Another neat plant I discovered when we bought this house - Costus, aka 'Corkscrew ginger' or 'spiral ginger'. They are impressive foliage plants with really cool spiral stems that will thrive in the ground even competing with the oak tree roots! (a big deal for me!) The flowers aren't large, but they last a long time, and come in interesting colors, some with patterns. Start very easily from cuttings.
First is special, not so tall as the plain ones that can get to 6ft. Fabulous variegated foliage about 3ft tall. The coral flower is Costus scabra, a tall one that blooms and grows nicely even under my huge oak trees! The flowers always seem to have ants on them, but otherwise are pretty. Third pic, another plain foliage one with cute little yellow/red striped flowers. They open sequentially over a couple of weeks, and keep blooming if you cut out the spent stalks.
This one shows the spiral stem. Then this butterfly was following me around this morning, naturally I didn't have the zoom lens on the camera, so couldn't get very close to him. Zebra longwing, the state butterfly.
