Overall not really a success story. I planted this garden center plant in the spring of 2023 in a pot on the very sunny and hot terrace. In the summer Egyptian locusts chomped on the leaves and the plant itself was rather underwhelming with the tips of its leaves constantly brown. Too much water? Not enough water? Impossible to know.
In October the middle of the plant got moldy from the rain. I pulled most of the dead stuff off and put the pot under the pergola roof. In November new growth sprouted from the bottom around the trunk and the whole thing looked pretty silly.
For most of 2024 the plant continued to look ugly and constantly had brown tips. In August all the inner leaves were dry and brown and I pulled them all out. in September the plant finally came into its own, took on a good shape, looked healthy and grew.
In the spring of 2025 the plant looked great. It grew two new trunks and then, in March, several stalks that flowered throughout May with wonderful white, jasmine-scented flowers. They stayed on the plant forever, albeit getting darker and losing their scent. I finally cut off the flower stalks in June to clean out the masses of spider webs among the leaves. In the summer the plant began to look tired and burned. I put it in the shade but it continued to dry up, despite watering, and in September it looked mostly dead. In November it grew a new green trunk in the middle of all the dry stuff, but was impossible to separate or clean up. I tried pulling off the new trunk and putting it in water to see if it would grow roots, but that didn’t work out. So the whole plant went on the compost.
On the whole this is not a plant I will try again. I also found out in the meantime that it actually prefers a milder oceanic climate, growing mostly in the Western Pacific region, New Zealand, Eastern Australia, Southern Asia, Polynesia and Hawaii.
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