They do love lots of water! I have a clump of the regular white Hedychium 'Butterfly' right near my mango tree. At this time of year when the fruit is sizing up and ripening I am watering the tree regularly, and those Hedychiums just jump up with the extra water. Then of course they slow down again once the fruit is done.

This one is similar to Bob's Tai Monarch up above. Very nice shots, Bob!

On my walkabout this morning I remembered Elaine mentioning that the Peacock Ginger's flowers were shimmery and hard to catch ... I kind of took that as a challenge and sort of caught it.

Good job, Anne. That's the closest to the actual color I've seen in a photo.

Thanks .. digital cameras are notorious for having problems with blues and purples.

Yep, mine makes everything much more red than it should be, except if I use the flash. Can't get those little flowers with the flash because they're gone by the time it's dark enough, and don't open until the sun comes up.

If your camera is not just a point and shoot, you should be able to set it so it takes three pictures of the same thing at different exposure values. You have to click on the picture to see what I'm talking about.



Also I have found that if you have a camera you can set for different types of light such as Cloudy, Sun, Incandescent, Flash etc. that you can play around with those which give you different color values. If I set mine on flash, even though I'm not using the flash, it usually corrects the colors closer to normal.

That's really cool, thanks Anne. I'll have to dig out the destructions for my camera now and find out how to do that.

I've just been lazy and used it as 'point and shoot' but it certainly has all the bells and whistles to do anything I want. We got this camera for shooting pictures of sailboats with a big zoom out on the water. Image stabilization, fast exposure and that stuff was much more important than color values.

The Pinecone gingers are going to town with their funny little flowers today. The flowers themselves have a very faint, if any, fragrance but the 'shampoo' you get from the cone after the flowers are finished is quite 'ginger-y'. I've slapped it on my ankles for a short-term insect repellent before. Works for about half an hour or so which is all I'm generally out for anyway.

I don't have any of those types of gingers ... I may rectify that this coming Spring. Know any good remedies for tick bites that itch like crazy? I found a tiny one between my fingers and removed it before it got really attached. There is no swelling and you can't even tell where the darn thing had bitten me but it apparently got enough proteins in the area to drive me nuts. Even betamethasone doesn't help.

A really tiny tick-like insect might have been a chigger, Anne. In any case, yes they do itch like fury! I use an all-natural insect repellent called Herbal Armor that has a bunch of aromatic oils in it. Even when I do get bitten, if I put it on and rub it in it takes the itch away for me.

Another good remedy is a hot water soak with baking soda in the water. A tablespoon of baking soda to a couple of quarts of water as hot as your hand can stand, and soak it for 10 minutes or so. This works for stings, too, after the first sting goes away and they start to itch and swell up.

A paste made of Meat tenderizer works also. Press it onto the bite, and if you can cover with a bandaid.

It was definitely a tick - I was checking real hard to see if it was a deer tick before I flushed it. It's seemed to eased a bit since I did some dishes ... the hot water probably helped.

Anne, the Shampoo ginger is also called the Pine Cone ginger. I thought I had lost all my Shampoo gingers after the severe winter, but I now have six plants coming up. They were a month later than usual and they usually germinate a month later than my White Butterfly gingers. The White Butterfly gingers handled the cold winter well.

I don't think you can kill hedychiums. Mine come up no matter what the winter turns out to be. I only have one Alpinia because they bloom on old growth. I've pretty much steered away from Gingers that bloom on old growth since they essentially won't bloom for me being outside and dying back in winter.

I lost 2/3 of my 'Shampoo' gingers this winter.

Dr. Dawg, I'm glad that I didn't plant my shampoo gingers, as I would definitely have lost them completely. I had mine in a large pot and kept it in the garage this past winter. I didn't realize that my soil was too moist and some of the rhizhomes rotted (it had a large root system and it just rotted). In the future, I will take them out of the pot and store them dry over the winter. My white hedychium and a curcuma elata (I believe) in the ground are fine.