Ever dreamt of growing a garden in a desert? Then get ready to bring home a desert rose (Adenium)!
SUMMER BLOOMS
Ever dreamt of growing a garden in a desert? Then get ready to bring home a desert rose (Adenium)!
Native to Sahel regions in Sahara, Adenium comes in a lot of varieties, but the variety that you can see in every nursery in the summertime is Adenium Obesum; they have flowers that look like tiny loudspeakers painted with the darkest shades of pink. In Urdu, we lovingly call them “loudspeaker wale gulabi phool”. Some varieties do look like roses but they are hard to find here. Since our summers are so hot, Pakistan becomes an ideal place for this succulent to grow. Don’t trust the pictures! In real, they look so gorgeous you would want to tuck one behind your ear like Moana.
So we visited a nursery in Karachi and talked to Ikram Khan, a professional gardener who tells us how to grow and take care of a desert rose.
There is sunlight everywhere, right? But do you have that spot in your house where sunrays hit with full force? Like somewhere on the roof or your window sill. Found one? Good, now reserve that spot for your desert rose. It needs at least six hours of unfiltered sunlight and a minimum temperature of 21 degrees Celsius to grow healthy flowers. So, here desert rose blooms in winters as well.
Desert rose is kind of a succulent which means it has an in-built water storage system in its stem. So watering it moderately like twice or thrice every week would work well. And when the plant is dormant (stops blooming) in the winter, watering it once a week would be more than enough.
Pot
For keeping soil well-drained, clay or terracotta material is what you need for a desert rose. Plastic, or china clay pots are just a big no!
A 6 – 12 inches pot is good for a new plant that has just started to bloom. You can repot in a bigger pot after two years. But you can stretch it to five years as well.
Flowering plants need a constant supply of nutrient rich soil to flourish, but the desert rose likes a desert treatment! You got to make a potting mix that’s very close to the desert soil – which is dry, gritty and loose. A gardener recommends this for making an ideal potting mix for Adenium: 60% construction sand (bajri), 20% cocopeat, 10% river sand, and 10% compost of any kind.
And now comes the great thing: you can go without changing the soil for as long as two years.
Pest control
It’s very hot in Karachi, very much like a desert situation, but since the humidity level is always high, desert rose is an easy target for mealybugs, scale and spider mites.
To get rid of pest, you must:
1- First, wear gardening gloves (necessary because the adenium sap is poisonous and can cause irritation)
2- Then, wipe off the stems with cotton balls soaked in alcohol. Let the leaves fall off, so that you can wipe off thoroughly.
And if you are going to keep the plant in a nice sunny spot, chances are little that any pest would attack the plant. With love and care, you can get the best out of a desert rose!
Never use pesticides in settings where people are in close contact with plants; either take plants to the nursery or isolate them to human-less zones if you spray them with chemicals.
Though seed propagation is easy, gardeners here prefer growing desert rose from cuttings. You can also do that if you want to expand your collection!
So this is how you do it: take a cutting from the tip of the branch and let that cutting sit for a two days so that the bruised edge shrinks and the cutting is closed slightly. Now like any other succulent cutting, plant the cutting into the soil. Water slightly to keep the soil around the cutting moist and let nature do its thing. In a month or two leaves would start to show up.
- Tooba Ghani
