Branching out into oddities

LITTLE ROCK — A flower-shop customer wonders about people's fascination with strange greenery in The Little Shop of Horrors, the old movie (1960) turned perennial stage musical.

"I remember in one flower shop there was a whole wall covered with poison ivy," he says. "And people came from miles around to look at that wall, and they stayed to buy."

The line was a joke. But today's buyer can take home a rash of weird and exotic plants, from bug-eaters to banana trees. Some even grow outdoors.

Banana trees are native to the tropics, Central America and the Caribbean. They expect the kind of sunlight that shines off a pina colada glass. Arkansas can freeze in April - a slippery slope for treelike plants that grow from bulbs. Banana trees have to be dug up and sheltered through the winter, says Becky Hicks of Lakeview

Gardens Nursery in North Little Rock.

All the same, Tarzan's favorite foliage really can and does grow tall and leafy in Arkansas, and some trees produce bananas.

"I've had bananas grow," Hicks testifies. "They don't really end up tasting good, and they don't mature like they do in stores," but they're Arkansas ... bananas.

They peel back a question: What else might grow?

Juli Odum makes a business - Urban Jungle, she calls it - of renting and caring for tropical plants in restaurants and offices in and around Fayetteville.

She recommends the frilly anthurium for its ruffled leaves; the ZZ plant (Zamioculcas zamiifolia) for its long stalks; the ponytail palm; and elephant foot (Dioscorea elephantipes), so-called for its thick base.

The palm is a slow grower that can start as a tabletop decoration, but Odum tells of one "35 years old, up to the high ceiling."

She offers a tip on how to grow the exotic.

"Some people have green thumbs, and some don't," she says. "But most people could do better if they just didn't overwater."

GROW A SUSPICION

Petunias and pansies, daisies and daffodils, roses and marigolds make for a bright patch of cheer, but a garden is more than sunshine. It's also a twilight zone.

Bugs as strange as Venusians live in the leafy shadows. Submitted for your approval, as Rod Serling would say - the praying mantis. The two (of six) legs that seem to strike a pious pose, in fact, work like spring-loaded hooks to grab worms.

And grub worms - another creepy denizen of the underground. Beetles go through an icky phase in the form of these C-shaped white worms that turn the ground as soft as ooze. The botanical name, Cyclocephala lurida, sounds like a horror movie, and the common name, the masked chafer, reads like a wanted poster.

No wonder Mistress Mary wants a garden as contrary as she is.

"The world is full of weird plants, and more and more people are encouraging them to take root in their gardens," according to National Geographic News, online at www.nationalgeographic.com.

Tropicals the out-of-place likes of pineapples and citrus trees sometime turn up in nurseries and even Wal-Mart and Home Depot in Arkansas, and gardeners in search of more exotic and expensive plants can find almost anything on the Internet.

"A lot of perennials are unusual," Hicks says. Namesalone, in fact, can make a plant sound peculiar. She rolls around the sound of "wormwood."

"You have to wonder what 'wormwood' is like," she says. "Actually, it's a kind of gray foliage."

But there it is, waiting for someone to ask.

Plants generally have two names. One is the scientific moniker that only a scientist can pronounce. Wormwood's is Artemisia absinthium. The other is what most people like to call it, often a quick description of the plant's odd appearance.

"One of the most whimsical is the contorted filbert [Corylus avellana], or Harry Lauder's walking stick," Rick Minor points out at Cantrell Gardens Nursery in Little Rock. "It's a nut tree with branches that are real twisted and corkscrewed. People always say, 'What's that?'"

The tree's devotees also call it a Harry, presumably after the Scottish music hall entertainer Harry Lauder, who sometimescarried a bent stick and sang "I Love a Lassie."

Spring isn't the best time to admire the contorted filbert, Minor says. As it leafs out, the foliage hides the gnarly tangle. Winter displays the crooked, bare branches in all their confusion: something to anticipate.

The world's ultimate maze of branches might be the monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana), the national tree of Chile. It's a conifer that looks so complicated, they say, a monkey couldn't climb it.

In Arkansas, passers-by are apt to stop and puzzle over the beauty of another of Minor's favorite rarities, the laceleaf Japanese maple.

"It's like a weeping Japanese maple [Acer palmatum]," he says. The branches lift up and spill down. Far from sad, "It's real pretty."

Lobster claw (Heliconia) is the attention-getter at The Good Earth Garden Center in Little Rock.

"It's a tropical in a pot, and it looks like a lobster claw," Cathy Morgan says. "Its bloom is blue and red and orange."

RAISE A STINK

The Internet is a rich ground for finding weird plants that might never creep into Arkansas any other way.

Devil's tongue (Amorphophallus konjac) is one. A spikelike purple flower tops the 6-foot-tall stalk of this Asian plant for sale at Plants for Kids, at www.plantsforkids.com, of Vista, Calif.

The site is an offshoot of grower James Booman's Booman Floral, at boomanfloral.com, and its specialty is strange plants to keep young gardeners guessing. Possibilities include the Medusa's snake tree (Acalypha hispida) with its red and pink flowers that resemble serpents, and the shrimp plant (Justicia brandegeana) that the onlinecatalog describes as "looks like it is covered with cooked shrimp."

"The Amorphophallus are always bizarre crowd pleasers," Booman advises, "as the blooms smell like rotten meat. The odor attracts pollinators. Any of the carnivorous plants will do well with the summer heat and humidity most parts of Arkansas have."

These are among the pulchritudinous and putrid possibilities to be found online:

Venus' flytrap (Dionaea muscipula). This popular bug-eater is one of a variety of carnivorous plants that are widely available on the Internet, including at www.petflytrap.com of Houston.

The flytrap's jaws close shut on hapless bugs. It's a cousin to the sundew, or octopus plant, socalled for its sticky tentacles. And the pitcher plant lures insects to drop in. They plunk into a pool of digestive juice.

Carnivorous plants have tiny appetites. They're skeeter-eaters, not man-munchers. But they prompt a big interest among the devotees of the International Carnivorous Plant Society of Pinole, Calif., at www.carnivorousplants.org .

The site offers sample articles from the group's Carnivorous Plant Newsletter. For example, "The Carnivorous Flora of Gunung Bandahara" tells about an expedition to find out what's in the pitcher plants that grow high on the mountains in Sumatra. Attacked by a swarm of bees, the researchers almost lost interest. Still, they persevered, and theoozy contents turned out to be spiders and centipedes - and more bees.

The society's advice on how to grow carnivorous plants is "the way you can," anywhere from a bog to a windowsill. They need distilled water, according Petflytrap.com. The full sun in the South is too much for them.

And quit that pestering: It's mean to tickle a flytrap. The little plant gets nothing out of closing on a person's finger, and the strain might leave it too exhausted to nab a gnat.

Butterwort - or pinguicula or ping - is one of the most popular carnivorous plants to grow, according to the Web sitedevoted to it, www.pinguicu la.org. Flies stick to the plant's gooey leaves.

Giant starfish plant, zulu plant, giant toad (Stapelia gigantea). Jaws drop in the - pah! - presence of this 9-foot-tall South African oddity. Its star-shaped flowers spread a foot in diameter. But mainly, it stinks. The giant starfish is a huge example of carrion plants that smell like bad meat.

While other flowers attract honeybees and butterflies for pollination, the starfish lures flies and beetles. It seeks with a reek, fooling bugs into thinking it's dead. The flower is reddishpurple in the center, the color of a nasty wound, to match the peeee-yew! scent.

There's not much call for this stinker. It can be hard to find, but the Internet auction site eBay, at www.ebay.com, is one place tosniff. A recent search turned up a 6-inch-high starter.

SPROUT A CONVERSATION

The pretty garden "is the purest of human pleasures," Francis Bacon wrote in Shakespeare's time, 400 years ago, if not in Shakespeare's garden.

But the delights of the strange garden were left to the pen of another Englishman, Lewis Carroll, who wrote about the oddest of all in Alice in Wonderland.

"We can talk," the flowers tell Alice - when they're not asleep in their soft beds, and "when there's anybody worth talking to."