Spurges

I think it's great.

It's called Crown of Thorns, aka Euphorbia millii.

Why is it called crown of thorns? Well, of course, that's a reference to Jesus.

These plant people love to love to give a religious reference to plants.

But yeah, a range of names, but all often referring to the spines and often referring to Jesus.

So take your pick.

If you want to call it Euphorbia Miliae, that's cool with me.

If you want to call it crown of thorns great now this one comes from madagascar that island that is jam-packed full of incredible ecological niches and microclimates and indeed as a result loads of really fascinating plants in particular succulents and this is a plant that is obviously very prone or suited to breeding because if you go looking, you'll find that there are hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of different cultivars out there.

I love this plant.

I love Euphorbias anyway.

But this is one of those that you look at and you think, how can I even put this anywhere? How can I move it? What's going to happen? Because the center of it is a multifaceted stalk.

but the leaves pop off all up and down the whole thing and it's really pretty it has a real dramatic presence in your house and it will get to be in a container um even in your house in a sunny window it'll get to be four feet tall without any problem so i'm glad that he's uh i'm glad that he's got that one It's not called milk because you can drink it.

It's a euphorbia.

Let's see if we can get this thing right here.

Euphorbia.

Yeah.

Euphorbia is basically when you say euphorbia.

What makes them distinct is they have real milky sap.

You can't really focus on it, but you pluck a leaf off and the sap is milky colored.

I do hear that you have a bit of an obsession with euphorbia, don't you?

I do very much so.

I love Euphorbia too.

Yeah, I was talking to David about that one.

Every time I go to a garden centre, I seem to come home with one.

There's bits of border and wall I can go on.

and in the bits where I can recognise a seedling very, very young recognise it from just its germinating leaves so things like the Syntranthus, things like the Euphorbia things that basically have scattered their seeds immediately under where they stand I am scooping these out and putting them into little trays of their own so that I don't have to wait until the grass is forming roots there and then dig them up and disentangle the little border plants and then pat the grass back down and knock it back just when it was trying to get into its autumn stride just when it was trying to put down the little network of roots that would take it from being two atoms thick to being a hundred thousand atoms thick and covering the ground in a beautiful carpet.

So that's been quite fun.

It's a nice meditative job.

That's where all the beneficials are living.

Spurge, oxalis.

So you're talking about a balance when it comes to bugs and so on and so forth.

Yeah.

And we have this one as well.

Euphorbia.

Ascot

Rainbow.

It does.

Euphorbia bicolor.

Yes.

Yes.

And they only have one name for this common name, snow on the prairie.

That's right.

And there is a similar plant that looks... very close to it, called Euphorbia marginata, and it is called Snow on the Mountain.

Yes!

I'm just going to take a guess with it.

I love Spurge.

All right, sports, back to football.

College football, number money, number money.

So right now it's still too early to put it out for the cool weather weeds.

You know, if you have, like I have some rock work in the front yard and spurge loves to come up in that area.

Spurge is one of those weeds that it will have several different cycles of germination.

So I put pre-emergent in those rocks to prevent that from coming up.

Now, In the grass, I don't typically have spurge in the grass.