I write to you frantically from the office of an auto glass store as I wait for a new windshield. A week from today our Hawaiian Plumeria Festival will be in full swing, a sale will be packed, people will be entering bloom after bloom in our flower show, and Hawaiian dancers will be entertaining on the patio, and hopefully this will be in your hands.
This journal is terribly timed (or the Festival is): it's too late to do a proper send-up of the festival, and it's too early to recap the flower show winners and the merriment of the festival. As we go to print, the current list of cultivars was at 267 different varieties. I'd like to remind you that availability is not guaranteed. If I had access to a huge warehouse packed with JL Hawaiian Corals and Makaha Sunns and Herzog's Autumn Sunrises, trust me, I would have shared that location long ago.

As you may have heard in August, we are still looking for places in central San Diego to host our meetings for February, March, and May 2015. Contact Kim with any leads.
Finally, the 2015 SCPS Calendar, which Maggie Forys compiled from the winners of the SCPS photo contest, will be available at the sale for $12.50 each. They'll make great gifts for the holidays and they have all our events and meeting dates on them.

Finally, we got a lovely thank you note from the San Diego Garden Botanical Foundation thanking us for the gift of the two framed photographs for display in Room 104. Visit the Casa del Prado to see them; the beautiful framing was done by the incomparable Carolyn St. Clair.
including one authored by our speaker (although his is much better and more technical) does not give much detail on buying plumerias. Our handbook has a section how to buy plumerias and questions you can ask your vendors, which is a good thing to buy before the plant sale.

Kevin of Poway, Christina of Temecula, Mildred and Jim of San Diego, Vicki of Encinitas, Andrew and Suzanne of El Cajon, Araceli and Lucia of San Diego, Jeanie of San Diego, Esperanza of Chula Vista, Nancy, John & Veronica, and Diane of San Diego, and Lori & Mike of Lakeside.

Kim was very pleased to introduce Richard Eggenberger. Richard is an old friend of the society; he is a past president of the Plumeria Society of America out of Houston. He is the author with his late wife of The Handbook on Plumeria Culture, which is an excellent book.
Roland Dubuc presented Richard with two leis, one from the Jim Little plant, Mary Helen Eggenberger, and Lee and Roland's plant named Mary Helen's Rainbow.

Richard spoke of the town of Auroville in South India, the first township in the world built on the ideal of human unity. The Mother, the great person, divine person, asked Richard to come and build the gardens at the center of the city. There are 12 gardens. The first garden is the garden of existence, the second garden is consciousness, the third garden is of bliss, after many others, there is one garden remaining and that garden's name is perfection. The Mother had chosen that all the flowers going into perfection will be represented by the plumeria. So we moved from existence to conscienceness all through youth and harmony and ending with the last garden, the twelfth garden, the garden of perfection. The spiritual significance of the plumeria is poetry. Richard fell in love with this flower the first time he saw it and we had quite a few plants in southern India. There was a botanical garden in Bangerhood begun by British and German horticulturist. They had the wonderful collection. They shared it, so we had the dwarf plumeria obtusa that could grow in a container for year after year, so slow growing. When it got a little too big, you just prune the roots down and put some new soil and it was good for another few years and eventually a little larger pot. Then another one was the obtusa type with the strappy thick leaves, which dropped its leaves in winter right in the center of the garden, another one that I had never seen in America. It is a flower that is quite unique it is an evergreen, the leaves are about 15 to 18 inches long and the flower has high widely separated petals each is pure white and each petal is about 4 inches long. It is an extraordinary plant. It even seems to be rust free in that humid climate.
So Richard began collecting plumerias going wherever he could go. In Sri Lanka he met Dorothy Fernando and all she painted was plumeria. Great artist, she said Richard me one day that she would like to take him to a friend's house; he has about 12 plumerias she thought Richard had never seen. It was a beautiful ranch and this gentleman was sitting by the pool; Dorothy introduced him as Mr. Arthur C. Clark. He said welcome and take all the cuttings you would like. Richard took bags full of cuttings back to India. In Hawaii on the Big Island, Richard saw a small evergreen plant with not the greatest flower but definitely an obtuse we named it the Pink which you now know as the dwarf pink Singapore. We thought it would be excellent intergeneric stock for dwarfing root stock. Richard was working in Houston, in Brownsville, there was a Mexican family who were selling plumeria cuttings and we started the first business in plumerias called The Plumeria People.

So that is Richard's collecting history. He and Mary Helen worked with Jim Little and Dr. Criley for many, many years. I gave talks and joined many plumeria societies. Today Richard wants to talk about a few different aspect of your world of plumerias. You have far exceeded what I knew;, there are varieties and colors and sizes and fragrances that I never knew. Basically in those days, it was Jim sending things from Hawaii. Through hybridizing you have created some wonders, you are registering them now, which is very important. I am going to plant a bug in your ear as I did in my last visit her 5 years ago. Last time Richard was here, he talked about experiments with hydroponics, which was a huge success. Today Richard is going to put another challenge to you. He thinks the Southern California Plumeria Society should write a book of the 100 most beautiful plumerias with great photography. What would be the first criteria? Color, fragrance, size, growth habit (very Important), stability, consistency of flowering every year hardiness, keeping quality. We are up to seven already. How about the size of the inflorescence? What about creating dwarfs? Here is a project in which you all can participate; photographers would be needed, someone knowledgeable in design. Others with knowledge of those eight things we just mentioned. It would be a first—no one else has even attempted this.

How many of you talk to your flowers? In Through the Looking Glass, Alice sees all the flowers and she says, "Oh, flowers, if only you could talk," and the flower says to her, "We can talk when there is anyone worth talking to." This communion with flowers shows this aspiration to beautify the earth, to bring more and more beauty, not only individually, but as a collective body to the world. Richard doesn't think that it has been done with any other society to the degree in which you have accomplished, and he honors you for that.

Question & Answer Section

Q:   Plumeria is the most beautiful blossom on earth. Does it help homeopathically, medicinally?
Richard:  On a physical level I cannot answer that question, but on a psychological or spiritual level I can and there are 5 psychological perfections and if you are interested in that it is in my book. I can tell you that every flower has a specific vibration. It vibrates with a force that can cure, that can help us with difficulties. It doesn't have the power of speech. It only give itself an aspiration of life. If one is sensitive enough one can get a mental approximation of the vibration of the flower.

Guest: What frequency?
Richard:   I can assure you it is above megahertz, it's cosmic. I have seen Zinnia which I have mentioned has endurance blooming in the desert for months without water. That's endurance. I have written a book, it called Flowers and their Messages. It's very beautiful, very deep; for anyone who is interested, I will also include Savitri with almost 24000 lines. This I will send to you as a gift. Just give me your emails.

Q:  Can you eat plumerias?
A:  There are so many good things we can eat; why would you want to eat plumerias? However we can absorb its vibration; we can feel within its beauty the power and fragrance and color. All of that we take within as a different kind of food.

Q:  With a cutting, what do you do with it? Do you put it in water or the ground and how long do you hold on to them?
Richard:  There are people here that could talk more than I and they have such knowledge but I will tell you the story of coir dust. The coconut is a plant that gives so much, more than any other plant. It gives water then ripens and you have the meat it can be dried, it can be eaten fresh it can be used for cooking so many uses. When that is finished then the coconut husk is soaked in the back waters of the sea and it breaks down and the fiber from that makes rope mattresses all kinds of things, You have heard coir mattress. So this was in the early 70s all that dust was sitting in the water and they would give it free so would take cart after cart of it till they started figuring out they could get money for this. It had to age, it had a fungus that could kill all kinds of plants. I saw coir in the blocks and it is beautiful material and of course stays away from Perlite.

So you take a cutting let the base dry, put it in this medium and it will develop roots. When we started there was no such medium, I would place them in sand coarse sand., and then when it came time to pull them out I would do it as gently as I could so many roots broke off so when I started using coir I could lift that thing and there would be a ball of roots. That was the greatest discovery I made about coir.

Kim Schultz: I am going to give a less poetic answer which is go to socalplumeriasociety.com; we have a lot of rooting tutorials for all sorts of rooting methods with instructions on there.

Q:  You mentioned a book. Who's going to write it?
Richard:  Put your heads together, I think this could be a book of such value. You will sell many plants and you will sell books and it will be a gift to the world. So please consider it.

Closing

Kim thanked Richard for his speaker. She reminded people that to enter for the floral arrangement and photo categories, people need to reserve a spot with Jerry and Betsy Markle before August 20th to make sure we have enough space for entries. Meeting closed at 2:12 for refreshments and raffle.