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Galphimia glauca

 
Galphimia glauca
thryallis

Common name thryallis
Family malpighiaceae
Life cycle shrub (Z8-10)
Flowers yellow (spring-fall)
Size 6'
Light sun-part shade
Cultural notes drought-tolerant
From seed Self-seeds sparingly in our garden

Low care shrub covered in yellow flowers throughout the growing season. It is popular as a background planting in wide borders, visual barriers, or foundation plantings (because they are easily pruned or sheared into a low hedge). We planted ours as a nice-looking smallish shrub in late May (photo below), and by early July it had not only grown a bit, but also became even more floriferous. Since then it has only grown larger and fuller. One of my favorite "new plants" since moving to Texas. They are root hardy to zone 8, but online sources say top growth may be killed by temperatures dipping below 30F. So I was surprised how well our specimen weathered the freeze into the mid-teens in January 2018 – it was one of the only plants in the garden to stay evergreen, and never missed a beat. It did suffer in the even more severe freeze of February 2021, losing all its leaves and smaller twigs – but it returned from the base and main trunks about a month later.
Native to Central America.

Galphimia glauca

It takes a brief break from flowering between January and April, but on the first of May, it is once again full of buds, just waiting to pop (with just a few already opened up in the photo here). The foliage stayed nice all along.

thryallis
Immediate aftermath of the '21 freeze – the leaves would all drop, and most of the top growth died
Galphimia glauca
Regrowth a month after the severe freeze of '21
thryallis
Young shrub, first planted
Galphimia glauca
Several years after planting our first specimen, I noticed several seedlings underneath our mother plant – these survived the 2021 megafreeze and were rearing to go by early April.

In our garden, this plant grows in the following areas: back fence border, houston front yard, right-fence nursery area

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