Garden Guru: Spice up landscape with jatropha
Blooms, birds and butterflies are the attributes everyone experiences when growing the award-winning spicy jatropha. Spicy jatropha, also commonly known as peregrina and firecracker jatropha, is really a must have plant for the long hot season ahead. No amount of heat will deter it from producing non-stop blooms all summer until freezing weather arrives.
The spicy jatropha is known botanically as Jatropha integerrima and is native to the West Indies. Even though it is a tropical it has been showing up at garden centers much like tropical hibiscus or mandevilla. It is such a great plant it was declared a Texas Superstar Winner even though it is only cold hardy in zones 9 -11. At the Coastal Georgia Botanical Gardens ours gave us a spring return from the ground after a low of 22.
To me, the foliage has always been an additional selling point. The leaves for the most part are deep glossy green and fiddle-shaped. You can get a variance in leaf shapes, but regardless they serve as the perfect backdrop to the red or pink flowers depending on your choice in variety. In the tropics it is not uncommon to see them as small trees reaching 10 to 12 feet, but for most of us, we will enjoy them in the 3 to 5 foot range. They are not finicky about soil pH but do need very well drained conditions. We have planted more this year and are growing some as thriller plants in mixed containers.
Whether you grow them in the landscape or in containers on the porch, patio or pool-side, you will notice that all summer butterflies and hummingbirds make regular visits. The flowers are about 1-inch across and are borne in clusters that amazingly are always around. Should yours get fruit, know that these are poisonous if ingested. In all of the years I've grown them I have never seen fruit formed.
They are tough-as-nails and slow to wilt and make a quick recovery once water is applied. I've never seen any diseases or insect pressures which is pretty shocking since they perform for such a long season. In the landscape you will want to feed with light monthly applications of a slow-released balanced fertilizer containing micro-nutrients. Feed those in containers with a balanced controlled-released granular fertilizer as per formula recommendation or every other week with a dilute water-soluble 20-20-20.
Though jatrophas are still fairly new to garden centers in zones north of the tropics, the prices generally make them one of the best buys for your garden dollar since they bloom non-stop for 7 to 8 months in the Savannah area.
In the landscape, I love them with bananas, philodendrons and elephant ears, where their coarse textured foliage combines with the red flowers for a real taste of the tropics. In our mixed containers we are using them with rich pastel yellow lantanas, blue verbenas, white scaevolas and carmine colored celosia. As they have grown together the look is simply dazzling with the color.
We are growing one more jatropha that is absolutely sensational called coral plant. It is known botanically as Jatropha multifida and is deserving of a great marketable name and a spot as the cover photo of a fine catalogue or magazine. If you ever see it buy it too!
Most likely will be purchasing your spicy jatropha generically, which is absolutely fine. On the other hand, you just might be fortunate to find name selections like Ingram's Red or Petite Pink. Regardless, if you see the spicy jatropha for sale you will know you are getting an outstanding plant.
Norman Winter is the director of the Coastal Georgia Botanical Gardens at the Historic Bamboo Farm, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension. Follow him on Twitter
@CGBGgardenguru.
