Tag: Leu Gardens

Leaf of the Day: Gumbo Limbo and Peeling Tourists

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The leaves of the curiously named “gumbo limbo” tree have evaded my grasp so far as it is high tree, holding its leaves far above my reach, but of course, Fay has done me another favour by depositing a small branch on the ground. The small and pretty leaflets are not particularly special but do have a interesting lopsided profile.
The gumbo limbo Bursera simaruba has many names, its common name in Florida, is derived from the Spanish “goma-elemi” meaning “gum resin.” I must admit I was hoping for something more exotic possibly a traditional dance or something of the kind. However its pet name in all its tropical homes is the “tourist tree”. When you see the red flaking shiny bark you know why, a week of scorching southern sun on northern skin, lightly greased with Ambre Solaire..

It’s a really nice and useful tree tree and will have red fruits in the autumn and winter, which are an important and very nutritious food for migrating and local birds ( Well, they will be somewhere up there in the heavens way above my head, so I will probably never see them)
It is also known as the turpentine tree as it produces a turpentine like resin used in the West Indies to make glue, varnish, insect repellent and a kind of incense. The aromatic sap is used as a treatment for gout, while the leaves are brewed into a medicinal tea as relief for back pain.
The Tainos people of the Eastern Caribbean would burn the fragrant turpentine both as insect repellent and possibly for ceremonial purposes and they used the resin to varnish the exteriors of their large dugout canoes, to protects against marine boring molluscs.
The gumbo limbo was also discovered to make extremely practical, and attractive, living fences which I had seen in central America. It is a very useful attribute of quite a few trees to be able to regenerate quickly from a cut branch. In regions where otherwise there would be problems with rotting or termite eaten fenceposts, you can, quite literally, stick a branch in the ground and watch it grow. At first it seemsquite odd to see leaves and branches sprouting out of wooden fence posts, but what a great way to fence your ranch, nice for the birds as well.
I didn’t take a photo in Costa Rica where we saw them up near the volcano at La Fortuna but here is the gumbo limbo as fence, in Costa Rica from Ecolibrary here .

I read somewhere that, however hot the weather gets, the trunk of the tree is always cool. I haven’t tried hugging this one yet but I will.

It is one of the Old World ‘Torchwood’ trees from the family Burseraceae so called because of the inflammable nature of their wood, which are rich in resins. Interestingly, included in this group are the exotic and evocative frankincense, Boswellia sacra and myrrh, Commiphora myrrha which was once worth its weight in gold. They are still valuable, and frankincense trees are becoming endangered due to overtapping.(We don’t learn do we?)

The leaves are compound, with leaflets usually in 3’s to 11’s. Mine is a 7 leaflet leaf, one a little deformed. I drew one right hand leaflet to show how the shape of each leaf has a bias, according to its position on the stem. This means that they hang very prettily, slightly overlapping. Another tree I have in my imaginary garden.
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Gumbo Limbo Leaf and Leaflet

Leaf of the Day: Pummelo, Pumelo, Pomelo.. whatever

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When I was writing about the Contorted Orange the other day (here) I felt sure that Leu would have a Pummelo. They would just have to have a specimen of this very early citrus, and sure enough there it was, with many other varieties in the citrus garden and another “windfall” for me yesterday as one large fruit had fallen on the ground. It is huge. I have a picture of the fruit on the tree but also this one on a plate with a regular sized lemon and a pencil so you can see how absoutely enormous it is.

This one is the well named Goliath Pummelo, Citrus maxima, and to recap a little, it is one of the first 4 citrus fruits from which the modern varieties are descended. It is thought that the basic orange we all know and love, is a cross between this monster and a mandarin. Little and large makes medium I guess. It was considered more a curiosity than a good eating fruit and something of a talking point for tropical fruit displays. A tricky addition to Carmen Miranda’s topknots though!

Additionally, Wiki tells me that “The pomelo is also known as a shaddock, after an English sea captain, Captain Shaddock, who introduced the seed to the West Indies in the 17th century from the Malay Archipelago.”
I will, annoyingly, now remember this little bit of trivia, as I can’t get Tintin’s Captain Haddock out of my head.

But the leaves, the leaves are a nice surprise, not quite as simple as a normal citrus these have a winged part to the lower, a winged petiole to be exact.
A very worthy leaf of the day.

I had also forgotten that there was a pummelo in the “Amazing Rare Things” exhibition (see my other posts here), how could I ! Also a Buddha’s hand citrus which I wrote about before here.

Both are attributed to Vincenzo Leonardi 1621-c.1646 who was producing drawings for the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo and provided illustrations for Giovanni Battist Ferrari’s “Hesperides” of 1646, a treatise on citrus cultivation. It is fascinating and the digitised version of the book is online here


You can see the slightly winged shape at the base of the leaf here but it is much more pronounced in my leaf from Leu.

The Pumello.


Pummelo, whole fruit and half …c1640

And Vincenzo’s drawing of the Buddhas Hand citron, known here as the “digitated lemon”.


Digitated Lemon …c 1640

There is something about these wonderful old images which some modern works lack..I feel we sometimes go for perfection rather than character, something I will try to keep in mind.

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Pummelo Leaf

Leaf of the Day: The Goldfinger Tree and Sun

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This morning the sun was shining. The windows were thrown open and warm breezes flowed through the house, lifting the sense of damp and everybody’s spirits too. Delighted, I cycled down to Leu where, instead of the normal Sunday morning solitude, the gardens were full of people, all so pleased to be outside in the sunshine again.

On the way I was able to see what Fay had done to the parks and gardens, with leafy debris littering the streets and the occasional fallen tree. My cycle route takes me round Lake Sue where the decks of the jetties, which usually stand high out of the water, are marooned, their wooden walkways to the land invisible under inches of water. In both Mead Gardens and Leu Gardens low lying areas are flooded making wonderful fleeting watery worlds which I used to love when I was a child. There was something magical about paddling through the waving underwater grass in those temporary lakes and at Leu a beautiful big Red Shouldered hawk was standing by the edge of one of these newly formed ponds, seemingly admiring itself in the waters.
I did take a photo but only from a distance, just enough to identify it, so here is a perfect image from Audubon… complete with Spanish moss which Fay has draped all over Orlando.

There was not too much damage at the gardens, one or two trees had lost branches and of course, for me, there were plenty of fallen things to find, one was the curiously beautiful flower of the Gold Finger tree Juamulloa mexicana.

This unusual plant which originates from Central America can be either a shrub or climber. It was described by one site as a hemi-epipyte which is a plant which spends some of its time as an epipyte growing on a host, before sending roots down to the ground, so it can grow quite happily on a tree or in the garden. These waxy orange yellow flowers form at the ends of the branches and it is apparently a member of the potato family. This tree at Leu is growing in the ground but leaning on a large palm for support.
The flower is in two parts with an orangy bract with a red flower.
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Juamulloa Mexicana

Leaf of the Day: Chris’ Carambola

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It is still raining.. raining, raining, raining.. if there is just one tiny gap in the clouds I will be out for some air but the sky is grey and the forecast gloomy.
However all this rain has meant I don’t have to water the few plants on our tiny balcony but throughout the stormy weather Chris has been worrying about his tree.
Chris does not really have green fingers nor does he share my passion for plants but, inexplicably, came back one day with a tree in a pot. Possibly he is working on the “if you can’t beat them join them” theory.
“Ay caramba.. another plant to look after!” I exclaimed.
I was nearly right as it is the delightful Carambola, the star fruit, Averrhoa carambola. Chris need not have worried too much about his tree, as it is sheltered in its VIP position on the top step crowding out all other possible life forms and edging towards the front door.
Currently it is still upright and has had a good watering. It is already 4ft high and well on its way to attaining the 20ft to 30ft of its adult stature.

There is a Carambola at Leu, but it is slightly obscured by a pedestal adorned with pots. I have glanced at it in passing and vaguely wondered when it was going to produce anything, only to find, when I went to look properly last week, that it is absolutely laden with these pretty waxy fruits. They are difficult to see as they are very well camouflaged, being an unripe green and hidden amongst the fluttering leaves. It really is a nice tree and at the moment it has tiny pretty pink flowers too.

As a fruit it is quite nice and refreshing and is, without a doubt, very attractive. When I first started this blog I used to get quite excited about the” medicinal uses” sections in plant descriptions. But the more you read, the more you realise that, unless they are horribly poisonous, most plants seem to have been used by some culture somewhere in the world to alleviate most aliments. Sometimes there are very conflicting claims and many have irresponsible claims to “cure ” diseases . So now I read with interest but don’t generally comment unless there is some historic importance or a curious fact.
The claims for the carambola are typically legion, but I was interested to learn that the more acidic varieties can be used for cleaning brass due to the oxalic acid in the juice. An acid by the way, that also contra indicates with heart medicine. (Which means that Chris’ plant could kill him, what gratitude?)

Our pretty and delicate carambola has neither flowers nor fruit, but after a slightly rocky start is looking cheerful. It has an endearing habit of folding its leaves at night, at first a cause of concern to its fond owner, but after anxious research was discovered to be a perfectly natural reaction to a lack of light. The drawing below is a fruit from Leu, with a leaf from Chris’ plant. He ‘ll never know…Ay Carambola!

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Star Fruit.

Leaf of the Day: Mother and Daughter Croton

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I have spent most of the day working on my other blog which I may post tomorrow, but as a bit of light relief today I just had to draw these wonderfully strange leaves.
I stumbled upon them down in the jungly bits of Leu. They are from the bizarre Mother and Daughter Croton, I think the variety is Codiaeum Appendiculatum. You can see why it has this name, with the nodding small leaf sprouting from the top of the bigger leaf joined by the slender stalk. Where they join, is a slight funnel shape which is quite beautiful. You really need to hold one in your hand to appreciate it. The one I have painted is an almost black-green with deep red on the underside of the leaves, the young leaves are bright green. I am so taken with these I will probably draw them again.
It was only because I was looking at something else that I noticed this croton whose leaves, like so many other crotons and fancy leaved plants, really need to be seen in isolation and away from the muddle of the whole plant. I initially didn’t like crotons much but I am coming to admire them more and more. Their sheer variety is stunning. The previous posts re: crotons are here

The croton is so named because the seed looks like a tick and there have been a few insecty things around this week. One is the discovery of a new sort of aphid which was bought, preserved in amber, on Ebay for 20 pounds.

Another is a short piece on BBC Radio 4′ Great Lives about the extraordinarily talented Robert Hooke, whose Micrographia I have mentioned before here.
The introduction has David Attenborough reading Hooke’s description of a flea.
” the flea is adorned with a curiously polished suite of sable armor, neatly jointed.”
What a marvellous description. I think nowadays we have lost much of beauty of descriptive language just for the sake of brevity. It’s a shame.


Robert Hooke’s engraving of the Flea from Micrographia, from Stanford University here

You can listen via the BBC website here if you are interested. “Micrographia” was so important as it was the first book devoted entirely to the new science of microscopic observation, illustrated with Hooke’s own beautifully executed engravings. Can you imagine the impact of such a work in 1665?

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Mother and Daughter Croton

Leaf of the Day: Fountain Clerodendron and Dwarf Poinciana

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It’s Thursday morning and I am having a break from the flower heads. I cycled into Winter Park village to look for any other flowers that might inspire me and got caught in the rain on the way back but I did get my glasses mended.
When I eventually started work it was the beautiful Clerodendron minahassae, the Fountain clerodendron. I had to spend quite some time trying to identify this tree as the label had gone missing at Leu. It is really pretty. These long tubular white blossoms spray out from the branches and the leaves are elegant and a lovely shape.

It seems there will be some interesting berries to come too, judging by what I have read. It was delightful to paint but white on white is hard in watercolour. I think they need to be set against the green leaves to show off their true beauty but the central curling red stamens are gorgeous.
The clerodenrons are a huge family with many pretty flowers and now I have seen a couple more shrubs at Leu.

Number 2 today was the Dwarf Ponciana floret which I had sketched last week. Again I had to get another flower head but luckily they are all quite similar, so I could work from the sketch too. The colours look dull here but are brighter in the original. (I am not sure that the computer does very well with yellow.) I am noticing more and more flowers with red stamens here. I wonder why.

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Fountain Clerodendron and Dwarf Poinciana



Leaf of the Day: Blue Pea, Yellow Parrot Plant and Ginger

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Wednesday. I am painting the Blue Butterfly Pea vine Clitoria ternatea ( you can blame Linnaeus for the unduly explicit name!) and the Parrot’s Beak Vine and I also added some tiny Blue Ginger florets to the page, as the vibrant blue of the pea vine needed some balancing up.

The Pea Vine is the deepest velvet blue with purple tints. I used ultramarine and dioxazine violet. The colours look rather raw on the scan and I have no time to adjust them. It looks too blue here, and the original has a darker purple at the edges not black.

The Parrot’s Beak caused me endless problems in identification and I am actually updating this post on Sunday, as, having painted the wretched thing, I could not find any information about it anywhere. All I came up with for “parrot’s beak vine” was nothing like this flower. In the end I have had to cycle down to Leu this morning just to find the ticket again. It is the parrot vine but this one is Gmelina phillipensis Parrot’s Beak not Lotus maculatus Parrot’s beak which is quite different. It was a nuisance but turned out to be a worthwhile visit as I have found more very interesting things..including a rare turquoise flower.. quite amazing.

The little Blue Ginger florets are from the central spike of flowers of the Dichorisandra thyrsiflora. This is actually the spiderwort family not a true ginger at all but the plant has a ginger-like habit.

Its particular form of flower spike is termed a thyrse and as long as the growing conditions are favourable the thyrse will continue developing, adding flowers to the top. It appears that this is another flower which, despite not offering nectar, relies on bees for pollination. The flowers produce a food pollen for the bees which they seek by shaking the flowers. This disturbs the pollen and the bees receive both food and a dusting of real pollen. This is picturesquely called “buzz pollination”, more about that soon.

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Blue Butterfly Pea Vine, Parrot’s Beak and Blue Ginger florets

Leaf of the Day: Three Reluctant Flowerheads

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I have been to the gardens today to look for more inspiration for flowers but got very sidetracked by some extremely interesting oranges, loofahs, more Jatrophas, spice trees, the rare Juanulloa mexicana, the Agaves and some great Ladies fingers pods. This did not help at all with today’s mission to find some flowers to paint for the course. Also, having mentally earmarked some, when I go to collect a specimen I find that the Glory Lillies are no more, the Aristolochias are decimated again by caterpillars, the Coral Tree flowers are now very much past their best and even the Black Eyed Susan is flowerless. Flower wise it had been a bad day, not helped by getting soaked to the skin in my way home in the big storm that swept through Orlando at lunchtime. Also a hopeful model died on the way home even in a cool box.
But I have three possibles and made preliminary sketches but I have to say I am not much inspired.

The first and the most interesting is one of the gorgeous heliconias..the smallest I can find ..the heliconia episcopalis. It has a bright red orange inflorescence with the remnants of spent flowers peeping out of the sides.
The second is the dainty little flower of the Dwarf Poinciana otherwise known as the Pride of Barbados because it is the national flower of Barbados. Alternatively it is called the fence flower because it grows into a small bushy tree with thorns, so good for effective and pretty fencing! This one is a bright red and yellow variety with an interesting flower structure and long red whiskers. Its Latin name Caesalpinia pulcherrima gives rise to more interesting information as it honours the Italian 16th Century physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. He made many important observations about plants and the body but from a botanic point of view it is the two publications, De plantis libri XVI (1583) and his Herbarium 1550-60, one of the oldest herbaria still in existence, for which he is held in high esteem. The first, a herbal was a collection of acute and insightful observations about plants, their structures and their classification. His system of classification was deemed to be the most important until that of Lineus who honoured him thus, Quisquis hic exstiterit primos concedat honores, Casalpine Tibi primaque certa dabit.

Which I think, very roughly translated, means that the honours should go to Casalpine as he was the first. ( apologies to any Latin scholars, you might like to put me right?)
His second ‘book’ is a herbarium ( a collection of dried specimens)containing 760 plants and now held in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze in Florence. Sadly there is not much visual information on the Internet that is obvious from a quick search, but here is an image from the museum website.

In desperation for something else to paint I have also turned reluctantly to the anthuriums. I don’t really like them. I don’t know why and there is not much to say about them except that they do have some great leaves..now if it was the leaves I was drawing it would be a different matter, but the flowers? …well maybe I am missing something.

One of the problems with this assignment is size.. I would love to have taken home one of the huge magnolias or the strelitzias or a stunning double ‘angel’s trumpet’ flower, (at least I could have given myself over to its narcotic scent which might have helped the creative process along a bit) but I am limited to getting 7 flowers onto one A3 sheet…sigh..
Anyway here are 3 preliminary sketches of these flower heads.

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Heliconia Episcopalis Dwarf Poinciana, Anthurium,

Leaf of the Day: The Gout Plant, Biofuel and more.

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I like everything about this plant. It’s quirky and striking and it’s the one with the ballistic pods which exploded in the studio a couple of days ago. One pod is still left so I have drawn that (quickly) and the remains of the shattered pod and a seed.
It has some wonderful names, Gout stick, Buddha belly, Guatemala rhubarb, Goutystalk nettlespurge, and Tartogo, as well as this splendid Latin name Jatropha podagrica. If this were my name I would, without a doubt, be a famous and sought after artist already. I may adopt it.
The Jatrophas, and there are qute a few of them, are from the Euphorbia family and native to central America. The name “Jatropha” is from the Greek iatrós meaning ‘doctor’, and trophé meaning ‘food’, referring to its nutritious qualities (although this one is poisonous!) and “podagrica“ means ‘swollen foot’ ( gouty )

When you see this odd little plant you realise why it has the name Buddha belly, from its bulbous thickened lower stem which gives it a belly (to rub for good luck of course). Another Buddha plant for this month.
This photo from Toptropicals site here shows very well its bottle shaped stem and also the two hopefully waving raised arms that are another characteristic, (this one seems to be wearing small sunglasses too). Toptropicals is an very good site and I have referred to it quite often now. It has excellent information about plants and good photos too.

My photo below from Leu shows its nicely shaped leaves and brilliantly coloured flowers…and again, the two waving arms.

Its relative Jatropha curcas, the Physic nut, or Barbados nut has recently been discovered to produce excellent oil which could be a replacement for diesel. The seeds contain 30% oil that can be processed to produce this high-quality biodiesel fuel, usable in a standard diesel engine. Last year an article in the Times was optimistic ,

“The jatropha bush seems an unlikely prize in the hunt for alternative energy, being an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed. Hitherto, its use to humanity has principally been as a remedy for constipation. Very soon, however, it may be powering your car.
Almost overnight, the unloved Jatropha curcas has become an agricultural and economic celebrity, with the discovery that it may be the ideal biofuel crop, an alternative to fossil fuels for a world dangerously dependent on oil supplies and deeply alarmed by the effects of global warming. “

If you Google ‘Jatropha’ now you will find many trials and projects from all over the world growing and testing this crop.
The plant was already well know in some countries as a malaria treatment, live fencing and for candle-making and, despite its potentially fatal properties (three untreated seeds can kill a person) as an ingredient in medicinal remedies around the world, hence the name “physic nut”. There doesn’t seem to be any down side to this plant as it grows almost anywhere, really quite liking arid and harsh conditions so we watch with interest its progress.

But getting back to the Gout plant, here is a closeup of the flower head where you can see the green pods developing. It would be wonderful to draw the whole thing but I should have to, either get my own plant, or use a photo as there are only a few flowers on each plant, and I would need more than a couple of hours.

My drawing shows the one pod that remained after the first one exploded. It broke away from its central stalk which is on the left. What first drew my attention to these pods was an empty seed capsule that was sitting on one of the leaves. It looked just like a beetle. The pod divides into 3 capsules, each holding a hard, pretty little seed and the seeds look like beetles too. Fascinating.

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Gout Plant Pod and Seeds

Leaf of the Day: The Joy of White Champaca.

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Today I had to eat that last fragrant little guava, it has scented the whole house over the weekend, but I have replaced it with the superb White Champaca blossom. It has been in a container in the fridge for 3 days but as I brought it out , the whole room was filled with the most exquisite perfume. It is quite unbelievable and, it is not only sweet smelling, but beautiful too, the kind of flower I like, simple with slender creamy white petals, most elegant. You just have to keep going back to it for one more noseful of delight. If you live near one, beg a blossom or if your garden is big enough, grow one for yourself. If I had a garden it would be my number one tree. For an artist it is a delight, everything about it is worth painting, from leaves and flowers to the twisted pods with the red seeds and the tree itself.
The White Champaca is the Magnolia (once termed Michelia) alba. It is a tall, evergreen tree with these spidery creamy white flowers and the delicious sweet fragrance which starts early in the morning becoming more intense in the afternoon and filling the air at night. It is Shanghai’s floral emblem and in Thailand the blossoms are hung about the temple altars and floated in bowls of water to perfume the air.