Arnold Zwicky's Blog

This:

A plant masquerading as a gaudy glass Christmas ornament, or vice versa. Abutilon ‘Tiger Eye’, now blooming showily at the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, along with some other less spectacular flowering maples. It’s their season.

This one is a tender shrub, 6-10 ft tall, that flourishes in our Mediterranean climate. Called flowering maple because of its palmate leaves, which somewhat resemble maple leaves, but it’s not at all related to maple trees (genus Acer, related to horse chestnuts and buckeyes and some tropical fruit trees (lychee / litchi and rambutan, in particular).

As detailed in my 3/27/13 posting “Abutilon and its relatives”, abutilons are instead related to mallows and to the shrubs rose of sharon and hibiscus (and in fact to okra, cotton, cacao, and durian plants).

This entry was posted on November 21, 2017 at 9:36 am and is filed under Holidays, Language and plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.