PlantFiles: Christmas Senna, Winter Cassia
Senna bicapsularis

Easy, vigorous growth, but beware....This plant will take over if it's happy. I've known it to tightly bind shutters to the owner's second story by interlacing its growth through the slats and to block a neighbor's access to her shed door as it spilled over the fence. Do not turn your back on it.

The winter cassia is a great plant for the fall garden in zones 8 or higher, when many other plants are winding down this guy just releases a mass of blooms from October through first frost. The 1" flowers have an orchid like appearance. The plant is the host plant for Sulphur butterflies. It performs best when in good sun. I prune mine to a height of 3 feet each spring and by the fall they are 12 feet tall, a good choice for a nice splash of color.

I planted three last year in zone 8b, they grew fast (now 8' tall) but tropical storm blew all the leaves off and they grew back, winter frost knocked all the leaves off (not grown back yet). It didn't bloom last year (first year in ground) and I don't know if I should cut it back this spring or wait for it to bloom on existing trunk and stems.

This Senna blooms late in the season, hence is sometimes called 'Christmas Senna'.

This plant is used as herbaceous perennial here in my garden, some years, like this year the flowers were late in the season, thus none were pollinated in time for seeds.

The plant can temporarily tolerate mild frost in early winters. It's a hostplant for sulpher butterflies.

I was given a few of these seeds in December 2006. I transplanted two of these plants and kept one in a pot. The two that are planted are now four feet high. The one in the pot just started blooming in March 2008. Beautiful plants!!


Just as an update on my Senna bicapsularis, I gave the blooming senna to a friend who is an expert in getting the plant to grow. The two I planted still haven't bloomed but they are now ten feet tall and a beautiful shrub planted next to each other. I can hardly wait for them to bloom so I can see what butterflies and insects are attracted to them in our area.


Thanks,

Chuck

Just when your SoCal garden is starting to expire and head into the winter funk, this plant flowers and warms up the garden. It is attractive even not in flower and can be trained into a small tree to about 10 - 15 feet tall. Mine seems to always have the pesky Argentine Ants on it and I need to use snail poison three times a year as slugs will invade it and destroy all new growth in the course of a few days. Other then the fact it does 'weed', I still find this plant to be well worth it in the garden. Depending on the plant it can flower from late September well into November.

Hi from natrgrl in zone 8b Abita Springs, La.

My Mother had to have this plant, so for a couple of hours
she and I drove around to every yard where I could remember seeing one trying to gather info to find out what type of plant this was. We did not succeed in finding out, however God is good and as we drove home we spotted them passing by a nursery on the way. Both of us purchased the plant. I actually like to see them grown like a tree as they are very unique looking. My Mom planted hers immediately because she is very diligent in these ways, I am not. So my little tree stayed in it's pot for quite a long time I'm ashamed to say. Truly I thought I had killed it. Winter had made all of its leaves fall off and it was rather cold out, so no I didn't even water it. I would not suggest making this poor plant suffer that way but for anyone considering one who may be worried about its survival let me assure you they are quite the survivors. I'm happy to say my tree is planted and thriving I can't wait for the butterflies and I'm thinking of getting one more, that I promise to plant immediately!

I have two growing in the yard for three years now. One on the NE corner, the other in the SW corner. Both plants are about 8-9 ft tall. They are low maintenance bushes with the beautiful yellow flowers providing winter interest. They bloom from November to early January.

A favorite larvae plant of sulphur and white butterflies. An oddity with the sulphur caterpillars that feed on the leaves from this plant. In the spring through early fall these cats are green and black. In the late fall when the plants are blooming the cats become yellow and black because they then eat the yellow flowers instead of the leaves.

In zone 10 I have not found a single offshoot of these plants anywhere in the yard.

In my pictured plant it's shown proped up. It has been replanted twice this year due to being blown over by storms Katrina and Wilma.

An interesting note to this plant is it attracts just about everything that flies, crawls, lands or rests in my yard. It's a bee hive of insect and bird activety all year round. Some of the strange things I see around the flowers are bright colored bees about 3/8 to 1/2 inch long. They have iridescent colors of green or blue or a goldish color bodies. They stop dead in mid flight and check out the flowers then zoom to another flower again stop dead in the air...seemingly suspended by thread. Occasionally I actually think they are looking directly at me. They are amazing to watch.

This plant was not doing well in my garden until I moved it to an area of full sun. It then grew to a height of about 6 ' in one season. I have interplanted it with Cape Honeysuckle (Tecomania capensis). These two plants have a similar growth habit and bloom just about simultaneously in the Fall in my climate. The mixture of the Senna's bright yellow with the bright orange of the Tecomania creates a very attractive color combination!

Beautiful yellow orchid-like flowers in fall and winter. Grows like a weed, even if killed by a freeze it will flower by next fall. It attracts sulfur butterflies to lay their eggs on the foliage. The caterpillars feed on the leaves. This leguminous tree also has another interesting feature-its leaves fold in at night and are even more attractive in my opinion. You can actually watch it slowly fold in its leaves at sunset.

Although the Christmas Senna is indeed beautiful in bloom, I find that it propagates too easily by seed. I have large patches of seedlings growing in various spots of my yard, too numerous to pull out unless I had hours of idle time on my hands. I am contemplating getting rid of this plant. I just have to decide which I prefer more: the cloudless sulphur butterflies it attracts and its beautiful yellow canopy or not finding it growing in thousands of places in my yard.

Senna bicapsularis is a fall bloomer

The flowers are also very attractive to bees and butterflies. The plant, a member of the Royal Poinciana family, can be found in almost all the tropical areas of the world. The tree can be kept as a potted specimen with judicious pruning. Makes an excellent small specimen for limited-space areas such as street sides or parking lots.