gardenchatter

Garden adventures, thoughts and ideas…

Ornamental Eggplant (Solanum Aethiopicum)

Leave a comment

Also known as Pumpkin on a Stick, the ornamental eggplant is a truly fascinating plant.

Not overly exciting at first, it quickly grows into a bushy, tall plant with 4- 5′ solid stems that develop large, prickly leaves (actually, rather spikey – just like a “regular” eggplant).

An abundance of small white and purple flowers appear over the summer that look almost the same as the flowers on a potato plant…and considering these are both plants from the Nightshade family (solanum), it makes sense.

The flowers grow into small ribbed “pumpkins” – these tiny gems (2.5″) start out green in early August and as fall approaches turn a vibrant orange.  The stems can be cut and used in fall decorations, or leave the plant where it is for fun colour and plenty of interesting comments until the frost hits. 

They are easily started from seed, indoors, about 8-10 weeks before the last expected frost for the area.

These make a fabulous front container garden display or look great in any part of the garden.

Author: gardenchatter

I'm a horticulturalist, a garden experimenter and member of GardenComm International (garden communicators) who enjoys playing in the dirt and growing a wide variety of veggies, plants and flowers in my Zone 5 garden. Check out my website http://www.wowmygarden and the gardenchatter podcast at https://anchor.fm/cheryl-losch.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s