Venezuelan Garden Flora -

A selection from our garden.

I will start with these little nasties, I'll swear these spines sting, it certainly feels like it.

This plant is easy to grow and propagate but it does tend to spread.

This is colourful and is good for screening, but you might spend a lot of time raking up leaves.

Another colourful plant good for hedges because of the thorns but you might spend a lot of time scooping the primitive petals out of the pool.

This one adds colour but is not so easy to propagate since it simply spreads from the same root.

Adds a bit of blue and fairly easy to propagate as it spreads like strawberries.

Another bit of blue but the heads keep falling off.

Decorative and on the right perhaps the most exotic plant in the garden - a rose!

Decorative but needs a damp shady corner.

Decorative and exotic but can grow quite large.

This is easy to grow, and when it has grown to a clump, it can be separated and propagated.

This one I do know, Aloe Vera, it has a yellow flower, grows wild, is easy to propagate and is good for first-aid.

Some cactuses rescued from the wild and given a new home (Turks Cap, Melocactus intortus ?).

The small ones on the left were found growing under a tree in the garden, on the right another re-housed one.

These cactuses will grow from fallen segments that then take root. They are as hard as sticky tape to put down though as they have barbed spines.

Yes I know fungi aren't plants but this seemed the best place to put them.

This fruit grows on a climbing vine and turns yellow when ripe. I am told it is a kind of passion fruit called pachita. Scoop out the insides and liquidize with sugar and ice for a refreshing drink.

A weed that seems to be another member of the passion fruit family.

This fruit is more familiar, although I didn't think there was any on the tree until I found this underneath.

This tree normally grows near the sea, the fruit is mostly an air bladder so, when dropped in the sea it can float to a new beach.

Papaya fruit growing on tree.

One day I was watering the garden and heard a crash. One of the trunks of the Papaya tree had broken in half!

There were 21 Papaya on that trunk with one nearly ripe, they turn yellow/orange; Perhaps the weight was a bit much for the hollow trunk and we should have picked some earlier. The locals tend to pick them early, score the outsides with a knife and cut a small piece off the end which releases a milky fluid, supposedly allergenic, and ripen off indoors before using. If you try ripening off outdoors, you are likely to get birds pecking holes in them. When you eat them, the skin is not eaten, cut open and scoop out the inside yellowy stuff and eat the fleshy part. the black seeds are supposed to make a good substitute for peppercorns when dried. Green ones can be put through a blender and used to tenderize meat.

Don't know the names for most of these things yet, do you want English, Spanish or Latin? If you are in a garden center it is easier to simply select what you want or point.

I have tried to provide pictures adequate for identification and hope to provide more and better in the future. Please feel free to use the feedback page to ask questions or indeed to give me more information if you have it on anything here :o)