Tomorrow I will plant out four Jewels of Opar. It's another toy courtesy of a nice plant description in a catalog. The gist of it: tender perennial 24" tall; full sun; tolerates dry conditions; chartreuse foliage, pink flowers. Mild leaves are succulent, light green, and eye-catching. Great in salads, on sandwiches, and as a spinach substitute (moderate consumption only).



An almost dayglow green plant with pink flowers. Sounds good to me! And supposedly edible. So where or what the heck is Opar? Inquiring minds needed to know this evening and courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Opar is a fictional lost city in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and later the Khokarsa novels of Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey, as well as various derivative works in other media.

Then it gets interesting:
"As envisioned by Burroughs, Opar is a lost colony of Atlantis located deep in the jungles of Africa, in which incredible riches have been stockpiled down through the ages. The city's population exhibits extreme sexual dimorphism caused by a combination of excessive inbreeding, cross-breeding with apes, and selective culling of offspring."

It continues to get weird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opar_(fictional_city)

LOL! Well, I have some of their jewels!

I was going to put a thumbs up until i read further down ...
The plant is really pretty.

LindaJean wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 10:05 pm I was going to put a thumbs up until i read further down ...
The plant is really pretty.

LOL! I'm not going to hold the history of the name against the plant. Can't wait to see if the flowers are large enough to create a "wow" factor or if they're little dots of color. Gotta have a toy or two every year. Today I'm setting out four sesame plants, another toy that might be useful.

I planted a few of these a couple years ago, hoping for an edible green in the summer. Mostly I enjoyed them as pretty flowers. They spread nicely (but not too much). And, surprisingly, they came back from seed last year!! Even the little pots in the greenhouse that never got planted out have new seedlings in them.

I don't think I ever got around to tasting them, though. Or if I did, it was not memorable.

This year I'm trying out Doucette d'Alger, which is supposed to be a warm-weather relative of mâche. (Assuming the seeds I got in a local swap are still viable!)

(In other summer-greens news, the arugula I planted over a year ago in a big pot on the north side of the house survived the HOT summer last year, and it's still going strong.)