John and Jacq's Garden

I'd like to welcome you to visit my other new Garden Blog where I hope to maintain an online database of our tropical garden plants!

See you there at http://jaycjayc.com

My Chrysothemis pulchella Blooms

Chrysothemis Pulchella
Originally uploaded by jayjayc.

Such a fascinating plant! The beautiful colours of its leaves and flowers perfectly match each other :-)
As you can see, this tropical perennial commonly known as Copper Leaf has large dark green with coppery-tinted leaves. It's leathery textured foliage are held in usually upright and thick succulent stems with very showy orange-red bracts which are long lasting and cupping lovely sunshine yellow flowers. It is very ornamental when clustered in any container! It doesn’t like strong sunshine but loves to be in semi-shade with filtered sun. It needs to be watered regularly, but doesn’t like to be too wet or it’ll die from root rot!

The plant forms tubers at the base of the stem and sometimes also in the leaf axils. You can propagate by dividing the tubers or from stem-cuttings. They are not difficult to grow and do well under most indoor growing conditions. It makes an excellent plant for interior tropical landscapes! Try growing it and you'll be thrilled to have this new addition in your garden :D

Hard Disk Crashed!!

Yea, my hard disk went kaput last month!

This jolted me because it’s still considered new having purchased it less than 2½ months ago. Stunned into silence, inaction and then in tears when I realized that whatever stored in it other than those saved in disc or diskette has gone forever! Irretrievable!

Aaargh...especially my garden plants’ directory which I’ve laboriously prepared with each plant’s image (nearly 200 of them which were copied from my garden photos, cropped and downsized for insertion into file), botanical/common names and brief info (googled endlessly from garden websites). Now, I’ve to start all over again...."sob". Even all my IE favourites were lost with this hard-disk fiasco! Aaargh...got to collect them all over again! :(

Rubbing salt into wound, I was without pc for almost three weeks and days seemed to drag boringly slow without contact to the vibrant cyberworld, so to speak! Fortunately, I’m passionate about gardening and ‘drown’ myself in my lovely little paradise. Did lots of weeding, pruning, propagating, transplanting of rootbound potted plants, added some new plants/flowers from nearby nurseries, etc. etc.

An invaluable lesson learnt here...nothing last...so don’t procrastinate, save and back-up! back-up! back-up! As an alternative to adding website addresses to the IE Favorites, my knowledgeable son recently suggested bookmarking them at the Google Toolbar which will be saved online instead of on my hard-disk.

Anyway, as a result from this mishap I’m richer by a new hard disk, compensated with twice the capacity of my previous one (it’s now 160GB). Hooray for that!!

Now, I’ve more than enough space to rip in all the favorite songs of the oldies from our music CDs, delighting my darling hubby so much! Now, both of us can enjoy simultaneously when the pc is powered on! Such wonderful blessings from The Almighty! And I’m most grateful and thankful!