Syngonium can be a plague I tell you. Of course there are different forms, I have 3 others in the greenhouse that I really like and they have not tried to become the huge little shop of horrors this particular one has....I have the pink and green splashed one I think its called Confetti, and the green and white albovariegated one which is actually kind of rare. I also have the big leaf climbing one that kind of resembles the juvenile form of Anthurium clavigerum going up in the plumerias and it has not tried to take over.
Areca vestiaria is a very interesting palm. There are several different color forms. I have the yellow. But there is an orange, a maroon, a 'purple', and a red as well. They are the poor man's (or poor woman's LOL) Red Sealing Wax palm. The most interesting thing about them is that they grow at both higher and lower elevations in the wild, and the ones that grow at higher elevations exhibit more vivd color than the ones at lower elevation. And, if you collect seed from one color, say maroon, you cannot be 100% certain you will get ANY maroon seedlings. You have to plant all the seeds and select out for the color you want...its like a roulette wheel you can get any and every color.
I understand your fear of the snakes, even though I don't share it. They just don't scare me, probably because when I was 5 years old I was bitten by a western diamondback when we lived in West Texas, before we moved South. It wasn't a full envenomation, and the snake was only about 18" long, but it was enough that I was in the hospital for 3 weeks. I never kill the venomous snakes that we find here. We just skirt them and let them go away, or we get someone to remove the really big rattlers.
My big problem now is what to do with all this Syngonium. If I dump it on my magic compost pile just inside the edge of the woods by the greenhouse, it will all root and become naturalized there and I really don;t want that. I guess I can try to throw it on the bonfire next weekend.
