5pm on March 25 - he's 21-1/2 inches

9am on 3/24 Mr Stinky is 18" tall

Interesting Foliage during Summer Months

Here’s a little left-over something from my Chicago days. One of my flat-mates’ father was a missionary who traveled the world. He brought a funny tuber back from India that many years later he shared with me – funny potato-looking thing with a very bizarre but interesting growing pattern. He called it an Indian Stink Lily. Many years later and thanks to the internet I have been able to find out about this curious plant – Amorphophallus – also known by many other names including elephant foot, voodoo lily, Telinga potato, corpse flower, and dragon flower just to name a few. When this plant blooms it exudes a fragrance not unlike the smell of rotting flesh. And how funny to receive a plant with such a phallic shape from a missionary!

Mr Stinky on 3/17 - St Pats Day, 1 day of growth!

My one tuber has multiplied many times over but I have only had one bloom before this year’s attraction – that other bloom was in my living room – the March after I received the tuber – before I could smell any foul odor coming from it, any dog guests I had immediately lifted their legs upon entering my apartment. Well, no more doggie friends until this thing is done blooming, but after a day of smelling it, I had to put it out on the back porch to let it die back in the cold. According to Wikipedia, “these are typical lowland plants, growing in the tropical and subtropical zones of the paleotropics, from West Africa to the Pacific Islands.   None of them are found in the Americas although a remarkably similar but not closely related genus, Dracontium, has evolved here” and can be found on the West Coast.

I have planted the tubers directly into my Saint Louis gardens and forgotten to dig them up to bring in for the winter – only to have them reappear around late May – wintered over in the garden! Of course it is too cold here for them to bloom outdoors but they will act like perennials even though they are purported to be tropical or sub-tropical – St Louis weather is really not any kinda tropical (well, perhaps a bit tropical in August).  Here are a few more pictures of my plants’ really unique foliage.

Eventually they create an umbrella shape

Top view, before the leaves canopy

Some very strange speckled stems!

Mr Stinky's Flower stalk, not open yet - and growing 3 to 4 inches a day! This photo is shot in our greenhouse today, 3/24/09

Usually I dig them up and pot ‘em and put them in the basement to winter over, but this year I put them near a South facing bedroom window and about a week ago started to see a bloom coming! Well I own a dog and wasn’t going to put up with that leg-lifting business again so I brought Mr Stinky to work. His bloom as of today has not completely formed and he’s growing 3 or 4 inches a day! Come visit him at our garden center at the corner of California and LaSalle – come soon, I’m sure the garden center helpers are going to make me take him away once the “odor” arrives! While you are here check out all the new spring items coming in, we have some wonderful hand blown glass hummingbird feeders and other giftware as well as tons of growing things coming in almost daily!  Here are a few pics for you!

Azaleas

Our new pottery line includes pots with saucers and matching birdbaths.

Red and Yellow Stemmed Dogwoods

Marigolds (buy one for each tomato plant!)

Yarrow Plants

For years I have searched for information on my VooDoo Plant but have never found foliage or flowers that look like mine – until today, check out Martha’s blog here for more info and photos – I wonder if she got her’s from a missionary!  It looks to me that we have the same variety.  I’m planning to put a photo up daily chronicalling Mr Stinky’s bloom so check back!

Martha Stewart Living’s Weddings website rates Walter Knoll Florist the highest of the Saint Louis area florists

 Click Here to Read Reviews.

Wow, is this cooking-outside weather or what? Stopped at my local Schnucks Market on my way home from work yesterday and picked up a couple of beautiful steaks. (Way more money than this “florist” should spend for Friday night dinner, but it was an anniversary day!) These puppies were just over an inch thick! I’m a rib-eye girl and Denny’s a t-bone man, so no sharing for us.

set them out to room temp up and dressed them with sea salt, freshly cracked pepper and olive oil. Really only had a couple potatoes to go with, but then spied that basket of onions and remembered how Denny loves carmelized onions – so I grabbed a huge one, I bet it weighed a pound, it was certainly bigger than a softball, anyway I sliced it and put it in my favorite Martha Stewart pan I got at K-Mart – added some salt and pepper and just a bit of sugar and began to cook them – here they are after about 10 minutes -

I then grabbed a handful of fresh thyme and bundled it up and added it to the onions and cooked them another 20 minutes or so

About this time I decided to try that Mad Housewife Cabernet Sauvignon that’s been sitting on the counter next to the olive oil all week – tempting me, tempting me

So I pour myself a glassful – and hmmm, I wonder if I couldn’t make a nice cab sauce from the frond of the onions along with that thyme bundle – so I took the onions out of the pan and tossed about ½ cup of the Mad Housewife Cab into the pan along with the thyme bundle and reduced it to about half and then added about ¼ cup of chicken stock I had left over in the fridge along with a pat of butter and voila, delicious! yummy stuff! Great on the meat, great on the potatoes and great on the onions!

My grill chef cooked the steaks to perfect medium rare

Oh yeah, of course I know a nice green vegetable would have been a healthy addition, but I did use a nice sized bundle of thyme in the onions and Mad Housewife cab sauce!

Speaking of green, when checking on my bakers (which I rubbed with bacon grease and pretzel salt from the bottom of an empty bag of sticks) I burned my arm – actually think I left some skin on the upper rack in the oven,

but I grabbed and split a handy stem of an aloe vera plant and the burn looks pretty good today and it’s not sore at all – that’s good because today’s a good day to make some steak soup with the leftovers – if I can keep my hard workin’ handsome grill chef out them that is! Happy Anniversary Sweetie!

Need an aloe vera plant?

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