Azaleas in October? Why not?

They are colorful and fun, and a color like Perfecto Mundo® Orange is spicy enough to work with fall décor. If you want to match it with another seasonal in color, check out Perfecto Mundo® Red.

These plants are reblooming machines – they’re flowering right now in our research and development greenhouses. In October! And they’ve been going all summer long. We typically see 12-18 weeks of blooming a year on the Perfecto Mundo® azalea varieties.

Impressive bloom time, and even the size and quantity of the blooms themselves, create quite a show in any garden. Yes, these plants are as over-the-top as a Broadway musical.

Perfecto Mundo® Orange will grow in USDA 6-9 and gets 3-4′ tall and 3-5′ wide. So while it’s certainly an appealing plant at retail or used in a deco container, this is a really good size for many landscaping applications, too.

It will grow in full sun or partial shade.

Cats!

Not my cats, although if you video-conferenced with me while I was working from home, you probably saw mine.

No, I’m talking about the musical. Cats opened on Broadway 39 years ago today. It was quite the thing. And while my own cat is pretty great at comic relief, she’s not nearly as talented as the humans who sang and danced their way through T.S. Eliot’s poems.

The connection to azaleas is that azalea is one of the most commonly searched plants on the ASPCA’s toxicity list. Note: yes, they are toxic to cats – and dogs and horses, too. Poinsettias? Not so much. The sap can be irritating but “generally over-rated in toxicity.”

Anyway, it’s a good link to have handy when people ask about their pets and plants. I’ve found that most animals don’t eat plants that are really dangerous, but every once, there’s one that doesn’t have much horse sense.