That Giant Plant in Ciscoe's Yard

My merry band of four or five blog readers know that I like to take pictures of Ciscoe Morris's yard. I have not seen any of his TV or radio segments and I have not read his book (books?), so I don't know much about him, other than, apparently, he likes to say "oh la la" a lot. But he lives near a friend of mine, so I like to go check out his yard from time to time.

Anyway, Chuck (who knows far more about these things than I do) has commented a couple of times about a plant in Ciscoe's yard. When I took a photo of it in April, Chuck suggested that it might be a castor bean plant.



But then when I took photos in May, he thought it was probably something else. (He's right.)





This sunny morning I decided to stay in bed instead of going to the gym, and I leafed through the Seattle edition of the May Sunset magazine, which has an interview with Ciscoe Morris:

What is your current plant obsession?

I've got a lot of them. Right now, I'm crazy about Tetrapanax papyrifera 'Steriodal Giant' (also known as giant rice paper plant). It really is humungous. It has 4-foot-wide and 4-foot-long maple-like leaves on a 15-foot-tall plant. It looks so tropical.

Mystery solved!