Just off bustling A1A South you'll find the Peppertree Luxury Camping Resort packed with various sized campers and mobile homes, most with manicured landscapes. Such is the residence of Susan and Lewis Starling. Within a very limited space, they have a beautifully landscaped yard complete with citrus and banana trees and abloom with colorful plantings such as pentas and a bed of blue daze in the front of the property. There's even a Norfolk Island pine that has managed to survive the freezes of last winter.
Susan's call to us was about a rather unusual succulent she has -- a pencil tree that she purchased in 1997, at an Earth Day event. Originally in a four-inch pot, the pencil tree is now a towering 10 feet in height and in a much larger container. Susan swears by both Miracle-Gro liquid fertilizer (15-30-15) and Jungle Growth Pro-Grow mix for soil.
The pencil tree grows with single or multiple trunks which support a tangle of light green, pencil thick, succulent branches with little sign of a leaf. The trees can reach a height of 20 to 30 feet. The main trunk and branches are woody and brownish, but the younger branches are green and cylindrical, looking like so many pencils. The leaves are tiny and are shed early. What is usually called the flower is really a group of petal-like-bracts. The true flowers, which are centered within the bracts, are inconspicuous.
Pencil trees, indigenous to tropical eastern and southern Africa, need all the light you can give them. Water only when dry. They thrive as a houseplant in the driest atmosphere with ordinary soil, water and feeding. Pencil trees are highly drought and salt tolerant.
They can be used as patio plants in containers, or as specimen or background plants and mixed hedges in tropical and subtropical climates.
An interesting fact about this plant: It is one of the African "fish poison" trees. When branches are macerated and placed in a stream, the juice will stupefy fish, enabling fishermen to catch them easily.