Posted by
Ispahan (Chicago - Zone 6a) on Nov 6, 2011 9:44 AM concerning plant:
This plant has been a pure joy to have around. I obtained a couple of semi-dormant cuttings from a very kind and generous gardener in California in December 2009, and they rooted easily in a glass of water during the cold darkness of a Chicago winter. The cuttings have grown easily and steadily since that time in an unshaded north window. It started to bloom this May and has been forming waves of flowers every few weeks. I love everything about this plant: its understated elegance, quiet beauty and unusual flower form. But its best feature is definitely the wonderful fragrance of the flowers. It is a pure, clean, sweet, citrusy scent a lot like Aglaia odorata but maybe stronger. It can lightly fill up a room with its fragrance or it can send heady clouds of fragrance to a distant corner of the room. Curiously, if you put your nose in a flower, it only seems delicately fragrant, but yet it is able to throw its fragrance around like a ventriloquist to surprise you when you least expect it. Each chicken-foot-shaped flower only lasts a day or two but the plant is not stingy with bloom production and always has a cluster or two waiting to open. I am not sure why this plant isn't more well known or commercially available (I can't think of a single commercial source for this plant right now), but it is a nearly perfect houseplant: attractive, uncomplaining and fragrant.