Plant of the day is: Backhousia citriodora or lemon myrtle
It smells great. Kind of a citrus like smell but just slightly different. I had written a really nice flowery and sentimental passage about smell and plants and then due to blogger's ineptitude at handling drag and drop images...lost it all. I love plant smells. It's a thing. There.
Photo Credit; Tatters ❀ (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Note the "poofiness" That's a word right?
Taxonomy, etc.: A member of the Myrtaceae family, it does qualify for the myrtle designation. Fun fact about the family. There is phloem on BOTH sides of the xylem. Crazy right? But seriously, it IS pretty cool. Let me google a wonderful graphic for you depicting a normal woody species vascular cambium, phloem, and xylem. Members have a base number of five petals but in some species they are absent or very small. It's a fairly large family of over 5650 species and has included previous plant of the day candidate Syzygium samarangense, which was very tasty. Also includes Melaleuca (which I also planted today). The family tends to have very showy stamens, and this species is no exception. That ...soft, poofy, fluffiness? Stamens. Think of a "Mimosa" tree here in STL. Mimosa in quotes because it's not and it will forever irk me. Albizia julibrissin. Anyways, the genus was named in 1853 after the English botanist James Backhouse. Not Jason Stackhouse.
Photo Credit; Tatters ❀ (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Description: A small to medium size tree. Usually only reaches about 8m tall with a low-branching habit. Wiki mentions that it can reach up to 20m but I think that is extremely rare. Sometimes the branches will actually touch the ground and take root. These can actually be dug up and started as new trees. Leaves are opposite, evergreen, and have a nice green oval/lance shape and have a very strong lemon scent to them. Very slightly toothed margins (quite small). Young foliage is reddish and you shoots tend to be hairy or pubescent. Flowers occur on long-stalked clusters. Flowers have 5 petals and 5 persistent calyx lobes. Page here has some photos of fruit so you get an idea (if you want).
Range/Native Habitat: Naturally occurs in the Queensland coastal forests from Brisbane to Mackay. Those places are in Australia. East coast Australia to be exact.
Culture: Is not tolerant of frost/freezing so ya better keep it warm. It likes plenty of sun, can handle some pretty humid temps, and also handles a wide variety of soils. Well drained soils are better but apparently it can handle some pretty poor soils. It's younger juvenile stage is more shrubby and as it matures it tends toward a single trunk. I'll mention something on this in propagation in a sec.
Propagation: So, as is a very popular practice with older, dried seeds, I soaked these in water overnight. I picked apart the little seed capsules and used a syringe to suck the small seeds out of the water and surface sowed them. Not sure if I could have just planted a capsule and had some good germination but I wanted to try to spread out my chances of several seedlings. They are fairly easy to root from cuttings. You can bypass the juvenile stage of the plant by taking cuttings from mature growth...cool right? The catch, typically, is the more juvenile growth tends to be easier to root. In this case, however, it is definitely possible to root older growth. I'm sure applications of IBA help with rooting.
Etc.: I'm not going to get too into this, but it is a widely cultivated and utilized plant for a spice and it's delicious compounds. As I've been researching several Australian species I've discovered this thing known as bushfood. This plant in particular was used by Aboriginal Australians long before the Western world discovered it. It is the highest natural source of citral which about 1-2% of people are allergic to. Those poor, poor people. It is supposed to have a "cleaner and sweeter" aroma than even lemongrass. Go Backhousia Litsea, you just got schooled.
Enjoy.
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