Mexican garden question
Jane Sargent (Sat, 13 Jul 2019 09:31:56 PDT)

While my home garden is in Zone 5b/6a (depending on whether the glass is
half full...) I also have a garden in the south of Mexico, which I have
neglected this past year. I am working on fixing it up now. I have a
Zephyranthes question.

My commonest kind of Zephyranthes, a lovely generic white one about
10'' tall, has lived in a raised bed in the sun for  maybe a decade. It
seems happy there. Now a bunch of them have popped up in the lawn,
scattered up to 20ft away, not just directly under the raised bed. They
are in full sun. We had a few unnaturally dry months, but now we get our
usual thunderstorms and amazingly violent short rains, and the
Zephyranthes are flowering. They are so cute that we mow around them
(perhaps ought to move them for convenience.) My question is how they
got out onto the lawn. How do they disperse their seeds? And could they
have been doing this all along, while I was keeping the grass really
short? It got out of hand a bit this year when I was not present, but
now the grass looks respectable again.

Amazing things happen to a neglected garden here. We had a mature
coconut palm fall over in a storm. One of my neighbors collected a bunch
of the coconuts and planted them all over my lawn, and of course they
grew. Our recent weeding has included pulling out young coconut palms.
We have sprouts of a number of other kinds of palms, as always happens,
and the canna seeded into the edge of the lawn. Vines are attacking. The
Megaspekasma erythrochlamis is now 10 ft tall and needs to be
disciplined with a machete. I do love that plant. It makes enormous
flowers and asks for nothing. The heliconias all need to be whacked back
by about 2/3. Bougainvillea needs to be shown who is boss. A banana tree
has mysteriously appeared in one corner. We are well on the way back to
having the jungle this used to be.

But I wonder how the Zephyranthes sneaked out onto the lawn. The
neighbor is a possible but unlikely explanation, because the flowers
have been blooming only very recently and wouldn't have drawn much
attention before.

Jane Sargent

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