Shrubby vinca in the tropics/pomegranates

 Richard F. Dufresne wrote on 11/23/99 10:49 PM:

>Catharanthus roseus has important medicinal uses:  it is the source of
>several vinca alkaloids used in treating cancer.  

Some must be aware of this, if only because one of the major 
pharmaceutical companies ran a series of advertisements not long ago 
pointing out the known utility of several plants such as C. roseus for 
medicinal purposes and calling for the preservation of natural habitats 
in places as Madagascar (a generally hopeless cause) before other 
potentially beneficial plants are lost forever.

Getting back to getting C. roseus to bloom in B.C., I thought that part 
of Canada is known as the 'Sunshine Coast'. Perhaps Diane Whitehead's 
sizeable plant might be encouraged to bloom if removed from the 
greenhouse and set outdoors in the warmer months. But I must confess I 
have never seen a C. roseus in the Caribbean, Africa, or Madagascar 
growing as high as 1 m, much less 'about 2 m high' after pruning, and 
some of my plants have been in the ground under the tropic sun for more 
than fifteen years. Could the plant be misidentified?

As for pomegranates, when I was a boy not long after the Titanic went 
down they were known in at least one untutored part of the USA as 
'Chinese apples' and most ate them by simply quartering the fruit with a 
knife, biting into the quarters while trying to avoid the membranes and 
white spongy tissue, and then sucking on the seeds for a while. A messy 
business to be certain, almost as messy as eating mangoes out of hand. 

Warm regards,

William Glover
New York/Nevis, W.I.
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