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ifraser25

Brunfelsia uniflora

ifraser25
17 years ago

Surely one of the most spectacular of all flowering bushes. It has a number of names locally including Mercury and Romeo and Juliet, the latter presumably because of the 2 different colors of the flowers which open purple then within a day or so fade to white. I have also heard the English name "Morning Noon and Night" presumably also referring to the color change.It has a lovely scent and here in SE Brazil flowers twice a year! What more could you ask? Apart from being frequent in gardens it also grows prolifically in the wild in the Atlantic Forest.

Comments (5)

  • bahia
    17 years ago

    Nice photo, but you didn't quite get the species name right, it is actually B. pauciflora. It typically only blooms from spring into summer here in northern California, where it can also get quite large. It doesn't escape into the wild here, as it can't survive our rainless summers on its own.

  • garyfla_gw
    17 years ago

    Hi
    Have had one of these for many years though i don't know which one .Seem to be at least a dozen closely related species. They usually call it Yesterday Today and Tomorrow locally.. blooms all winter for me
    Can't really tell from the pic. but I'd guess uniflora
    gary

  • sultry_jasmine_nights (Florida-9a-ish)
    17 years ago

    Nice photo.
    I got one of these last year and it didn't flower. This year it grew about 3 x as big and just started blooming last week. We call it yesterday-today-&Tomorrow (YTT). Mine doesnt seem to be fragrant ;( (wonder if it is due to lack of humidity here or I got the wrong variety) but it has large flowers and is pretty.
    ~SJN

  • TonyfromOz
    17 years ago

    Bahia, I would not be too confident that this is B. pauciflora. There are several Brunfelsias from southern Brazil with this general color scheme, including B. pauciflora, B. australis and B. uniflora. You would need to see closeups of leaf and inflorescence, and even then there is very little information available.

    In Australia we have what I believe is B. australis, commonly cultivated for at least 60 years in local gardens, usually under the erroneous names B. latifolia or B. bonodora. We also have B. pauciflora, a small-leafed form of which seems to be increasingly popular, with more purplish or mauve flowers than B. australis (which has more violet-blue flowers).

    In the Sydney Botanic Gardens there used to be a plant labelled B. uniflora, hardly distinguishable from B. australis except flowers sparser and borne singly rather than in twos; also a large-leafed, large-flowered form of B. pauciflora ('Eximia'?) which was quite dramatic but very slow-growing.

  • longwoodgradms
    17 years ago

    I would also voice that it does not have convincing charactersitics to be B. pauciflora--for one, the amount and density of the flowers is not indicative of the species.

    If it is highly fragrant, definitely lean to it being B. australis, but nary a scent, as sultry night in Louisiana mentions is potentially (more likely to be) a B. grandiflora.

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