Adenium obesum / Desert Rose

Very striking flowers. Gorgeous colour.

Fabulous colour!

It’s beautiful! I purchased one like this last year.

My big 19 year old desert rose died in 2023. We had so much rain along with cooler than normal weather and it rotted 😞.

Oh no, so sorry to hear about your beautiful old desert rose. What a terrible shame!

I was really sad when it rotted. It bloomed very profusely every year, as it had several branches.

Well, hopefully your new one will last for a very long time.

I hope so! I will keep it under cover during very rainy years…which is not very often here in dry San Diego.

Yes, I'm afraid I've lost a few during particularly heavy monsoonal wet seasons.

I always try to remember that the desert rose is truly a desert plant. I keep my plants very dry. I know they particularly don’t like it wet during the winter.

Exactly! They like dry conditions and so many people tend to think of them as 'tropical' plants and expect them to enjoy wet conditions!

So true. It’s native to a tropical desert, big difference from the wet tropics.

I usually water my desert roses once a month in summer.

Once they're established here, they survive on whatever Mother Nature provides! Sometimes I might give them an extra drink or two if it's a particularly bad summer.

We receive no rain in summer, sometimes not for 8 to 9 months. I have to water plants almost every day, even in winter. It’s my full-time job. 😂

Yes it's almost the same here although our dry season usually lasts from April to November which is our mid-Autumn to end of Spring. We also have to pay for water here so it can be expensive keeping a garden going through long dry seasons every year.

We were very lucky the last two winters, the rainfall was very high. We also had tropical storm Hilary bring us record rainfall in August of 2023. In 2023 we broke the mega drought in California. Prior to 2023 many of the reservoirs in California were literally completely dried up.

Water is extremely expensive here. If you have water service and never even use a drop of water, it’s $60.00 per month. The rates are constantly going up 20 to 30 percent, also. It’s insane!

Yes the costs here are also very high. It's sort of understandable though given that Australia is one of the driest continents on the earth and I also live in a dry tropics zone, so water is previous. We really need another decent monsoonal wet season which hasn't happened for a few years now.

I hope you get a good wet season there this year!

I completely understand. We get some water here in San Diego County from the desalination plant in Carlsbad. It’s actually helped out in the very dry conditions in the past from the severe droughts we experience here.

Thanks Delonix. We're keeping everything crossed. So far we haven't had to go on water restrictions this year, which is great but we'll see how next year goes. We need loads of rain to get our city's dam (the source of our water) back to a decent level.