'Sparkling Burgundy' Pineapple Lily - Eucomis comosa

Welcome to Garden Plants with Jim Putnam. Let's talk sparkling burgundy pineapple lily. This is a super unique pineapple lily. It was actually discovered from Tony Avon at Plant Delights Nursery as a seedling, a eucomus. Pineapple lilies are bulbs. They're in the asparagus family and they come out with this kind of rosette type growth and then large strapping leaves like this that then kind of splay open just a bit as the flower spike kind of forms in the middle during the season. This one starts off with this incredible dark purplish burgundy-like color, I guess, a sparkling burgundy color earlier in the spring. By the time it flowers out here in the full sun for us during the spring, it has greened up just a bit, but you can see the flower spike also has that same coloration on it as it's coming up. This is a South African native. We'll talk about what that means for how you're going to garden with it in just a minute when we talk about watering and that kind of thing. This will come up and grow between maybe a foot and a half and three feet in height during the season, the leaves will. The cluster gets a little bit bigger each year. This started out as one individual bulb and now I can pretty much see that I could probably pop this out of the ground and divide this into maybe five plants at this point, so the width is going to be determined by its age a little bit. So right now this one is probably three and a half feet wide or something like that if we measured it out from tip to tip, you know, on all the foliage that's on it. Then in the summer, you know, we're filming this right around the end of June and you see the flower spikes. We started to see these flower spikes maybe two and a half weeks ago and now they've reached the point where they've, you know, they're up above or right in the top of the foliage here. The spikes are beautiful. They're kind of heavy. It's amazing how heavy they are. The reason these are called pineapple lilies is they have that similar little, you know, leafy part on the top in the make resemble a pineapple overall. The flowers begin to open up here in the first of June as that spike has gotten to its kind of maximum height and then you can see the inside of the flower color and then this will be followed by a fruit later on that's also quite colorful as well. This is definitely a plant that's going to prefer more sun than not. It might go into a little bit of shade but it'll get floppy if it's in any kind of deeper shade. It needs enough sun to not stretch. If it stretches, it will flop over. We had it, one of the three years it's been in this spot, it did kind of splay open during the season. I'm assuming that it was something to do with, you know, maybe some cloudy weather or whatever. It was stretching in some way that it stayed thinner and then opened up on us. This year it's vigorously upright. It's had, you know, been in plenty of sun and it's standing up big and tall because of that. These are hardy in zone seven to nine. Maybe we'll put in parentheses 6b but you definitely would want it in a protected, you know, some sort of, you know, slightly protected space in order to keep it, you know, keep it from being damaged by the cold during the winter. Let's talk about uses in the garden. We have ours right next to our entry into our, you know, the main entry to the front of our garden to show it off. That strapping foliage, the flowers, everything about this plant is interesting. It contrasts with just everything else in the garden. We've got it with one of its other South African cousins over here, you know, in the Agapanthus. We have it with the Coriopsis here. We've got Bee Balm growing up through it that matches it just beautifully. Everything here, it contrasts with everything. There's even a blue conifer behind it that looks great with it. So, just the perfect plant to add into a cottage garden, to a container, to pretty much any full sun space that you would have where you're looking for a plant that will contrast with every, you know, with everything else. Coastal garden, any, pretty much anything, anything goes with this plant in my mind, just because it contrasts with everything else around it beautifully, makes everything else stand out while it's stand out here in the garden as well. You can also see here that it would stand out in a tropical garden. If you have a drier, a drier space that you're trying to garden, this plant would fit into that. Pollinators absolutely love these flowers as they're starting to open. Again, these are, there's hundreds and hundreds of flowers here. There's, looks like about six or seven spikes. The first year it was in the ground, we had one flower spike, and now we're up to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven this year, and the flowers are just starting to open. So, good in a pollinator garden as well. You might receive your pineapple lily as just a bulb. At that point, it would go about four to five inches down in the ground. You probably would want to plant these in the spring and get a whole season under them if you're planning on leaving them in the ground through the winter time. They can be dug. We'll talk about that in just a second. So, four to five inches down, if you're in colder areas, you're probably going to want to mulch over that. So, zone seven or six B, if you were trying them up in six B, you'd probably want to mulch over them during the winter time, a little bit thicker to insulate them a bit. Most of you are probably going to buy it in a container and just plant it at whatever depth it is in that container, just like you would anything, just like you would anything else at that point. They like, this is one of those moist, well-drained plants. It likes humus, it likes organic material, but it wants to be slightly on the dry side. This is not a bulb that wants to sit in water through the winter time. A lot of these South African plants are trickiest in the winter time. So, in the summer, they'll take whatever you got going on. The agapanthus back there, the yucomas here, several other things that we grow as South African plants in our gardens. In the Southeast United States, we can be a little bit wet during the winter time, and that's the time of year when they're dormant and they can end up rotting. So, we have ours in a spot that's going to stay dry. It's going to stay moist, but never wet out here near the road. So, that's the best location for them overall. For those of you who live in colder areas and want to grow these, they can be dug at the end of the season, and you just dry them out, and then you store them typically in some sort of dry peat material through the winter time and keep them at a specific temperature, like 40, 45 degrees, something like that, through the winter time. And you can store them and bring them back out the next season and plant them back in the ground. This is an incredibly low-maintenance plant. If you're in an area where you wouldn't have to dig them, then there is basically no maintenance. We will get a leaf here or there that will come out onto this sidewalk that we can just cut off during the growing season, right down to the base. We might get a tattered leaf like this that we want to take off the plant that doesn't look as attractive as the rest of it. I usually just don't worry about things like that. As you can tell, there's a couple that have been hit while we've been walking past them that probably could have been cut off, but that's it. There's really just almost no maintenance on this plant whatsoever. We keep the ground around it mulched, and weeded. We water occasionally when we need water. We fertilize this entire garden once a year with an organic fertilizer that's usually back in March before this thing is even awake. It's just dormant under the ground when we actually fertilize out here. I don't re-fertilize at all. You'll probably read online that you could re-fertilize it and whatever, and if you want to, you can. But look, between the soil improvements we've made and my once-a-year fertilizing and my continued mulching out here, I'm mid-summer right now. It definitely doesn't need to be fertilized. It's absolutely thriving out here in the garden. So this is really an easy, low-maintenance plant that offers just a tremendous amount of interest. When we have our open garden event here, everybody wants... This is one of the top, probably. There's between 800 and 1,000 plants in this garden. I would put this in the top 20 most talked-about plant at our open garden every year. It's just such an easy plant to get so much interest out of. It's always changing. It leaves out purple. Then it turns green. It has this beautiful strapping foliage. Then the flower spikes come up, and they look like pineapples. Then the flowers start to open, and then the seed turns a darker color. So it's always, always interesting. It gets out of the way during the wintertime, allows me to clean up this space, and then comes right back the following spring. So this is Sparkling Burgundy Pineapple Lily. Thank you guys so much for watching.