Viewing post #800001 by vitrsna

Well super Lin...now we will have some photos for the database if we ever discover the identity It is a beautiful plant with those lovely year around flowers and rich deep green leaves. Where you live you will have Mexican Fritillary butterflies and they will have munched on all the spectacular leaves so if you don't like half eaten leaves you may have wanted to get rid of it anyway. Because i have a butterfly garden specifically for providing habitat for butterlies and moths (plus nectar for the bees and hummers), i am always happy to see munch marks in the leaves of my plants. I call the caterpillars "my little pruners"...they will starve before they will kill their food source (with a few moth exceptions). They eat economically and the plants are encouraged to regrow quickly. This is one reason why my plant did not become 5 feet tall and the other reason was because it was growing in a container. Butterfly gardens are by nature rag-tag and i don't expect many of the photos of them appear in the "beautiful garden magazines."

As for being invasive, i grew my plant in a large container on the stone patio. Which is one way i kept it from being invasive. The roots are not a problem but the plant does produce an awe-inspiring number of seeds. The seeds however are not the exploding kind and most of the seeds i either kept to share or easily swept up from the stone patio pavers. Here in the tropics, just about every plant is invasive so we don't make much of a fuss about it. The plants seem to get things sorted out amongst themselves.