Unkind words about sagos

In California, apparently you lock down a good specimen of sago / Cycas revoluta. In Houston, the issue has not come up--at least not for me, because I don’t design with them. I do get asked to pull out badly placed specimens where an eye-gouging mammoth has grown from a Boston fern-sized charmer.

Dare ya to walk through there.

The reason they don’t get filched is that we are near sago saturation here, with a dull stiff cycad in almost every yard and landscape. Besides looking ‘tropical’ (though they hail from Japan), I reckon sagos’ popularity is supported by their easy propagation, durability and fast growth, for a cycad. (They flush out yearly with an increasing number of fronds. Compare that to the mingy frond per year on a Dioon edule). With the ease of making more sagos, filching them should be irrelevant.

Recently a subcontractor who works with me was telling about a job he’d been hired to do: relocate a sago that had a cable running through the trunk and into a subterranean concrete footing. He tripled the price. We shook our heads at the wonder of it.

It would be too much to hope that California would come and take these sagos away.

What am I missing here? What is the crazy appeal of this plant? Do they actually get pirated away in Houston, too?

Corrections

Being wrong is just this quirky little thing I do sometimes.

To set the record straight, the annoying little trees that were next door are not Tree of Heaven/Ailanthus, but Golden Rain Tree/ Koelreuteria paniculata. I want to slander them in exactly the same way (a rose by any other name, huh?). Yes, they have gorgeous flowers but Golden Rain Tree is so invasive. Too many volunteers crowded together in a monoculture, or forcing their way between sidewalk and building, have led me to think they are not attractive or desirable.

And another thing: I thought the Cuban brown anoles and the local green anoles had different ecological niches but now that doesn't seem to be true. Young Cuban brown anoles are scuttling over everything! I hope that this little guy is not the last green anole left in the garden:

By the way, the surprise mystery bloom opened out into a bract of the Golden Spider Lily/ Lycoris aurea. I remember digging some bulbs where a bungalow in my neighborhood was demolished, and the Golden Spider Lily must have been one of them. What joy.

Ai Yi Ailanthus

Today’s post is the first in the series Plants Not To Plant. Ailanthus altissima, aka Tree of Heaven, is not the worst looking tree you could have spring up overnight. Its bloom season is eye candy, I’ll give it that. But those pink lantern shaped flowers give way to seeds and every one of those bastards germinates.

They sprout in your garden, where you eventually pull them all out. They sprout in your neighbor’s garden, where they never get pulled out, and in two years you are surrounded by an ailanthus forest breaking into bloom.

I have a theory that the exotic trees which reproduce so aggravatingly well have seeds that are not well liked by local wildlife.

Now you may ask who actually plants Ailanthus if it is on the way to covering the planet by itself. There is a line of thinking that where the urban environment is so degraded, only the kind of tree that survives there anyway should be planted. While I generally agree that any tree is better than no tree, we get an idea where this handbasket is going if Ailanthus is the one.

This photo tells why I pick on Ailanthus today. There they are to the upper right, on my neighbors' side of the fence. They were born this spring and already 5’ tall. I’m gearing up for the diplomatic version of ‘Hi yall, can I cut down your trees?’

Fortunately my neighbors are such lovely people. They even like my flamingo.