There is a particular tree growing here at GaiaYoga Gardens, Muntingia calabura, which has vernacular names of Jamaica cherry or strawberry tree, with delicious edible and nutritious fruit and medicinal leaves that I've used often in my medicinal tea blends. It's a beautiful, fast-growing tree in its own family, Muntingiaceae, that has been surprisingly and frustratingly challenging to propagate here.
In my four years living here, I've only been able to successfully propagate this tree two times, and both times via root suckers. While the tree does produce copious amounts of fruit, with many thousands of very tiny seeds in each fruit, and the seeds do sprout pretty easily, the seedlings are very tiny, and remain tiny for quite a long time before finally beginning to grow larger. Because of this, in this part of Hawai'i, with the frequent and intense rains and very fast-growing plants, no area of ground remains uncovered by vegetation for long, so the tiny seedlings just can't seem to live long enough to actually grow larger.
As I was cleaning out my old nursery here at GaiaYoga, that had not had care in more than five months during the time that I was not here, I was surprised and eleatated to find a more mature seedling of this tree growing in a pot of another plant. This is the first one like this that I've found, so this is super special!
The original plant in the pot had died, so this seedling was all that remained. I up-potted it a few weeks ago, and it's growing well. I'm so happy that I now have a new one of these amazing trees! 😁🙏💚✨
Oh well that's really awesome! I can feel your passion for this little plant and how amazing it grew in such an unexpected place! I have a ridiculous amount of elder weeding up everywhere - if only something would sow itself like this for me!
Yes, I was super excited and surprised to find it! Hehe...and there's probably someone somewhere who is praying that elder would pop up in other places for them! There are actually quite a few cool and interesting plants seeding themselves in the pots of various other plants across my nursery. I'm always doing my best to keep track of them so that I can take them and put them in their own pots! 😁🙏💚✨
Oh, I love this, @tydynrain ! I was writing in a recent blog post on Hive, about having found a few surprises this month, and one was a sage plant that I'd planted half a year ago, and then it was presumed missing in action at least two months back... It popped up amongst the grass as I was clearing it from between the borages and chards... What a joy! I adore sage, and have found it quite hard to grow here!
That puts such a big smile on my face @clareartista! I've had numerous similar experiences of planting something, losing it among other plants, presuming it dead, then having it reappear, as if by magic, quite a bit later! That's such a wonderful surprise and experience! 😁🙏💚✨