Duranta Gold Mound

Duranta Gold Mound is very popular around south Florida right now. It's popularity exploded a few years ago. Nearly all of our street medians have Mamey Croton, Gold Mound, and Society Garlic. The combination of red, lime green, and purple is unbeatable. If the society garlic (crinum) wasn't so stinky, I would have it all over my yard.

Here (above) is my tiny rose bed, I have a large patchoulli in the back, two roses on the right, an asparagus ferm in the middle and a row of gold mound in the front. There's a trick to growing pretty gold mound...

Trick...only the new growth is this fluourescent lime green. So, you need to keep it trimmed not only to maintain size, but also to maintain that showy bright color. If you were to let the plant go for a year, it would still be pretty, but also a tyipical medium dark green color. The whole reason (in my opinion) to use duranta is so that you can achive that big contrast in color and texture. That's why it's so striking when used in combination with a red or dark green plant.


So, this brings me to the second point of this posting... I blogged about Duranta Gold Mound last year. Last week, I was looking on eBay for some duranta seeds and found a seller using my picture from last year (seen below). You can see my car mirror and the link to my original posting.

From danielle's garden blog

So, clearly I need to be better about watermarking my images. But, the image is hosted on an "all rights reserved" site and was published on my blog which clearly states my copyright notice. Further, all images unless otherwise stated are always copyrighted by the creator...it's a law. But, when it comes to prosecution, the law is still pretty hard to use.