“Dipladenia is one of the modern favorites in the list of conservatory climbers. The Gardener’s Record [pdf] thinks too much prominence cannot be given to it; for, ‘like many climbing plants, it blooms best when grown prominently forward near to the glass, and perhaps to perfection near to the roof of an intermediate house, with general temperature not below about 55 degrees.’
“Dipladenias are natives of Central America, and belong to the order of Dogbanes, a name given by Dr. Lindley to a certain class of plants, which I believe Linnaeus described as having contorted or twisted-like flowers, with corollas resembling a catherine-wheel firework in motion. To this family belong the Periwinkle, the Oleander, etc….
“With twining habit, and large graceful flowers nearly five inches in diameter, in form like a Convolvulus, and with color varying from pale pink or French white, to clear delicate rosy pink, I know not any more lovely climbing plant for summer, and what is commonly called early autumn. It may be grown from layers, from cuttings, and from seed.”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of Dipladenia Rio White from my garden. The first post is Dipladenia Rio White (1 of 2). Moreso than in the previous post, you can see “pale pink” or “rosy pink” (described above) that appears in the blooms during their unfolding, color swatches that tend to be more apparent in the second or third blooming cycle — though this is one of my completely unscientific observations.
Did you know “moreso” isn’t a word? Allegedly, I say! When I typed the previous sentence, the computer ensquiggled “moreso” at me as a misspelling, and I of course just assumed the computer was wrong. It turns out that “moreso” should be written as “more so” or “more-so” — but I don’t like either of those so I’m sticking with “moreso.” I’ve already used it in five previous posts, which makes it a word as far as I’m concerned. And, like everything else in our modern era, it’s controversial — see More So Vs. Moreso: Which is the Correct Spelling? — so I think I can follow my own path.
“The large, convolvulus-like, and exquisitely-colored blossoms of this plant are hardly matched by those of any twiner with which I am acquainted, and, under proper management, its charming flowers are produced very abundantly for some two or three months in succession. Notwithstanding that, it is, perhaps, the finest of all twiners which we possess, it is by no means universally cultivated; for in the hands of many it is found to bloom very shyly, or not at all, consequently it has never received the attention which it deserves.
“To insure success in its culture, a light, warm, moist situation and a brisk bottom-heat are indispensable, and where such accommodation cannot be commanded, it is useless to attempt to grow it; with proper convenience, however, it grows very rapidly and blooms abundantly. Cuttings, made of short-jointed, half-ripe shoots, root freely if inserted in sandy, peaty soil, covered with a bell-glass, and afforded a sharp bottom heat….
“In autumn, gradually reduce the supply of water, expose the plants to a circulation of warm, dry air, in order to ripen the wood, and, when this is effected, remove them to a house where the temperature may average from [50 to 60 degrees], and allow them a period of rest, giving no water to the soil during that season. Towards the end of January, or as soon afterwards as circumstances will admit, turn the plants out of their pots, shaking away a portion of the old soil, so as to be able to repot them in fresh materials without using larger pots, at the same time cutting back the shoot to a strong bud near the base. Be careful to have the fresh soil in a moist, healthy state, so as to prevent the necessity of giving much water until growth shall have commenced, and the roots taken to the soil.”ย
White petals unfurl like delicate fans, Yellow centers aglow in fading light, Dipladenia blooms on weathered back steps, A graceful display as day turns to night.
Autumn whispers through waning warmth, These flowers defy the season’s chill, Their brightness a lingering memory of summer, On steps where time stands still.
Hello!
Every spring for the past bunch of years, I’ve gone to one of the nearby garden centers to buy six dipladenia plants. I come home and dig out the previous year’s spent roots from six pots, replace them with the new plants, then set three pots on each side of my back steps. I’ll sometimes choose red dipladenia or sometimes pink — but I especially like these white ones with the yellow centers (officially known as “Dipladenia Rio White”), pictured below. Once they start blooming, they make a nice bright visual pathway from my back door to the courtyard, producing vines that are just robust enough to be attractive and shapely, but only require a trimming or two all season to keep the human or the dog from tripping on them.
I had tried other plants in these same six pots in the past, but have kept returning to dipladenia since — it seems to me — squirrels will leave these plants alone. Any stems or vines they chew or slice with their Freddy Krueger fingernails will exude a sticky white substance they probably don’t like. I don’t like it, for sure; so I’m guessing squirrels don’t like it either and so tend to stay away.
Dipladenia also has a strong root system, even in medium-sized pots, and isn’t bothered by the torrential waterfalls that flow from the double-peaks of my roof during thunderstorms. And here in the southeast, they’ll bloom from April until right about now (or longer, in warmer autumns) so are especially fetching at dusk when receding sunlight catches the contrasting white, yellow, and dark green colors. Late summer and early autumn — when many other flowering plants have passed their blooming stages but fall color hasn’t yet appeared — are my favorite times to photograph them.
If you read the quotation at the top, from the very old book The Floral World, Garden Guide, and Country Companion (sometimes shortened to “The Floral World and Garden Guide”), you know now how to propagate dipladenia in a greenhouse, 1879-style. I don’t actually have a greenhouse — though I’ve often wondered if I could ensqueeze one on my property somehow — but was impressed by how concisely (though somewhat old-Englishly) the author Shirley Hibberd described the process. It would be fun to try it, so if you do, let me know.
If you’ve been here before, you know I often hunt down poems about what I photograph and post them along with one or two non-fiction selections about each kind of flower or plant. I’ve written before — see here and here — about discovering all sorts of excellent books and poetry on the Internet Archive, and how much I’ve learned by doing that. But the Internet Archive (including my favorite part, “Books to Borrow”) has been offline since October 9, after suffering a data breach and a cyberattack — one so significant that it’s gotten its own Wikipedia page: Internet Archive Cyberattack. The organization is still recovering from the attack over a week later, and remains offline until… well, until it’s not offline any more.
Having used it for several years now, I can honestly say that I’ve found it indispensable, and I’m really missing my fingertip access to thousands and thousands of poems. So for today’s poem — “Autumn Dipladenia” — I instead asked my imaginary friend (and amateur poet) ClaudeAI to produce some poetry by prompting it to “write about the Dipladenia variant with white flowers and yellow centers, in pots on someone’s back steps, as they appear in late afternoon autumn light.” After a bit of back and forth with me, it developed that two-stanza poem, which surprisingly placed the plants on “weathered back steps” — which is how my steps look in real life, though I didn’t mention it when asking for the poem. Apparently ClaudeAI has (somehow!) sneaked a peek at my back yard; and I’ll leave you to decide if the poem is any good or not (it does have some pretty good imagery).
See! the lark starts up from his bed in the meadow there, Breaking the gossamer threads and the nets of dew, And flashing adown the river, a flame of blue! The kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air.
And the sense of my life is sweet! though I know that the end is nigh: For the ruin and rain of winter will shortly come, The lily will lose its gold, and the chestnut-bloom In billows of red and white on the grass will lie.
And even the light of the sun will fade at the last, And the leaves will fall, and the birds will hasten away, And I will be left in the snow of a flowerless day….
Hello!
This is the third of three posts featuring dipladenia flowers from my garden. The first post is Do You Know Dipladenia? (1 of 3); and the second post is Do You Know Dipladenia? (2 of 3). For this post, I took a few of the photos from the previous two, twisted them into slightly different crop formations, then painted the backgrounds black.
This post marks the last of my spring and summer photographs for 2022 — about 240 photos from my gardens, and about 480 from my ‘hood (mostly Oakland Cemetery’s gardens but also Grant Park’s Grant Park). Since I use Lightroom to organize my photo projects — and separate the projects by year and season — I thought it was fun to compare this year to last year, and found that I posted almost (within 10 percent of) the same number of photos as 2021. Weird, that, because in my imagination I thought I had posted a lot less this year… but I guess not! I’m blogging at a pace of six to eight posts a month — each with new photographs and many with new writing — which seems to keep me at a reasonable balance between maintaining a site and regular life.
A heightened level of new fall color has blanketed my city over the past couple of weeks, presenting between bouts of rain when the sun comes out. While some of the first-turning, more boring leaves had hit the ground early, Japanese and other maples in particular are just now absolutely glowing in red, orange, and yellow — waiting patiently for someone’s (I wonder whose!) camera. Late season flower-bloomers like mums, daisies, coneflowers, goldenrod, and anemone, however, have recently been photographed and are in my “to be processed” Lightroom collections. My back yard is covered with discarded oak leaves from my neighbor’s tree to the height of the dog’s knees, demanding (but not yet getting any) attention. At the same time — with Thanksgiving under our belts (so to speak!) — the boxes of Christmas decorations have been dragged from their oh-so-tight storage spaces and are strewn about the house in various states of disorganization. Is this what multitasking is supposed to be for? I always thought that concept was strange; I mean: isn’t it true that only one thing gets done at a time? Those decorations — as I write this — aren’t putting up themselves!
I treated myself to a second Christmas tree for my home office this year — a six-foot slim or pencil tree, as they’re often called — and stood it up a couple of weeks ago shortly after it was delivered (I couldn’t resist!), then festooned it with a few hundred multicolored lights and a delightful batch of red, green, and gold shatterproof ornaments. The Dog — or The Photographer on his behalf — is a big fan of shatterproof ornaments because one of us likes to walk by the tree and bat at the low-hanging glitterlicious objects with his paw. For some reason he believes that’s forbidden, even though I’ve never reacted or tried to correct him for doing it. Funny how they know such things, isn’t it?
I often see him out of the corner of my eye when I’m at my desk as he does this: he sneaks forward one step at a time, checks to see if I’m looking, takes another step or two until an ornament’s within reach, checks on me again and if I don’t make direct eye contact taps it with his paw to get it swaying… then rests on his haunches to marvel at the motion he’s made. I’ve tried to take a few photos to catch the little elf in action — but me picking up the camera he thinks is a signal we’re going outside, so he races to the back door before I can get the shot. Ah, well, we’ll keep trying; and since we bought the tree so we’d have something new to photograph (and play with!), we may still manage a shot of the pup pawing its decorations over the holidays.
(Haha! True story: as I was proofreading this post, he tried it again: snuck up to the tree and glanced toward me, but I looked right back at him and I swear he pulled a guilty face then ran into the kitchen for a drink of water. Dog-crime makes a canine very thirsty, apparently!)
“‘For all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.’
“So wrote Herman Melville in the forty-second chapter of Moby-Dick. Entitled ‘The Whiteness of the Whale,’ the passage is a veritable homily on the troubling, bisected symbolism of this color. Because of its link with light, white has laid deep roots in the human psyche and, like anything divine, can simultaneously inspire awe and instill terror in the human heart….
“White has long been intricately connected with money and power. Fabrics, including wool and cotton, had to be heavily processed in order to appear white. Only the very wealthy, supported by battalions of staff, could afford to keep the fresh lace and linen cuffs, ruffs and cravats worn in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries pristine. This connection still holds true.”
Hello!
This is the second of three posts featuring dipladenia flowers from my garden. The first post is Do You Know Dipladenia? (1 of 3).
These white variations — this one is called “Dipladenia Rio White” — start out with a light pink tint as you can see in the first image below. The blooms contrast nicely with the dark green leaves and vines, and it seems that the white varieties produce more flowers than the other colors I’ve grown… though this might be just a coincidence.
Like the red ones, the opened flower has a bright yellow center, one that — when it captures early morning or late afternoon light at a low angle — shows off an iridescent glow. That glow is most apparent in the last seven photos in this series, which I photographed about a half-hour before sunset.
“Dipladenia is a flowering plant you’ve likely seen before, either at your local nursery or growing in a friend’s pollinator garden. Most recognizable for its bushy leaves and trumpet-shaped flowers, this tropical plant thrives in pots, in the ground, and in hanging baskets. Horticulturist and gardening expert Melinda Myers has been growing dipladenia for about 30 years — ahead, she shares everything there is to know about the plant, including what makes it different from its relative, mandevilla.
“‘Dipladenia is botanically in the mandevilla genus, but they used to be separate,’ says Myers…. The two names are commonly used interchangeably, she says, but there are some differences between the plants. Dipladenia, for example, tend to be more shrub-like in appearance, with smooth, glossy leaves, while mandevilla has longer, thinner, textured leaves that are less bushy; this plant looks more like a vine. Both plants’ flowers are similar, but dipladenia blooms are often smaller — plus, this iteration changes all the time, thanks, in part, to its popularity: Growers are regularly introducing new varieties, some of which include new bloom colors, larger blooms, denser foliage, or types that act more like a vine….”
Hello!
As you might have gathered from the title (and the quote above) the flowering plants featured in this post (and the next two posts) are called: dipladenia, a nice roll-off-the-tongue kind of name that you might find hard to say if you were drunk. Over the years, I’ve alternated between buying dipladenia or their relative mandevilla every spring: sometimes, I buy whichever one I find first at the garden centers; other times, I’ve bought them specifically for smaller pots so wait until the little dips are available. Despite some naming confusion, mandevilla is usually associated with larger vines, typically sold in a big pot with the vine already heavily entangled on a plastic or bamboo trellis. Both are very common and grow quite rapidly here in the southeast; the smaller, bushier plant — the dipladenia — works quite well on the back steps leading to my courtyard, and, unlike the mandevilla vine, never grow so long that they need frequent pruning or manual detachment from whatever structure happens to be nearby.
Both plants are annuals, and, from my experience, they’ll flower well into fall, even if there are plenty of cold nights. By now — mid-November — flowering tends to stop, but their hardy vines and leaves will keep on growing (a bit more slowly) through much of the winter unless there’s a multi-day stretch of temperatures well below freezing, and then all the leaves fall off. Despite their small size, they produce an enormous volume of roots: when spring comes and I replace them, I get to cuss profusely as I cut and tug and pry the roots out of the pots and always wonder where all the soil went.
Despite having a big batch of plant, gardening, and botany books, I didn’t find any references to either plant, the plants’ family name (Apocynaceae), or some of their common names (rock trumpet, rocktrumpet, or trumpet vine, and possibly (from the olden days yore) dogbane), which led me to dig around on the internet and find an equally small amount of information. Perhaps I’ll keep digging — note to self: watch out for rabbit holes! — but, for now, we’ll just have to enjoy the pictures. These are the red ones (sold as “Dipladenia Rio Red”). In the next post, I’ll feature white ones (my favorite of these flowers); and in the last post, I’ll upload a handful of each on black backgrounds.
