There is an enormous family of plants called the Rubiaceae. It comprises certainly 400 or more genera, and many thousands of species. The most common genera include the mussaenda, ixora, gardenia, coffee and quinine, and as you can see by this very short list, many plants are highly desirable from an ornamental viewpoint and many more have commercial (coffee) and medicinal (quinine) value. All of these are to be found in Guyana, and some are native to this country as well as to nearby countries.
The mussaenda originated in the Old World tropics and is one of the most spectacular shrubs available to us. The best and most commonly planted mussaenda are the pink, white, and the red varieties of Mussaenda erythrophylla. Strictly speaking their attraction comes not from the flowers but from their enlarged and highly coloured sepals. Mussaenda are not naturally tidy plants and have a tendency to straggle. This can be corrected quite easily if they are pinched back or cut back from the time they are youngsters in order to make them bushy. In fact quite old plants can be cut back and shaped very nicely even if they have been neglected in their early years.
Some of the colour types of mussaenda (red, for example) have always been thought difficult to propagate. I have managed to root all of them with varying degrees of success. Certainly all of them can be rooted from soft wood cuttings about 2 inches long taken from the tip of strong healthy shoots, treated with rooting hormone and grown under a mist propagation system. However most of us don‘t have mist, so the chance of success using soft-wood shoots is very much reduced. By far the best way of propagating mussaenda in the absence of a mist unit is by hard-wood cuttings.
A hot item: Here are a few thoughts about peppers which play an important part in Guyanese cuisine.
Black pepper is from India, where for many hundreds of thousands of years it has played a vitally important part in cooking and medicine. It was first brought to the fringe of Europe by Arab traders between India and Venice, and is recorded as being used by the Greeks and Romans over 300 years before the birth of Christ. It must have been dreadful to prepare meat and fish dishes in those far-off days before refrigeration, and black pepper as well as many other spices formed an important part of the battle to preserve food or mask the fact that it was going off.
Now all kinds of spices, including peppers, are used not to preserve but to give that extra zip to meals. I have seen quite a few black pepper plants in and around Georgetown. It is of course a climber, and a vigorous one at that, and unless you’re careful you’ll have to take mountaineering lessons to gather the peppers. Gardeners prune black pepper plants to encourage side-shoot production for the purely practical reason that it‘s easier to collect the fruit when the plant is smaller.
It seems that black pepper plants prefer a bit of shade, and can be planted in the shadow of the house or tree. In fact often cuttings are planted right against a tree or house to allow the vine to grow up. I suppose if you live on the first floor you can just reach out and pick when you like! When the fruits are dried they are the black peppercorns of commerce. White pepper is produced when the fleshy pulp is taken off the fruit and the hard round seed is ground to a fine powder. Bon appetit. Until next week take care and may your God go with you.
