Failure: plumeria

Last year one of the new plants I tried was plumeria. I bought a couple of cuttings (which looked like fat sticks), planted them in pots and waited. They eventually woke up and formed nice little plants.

The overwintering process was not kind to them though, and it appears that neither of them survived the winter.

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This is what they looked like at the end of last summer:

Since they're not cold-hardy plants, I treated them like my Colocasia (elephant ears) and other non-hardy plants: once the temperatures got below 40ºF (4ºC) or so I moved them into the garage. Then for the next 5 months or so they received no water and no light.

I had read that plumeria are pretty easy to overwinter this way, but I think I made one critical mistake...

I didn't remove the leaves from the plants. I'm guessing the leaves contained enough moisture to allow the stems to rot.

The smaller one is most likely completely dead, rotten to the roots:

The larger one though appears to be solid toward the bottom of the stem, and there are some little "buds" there as well:

I'm hoping this means that it will produce some new growth, but I may need to purchase some more of these and try again.

I was so looking forward to seeing (and smelling) their blooms this year though, and now it looks like I'll need to wait another year for that.

That's one great thing about gardening though: there's always next year! (Much like the St. Louis sports teams I follow.)

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