My beautiful desert rose is back and even more glorious than last year! I saw these beautiful plants for sale at Market Days in Wimberley, Texas, about six or seven years ago (for $200 or more!). I passed them up but never stopped thinking about them. Then, about a year later, I happened to see one lonely desert rose at Lowe’s ($20) hiding among the indoor plants. I grabbed it without hesitation and took it home. It put out a few blooms each year, but it really began to flourish a couple of years ago when I put it outside and gave it more water. [Note: it does like more water than its name might suggest – but not too much.] I bring it in for the winter and prune it slightly. It doesn’t take long for it to show its color again after returning to the warm spring sunshine.

 

I haven’t had this kind of attachment to a plant since my mother’s beautiful hoya in the late 1960s – a beautiful wax plant with gorgeous and fragrant waxy blossoms. Every afternoon around four o’clock, it filled the room with its very sweet fragrance.