Thursday, December 6, 2007

MORE seeds!

My friend Jean Anne brought 2 big sacks of seeds to a meeting last week. For me. Mine, all mine.

BEAUTIFUL, smoooooth, seeds, not quite 2' in diameter. Big seeds, and did I say how pretty they are.

These are kind of a light, reddish brown color. They darken as they dry. Just gorgeous.

They are seeds of the Buckeye, a native here.

"Red Buckeye
This is another native buckeye that prefers the shade and moistness under larger trees. Its rich carmine flowers are a spring highlight. Red Buckeye has a rounded habit of growth and will grow 15 to 20 feet high and wide. One disadvantage of this tree is that it may lose its foliage early (August to September), especially during dry summers."

It is usually more shrubby here. This is the info on the native that grows all over in the Hill Country of Texas, and ours is very similar. Ours does have RED flowers though.





"Mexican Buckeye Sapindaceace Ungnadia speciosa
Pink flowers appear on bare branches just after the redbuds bloom in early spring. The tree is multi-trunk if grown in full sun, but more open if grown as an understory tree. The leaves are long and slender and turn yellow before dropping in the fall. The seed pod hangs on in the winter even if the seed fall out. It makes an interesting sculptured look in the winter. It is drought tolerant when established. "

The Mexican Buckeye that grows here blooms RED, but has the habit of what grows around Wimberly.

Anyway, I like it. The main drawback is that it grows slow, but sometimes you need something that will grow slow.

They germinate very easily.

I did share some of them, and I still have many more than I will ever be able to use. I would share.

3 comments:

Jean Campbell said...

The buckeye that is native here is aesculus pavia , Red Bottlebrush. I've seen it growing, it's very pretty.

Jean Campbell said...

Here's the last word in Georgia native buckeyes, nice blog site.

Buckeyes

janie said...

Wow! That is very pretty. I have never seen a white one. Nor one that had the bottlebrush type flowers.