Four O'Clock Follow Up

On Gardeners Bloom Day last month, I wrote about mirabilis jalapa, the Four O'Clock plant. I said that the plants I'd grown from tubers were blooming, but that all they'd given me were either red or pink flowers - a bit disappointing given that the plant can have a variety of colours, the flowers can be bi-coloured, and that sometimes you'll even get two different colours on the same plant.

But I also had some others coming on which I'd started from seed, and they're now blooming. And lo and behold one of them is producing a mix of yellow and pink flowers, some of them with rather natty stripey sections.

As I was moving them around last week I clumsily broke off a large chunk of one of them. It was full of buds, so I thought I'd stick it in a jar of water to see if the flowers would open anyway. I then forgot about it till yesterday, only to find that within the week it had put out roots. This has to be the easiest plant in the world to propagate ...