Thenardia Species, Petatillo

I planted T. floribunda in my yard in Venice, CA last year and it is doing nicely. Growing slowly, and doing ok in a sandy clay loam mix...Read More. ( I replaced the heavy clay soil native to thIs area down about 2'). It is now flowering again and the flowers are really beautiful and have a light fragrance. It does not seem to be very vigorous but it looks healthy. Needs support.

A beautiful evergreen vine native to the Méxican states of Michoacán south into México, Guerrero and Oaxaca. It is well described in ...Read More"Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants" written and illustrated by Helen O'Gorman (Ammex Asociadis, Mexico 1961) as follows:

"One of the prettiest of Mexico's beautiful native vines is the T. floribunda with its wavy, fresh green, tapering leaves and pendulant clusters of fragrant, red purple flowers. It is a large vine, climbing to the tops of fairly large trees. It is glabrous throughout, the branches slender; the slender-petiolate leaves lance-oblong or ovate-oblong, two and a quarter to five and a half inches long, acuminate to long-acuminate, obtuse at the base, inclined to a wavy edge and curling backward. The many-flowered cymes, three to four and a half inches broad are pedunculate. The calices are small, five-parted; the corollas are subrotate, the anthers shaped like an arrow-head. The lobes are reddish-purple with a white edge and the center is pale greenish."

Thenardia floribunda is listed in Peter Reidel's "Plants for Extra-Tropical Regions" as an Evans and Reeves Nursery (Brentwood, CA) introduction in 1941. Its planting in Santa Barbara was advocated in an article by Lockwood and Elizabeth de Forest titled “Climbers” in the May 1942 issue of "Santa Barbara Gardener" (Vol 17,#6). This article noted that Thenardia floribunda is a “vine with fragrant maroon flowers with white centers comes from Mexico. It is evergreen, has neat lance shaped leaves about an inch across and 4 to 5 inches long, is not particular as to soil but must have summer water."

In Fall 2006 a thriving specimen of this plant was identified at a home near the base of the foothills in Santa Barbara, California - an area called the "Lower Riviera". Cuttings of this plant were graciously offered by the owner to Terra Sol Garden Center and San Marcos Growers in the hope to "reintroduce" this beautiful plant that has disappeared from the California horticultural trade.