Book Review: Hothouse Flower, by Margot Berwin

SPOILER WARNING: Contains spoilers for much of the first third of the book, and one spoiler regarding the end of the book, though I promise the last one doesn't really count as a spoiler.

If I had known what this book was about, I would never have signed up to read it. This could be relevant later, so try to keep it in mind.

Back in mid-July, Mr. Brown Thumb, via his @GardenBloggers Twitter account, posted a link advertising a free book in exchange for a review, open to garden bloggers. The original post has been taken down, so I don't know what, specifically, it said. If there was a plot summary, I missed it. The title of the book was Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, which to my hopeful and naive ears sounded like it was going to be about nine plants. I envisioned fun-but-meaningful nonfiction about, you know, Important Plants in History or whatever: cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, rubber, that sort of thing. No word which plants, or what the focus was going to be, but hey. It's free, I have a blog, I can read, why not.

And in my defense, the similar-sounding The Botany of Desire was more or less exactly about that, except four plants instead of nine. Nine Plants of Desire, Botany of Desire -- same thing, right?


So when I opened the package on August 2 and saw Hothouse Flower: A Novel on the front cover, in Barbie-aisle pink lettering, I panicked a little. I may even have said no, no, no, no, no aloud: I don't remember. The panic intensified when I flipped the book over and read, on the back cover:

Recovering from a heartbreaking divorce, Lila has a simple mantra: no pets, no plants, no people, no problems. But when Lila meets David Exley, a ruggedly handsome plant seller, her lonely life blossoms into something far more colorful.

Which looks at first glance like it's going to be the Lifetime Original Movie formula of the Damaged Woman Who Learns To Love Again Thanks To A Strong Yet Sensitive Hunk Who Sweeps Her Off Her Feet And Teaches Her To Love Herself Again, When, Suddenly: Babies! Thousands Of Them! or something along those lines.

I seriously considered trying to locate another blogger to hand the book off to. 'Cause that book is not my thing.

But before I did that, I wanted to check to see whether it was really as bad as I'd feared, so I read a few pages. It didn't blow me away or anything, but there were plants involved. I approve of plants. Also there were ruggedly handsome plant sellers, which I also approve of ruggedly handsome plant sellers. So I calmed down a little and read some more. And the first sixty-five pages went more or less okay. In a nutshell:

Our protagonist-narrator is Lila Nova, thirty-two years old, who works in advertising. She's just off of a divorce that was less traumatic, apparently, than just really, really unexpected: the marriage lasted four years, and then her emotionally-distant husband -- who had been emotionally-distant throughout -- told her he was leaving. We don't get much for details about the marriage, nor do we want any, because who has time to rehash the boring, painful past when there are hunky-yet-sensitive, ruggedly-handsome plant dealers ahead, but apparently the whole thing was deeply traumatic and painful in that blank, detail-less way that personal trauma never actually is.

Lila is thereafter sort of a wreck, imagining that her doorman pities her for her 32-year-old, manless, childless condition, which makes the simple process of getting in and out of her building fraught with emotional peril, bless her heart. I was worried for a while that this patheticness was accidental, and I was supposed to assume automatically that the only important thing in every woman's life is to find a man, marry him in a large, elaborate church wedding, and start having his babies, as per the Lifetime formula, but it's a deliberate characterization choice, and people comment on her desperation later. That may or may not make it better, but at least it's not accidental.

Strelitzia reginae. Photo by Lauren Chickadel, at the Wikipedia entry for Strelitzia reginae.
Lila meets a man, David Exley, who is the aforementioned hunky-yet-sensitive, ruggedly-handsome-non-metrosexual-manly-studly-man-with-a-heart-of-gold,¹ when she purchases a plant from him for her new, post-divorce place, which has full southern exposure all day long and floor-to-ceiling windows. She asks for recommendations, and Exley suggests a bird-of-paradise, Strelitzia reginae, promising her flowers in five to seven years and telling her it's from Hawaii.

So we're only at the top of the third page of the text and already we have problems.² 283 more pages to go. I continued to read, knuckles whitening.

One day, Lila happens upon a plant-filled laundromat owned by a peculiar older man named Armand, who is nice to her and gives her a cutting of an Oxalis hedysaroides rubra, or "fire fern." Armand says things like "The fire fern spoke to you straight through the glass" and has a secret back room containing Nine Super Special Mystical Magical Plants that he won't let Lila see, the nine plants of desire from the title. If she can get the Oxalis to root, he says, maybe he'll show them to her. (Even in context, this manages to sound like a euphemism for something filthy.)

Long story short, it roots, and Lila eventually tells Exley about it, and the Oxalis is so crazy valuable in the world of the book that he offers her $500 for the rooted cutting (Exley, besides being as excitable as a Jack Russell terrier puppy, is also unfamiliar with the internet, or he would know that Logees sells rooted 2.5-inch pots of O. hedysaroides rubra for $9.95.³), and gets her to tell him where this laundromat is, and she accidentally lets slip that there are Nine Super Special Mystical Magical Plants in a back room. So of course he, being excitable, and also (surprise twist!) a bad human being, then breaks into the laundromat to steal the nine plants, with a good deal of gratuitous destruction in the process (One is surprised that Berwin didn't give him a moustache to twirl. Moustaches are country, right?), which of course makes Lila feel very bad. Armand's surprising solution (surprising because it's completely ridiculous) is to make Lila come with him on a trip to the Yucatan, in Mexico, to find and replace these magical nine plants.

And this is the realistic (-ish) part of the story. I'm not sure whether my disbelief-suspenders snapped at the $500 cutting, or at Armand's solution to the destruction being to just go to Mexico to get replacements, which is just as nonsensical, if more subtly.⁴ But somewhere around this point, I knew the book and I were not going to get along.

From here on, the book stops pretending to have much to do with reality. Indeed, by about p. 128, Book and Reality are standing in the middle of the street in the pouring rain at 2 in the morning, knife trembling in the sobbing Book's hand as she screams obscenities against Reality loud enough to wake the neighbors, who call the cops. And then eventually the cops show up and take Reality to jail and we never hear or see him again.

Chicory, Cichorium intybus. One of the nine plants.
What Berwin does is, she takes the picture she's sketched for us in the first 70-90 pages, and turns the contrast and color saturation knobs up as high as they'll go. Nothing from here on out is ordinary. You don't just see a big rattlesnake, you see a rattlesnake with a head bigger than Lila's, coiled on itself in a stack of snake four or five feet high. When a new character, Diego, is introduced, he's not just a good-looking man, he's "the single most beautiful man [Lila] had ever seen." Diego's not just a keen observer of nature; he can ask specific questions of deer (to get directions to a specific plant) and get accurate, fast answers. And so on. This does make the story vivid and memorable, but what you get when you draw everything in basic, flat shapes and color everything brightly is a cartoon, and the book was plenty cartoony already.

Speaking of basic, flat shapes: you can sort of tell that the book was written with a movie in mind (or at least I thought it read like a movie⁵). The characters are mostly familiar stereotypes we've all come to know and love: the Exotic, Tightly-Muscled, Dark-Skinned Foreigner Who Is Magic Because He's Deeply Connected To Nature (Native American Version); the Petite, Mystical Dragon Lady; the Bleach-Blond Surfer Dude. Also the plot relies on ridiculous coincidences and certain ongoing stylistic tics⁶ in order to (barely) function, which is quite movie-like. Although there are no car chases, there are explosions. Sorta. Unfortunately I can't tell you about them more specifically, because there's no way to describe the scene without ruining a portion of the ending, but to me it read as so over the top that it was basically camp. If it helps, I have to watch James Bond films as basically camp, too, and Berwin has said she was aiming for an adventure story sort of thing, and you don't get much more adventurey than James Bond. So -- mission accomplished?

The movie resemblance isn't entirely bad. Though the plot doesn't withstand any kind of critical thought after the fact and is a veritable engine for producing Refrigerator Moments, the ridiculousness of it all also means that pretty much anything can happen at any time, so there are all kinds of outrageous twists and turns which are in fact legitimately entertaining and compelling. It's a quick read, and you never feel for a second like you know what's coming next, which is arrived at dishonestly but is still an accomplishment. And once you catch on to the fact that the story isn't occurring in this world, but is instead a story from some parallel, much more interesting, world where every plant is representative of female sexuality,⁷ everyone's a telepath, a houseful of furniture can be made by a single person in a matter of hours,⁸ anyone meeting an unmarried 32-year-old woman automatically pities and scorns her, and mail-order plant-purchasing hasn't been invented yet, it's not so bad. Things happen, it's unpredictable, and even if it's not remotely realistic, it's at least entertaining.

A lot of the other reviewers have made a point of saying that they do not like Lila. Specifically, they say, she's passive and lets the men tell her what to do all the time. This is true, but I didn't have a problem with that. To develop a character, the character has to start somewhere, after all, and I'd rather hang out with her for an hour than any of the other characters.⁹ She gets in a bit of dry humor (I most love Lila on page 100, where she and I had the same thought at the same moment), and although she does get a bit of humiliation for it, I have to approve of her on principle for being unapologetic about wanting to have sex. So much of the time in movies/books/TV/whatever the dynamic is, the man wants to have sex, but the woman doesn't because she'll be Sullied! Forever! so the man has to bribe and plead and generally wear her down until she finally gives in. At which point then everybody calls her a slut for giving in, or she gets married so people won't call her a slut, or whatever. In Hothouse Flower this dynamic is at least partly subverted: Lila gets to want sex, and the men get to demur. Though there is some tongue-clucking about how desperate and BOY CRAZY she is, nobody seems to think it's unusual or unseemly for an adult woman to want to have some consensual sex with another adult. So thumbs up for that.

Unidentified baby Zamia sp., probably Z. furfuracea. Z. furfuracea is one of the nine plants.
A lot of the other reviews (There's a list of the other reviews here, several of which are written by other garden bloggers, and about 2/3 of which are positive) have mentioned the plant information as being interesting, that it adds something to the book. I agree, and I was actually impressed that a lot of it was fairly accurate, if sometimes a bit distorted, like I said in footnote 2. Berwin did some research, and this makes me happy. There is one particularly horrible factual error, though, on page 95, that needs to be smacked down hard like . . . um . . . like a really smackable antelope¹⁰ or something. The error in question:

[Orchids] don't need soil. They don't need fertilizer. They don't even need a pot to grow in. All they need is air. . . . They're about as hard to grow as grass . . .

This is wrong. Really wrong. In fact it reaches nearly George-Bushian levels of wrongness, and will one day be published in the textbooks of graduate-level History of Wrongness classes, is how wrong it is. Some orchids don't need soil. All orchids need fertilizer to some degree or another. Some orchids don't need a pot. No orchid can survive on air alone. (Water is also important, remember?) And of course some (most?) of them are much, much harder to grow than grass. I mean, props to Berwin for researching at all, and I give her credit for usually being more or less right with the plant stuff, but that particular bit is trouble.

For a while, I thought my main problem with Hothouse Flower must be the magic realist element, that things happened in the book that wouldn't actually happen in life. When I thought about it more, though, I realized that couldn't be my problem, because I'm not a stickler for realism in my TV viewing or my other reading. I mean, some of my favorite shows are "Eureka," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Battlestar Galactica," and "Dead Like Me," none of which follow the established laws of physics, biology, etc. I'm fine with magic. What I eventually realized was that the characters are the problem.

Armand and Diego spend most of their time teasing Lila, about different things, and in different ways, but it's still teasing: they never actually treat Lila as an equal, someone who might have interesting thoughts and experiences of her own.¹¹ Exley really is just a one-dimensional Bad Guy without redeeming qualities (even his plant-care advice is suspect). Sonali (Armand's wife) and Kody (Lila's coworker) are both semi-likeable, though I found myself confused about why Kody, who seems to more or less like and respect Lila, is never considered as a romantic prospect. I mean, he has a penis: what else is there? At the very least she could invite him over a lot, to reassure the doorman. (You know how Carlos worries.) And in any case we spend very little of the book with Sonali and Kody, so that only helps a little.

By the end of the story, of our four main characters (Lila, Exley, Armand, Diego), only one has been significantly changed by the events of the book, and it's not in the sense of having become wiser or stronger or more empathetic as a person. The other three have had experiences, yes: mind-blowing, life-changing, near-death sorts of experiences. Lila's nearly killed one person (accidentally), and watched someone else die in an exceptionally vivid and gruesome way (also more or less accidental). She's been close to death several times herself. But everybody's still the same people they were when we first met them. I know it's an adventure story, but you can have action and character development at the same time.

And then. Then, we get one big reveal that basically unravels the entire book, about fifteen pages from the end, which had me variously grinding my teeth in frustration, throwing the book at the wall, cursing Berwin, Mr. Brown Thumb, and everybody else who had a hand in me reading this book, and weeping, openly, like a tiny baby.¹² This will look like a spoiler, but it's not actually that big in context.

Armand lets slip on p. 274 that he actually had multiple cuttings of the Nine Plants¹³ back in New York the whole time, the entire trip to replace them was a deception, and (most alarmingly) that he'd intended to keep her in Mexico until she found the tenth Plant of Desire, however long that took.¹⁴ He doesn't give her so much as a "sorry I repeatedly put you in mortal danger," either.

And once you start tugging on that particular thread, the entire book falls apart. Armand already knew a Magic Indian Who Can Ask Deer For Directions To Plants. Why would he need Lila in the first place? And, if the deer don't know, and Armand does need Lila, he still didn't need any plants but just the one special tenth one, so what's the point of dragging Lila around with him to collect the other nine first? Just tell her about number ten and turn her loose, right? Why waste everybody's time? And so on. The whole damned book unwrites itself at p. 274.

Convallaria majalis, lily of the valley. One of the nine plants.
The reason my telling you about this doesn't really count as a spoiler is because it has no consequences whatsoever. After Armand makes this admission, instead of pulling a Taser out of her purse and shocking his ass into unconsciousness, tying him up while he's out, and running as fast as she possibly can to the nearest police station to have him arrested for kidnapping and god knows what else, like she should have done, Lila just chuckles and the two of them talk about what a wonderful adventure the whole thing's been, how lucky she is to have found Twoo Wuv with Diego, and how much she wants to stay in Mexico with Armand and Diego forever.

(Awwwwww.)

At which point Armand tells her he's bought her a ticket back to New York the next day, so she should go say bye to Diego.


OH MY GOD MARGOT BERWIN WHY DO YOU HAAAAAAATE ME?¹⁵

So yeah. Refrigerator Moments, one after another. I didn't even notice p. 274 until I was making a final proofreading/polishing run through the post on Tuesday afternoon. And then I was like, holy shit, Armand is a fucking sociopath! Does Lila know? Ohmygod does Berwin know? Does this mean the real-life Armand is also a psycho?¹⁶ Is Berwin in danger? Should I be calling the police? What in the sun-dappled hell just happened here?

So. [deep breath]

I really and truly tried to like it. Really, really hard. I tried to appreciate it on its own terms, and made significant progress for a while, I think, for a book I would ordinarily never have picked up in the first place. It's not without its positive qualities. But Sweet Holy Carlos The Doorman, I cannot recommend this book to anybody.

-

Photo credits: All photos my own except the book cover (which I guess comes from Random House, ultimately), the Strelitzia, as noted in the text, and the headdesk photo, which appears to be a screencap from "The Colbert Report." It came up repeatedly in a Google image search for "headdesk," so I used it.
Hat tip to The Indoor Garden(er), for alerting me to the existence of the IMDB.com page.

¹ The words "rugged country-sexual" are used on page 4, approvingly. In context, it's clear enough what this is supposed to signify -- a macho but soft-spoken, strong but gentle, handsome but not overly coiffed guy who nobody would ever think was gay in a million years, unlike the metrosexuals (people are still using the word "metrosexual?") surrounding Lila in New York -- but as a person who actually lives in rural middle America, i.e., "the country," I'd like to let Ms. Berwin know that genuine "country-sexual" is veeeeeeeeeeeery different from what she's picturing. I'm just saying.
² Even in really good light, like Lila apparently has in her apartment, flowers aren't likely indoors. It's not, strictly speaking, impossible, but I would be very, very surprised. This might just be Exley trying to make the sale, of course. Also the Hawaii thing is wrong no matter how you look at it -- Strelitzia cut flowers could, conceivably, be flown into New York from Hawaii, but an actual potted plant almost certainly comes from Florida, because everything always comes from Florida, unless Florida is frozen or under water, as happens occasionally.
Also, the species comes from South Africa, which we know because just two pages before this, in the plant-related paragraph which introduces the chapter, Berwin tells us that it's from South Africa. It's not clear whether Berwin's confused about the origin of the species -- unlikely, since several times I was ready to pounce on something botanical I was just sure had to have been a mistake, and when I looked it up, I found out that Berwin was right and I was wrong -- or if this is supposed to be a subtle way of saying that Exley's not trustworthy. If it's the latter, then I'm surprised Berwin didn't point it out to the reader later in the book.
The least interesting explanation is that Berwin just thought it more colorful and exotic for a potted plant to be flown across half an ocean and a whole continent than to be trucked up I-95 from Florida. It is indeed more colorful, but it's also way, way less plausible. Similar problems happen later on, with a Chinese windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) "from China" and a croton "from Jamaica." In the case of the Trachycarpus, Exley actually says it was shipped from China. Sorry, but no it wasn't. Not if Lila can afford to buy it.
³ Though delivery to New York City is $10 for 6-9 day delivery, and $21 for 2-day delivery, which is outrageous for a single 2.5-inch plant. Especially considering that Logees is in fucking Connecticut, just 3 hours away by I-95. Perhaps the plants are delivered in a limousine. But my point is that Exley is only a three-hour drive away from all the Oxalis hedysaroides rubra he could ever want, and I'm pretty sure you can get from New York to Connecticut for less than $500. So he's an idiot.
⁴ For reasons which should be perfectly obvious to anybody who knows anything about anything, countries frown on people coming in to dig up their endangered plants, which some of the "nine plants of desire" happen to be. Even if none of them were endangered, the U.S. doesn't want people bringing plant products into the country, either, this being how plant diseases and pests get spread, not to mention invasive species. So both of the central events in this part of the book -- Exley's theft of the plants and Lila and Armand's trip to the Yucatan to replace them -- are both so contrived and unlikely as to make the entire story ridiculous.
⁵ You don't have to believe me. But I really had guessed this. It was confirmed in the comments of one of the other reviews: the book has been optioned for adaptation into a movie by Sony Pictures. That doesn't mean the movie will ever get made, but it could. (It has an imdb.com page already.) Whether or not I'd go see it if it did would mostly depend on the casting. Julia Roberts has apparently already claimed the role of Lila, which makes me want to see it a little less, but Bradley Cooper or Alan Tudyk for Exley would bring me right back on board again. Neither is particularly rugged, but a little stubble, a little CGI, and I'm sure you could turn either one into the Marlboro Man. So.
⁶ The most problematic two being:
A) every character who isn't Lila can read Lila's mind. She'll think something, and then another character will respond to the thing she thought, even though she hasn't said it out loud and it's not a particularly obvious thing to be thinking in the situation. Once or twice, this trick can be used to good effect, by making people seem magical or mystically-connected -- we've all had those moments -- but when everybody can do it all the time, you start to think that maybe Lila only thinks she's thinking silently to herself and in fact announces her every thought aloud without realizing it, and this whole tale is actually the delirious rambling of a heavily-medicated woman in a padded room, in an institution whose library contains only books about plants and some Lifetime movies recorded on VHS.
B) Characters are frequently described in ways that make no sense. I'm not talking about cliched character descriptions, or vague descriptions, I'm talking about nonsensical descriptions. At one point lateish in the book, Exley -- oh yeah, Exley comes back -- is described as "He's a man who knows about hidden doorways. He knows about openings, and about the spaces in between things. He knows how to slip in and out of those spaces." This is meant to come across as profound and mystical, I think, but I can't even parse what this would mean in a mystical context. I mean, being able to fit through openings which are large enough to fit through is neither a personality trait nor a special skill, and you don't need to be attuned to the universe in order to do it. Plus by this point we've seen enough of Exley to know perfectly well what sort of person he is, so telling us that he must pass between solid objects, instead of going through them, is really not that informative.
⁷ Oh yeah. Basically every time a new plant is brought up, it's described as being able to reflect, intensify, or otherwise refer to female sexuality. This happens often enough that after a while I wanted to throw up my hands and say jeez, Margot, we get it, okay, it's a sexxxay book. Stop dropping the anvils already.
Also the one main sex scene, though fairly brief, is kind of agonizing. Sex scenes are famously hard to write, sex being extremely subjective, so I'm inclined to give it a pass, but you wouldn't believe the dialogue if I told you.
And then there's a dream sequence that some reviewers have objected to on the assumption that it was supposed to be sexy but wasn't. I'm not that bothered by it because I'm willing to give Berwin the benefit of the doubt: maybe she wasn't aiming for sexy. Even if she was, though, see above re: sexy writing being difficult.
⁸ A throwaway line on p. 211. It doesn't appear to be a joke, in context, and as best as I can recall, it's never even mentioned again, so I have no idea what it's doing there. It may be my favorite detail in the whole book, though, because it's so absurd that I find it hysterically funny. I picture the character's daily routine going something like: Get up. Make coffee. Drink coffee. Gather leaves for new furniture. Dispose of all of the old furniture. Weave a houseful of brand-new furniture. Shower. Get dressed. . . .
⁹ Exley would probably be my second choice -- we could always talk about plants -- though I'd have to choose my words carefully. I wouldn't know what might get him wound up, and if I said the wrong thing, then the next morning I might find out that my favorite garden center had been robbed, vandalized, and burnt to cinders.
Ideally, I'd also have enough advance notice about our meeting to order and receive a big box of Oxalis from Logees first.
¹⁰ (Rhetorical only: I do not advocate the smacking of antelopes. Though there are some out there who are asking for it.)
¹¹ I actually wonder a bit if the tendency of the reviewers to hate on Lila isn't because of the example set by Armand, Exley, and Diego.
¹² Exaggerated for comic effect. The teeth-grinding did happen; the book-throwing did not; the cursing is ongoing. The weeping is exaggerated, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't moved to a bit of despair for the human condition.
¹³ In this universe, all plants are propagatable by cuttings -- Strelitzia, bromeliads, orchids, Zamia, everything. If only.
¹⁴ Which is all the more alarming because two pages, just two pages, before, Exley had accused Armand of manipulating Lila just so he could find the Tenth Plant, and points out that Armand has endangered Lila's life several times over, and Diego's at least once, just for this stupid plant, and Armand doesn't really care about Lila at all, etc. And Armand is denying it and telling Lila no, Exley's a crazy person, a bad guy, don't listen to him, he lies, yada yada. But Exley was in fact dead fucking on. I mean, we don't know how Exley knew. I suppose the safe bet is telepathy, considering. But he wasn't wrong.
¹⁵ (I mean: why did Margot Berwin hate me before I wrote this review. 'Cause I can totally understand if she hates me afterward.)
¹⁶ There's a real-life "good friend" named Armand, whom the character is named for. Whether the real person is also a manipulative, selfish bastard with a callous disregard for the lives and feelings of others, I don't know. Probably not. Though if one of Berwin's family members happens to read this, maybe you could please do a background check or something? For me? Just a little one.

Random plant event: Magnolia seeds or something?

Something I don't believe I'd ever seen before. Not 100% sure on what it is, even, but the plant is definitely a Magnolia, and these have to be either seeds or fruits. Freaky-looking.


This seems especially appropriate, as my whole world has been getting weird for the last week or two. I mean, my actual personal living-arrangement-type life is the same as it ever was, and I'm accustomed to some strangeness, but . . . I can't even explain.

30ish Caucasian women are turning into teenage Filipino girls, I'm being offered money to link to something that was either the Canadian yellow pages or a close facsimile thereof (turned it down: it made no sense), people are e-mailing me to demand cuttings of stuff (they will be disappointed, needless to say, but this hasn't happened before so it still counts as weird), other people's books are unwriting themselves (will be explained tomorrow), and there are a couple other things that might happen later, that I can't actually talk about yet. (Neither of them is a book deal, so just put that hope back in your pocket. I'll let you know if/when it's time to get excited.) I mean, it's not particularly bad weird stuff. Just people behaving in inexplicable ways, plus some unprecedented happenings.


September's not ordinarily a kooky time of year for me, so I can only conclude that this is October's influence creeping in early. Or maybe March. This would be just like March, to lull me into a false sense of security and then boom! show up in September, when I'm not expecting it.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Rainbow Dance 'Akazukin'

Not the kind of Dendrobiums I'm used to, exactly; the shape seems subtly different in a way that I'm unable to be precise about, and I don't recall ever seeing a Dendrobium with veining like that.

I'm nearly as burned-out on Dendrobiums as Phalaenopsis, because where I used to work, Dendrobiums were the main other thing, besides Phals, we used to get in (it was something like 70% Phals, 20% Dendrobiums, and 10% other), but Dendrobium has one thing going for it that Phalaenopsis doesn't (so far), which is that I've been able to rebloom a Dendrobium. Only barely, granted. (But more than once, which must surely count for something.) But still. Barely is better than not-at-all.

And actually, now that I think of it, my mother, whose track record with indoor plants is . . . I guess the word would be intermittent -- has actually had a Dendrobium for a while and it's done okay. I don't know about reblooming, but with Mom, survival is quite an accomplishment all by itself.

I might quibble with the namers of this particular variety a little bit. Last I knew, it took more than two colors for something to be considered a rainbow. (Even the dehydrated marshmallow rainbows in Lucky Charms have three, and they're made by mentally-challenged leprechauns.) But they're fine flowers, even so.

Random plant event: Persicaria virginiana flowers

I was sent this plant by a reader who may or may not wish to identify him/rself, and planted it around the base of the maple (Acer saccharinum) in the back yard. This is less because the base of the maple needed something planted around it, and more because when I googled around for information about the plant, I found somebody saying that they'd planted it around the base of a tree where nothing else would grow, and it had done fine there. Having no good ideas of my own, I copied that one. And it worked.

I was trying to get a shot of the full plant, but it was apparently just a really bad time of day, lighting-wise, 'cause this wound up looking like crap.
I also divided up the clump I received, figuring that maybe they wouldn't all make it, but if there were eight of them, the odds were pretty good that at least one would. It turns out that this was an unnecessary precuation, because they've all rooted and grown, even the ones the husband ran over with the lawnmower earlier in the summer. (He didn't know he was. He knew I'd gotten plants, but hadn't gotten a good look at them, and it's possible that I hadn't told him any of them had been planted outside, much less where. And they look sort of clovery when not flowering, so.)

They've been blooming for a few weeks; I just hadn't bothered to get a picture until now. Because the stem is thin and the flowers are tiny, my camera is reluctant to focus, so it's hard to show what the flowers actually look like. This is the best I have:


Which is good enough to show that the flowers are strangely colored, the upper half being red and the lower half white, with the line running through the middle of some of the petals. I can't think of another flower that does that.


Some sources say that it spreads somewhat aggressively, but when I read around, most of the people I found talking about it didn't seem too bothered by this. Plants are fairly easily pulled up, and reseeding gets to be a problem, you can just cut off the flower spikes. I'm not too worried.

Unfinished business: Glycine max pods

Hiatus was . . . strange. I can't go into the details yet, but things were weird enough that I wound up not really getting anything done on the blog, beyond a little bit of work on the next plant profile (Ficus elastica).

Which didn't seem like that big of a deal on Friday night -- I still had a whole day to work on it -- but I felt unwell all Saturday, which is when I'd planned to, you know, blog. So we have the continuing story of the soybeans in the field behind our house. I took this picture on 21 September.


As you can see, the leaves have begun to die back. Most of them are actually a lot more yellow/brown than you can see in the picture. I knew that this would happen at some point, of course, but I didn't expect it to be so abrupt. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that they were a really deep, dark green. It's like someone threw a switch.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Eric Young x wallissii

Phragmipediums are interesting, and I'd be interested in one if I thought I could keep it going, but the advice I found on-line about their care suggests that if I had one, sooner or later I'd let it get too dry, and then it would croak. (Some species naturally live under water for part of the year, said one source. The same source said that as a rule, if you're in doubt about whether to water one, you should.) They are "not for beginners," numerous sites tell me. Fine then. I do appreciate the above flower, though. Weirdly pretty.

Eric Young is a cross of P. besseae var. flavum with P. longifolium, and then this is a cross of Eric Young with wallissii. There are interesting stories to be told about P. besseae in particular (Besseae is the source of the orange coloration in this flower, and kind of a big deal, if you're the sort of person who can find Phragmipediums a big deal.), but you'll have to wait until January (when there's a P. besseae picture scheduled) to read about that. Or Google it up for yourself. It's a depressing story, alas, though I suppose the ending could be worse.

In any case, I'm going on hiatus, and will be back on the 26th (Sunday). See you then.

ZOMG WANT.

Those who don't follow Plant Daddy should head over there and check out this new Aglaonema, which he says will probably never be named and sold. To die for. If the slow winter growth truly is the only problem the plant has (it's the only problem he mentions, anyway), it would be tragic for them not to mass-produce them.

I don't know what they should name it. Give me time; I'll come up with something.

Also while you're there, check out the recent archives for pothos (Epipremnum aureum) flowering, seed-collecting, seeds, and seedling plants. It doesn't happen very often, so this may be the only way you're ever going to see it.

Random plant event: Abutilon seeds

Wow. That was fast. It seems like just yesterday I was noticing the seed pods for the first time.

Of course, I wasn't really looking for them until recently, so by the time I noticed, they probably were pretty far along in the process already. Since then, the 'Bella Vanilla' and 'Bella Red' have also flowered, and I've been crossing flowers left and right, which means there will be lots more seeds in the near future. (At the moment, the 'Bella Pink' has six developing seed pods on it, mostly 'Bella Pink' x 'Bella Red' crosses, because 'Bella Red' flowered first.)


Once the seeds are ready to go, the seed pod splits open; you can see the seeds through the gaps. I put a sandwich bag over the branch containing the pod and tied it very loosely with a twist-tie. (Like, very loosely. I pretty much just folded it in half like a hairpin: I didn't even close the loop, for fear of damaging the stem. The sandwich bag just needed to be there; it didn't need to withstand hurricane-force winds or anything, so just barely folding it was enough.)


Not too long after the pod began to split, the seeds started to fall out, and then I sort of flicked the pod through the bag until the rest of them fell out. I wound up with forty seeds from the one pod --


-- though somehow when I planted them in a plug tray, I wound up with a count of 41, so either I missed a hole in the tray or there's one seed that didn't make it into the above picture.

I didn't know exactly what to do with the seeds, so I basically guessed. Wet down a bunch of soil, made holes of various depths, put the seed in, covered the seed up. It's in a bright but cool spot under some fluorescent lights in the basement, under a plastic dome. The seeds were very fresh, so if this doesn't work then I may have to give up on Abutilon propagation. I'll let you know.

On the other hand, if it works really well, and I get, say, 90% germination, then that leaves me with 36 more hungry mouths to feed, plus another couple hundred on the way once the other seed pods mature. If I really worked at it, I could have a thousand Abutilon plants by Christmas.

Not that that's the plan, or that it would be in any way a good idea. There are still whiteflies outside on the pineapple sage, tomatoes, and coleus, all but howling at the door to get inside (it's faint and very high-pitched, but it's howling), and if they were to succeed, it'd be beyond stupid to have a thousand Abutilons in here; I'd be fighting whitefly forever. So I don't know what my plans are for the Abutilon seeds, but I intend to accumulate a bunch of them anyway. Maybe they'll come in handy somehow.

Sheep Breeder (Aloe vera)

Those readers who only look at the plant profiles for the sake of finding interesting and weird plant-related trivia, I'm going to do you a favor and give you the weirdest stuff up front. My new favorite piece of houseplant-related trivia of all time, replacing my Calathea-related favorite from a couple years ago,¹ is this: Aloe vera gel, the liquid taken from the centers of Aloe vera leaves, is sometimes used to dilute sheep semen. (Let that sink in for a second.)

You may ask, Why would anyone ever want to dilute sheep semen?

 

[pondering]

 

Well I think the real question is why wouldn't you want to dilute sheep semen. What the fuck are you going to do with concentrated sheep semen?²


I don't know why knowing this tickles me so. Perhaps it's just that it was so unexpected. Aloe vera has been used in a lot of different ways through the ages, so I suppose I maybe shouldn't have been that surprised, but . . . well, you know, I wouldn't have thought of overly-concentrated sheep sperm as even being one of the world's problems, much less anticipated that Aloe vera might be the solution.

But so now that we've gotten that out of the way, let me introduce you to Aloe vera.

The first thing to know is that it's sometimes called Aloe barbadensis, and in fact I've been calling it that for the last couple years, because I thought the name had been officially changed. It wasn't until I started researching this post that I found a lot of places, including some that have a lot of credibility with me, like GRIN and davesgarden.com, calling it A. vera. As I didn't come across any explanations for why the name change or any definitive answer on which was correct, and as vera is more familiar to most people and marginally faster to type, I'm going with vera.


There are a lot of things sort of like that about the plant, though. Not only does it have two more or less interchangeable names: the good, pure, familiar vera ("true") and the more difficult, scientific, weirder barbadensis ("from Barbados"), either of which could be correct at any given moment, but we also don't know where it came from, or even whether it's a species at all, originally. Coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides³) has name-change and obscure-origin problems too: these things happen.

The prevailing theory, as far as I can determine by reading around, is that it originated along the north coast of Africa⁴ and was spread around all over the place by humans. There are some indications that it may have started out as a hybrid, too: it has certain strong genetic similarities to a handful of other Aloe species that are mostly from northeast Africa.⁵ Whatever its origin, A. vera now grows pretty much anywhere in the world that's warm and dry enough for it, including Hawaii, India, Australia, Paraguay, South Africa, Jamaica, and southern Europe. Some of this is deliberately cultivated, and some is naturalized.

Aloe vera in mass production, location unknown. Photo by sdm9093, found via Wikipedia.
As with any even remotely medicinal-type plant, people have tried using Aloe vera against pretty much every condition imaginable. In a lot of cases, nothing particularly useful happened, but there are two conditions for which Aloe vera seems to be especially helpful, using the word "helpful" kind of loosely. Both use the leaves, but different parts of the leaves.

The bulk of the leaf contains a gel which is not only a great sheep semen diluent, but it also soothes and speeds healing of burns. This is the use most of us are most familiar with, and Aloe vera's usual excuse for being in people's homes. It's also a mild antibacterial and antifungal, which has led to its use as an aquarium water additive, which is not quite as weird as the sheep semen but is pretty close. The aquarium thing doesn't appear to be widespread at all, though.


Aloe gel has also been used for all kinds of other skin conditions, and even quite a few non-skin conditions: as far as I could tell from sifting through the information I found, there's not a lot of scientific support for using Aloe medicinally aside from treating burns, and Aloe products are not universally helpful when you're talking about burns. For example, although Big Aloe would have you believe that Aloe vera gel can act as a natural sunscreen and prevent burns, this is not supported by science. (Try it for yourself, if you like.) It's also unproven for treating burns caused by radiation (X-Rays, radiotherapy for cancer, etc.), apparently, though I found many people willing to say otherwise, and the skin is too damaged in a third-degree burn for Aloe gel to help much. Still, your normal household burn is likely to be just a first-degree, so they're worth having around.

The antibacterial action I mentioned earlier has been scientifically demonstrated, and bacteria in petri dishes have died and everything, though it's not clear how useful that actually is in real-life situations. Tests on how quickly wounds healed when Aloe vera gel was applied, for example, have given conflicting results. People also sometimes drink the juice to get rid of stomach ulcers (which are caused by bacteria), but again, it's unclear how much that helps.


As for every other product that makes the claim, there's no evidence that rubbing Aloe vera gel into your skin will reduce wrinkles and make you look fifty years younger, but you probably already suspected that.

There's such a long list of other health problems that Aloe vera has been used to treat that I'm going to stick it in a footnote. I do not necessarily encourage or endorse the use of Aloe vera, topically or internally, for any of these conditions. People have tried it, but that doesn't mean it worked.⁶

Basically everybody recommends that pregnant women or nursing mothers not use A. vera products; pregnant women shouldn't because it can trigger contractions and miscarriage, and nursing mothers shouldn't because it's not known if any chemicals from the plant are expressed in breast milk, or how it might affect an infant if they were.


There's a second, somewhat less pleasant, main use, from the layer of cells just underneath the surface of the leaf, though, which contains a bitter yellow chemical called aloin.⁷ Aloin, taken internally, is a laxative. It basically irritates the lining of your colon so that it contracts more often and harder, pushing everything along faster, and at the same time it interferes with the body's ability to reabsorb water from the intestines. So, once everything's been pushed to the appropriate place, it's a lot wetter (and therefore softer) than it would otherwise be. If everything works the way it's supposed to, that is. If you overdo it, you wind up with painful cramping and diarrhea, which would be a strong incentive not to overdo it.

However! The U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibited production of over-the-counter laxatives containing aloin in 2002, due to concern about its safety and the potential for side effects.⁸ They still permit its use as flavoring (for certain alcoholic drinks; I don't know which ones), or in "herbal supplements," which is just a tiny, tiny taste of the reason why the whole herbal supplement market in the U.S. makes me really uneasy.⁹ Other species, including A. ferox (also sometimes grown as a houseplant or garden succulent), also contain aloin, and in the past, they were also used in its manufacture. People also occasionally drink Aloe vera juice, either on its own or mixed with other juices, and although these products don't use the aloin-containing layer, trace amounts of aloin may be present in the final product; heavy consumption of Aloe juice can lower blood potassium to dangerous levels, among other things, though I'd think you'd have to be trying pretty hard to give yourself that kind of problem.

A few remarkably unlucky people also find their skin irritated by Aloe vera, specifically the yellow aloin-containing layer, and get rashes and stuff. (Which is too bad, because you know what's really good at clearing up skin irritation?)

So the plant does have some legitimate health-sustaining credentials, but you don't want to go throwing it into everything all willy-nilly just because it's Natural and therefore Good For You, because it's got a bit of a dark side too.

Note the leaf in front with the brown line on it where it touches the pot. This will be important later.
The appearance of the plant is also a bit two-faced. Maybe even three-faced. Very young offsets are usually green or blue-green with white spots, with leaves arranged in two stacks opposite from one another. As they age, leaves remain spotted but start pointing their leaves in all directions, forming rosettes. This middle phase is how plants are usually sold. At some point after that, if they're happy, there's a second transition when they lose the spots and become huge. This confused me once at work; someone brought in a plant they said was an Aloe vera, in a big pot, but it didn't look like one to me -- it was much too big, didn't have spots, and was yellowish-green instead of bluish-green. The yellow-green was explainable if it had been getting a lot of sun; Aloes frequently turn reddish in bright light. But I didn't actually believe it was an Aloe vera until a few months later, when it flowered (yellow, tubular flowers on tall stalks) and I was able to check the flowers against the internet, and then it produced offsets which were obviously Aloe vera offsets, so I became a believer then.

A few sites call the spotted and non-spotted forms distinct varieties of the plant, but they're obviously not stable varieties, since one changes into the other over time, see the above picture.


Care for Aloe vera is pretty straightforward succulent-plant care, nothing terribly tricky:

LIGHT: More is better, and ideally full sun, but plants can get by on less if they have to. One of my plants is in a filtered sun / bright indirect spot in the plant room, and has been doing fine with that. It's maybe not growing as fast as it would like, and it's not as blue as it would be in brighter light,¹⁰ but it does fine. The others are under very bright artificial light, and do well there. They're equally flexible outdoors, though in full outdoor sun the leaves will redden. This is normal, and will go away if the amount of light drops. Plants that have been grown indoors in lower light will sunburn if suddenly placed in bright outdoor sun.

Aloe vera as an outdoor ornamental. The original photo is by Wouter Hagens and is public domain; I've cropped and resized. Via Wikipedia.
WATERING: Typical succulent watering. Use a fast-draining, fast-drying gritty potting soil. Drench the plant, then wait for it to get completely or almost completely dry, then drench it again. In the winter, water less often, or not at all (see TEMPERATURE and PESTS).

TEMPERATURE: Outdoors, Aloes can handle brief light freezes -- sometimes. Accounts vary. It looks like once you go below about 50F/10C, the odds of a plant surviving start to drop, particularly if the soil is also wet, hence the need to water less in the winter.

I'm not aware of any upper limit on temperature (they are from northern Africa, after all), though I assume there must be one, and one person in the comments at davesgarden.com said that they're more prone to root rot if watered when it's hot. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me (Northern Africa! When would it not be hot?), but I don't have any actual personal experience on the matter, so I suppose it could be true. If you can stand the temperature, your Aloe probably can as well.


The gel is said to lose potency when heated or exposed to air, and doesn't store very well as a result. This probably doesn't matter to you if you're just breaking an occasional leaf off of your plant at home to treat burns, though it might make a difference in how you should store products containing Aloe vera.

HUMIDITY: Not much of an issue for this plant.

PESTS: Not especially prone to pests, though scale and mealybugs are always possible. Root rot is also a common problem, if plants are too wet, particularly if it's also cold.


PROPAGATION: Plants will eventually self-propagate through offsets. Although the plant used as the example is actually an Alworthia,¹¹ not an Aloe, the basic procedure from this post works just as well for A. vera; I've done it myself.

The impression I get from the way people talk about them, and from my own personal experience, is that a plant's inclination to offset is mainly a function of how much light it's getting. Outdoor plants in warm climates are said to be practically a pest, they offset so much. My indoor plants under fluorescent lights have started to offset a little bit, despite still being babies themselves; the one in the plant room, getting less light, hasn't offset at all.


GROOMING: Not a lot of grooming to be done. I find that occasionally leaves will develop flattened sections, especially near where the leaf rests on the edge of a pot. Once that starts, I'm not aware of anything you can do to reverse it, but it will eventually spread across the width of the leaf. Sometimes it stays like that, and sometimes it dries out and turns black and brittle, at which point you can pull off the end.


I don't know specifically what causes this, but my suspicion is that it must be mechanical injury: the ones that get moved around most seem to be most prone to doing it, and often it begins where leaves touch their pots, which suggests that there must be something special about that spot. Bruising is all I can think of. If anybody has a different theory, I'm all ears -- none of the research even mentions this, never mind explaining it. (UPDATE: Oh. Actually one of them did. It says that black spots on the leaves are caused by overwatering. We might be talking about different kinds of black spots, though.)

FEEDING: Normal houseplant fertilizer, according to label directions, though you can skip winter, especially if your plant is going to be in a cold spot. They don't exactly go dormant -- if you have a spot that's warm year-round, they'll grow year-round -- but if it's cold enough, you won't be watering that much anyway.

There aren't any cultivars of Aloe vera as far as I could find, which is kind of surprising. I mean, you'd think with a plant that's been cultivated for thousands of years would have accumulated some interesting or pretty mutations, but if they're out there, they hide well.

Aloe vera is also one of the plants which have been tested for their ability to remove volatile organic chemicals from air. I'm not terribly impressed by this (I suspect that if you tested the species used as houseplants, you'd find that they all clean air to some degree or another), but some people are, so I mention it.


I remind the reader also that Aloe vera will be useful during the zombie apocalypse, mostly for those whose zombie-proofing includes flamethrowers. And even without zombies, any apocalypse is going to be hell on the skin. Can't hurt to have a couple Aloe veras around. More than that, you'll be prepared if there's a sheep semen apocalypse.¹²

I can't quite visualize what a sheep semen apocalypse would look like, though the parts I can imagine are very disturbing indeed. It's definitely not the kind of thing you want taking you by surprise.

-

Select references (The list of everything I looked at, whether I used it or not, would be too long and pointless, and would include a lot of advertising for beauty care products that don't deserve free advertising.):

Wikipedia (Aloin)
Wikipedia (Aloe vera)
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center (Aloe vera) (medical/technical)
Poisonous Houseplants (aloin)
ILoveIndia.com (questionable info about medicinal uses)
Zanthan Gardens (blog post about outdoor Aloe vera flowering in Austin, TX)
Guide-to-Houseplants.com (care)
FlowersInIsrael.com (mostly historical stuff I didn't use in the profile, but interesting)
PlantCare.com (care)
Davesgarden.com (comments are more informative than the profile)
Wignet.com (.pdf about a case of a woman who gave herself hepatitis with Aloe vera tablets "in the hope to delay aging")
University of Maryland Medical Center (medical/historical)

Photo credits: Mine except as otherwise noted.

¹ (that bats sometimes sleep in the rolled-up, newly-developing leaves of Calathea spp., in their native habitat)
² To answer the question seriously, though: it has to do with artificial insemination. A single ejaculate from a ram contains enough sperm to inseminate lots of female sheep, but if you use it all up on one female then obviously a lot of it has gone to waste. And who wants to spend more time jacking off sheep than they absolutely have to, right?^a So, you find something to dilute it with, and then you can inseminate many, many sheep, instead of just the one. Why and how Aloe vera gel came to be used for this purpose, as opposed to something simpler like plain water, I have no idea, and it's not necessarily an incredibly widespread practice -- the source didn't say -- but still. How can you not love knowing that?
          ^a (I'm fairly certain this is not how sheep semen is actually collected.)
³ (Except that now it might be Plectranthus scutellarioides. Having gone to the trouble of learning Solenostemon, I intend to use it for at least a little while longer before switching to Plectranthus.)
⁴ The eastern part of this range, along and around the Arabian Peninsula, overlaps with the home range of Coffea arabica and some Adenium species. Its original range is also thought to extend as far to the west as the Canary and Cape Verde Islands. Barbados, of course, is nowhere near any of this, which makes me wonder how and why the A. barbadensis name happened.
⁵ Most of these aren't species you've probably heard of -- the strongest links were to A. perryi, A. forbesii, A. inermis, A. scobinifolia, A. sinkatana and A. striata. Striata is the oddball: it's from South Africa, while the others are from Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. Striata is also, as far as I know, the only species in the list to be deliberately cultivated on any kind of noticeable scale.
I couldn't find an answer for why the similarities lead people to think it's a hybrid. It seems like the simpler explanation is that it has a recent common ancestor with A. perryi and the others, which would be easy enough to do, since they all live in the same place already. But apparently the DNA suggests a hybrid origin, or that's somebody's pet theory, or something.
⁶ Heartburn, long-term management of blood sugar levels in diabetics, allergies, acne, psoriasis, shingles, high blood lipids, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, herpes, asthma, fungal infections, ulcers, gingivitis, blisters, insect bites, rashes, vaginal infections, [male] genital sores, pain, conjunctivitis, hemorrhoids, dry skin, sunburn, frostbite, eczema, arthritis, baldness, the plague, fever, bladder infections, kidney infections, insomnia, leg cramps, and on and on like that.
Inappropriate use of Aloe vera can lead to: low blood potassium, blood in the urine, thyroid problems, hepatitis (reversible if the Aloe is discontinued), hypoglycemia, slower blood clotting, severe abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and probably other stuff.
It is just a plant, remember; it's not magic.
⁷ Technically it's a pair of chemicals called aloin A and aloin B. The difference is already way past the scope of this post, but if you really care, you can also probably understand the Wikipedia entry on Aloin so you should just go there.
⁸ According to one source, the specific reason was that they think aloin might be carcinogenic, and wanted to stop sale until someone can prove that it's not. I didn't find anything specific about why they think this, but molecules with large flat regions like the anthraquinone part of aloin can often slip themselves into the spaces between bases in DNA, distorting it and causing it to be misread by the cell in ways that lead to cancer later. This is also way past the scope of the post, but if you're interested, Wikipedia's page on intercalation (the fancy name for molecules fitting themselves in between bases in DNA) should tell you what you need to know.
I emphasize that we don't actually know whether this happens with aloin, and even if it did, that doesn't mean that products containing Aloe vera juice or gel will give you cancer. Aloe vera leaves being harvested for gel or juice are sliced up in a way that removes the outer, aloin-containing layer. So your shampoo, sunscreen, shaving lotion, etc., are all safe and will not give you cancer. Or, if they give you cancer, it's probably not the Aloe vera content that's responsible, anyway.
⁹ Not the husband, though: he takes some. Don't know which specifically. He's had, in the past, a bad experience with an aloe-containing "herbal supplement," though, so we don't let those in the house.
I at one time took St. John's Wort for depression, though I suspect it was just an expensive placebo. While I did get better during that period, I also started taking it at more or less the lowest moment of my life, following a couple of fairly big life upheavals. If I'd taken circus peanuts for the depression instead, I'd probably have seen just as much improvement. (Check out regression toward the mean.)
I'm fine with the idea of herbal supplements, but I think they should have to demonstrate in scientific, double-blind tests that they do what they say they're doing, and that they should be regulated to make sure that they contain the active ingredients they say they contain. At the moment, the producers of herbal supplements are not legally required to do either one of these things, which is why there's the disclaimer on all of them:

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

I.e., "use at your own risk," basically. Which is fine and everything, but it doesn't prevent them from making health claims, it just means they have to make really vague ones, like "boosts the immune system" or "provides energy."
You use regular pharmaceuticals at your own risk too, the difference being that there's supposed to be proof that they work, and they're supposed to be checked regularly to make sure that they contain the stuff that was shown to work, and you have to have at least a cursory conversation with two supposedly smart, highly-educated professionals (doctor and pharmacist) who can warn you if they're not likely to be good for your particular situation or if there are concerns about safety. The FDA could be doing a better job, it's true, but even a crappy FDA, plus doctors and pharmacists, is better than the honor system, which is essentially all you've got with the herbal supplement crowd. The FDA at least doesn't usually allow pills full of lead, arsenic, and pesticides to go out for sale, after all. Some herbal supplement companies are said to be more conscientious about this sort of thing than others, but I don't know which ones, or how much better, or whether this is true at all.
¹⁰ The blue coloring of Aloes, and lots of other succulent plants (Sedum morganianum, some Agaves, etc.), is a layer of wax produced by the plant, confusingly called "bloom," which reduces moisture loss and reflects excess sunlight. It also helps keep dirt and water off the leaf. Bloom will rub off, if plants are handled, which doesn't especially hurt the plant, though it does make it look less pristine. Plants grown in lower light may produce less bloom in order to collect more light, which I think is why my plant room Aloe vera is greener than the ones in bright fluorescent light in the basement.
¹¹ Aloe species can hybridize both with one another and with plants in the related genera Haworthia and Gasteria. The Aloe x Haworthia hybrids are usually called Alworthias, and the Aloe x Gasteria hybrids are Gasteraloes.
The post calls 'Black Gem' an Aloe because I thought it was at the time. I've since found out it's an Alworthia, but it's a fairly time-consuming affair to go through the whole blog to change a name. It'll get fixed eventually. (UPDATE: It was.)
¹² ("What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? I'm gonna get in there and dilute the sumbitch, that's what I'm gonna do. GERONIMOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!")