All About Plumerias

My name is Bill. I'm with B&B Exotics Plumeria. And thank you for coming to the busy bee for this talk. I'm sorry my partner is not here. He is in Mount Dora doing an event and a lecture there as well. For the first time in decades, we double booked ourselves. So, I apologize. You only have one of us today, but I'm the first bee, so that's good.

So, a little bit about ourselves. We have been a grower, an importer, hybridizer, and seller of plumeria for almost 30 years now. We got our start way back when in the early days when we saw a man named Nui in Thailand who was growing seeds for his birthday. His father gave him an acre of land and he went around and collected all of these plumeria seeds and started planting them and he started to have amazing varieties blooming. All brand new varieties from seed. That caught our eye and so since then we became friends and we have been working with him now propagating and developing thousands of varieties of plumeria.

So we plant about 50,000 seeds a year over on about 6 or 700 acres in Thailand. And out of that 50,000 seeds, we limit it down to 40,000 trees which are then planted in the ground and grown. We will watch them and notice what they do, how they bloom, what their growth habit is, and so forth as we're developing the varieties and hand picking and choosing which varieties we want to bring to the world. And so all of these varieties that you see here are varieties from there. And some of them are older varieties, so the prices are a little less expensive. And some of them are newer varieties. And when there's less availability, that makes the price a little bit more.

So what you will notice with these is if you give it time and you don't want to pay $200 for a plumeria now, wait a couple of years, maybe three years, and we will be bringing the price down for you as we produce the plants from that variety. And we are located in Indian Harbor Beach just about 40 minutes north of here. And we are by appointment. Sometimes people don't think we have doctor's appointments or go out to eat and they just show up at our place. And so please have a confirmed appointment with us if you would like to come to our nursery.

We also have a very nice website that took years months to develop and it's fun to shop on it. We've also added a gift line and home line t-shirts and now recently a ceramics collection for displaying your plumeria blossoms from 30 years of collecting those. We're finally getting some of them out of the house so I get the house back but you get to enjoy those. A lot of them are handmade pieces signed and you'll see them on our website in the ceramics collection.

We also have a jewelry line that's come out that's all nature inspired. So if you like sparkly pins, brooches, pendants, that sort of thing, we have those there.

So let's get to it. We will be doing events now on the east coast of Florida. The last four years hosted events over in Mount Dora and along the west coast and now we're going to bring it soon to this side of the state. Sometime in June on a Saturday and if you follow our Facebook page and please do take our card all of that information is on there. We will be announcing when we'll be doing a three hour talk about plumeria. There'll also be a large question and answer period as well as Polynesian dancers and lots of plants and everything for sale. So that's to be announced shortly.

We learned that plumerias are originally from Mexico and Central America, not Hawaii as everybody thinks. Hawaii made them popular with their ceremonies with lays and that sort of thing. So, but plumerias are originally from Mexico and Central America. We've traced it all the way back to the very single first variety called sac noct and sac noct is a variety that is what we call a species plant and species plants are varieties that are found growing wild throughout the central Americas Mexico and throughout the Caribbean species flamas like this one for example will always have white flowers and a yellow center and they will always have very unusually shaped leaves leaves. Every species plumeria has its own shape of leaf and they're fun to grow.

This one grows, it's woody, but it is a little wiry. So it kind of grows up and flops when it starts to grow these amazing huge balls of flowers on here. There are two main classifications of plumeria. Species is one of them. And then there's rubas, which are everything else that you see up here. And rubas are your hybrids in the plumeria world. When you're growing seeds, rubas when you grow the rubas seeds, every single seed in a seed pod is a brand new variety. It will have a different strand of DNA from the mother plant. The flowers may look similar to the mother plant, but they are not identical in any means. And the nice thing is you could have hundreds of new colors from those species.

Plumeria are a little bit different where probably 30 or 40% of these seeds produced by these plants are exact copies of the mother plant. It's the only type of plumeria category that produces possibilities of exact copies of the plant.