Using Catalogues to identify plants

Well, I never!  I opened up one of the latest gardening catalogues to discover that my beehive gingers were displayed in all their glory but with different names to what I had been calling them - ooops! sorry!
The one I was calling the shampoo ginger is in fact called Zingiber cocoa delight (Zingiber otensii)

 and the one I called beehive is actually Zingiber yellow (Zingiber spectabile). 

Closer,

and a  deep look into the pockets


 They dont show the infloresence of what they call shampoo ginger, but it has a variegated leaf.  I think zingiber is just the latin name for ginger...
There is another plant that I bought at the market, that totally dissapears during the winter.  (I thought I had lost it!) It surfaces every wet season and I now discover that it is called Peacock ginger (Kaempferia pulchra)
It was a bit drier this weekend and I was able to be outside without being attacked by too many mozzies.  They seem to get very agressive just before a big storm or so the locals have told me.  Certainly was true this time.   We had a walk through the botanical garden in Cairns on saturday and there were lots of mozzies there!  Check out the post on my other blog http://www.explorthetropics.blogspot.com/ for those photos.

Comments

  1. BernieHMon Feb 08, 04:35:00 PM

    It's a mistake easily made especially when there's mislabelling by the nursery selling it to you ... that's happened to me a few times now. So if they can't always get it right ... then I think it's perfectly OK for us mere gardening mortals to get it wrong as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. africanaussieWed Feb 10, 07:37:00 AM

    well said Bernie! In fact I dont stress too much about the names, it really boils down to how pretty they look in my garden that matters :)

    ReplyDelete

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