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Cavendishia in Adelaide and other parts Australia
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Posted by goted z8-9 Van, CAN (My Page) on Fri, Mar 12, 04 at 0:47
| Hi,
I am growing some Cavendishia from seed.
I noticed the Adelaide Botanic Garden will sell some Cavendishia acuminata.
Checking the weather data for Adelaide, I noticed some stations had lows near -3 to -4 C.
My question is, have many people had experience growing Cavendishia in Australia? Is the -3 C very very unusual for Adelaide?
I am curious to hear people's stories about growing Cavendishia.
I live in Vancouver Canada. Some winters are quite mild. However recently we had -11 C. Even so, I would probably keep Cavendishia as a container plant since it sounds so interesting.
Thanks for any discussion. Ted.
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Follow-Up Postings:
RE: Cavendishia in Adelaide and other parts Australia
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| It has been around in Sydney as a very uncommon garden plant since I was young (40+ years back). But I think our relatively humid east-coast climate should suit it better than Adelaide's dry Mediterranean climate. I suspect they grow it there in the microclimate of a conservatory or shadehouse. Sydney central has a minimum temperature of about plus 2, but it rapidly reduces to about minus 4 as you go to its western fringes. At present I know of an extremely luxuriant plant of C. acuminata at the Mt Tomah Botanic Gardens, at 900 m altitude in the Blue Mountains. It's a fairly misty climate there and it gets down to about minus 4 some winters, but the plant is in a sheltered microclimate almost beneath a building, virtually frost-free. If you check it out in the botanical database w3TROPICOS you will find that C. acuminata and dozens of other Cavendishia names are now treated as synonyms of C. bracteata. This is interepreted as a very wide-ranging and variable species, and a very large number of wild collections are cited. They range from about 200 m altitude in Panama (which is very tropical) to 3400 m in Bolivia, which I'm sure must get extremely cold at times. |
RE: Cavendishia in Adelaide and other parts Australia
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- Posted by goted z8-9 Van, CAN (My Page) on
Wed, Mar 17, 04 at 1:57
| Hi Tony, Thank you very much for your very informative answer.
It really depends at which altitude the seed was collected then as to what temp extreme it can take, I guess.
Humidity is certainly something I can provide. |
RE: Cavendishia in Adelaide and other parts Australia
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| I should think that when it comes to temperature range, rainfall and humidity, your climate in Vancouver is not too different from some of the misty highlands of Central America and northern Andean South America, where Cavendishia and its many ericaceous relatives abound. But a major difference would be in day length. In the tropics it's close to 12 hours light, 12 hours dark, all the year. At your quite high latitude, day length varies enormously between summer and winter. From my sketchy knowledge of plant physiology, this is likely to affect flowering behaviour of many plants. In Sydney it's somewhere in between. We get about 15-16 hours of daylight at the summer solstice. |
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