Cowardly Lion (Adenium obesum)

(This is the sixth and final plant profile in the Wizard of Oz series.)

I find Adenium obesum a frustrating plant to have to deal with. It's not so much that they're difficult to keep alive -- as far as I can tell, so long as you don't overwater them, they'll stay alive -- as that they're just absurdly easy to frighten. Which raises the question, how do you know when you've frightened an Adenium? My answer: when it drops all of its leaves. And how often does that happen? Pretty much constantly.

Yeah, this is pretty normal.

I have more experience with them at work than I do at home; the one time I've attempted them at home thus far, the plant defoliated more or less as soon as it got through the door, and I got angry at it and threw it away. This was, I now realize, an overreaction: the plant probably would have come back if I had tried. (On the other hand, I can't say I regret missing the chance to have a leafless stump sitting around the apartment, either.) They've been bigger frustrations at work, though.

We got a batch in in June that were in really magnificent, full bloom. Some had light pink flowers, some had "red" (really more of a dark hot pink) flowers, they were all leafy and healthy and awesome. So WCW and I were like, gosh, these'll sell like hotcakes, let's put them up toward the front so everyone will be able to see them.

It was a good idea in theory, but of course they all lasted about a week and then started throwing leaves and flowers and buds all over the place, necessitating a clean-up and a hasty move to a less accessible part of the greenhouse. We waited for them to get their act together, which took a few months, and then when they started blooming again, we moved them back. Almost immediately, they got spider mites (and probably also overwatered), dropped all their leaves, and went back to the back, out of the main sales area, where they've been since.

So, you know, if Adeniums drove cars, they'd all have this bumper sticker:

Picture created with sign generator at RedKid.net.
Outdoors in warmer climates, it's a different story: people keep them outside in pots, and not only do they do fine there, but they bloom continuously (or nearly continuously), and everybody loves them and thinks they're the bestest, most perfect plant ever!1!1!!!1!eleven!11!1 Greenhouses are apparently not acceptable substitutes, though.

As far as sales go, well, they sell pretty briskly when they're in bloom and everything. Of course, then there are questions to be fielded from customers about why their plant defoliated, and what they're supposed to do with it now, and sometimes that gets awkward. I understand, of course, having been there myself, and I try to sound reassuring and let them know that this is not necessarily a big deal, the plant's just gone dormant, and yes, it will resprout again in the spring, and yes, it can still flower, and no, I understand that you wanted more than just a stump, and so forth.

The crashes aren't even inevitable. If you provide your plant with the appropriate, Florida-level amount of heat and light (and maybe also humidity), you can keep yours going all year long, so long as you don't do anything to startle it in the process. But, you know -- try explaining to a customer that they can have their flowers year-round only if they invest in a bunch of lights and heaters and extra equipment. They lose interest quickly.

On the other hand, I didn't realize until I started researching for this post that these are also crazy popular. I mean, we're talking, Hoya- and Saintpaulia-level popular. People loooooove Adeniums. Clearly not everybody minds having a part-time plant.

This means, of course, that since I've already tipped my hand about not liking them much (it was #5 on the worst houseplants list), and since there's a lot of conflicting information about them out there (it's not like with the Saintpaulia profile, where there was a lot of information but it basically all said the same thing: everybody thinks they know the best way to grow Adeniums, and nobody does it the same way as anybody else), anything I say is going to be disagreed with by a ton of people, a situation to which I am quietly resigned. You can find other perspectives at mrbrownthumb or Water Roots.

For me personally, I find them disappointing. Some of this, I'm pretty sure, is that I was somewhat misled about what to expect from mine, but even had I known about the dormancy thing, dormancy's not supposed to begin in August. And pests (spider mites in particular) are a problem regardless. So no, I don't recommend this plant, particularly not if you're looking for something permanent, for a spot indoors. I'll give you the best information I've got anyway, and you shouldn't necessarily take my experiences to mean that you can't or shouldn't make an attempt if this is a plant you really want to grow. Everybody else says it's easy, actually. It's just that, you know, it's not necessarily going to be all pretty flowers and shiny green leaves.

I won't argue that this isn't a pretty flower. It's an awesome flower.

Adenium as a genus is from East and South Africa, plus a little bit of the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, the name itself comes from the Arabic name for the plant, Oddaejn, which means Aden, with Aden being the old name for Yemen. Common names range from the cynically salesmanlike ("desert rose," "mock azalea") to the obscure ("Sabi star") to the ridiculous ("impala lily," "kudu lily"). It is of course not related to roses, azaleas, or lilies (to say nothing of impalas or kudus), and is actually in the Apocynaceae, the family of Nerium oleander, Plumeria spp., Pachypodium spp., Mandevilla spp., etc., which family I discussed at boring length in the Pachypodium profile, q.v.

Specialists disagree about how many species are in the genus: one (kinda extreme) school of thought is that obesum is the only species, and the variability of the plants around the continent (and they are highly variable, differing in size, flower color, and general trunk shape) merely points to the existence of a lot of subspecies. The opposing view is that different populations are different enough to count as separate species, and the taxonomists in this camp have assigned a variety of other names to these plants (Adenium arabicum, boehmianum, multiflorum, obesum, oleifolium, socotranum, somalense, and swazicum).¹ Depending on who you know, you might be able to get hold of a plant by one of these names, but it may or may not be an actual species. Care should be at least mostly the same, regardless, as these are all from similar climates.

Adenium obesum is grown both for the flowers and for the sculptural,² thickened trunk. The trunk is an adaptation for storing water during the prolonged dry season (or, in some cases, the habitat is just dry all the time, and there's not really a wet season and dry season, in which case it's for storing water whenever there's water to store). The roots are also thick: they disturb me in kind of the same way that Buddha's-hand citrons disturb me. (See a picture at davesgarden.com.)

The flowers are the main draw, though, and may appear at pretty much any time of the year, as far as I can determine: I don't think there's been any point between June and December when we haven't had at least one flower going at work (though the smaller, 4-inch plants are far less likely to flower, in my experience), and they are supposed to be perpetual bloomers when grown in warm climates. Indoors, of course, they're not going to bloom during dormancy.

So how are you supposed to take care of one, then?

Adenium defoliation in three . . . two . . . one . . .
LIGHT: Indoors, you want full sun. Period. In fact, outdoors, you want full sun, too, probably, though people do manage to grow them in outdoor shade. If you don't have full sun indoors, don't bother. Seriously.

WATERING: The general rule of thumb indoors seems to be to treat these like a regular tropical plant in the summer, like a funny-shaped smooth rock in winter, and ramp up watering in the spring and bring it back down in the fall. Some people who grow Adeniums don't water at all between October and April, and this works, I'm told, just fine.

They also need very lean soil, with very little capacity to retain water. This is not so much important during the summer (although they can be overwatered to death in the heat of the summer, it doesn't seem to be common), but in the spring and fall, it's a big deal. (In winter, you're safest not watering at all, though it's unlikely that anything bad will happen if you water once or twice. The catch is that if you water, the plant is going to try to come out of dormancy, so don't wake it up until the conditions are right to grow it, or else it'll just wake up, look around, grow a couple leaves, and then panic and drop them.)

It's also probably a good idea to use a clay pot, instead of plastic (clay dries out faster), and if you're offered the option, a deeper pot is better than a shallow one: the roots go down further, and get larger, than you'd think. Younger plants usually need fairly frequent repotting, and have been known to break old pots if they didn't get a new one quickly enough. As a general rule, repotting is a spring-only deal: repotting in fall or winter is likely to end badly, and repotting in summer might be okay, but it didn't work out so well with the one I bought, so I hate to recommend it.

HUMIDITY: Mostly irrelevant to the plant, though higher humidity may help keep the spider mites at bay.³ Dryer air might be preferable during the winter -- the less moisture, the less risk of rot, is my logic -- but if you're like most people, dry air isn't something you'll have to work at, and it's not necessarily helpful. Don't sweat the humidity, is the gist.

TEMPERATURE: Heat is not a problem at all. They actually seem to really like heat, and can handle temperatures at least into the 100s F (38-43C) with no problem. Cold is another story. Different websites give really different information, but it appears to me that about 50F (10C) is as low as you can go and be completely safe. Plants will sometimes survive light, brief freezes but will probably lose branches in the process (and frost-damaged branches can provide an opening for rot, so surviving the freeze itself doesn't guarantee that the plant will make it). If your plant has been accidentally frozen, there's a decent chance that something might be salvageable, depending on how cold, how wet, and for how long.⁴

PESTS: So far, the only pests I've witnessed have been spider mites, which unfortunately can develop into huge, writhing balls of mites so quickly that it's not uncommon to hear a sonic boom, as the growing sphere of mites begins to expand faster than the speed of sound.

That may have been slightly overstated. But only slightly.

They are also attractive to the oleander caterpillar, which as you can guess from the name is a caterpillar that mostly feeds on Nerium oleander.⁵ Caterpillars are really only worth worrying about if you leave your plant outside for part of the year, though, and they're killed by cold weather so they're not normally found north of Florida anyway. Mealybugs are also a concern, according to a commenter at the davesgarden.com page on this plant (scroll down to the comment by "CropDoc"). The same commenter advises against using insecticides on Adenium (Why? He doesn't say.), and recommends alcohol, applied by cotton swab, which sounds like a fun way to spend an afternoon.⁶ Then of course there's rot. And scale (for which the treatment should be the same as for mealybugs). And whiteflies.

This is the "red" Adenium mentioned above. Nice, but I like the pink-edged white one better.
PROPAGATION: I'm not sure where one would buy seeds, but Adenium obesum can apparently be grown from seed fairly easily, and seed-grown plants will develop the bulbous trunk from the beginning. Sometimes, plants will spontaneously produce seed pods as well, which are 8-12 inches long when mature and may contain 50-60 seeds. These are apparently very easy to sprout: most will germinate within a week. One can also take stem cuttings, which are apparently not that difficult either, though cuttings have to be allowed to dry and callus before planting and do not immediately develop bulbous trunks (I think they still do eventually, but I was unable to confirm this.). See mrbrownthumb for more detailed instructions on how to propagate Adenium obesum from cuttings.

It's common for the more interesting cultivars to be propagated by grafting cuttings onto the caudexes (caudices?) of more common varieties, because plants do not necessarily come true from seed. This is not likely to have any effect on the casual grower, though I can maybe envision a situation where a plant that was cut back could resprout new stems from the base, which would have the flower color of the stock plant, instead of the desired cultivar. Not terribly likely, though.

It's worth pausing to note that, like most (all?) of the plants in the Apocynaceae, Adenium obesum is poisonous in an especially hardcore and not-to-be-fucked-with way (hunters have used arrows coated with Adenium sap;⁷ if it can take down an antelope, it can knock you dead too). So be careful if you're going to try to take cuttings. One person at Garden Web reported that a friend of theirs worked in a nursery and sometimes had to handle large quantities of bareroot Adeniums, and that "he gets a metallic taste then nauseous just from touch[ing] so many, he now [wears] gloves when handling." So if you start to get a metallic taste in your mouth and feel nauseous, you should stop messing with the plant and go wash your hands, at the very least. Or you could just wear gloves to start with.

Pretty much speaks for itself.

GROOMING / SPECIAL CARE: Well, you'll need a broom.

The most special special-care issue with Adenium is learning how to manage the annual cycle: when to start easing back on the watering, when to start watering again, and so forth. This is difficult stuff, though the penalty for getting it wrong is not that bad, and basically amounts to -- you guessed it -- defoliation. Getting it really wrong results in rot, which is more of a problem, obviously, but also less likely.

During the research, I ran into some people asking if there was a way to promote caudex growth. The advice they were given (in this Garden Web thread) was to plant the plant a little bit higher with every repotting (only about an inch), so that over time the roots are gradually raised out of the soil. Judging by the spectacular picture at that link, this is a good way to get an impressively twisted plant.

Plants are said not to get significantly taller after a few years of growth: if you want a tall plant, you have to get it tall while it's young. After that, they mostly just get wider.⁸ Species other than obesum can get to be tall, though (ten feet is not unheard of).

FEEDING: The usual recommendation is to feed with a balanced but weak (20-20-20 at quarter-strength, e.g.) fertilizer with every, or at least most, waterings when the plant is actively growing. Some people prefer a couple full-strength feedings during the growing season.

When possible, it's probably best to try to obtain plants grown near your home, rather than going to a box store that's had them shipped in from across the country. There are two reasons for this. One, shipping is fairly traumatic for the plants. The plants we got in at work dropped all their flowers and a good chunk of their leaves all at once not so much because of the move itself, but because of how the move was done: in that particular case, I think the plants were watered, wrapped in brown paper sleeves, loaded into cardboard boxes, and then stuck on a truck for three days. You'd be scared too. (It's a wonder they didn't rot.⁹)

Two, the interests of the grower and the interests of the consumer do not necessarily overlap. Just before I started writing this post, I e-mailed Cactus Blog to ask just what the hell it is that Adeniums want, and why they're such a pain. Peter was kind enough to e-mail back, and his advice was incorporated into the above care instructions, mixed with various bits and pieces I've gathered from elsewhere on the web. But there was one thing I didn't see addressed anywhere else. Peter:

. . . the key problem with most adeniums you'd get in are that they're pushed in greenhouses to bloom, and they grow what we take 5 years in 1 year or so. So they're not healthy to begin with.

My least favorite of the three cultivars we've had at work. The others make this one look kinda washed-out and tired.

You'd expect stressed-out plants that are pumped full of steroids¹⁰ and made to grow faster than they naturally would to sell about as well as plants that are grown in a slower, sturdier fashion, and obviously they're going to take much less time and work to produce, so you'll get them cheaper, too.¹¹ The catch is that such plants may also have a much tougher time adapting once they get to your house, and so you might wind up losing more plants, having to work harder to keep them alive, getting weird-shaped growth as they adapt, or etc. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again with a plant from a different establishment. Or the same establishment at a different time, possibly.

I don't know that I'll be retrying. I try to avoid plants that are exceptionally mite-prone (though there are some grandfathered exceptions, the main one being Cordyline fruticosa), and plants that I have had bad prior experiences with, both of which apply here. And I'm also leery of anything that's semi-deciduous (I even worry a little about Ficus benjamina and F. religiosa.). So the odds don't look good. But I've changed my mind about plenty of plants before, and I imagine these will be especially tempting when they start blooming again, whenever that is. We'll see.

-

References: species/subspecies designations from University of Wisconsin. Origin of name from valentine.gr. Poison-arrow Euphorbia species ID from African Ethnobotany.

Photo credits: Cowardly lion via shawnnacox.com; plant photos are my own.

¹ Please don't feel obligated to care, but: Tropicos, which I had somehow neglected as a resource until reminded of its existence by exoticrainforest.com, lists arabicum, arboreum, boehmianum, cotaneum, honghel, lugardii, multiflorum, namaquanum, obesum, oleifolium, socotranum, somalense, speciosum, swarzicum, swazicum (possibly a typo of swarzicum, or vice-versa?), and tricholepis, plus several subspecies of obesum, some of which overlap with the species listed, e.g. Adenium socotranum and Adenium obesum var. socotranum.
² "Sculptural" in the Henry Moore sort of sense.
³ There's some confusion on this point, as I've seen it said that humid air can actually make mite problems on Adenium worse. Might have been a typo, though. This isn't beyond the realm of plausibility, but it's not the usual way of things: generally, mites like hotter, dryer air.
⁴ In fact, if you want to see a flame war erupt over the proper winter temperature for Adeniums (and who among us doesn't?), check out this Garden Web thread. It's pretty incredible. It's also, in the end, fairly unilluminating, and ends without any obvious victor, so the question remains unanswered. In general, I find that when people who have obviously grown the plant in question disagree about its care like this, it usually means that either method is acceptable, and the debaters have just had different experiences for some reason or another. Only rarely is somebody just plain wrong.
⁵ Not particularly surprising, as Nerium oleander is a close relative of Adenium obesum. For more on the oleander caterpillar, interested readers should check out Wicked Gardener.
⁶ (Sarcasm.)
⁷ Interestingly, or maybe not interestingly: the hunters who do this don't use the Adenium sap by itself, but mix it with the sap of a Euphorbia, and sometimes many other ingredients. The Euphorbia in question is one I'm not familiar with (E. subsala), and appears to be more a thickening agent and adhesive, as opposed to being an active ingredient.
⁸ (Like people!)
⁹ They shouldn't be sending us specimens of rot-prone plants right after watering them, of course. My guess is that plants in Florida heat either have to be watered so often, or get rained on so much, that any plants the grower picked would be at least somewhat wet at any moment. This is not good, and it's caused us problems before, but there's likely nothing that can be done, really, and I can't say we lose a lot of plants to it: it just makes me anxious.
¹⁰ Metaphorically speaking: it'd actually be fertilizer and maybe the occasional hormone, not steroids. I don't think giving plants anabolic steroids does anything for them, and it certainly wouldn't make them grow bigger/faster/musclier.
In one sense, though, Adeniums are probably already pumped full of steroids: I couldn't track down a structure or even a definitive name for the toxin(s) in the plant, but they were often compared to digoxin, the toxin in Digitalis (foxglove), which does contain the particular arrangement of carbon atoms called the steroid nucleus: three six-membered rings and one five-membered one, arranged just so (ignore the numbers):

This particular arrangement shows up all over the place in nature, with other atoms attached to it, in everything from cholesterol to testosterone to yams to poison-arrow frog venom. So technically, Adeniums're already full of steroids, just not the ones you were probably thinking of.
¹¹ As I am occasionally reminded at work, plants cost us money even if they're just sitting there, not doing anything: they have to be heated, fed and watered, none of which are free, and then also people have to be paid to watch them.

Scarecrow (Cryptanthus cvv.)

(This is part 5 of the Wizard of Oz plant profiles.)

In the movie, the Scarecrow doesn't get much respect. Had he not spoken, Dorothy would have walked right by him. He can't intimidate the crows at all. He gets set on fire once, and he's apparently brainless to boot. Not a curriculum vitae that inspires confidence.


Similarly, Cryptanthus spp. aren't high-profile in the houseplant world. We sell a few, occasionally, but customers walk by them all the time. This isn't particularly surprising: it's difficult to find a suitable display area for small plants. (Dionaea muscipula, venus fly-traps, pose similar issues for retail, but they're actually worse, because they have fairly specific cultural needs as well, so we're limited as to where we can put them before we ever consider whether the customers can see them.) When we do have a good spot for them, they tend to sell well, though they're never going to be a bread-and-butter¹ plant.

One gets the impression, though, that Cryptanthus don't necessarily want a lot of people knowing where they are: they kind of work at being inconspicuous.^{2, 3} The varieties people grow as houseplants are terrestrial⁴ and small, forming low rosettes on the ground a few inches across. (Though there are larger varieties, and I've seen plants maybe a foot in diameter for sale around here before -- at Wal-Mart, if I recall correctly -- so just because it's a Cryptanthus doesn't mean it's going to be tiny. The smaller ones, in my experience, do seem to be more available than the larger ones -- I really have no idea whether it's because they're easier to produce, easier to ship, more in demand, or hardier, but it's surely got to be at least one of those things.) Gray, green, brown, black, and white are common leaf colors, and some of those can be very interesting (especially the brown, which is a really unusual color for a living plant), though the better sellers tend to be red, coral, or pink.


Different sources give different numbers of species: this page from the Florida Council of Bromeliad Societies (FCBS) lists thirty-nine full species in the genus Cryptanthus, and 404 named crosses or sports or whatever; I'm inclined to go with their numbers because they seem kind of obsessively (in the good way) interested in precise identifications. On the other hand, "Dr. David Benzing, bromeliad expert extraordinaire, recognizes 42 species."⁵ So who knows. I confirmed some suspicions about what plants I had on the FCBS site, though I failed to identify everything I didn't know already. (They probably do have pictures of the remaining unknowns: on the other hand, life is too short to spend it looking at Cryptanthus pictures.)

As best as I can determine, all Cryptanthus species are native to Brazil, though the specific habitats in question are fairly diverse (dry and shady, on top of rocks, salty wet coastal spots), and the internet is divided about whether they're primarily from southern Brazil or eastern Brazil.

I can't say all Cryptanthus varieties are suitable for growing indoors, since I haven't met but a fraction of them, but any that you're likely to find offered for sale should be. They should also be safe for people with children and pets: to be best of my knowledge, they are not toxic (bromeliads aren't, in general: in fact, I don't think I could name a toxic bromeliad if my life depended on it⁶). They do try to be scary: every Cryptanthus I've seen so far had small, pointed serrations long the leaf edges, but they're too soft and small to do any actual damage, unlike certain other bromeliads I could name; I don't know what the Cryptanthusesuses⁷ think they're deterring.


This is also, I think, the only houseplant I've ever lit on fire.

It was accidental, if that helps.

(Er, semi-accidental, that is: I meant to light something on fire, just not the plant.⁸)

Provided that you don't light them on fire, and maybe even if you do, Cryptanthus are pretty easy houseplants. I've never had any of mine really do anything objectionable (perhaps because they fear immolation if they do?): no pests, no rot, no massive shedding of leaves. I find them pretty much indestructible, though they have a reputation for being semi-difficult, and I realized as I was writing this that I've been doing a lot of stuff "wrong" with mine, and they're still fine. There have been a few failures to propagate, but aside from that, you know. So I don't have a lot of confidence in my rating, above, as it applies to other people. Your mileage may vary:

LIGHT: Cryptanthus spp. usually require some direct sun, though not necessarily a whole day's worth. One of the ones I have now is in a west window and has done well there for a while, though it is turning white instead of pink at the moment, because we've been having a dark winter so far; another is near a very bright artificial light (one marketed for Seasonal Affective Disorder⁹ which has been bright enough to fool cacti and crotons), and it's maintained color and done well in that spot. Less light won't necessarily kill your plant, but it may make it change colors: white instead of pink, or green instead of brown, and new growth may be weak. Too much light can burn them, but this is not likely to happen to any plant kept indoors so I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. I mean, really, acetone fires are probably a bigger danger.

WATERING: In my experience, Cryptanthus are not especially picky about when they get watered. I personally let mine get nearly but not completely dry between waterings, which winds up being approximately once a month for the one in a 4-inch pot and once every two weeks for the one in a 3-inch pot.¹⁰ That said, most of the websites I ran across recommend even moistness, with no drying out (some of them insisted on this, even), and the plants at work tend to be more on the wet side than on the dry side, so I'm not sure what to recommend here. I suppose I'll go with the experts, and start watering mine more often, but you may be able to get away with growing yours drier if you find you really have to for some reason. They do have certain water-conserving adaptations, see below.



TEMPERATURE: Not really that big of an issue: most varieties will tolerate any temperature found in the home (anything between 32-100F / 0-38C), though they're happiest in the 60-85F (16-29C) range, like most people. Plants kept in warmer conditions will need water much more often, just so you know.

HUMIDITY: Does need to be high for the plant to do well and grow continuously, though it doesn't seem to be completely unreasonable about it either. I guess. We don't do anything special here, but as I've noted previously, the apartment's humidity situation is not normal (we generally run between 40-60 percent at all times; the windows are fogged up all winter long), so if you have a normal home, especially if you live in a climate with particularly dry winters, a terrarium might not be a bad idea. Or at least a humidifier or pebble tray or something.

PESTS: I've never seen any pests on a Cryptanthus, nor did I run across anybody else warning about anything terribly specific. Mealybugs and scale are really the only pests I could imagine posing much of a problem. Plants that are kept too wet for long periods can rot out, and rot is a fairly routine problem with trying to root offsets, see PROPAGATION.



GROOMING: Very nearly zero. Your results may vary, but it's a pretty rare occasion when mine so much as lose a leaf.

FEEDING: One of mine got by for a year or better without fertilizer before I finally gave it a little bit. I don't think that it's a particularly urgent need, though. (Willing to be corrected on this point if anybody knows differently.) Bromeliads in general are poisoned by copper and boron, so avoid fertilizers containing these if you do intend to fertilize. Unlike most bromeliads, Cryptanthus do not absorb significant nutrients through their leaves, so foliar feeding is not going to be useful. The abovelinked bromeliad-chicago.org site recommends a slow-release fertilizer in the soil, along with occasional very light fertilizer delivered in the water. I did eventually give mine a slow-release form, at less than the recommended strength, and that's done okay for us so far.



PROPGATION: A Cryptanthus will flower the same way a lot of bromeliads do, with a bunch of bracts to begin with, and then true flowers popping up out of the bracts for a period after that. The true flowers aren't especially interesting - they remind me of Tradescantia flowers more than anything: three petals, white - and last only for a day at a time (also like Tradescantia). I don't know what happens next if a flower has been pollinated. I mean, seeds, I assume, but I've never seen the process, so I can't tell you. But even if the plant has not been pollinated, this is usually the signal for the plant to begin producing pups.



In the varieties I've seen so far, the pups usually pop out near the top of the plant, from just inside the spots where leaves join to the main stem:


But some plants will also produce pups from beneath the soil, as well, just to hedge their bets, I suppose:


The thing I find fascinating about the pups is, they're only very loosely attached to the plants, and this attachment gets looser as the pup develops. So once a pup is a good size (the usual recommendation is 1/4 the size of the parent plant), rock it back and forth gently, and it will detach. I expect that pups not deliberately detached by a human would probably still eventually push themselves off the parent plant: in nature, they roll a short distance away and then root.



This is the part that gets tricky for indoor growers, because a plant that's buried too low, or kept too wet, will rot rather than rooting, and even if you get it all right, rooting takes a long time. There's no secret perfect way to do this as far as I know, but so far, the most effective way I've seen is what WCW did with some during this last summer and fall: she put sphagnum moss in a clay saucer and stuck the offsets in the moss. We watered the moss occasionally, the Cryptanthus formed roots in a few months, and then we moved them to regular soil. I've also tried sticking them directly into soil, which has worked better at work (so far) than it does at home, where it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. I've tried vermiculite at work, too, but too recently to report on how well that worked.

It seems like a lot of work, to me, to go to all the trouble of producing a pup and rolling it off the mother plant without any assurances that it's even going to land right-side up, but I suppose we don't expect serious planning from the Scarecrow.


And now, because the "brainless" Scarecrow was actually the smartest one of the group (according to the book -- not so much the movie), here are a couple odd little Science! tidbits that were new to me, as reported by killerplants.com:

1) They conserve water by taking up carbon dioxide primarily at night, the reverse of most plants.¹¹ Most plants take in their carbon dioxide during the day because it makes sense to take up the raw materials at the time you're going to be using them, but some or all species of a lot of houseplants, including the genera Cryptanthus, Crassula (jade plants, among others), Ananas (pineapple), Euphorbia, Hoya, Zamioculcas, Agave, Aloe, Gasteria, Sansevieria, and Yucca, take up carbon dioxide at night, combine it with a compound in the cells called pyruvate, which a couple of steps later turns it into the four-carbon acid, malic acid.¹² The malic acid hangs around until morning, when the plant splits it back into carbon dioxide (which is then used in photosynthesis like any other plant would do) and pyruvate. (Oh come on, this isn't that bad; you can follow this.) The pyruvate is then free to store another round of carbon dioxide the next night. This process is called Crassulacean Acid Metabolism, in a rare moment of scientific lucidity, because it was first discovered in the Crassulaceae, it involves acids, and it's a type of metabolism. Usually it's abbreviated CAM.

But, you may be saying, why, Mr. S? Why would a plant bother to do this? It's not like there's no carbon dioxide to pick out of the air during the day, is there?


Well no. But -- do you notice anything special about the plants that do this? Anything, in particular, about the leaves of plants that do this?

CAM is yet another adaptation for plants that live in hot or dry (or both) environments, to minimize water loss. Most of the plants in the above list have thickened leaves, small leaves, or no leaves, most of them have a waxy coating to reduce the amount of water they lose to evaporation, and they use CAM to keep from losing water through their pores when they're trying to collect carbon dioxide. Instead, they take up carbon dioxide at night, when it's cooler and the relative humidity is higher. If it's very dry, they might still lose water that way, but when water is hard to get, anything you can do to conserve it and use it more efficiently is a good thing.

Cool though all this is (Oh my god! You learned a tiny amount of biochemistry! Pyruvate! Wheeeee!), I'm left a little puzzled. It's fine if water conservation through CAM is part of the Cryptanthus experience, but -- what for? They don't have especially thick leaves (at least not as compared to a Hoya or a Crassula: I suppose they do have thicker leaves than most bromeliads), and if you listen to people, they apparently demand humid air and moist soil. So what's the point of requiring lots of moisture around and resorting to CAM to conserve water? Why conserve it if it has to be all around you anyway? Why demand large quantities of something around you if you don't even use it all that fast?

[crickets]

Very well then.


2) The other item of interest is about chromosomes. While people have created a lot of hybrid Cryptanthus varieties, the genus as a whole is also, like some other plants (notably Syngonium podophyllum and Hedera helix), prone to throw out new sports all on its own, every once in a while, and there's an interesting possible reason for this, assuming that the above link, and Wikipedia, are trustworthy, which . . . well, I know. But I'm going to tell you anyway.

Most bromeliads, as I mentioned in the Vriesea splendens profile, have 25 pairs of chromosomes, or else numbers very close to 25 or a multiple of 25 (24, 25, 26, 50, 100, etc.). All Cryptanthus, though, have only 17 or 18 pairs, at least the ones anybody's counted so far. This is a little weird, but they still seem to more or less function, and it's not necessarily the case that they're actually missing anything much: on evolutionary timescales, it's not unheard of for chromosomes to link together or break apart in a stable way, so chromosome number can go up and down. If you think of chromosomes as books, this is like somebody taking Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter (the two original chromosomes) and printing a version that has them both bound together: all the same words are there, but instead of one large book and one small book, you now have one single very large book that changes stories in the middle. (The same analogy holds for increases in chromosome number: imagine a printer declaring that Moby-Dick was too long to bind in a single book, so they split it in two and publish it as two volumes instead.) Such big changes to chromosome structure are generally dead-ends, because it only gets passed on if you can find and mate with another organism that's rearranged their library in the same way, or at least a similar way, but that's a long story and this profile is plenty long already.

Not that it's not possible that Cryptanthus might actually have lost information, too. I ran across a scientific paper about the Cryptanthus chromosome number problem, that noted that yes, there were theories about why they're different from all the other bromeliads, but of course you have to be a paid subscriber to actually read the damn paper, so I don't know what the theory is. But really, there are only three basic possibilities: either the information contained in seven or eight pairs of chromosomes got lost along the way, and is no longer in the Cryptanthus genome (the library no longer has a copy of The Red Badge of Courage), or it got moved somewhere else, most likely by two chromosomes linking up to form a new, much longer one (the Moby-Dick-Scarlet Letter nineteenth-century SuperSaver volume), or both. This sort of thing happens all the time (on evolutionary timescales). But either way:


The secret to Cryptanthus variability is thought to be B chromosomes. Not X chromosomes, not Y chromosomes, not even Z or W chromosomes, but B chromosomes.¹³

You could think of the B as standing for "bonus." B chromosomes aren't required for the organism that has them to live, and if you have them, it's not terribly important how many of them you have. In fact, most Bs don't even code for anything and are never read, and sometimes one part of an organism might have them and another part of the same organism doesn't. They're also not necessarily transmitted to descendants, though when they are, the descendant usually winds up with more copies than the parent had, which is quirky. What B chromosomes can do is get in the way, though, which can make the plants that have them malfunction in ways affecting their fertility or appearance, which would lead to sports. Other organisms can be really variable without necessarily having B chromosomes, so I'm not certain that the B chromosomes are the whole ball game here. But it's at least a likely partial answer.

But so there you have it. Voila: Cryptanthus.

I suck at endings.

-

Photo credits: Scarecrow photo via shawnnacox.com; the remainder are my own.

¹ "Bread-and-butter" is the work idiom of choice for the plants that pay the bills, as opposed to the plants that make mr_subjunctive, WCW, and the other plant geeks happy. Dracaena marginata, Codiaeum variegatum, Philodendron hederaceum and the self headers^a like 'Autumn' and 'Moonlight' -- these are bread-and-butter. Stuff like Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa and Neoregelia are what make WCW and me happy, and you can tell the difference by the way we have failed to sell any of them to anybody but WCW and me. There is, fortunately, a little bit of overlap between the categories. There are also a few plants that are neither, but we don't talk about them. Shhh.
      ^a ("Phil O'Dendron and the Self-Headers" would make a GREAT band name, by the way.)
² Which means they're probably going to be upset with me for drawing attention to them.
³ This is reflected in the botanical name, which almost every search result for Cryptanthus will tell you means "hidden flower."
⁴ The entire genus is terrestrial, as far as I can tell, though there's a species or two that grow on rocks rather than in soil, which depending on your perspective may or may not count as terrestrial.
⁵ Someday, I hope to be an "expert extraordinaire" at something. Also a supervillain, as I believe I've mentioned previously. Not sure which title should go first on the business card, though. "Expert extraordinaire, supervillain" seems to scan better, rhythmically. EXpert exTRAORdinaire SUPervillAIN. What is that? Trochaic? Ananpestic? (See kids? You never know when you're going to need this stuff in real life.)
⁶ Of course, if my life depended on it, I probably couldn't name a non-toxic one either: sometimes I can think quickly under stress, and sometimes I cannot. It's hard to imagine a situation where my life would depend on naming a toxic bromeliad, anyway. I'm only very infrequently held captive by plant-obsessed supervillains/-heroes, and so far, when I have been, they've been more interested in finding out why their Spathiphyllum is going black than in learning about obscure bromeliads. (A: overwatering. Nine times out of ten.)
⁷ I'm not sure what the plural of Cryptanthus should be.
⁸ The story, mildly altered from a version I told at Garden Web some time ago:
I was kind of a pyro at the time, with access to acetone (= cheap nail polish remover; the expensive kind is usually ethyl acetate) as the result of being a chemistry undergrad. (Acetone will dissolve almost anything, and is relatively cheap and nontoxic, so we used it to clean glassware and stuff. Plus it dries quickly, because it has a lowish boiling point.) This had previously been used to, for example, light flat tennis balls on fire and throw them out of my (4th-floor) dorm window, set brief but impressively large fires on the (ceramic-tiled) hallways, dissolve styrofoam, and so forth. I'm not saying any of this was a good idea, please note, but it seemed like one when I was however old I was (19? 20?).
The dorm rooms had a sink in a corner, with a mirror above them. (I'm trying to recall whether it was just a mirror or a whole medicine cabinet, and drawing a blank. Probably a medicine cabinet.) For some reason, I had the plant sitting on the sink -- possibly I'd just watered it, possibly I'd run out of room for plants elsewhere in the room.
If I'm remembering correctly, the idea was to spray acetone on the mirror, and then light it on fire, so the fire would be reflected and look bigger and brighter and so forth, but I didn't take flammable vapor and dripping into account, so I kind of lit the whole sink area on fire, including the plant, for a few seconds. I do not recall whether the fire looked bigger/brighter, because I realized midway through that I'd set my plant on fire and was distracted by that.
Hence, accidentally lighting plants on fire. The incident scared me enough that I believe it was the end of the acetone period, though I was still a pyro for a year or so after, though that was as close as I ever got to damaging anything of any actual value. The pyro thing stopped at about the time I came out of the closet: draw whatever conclusions seem appropriate.
Just to underline: this was not actually a good idea. Your results may vary. Do not attempt.
⁹ Which I do not have: the husband has at times thought that he did, which is why we have the light. It's possible that he still has SAD, but one of the side effects of having plants covering every available surface is that there also has to be a lot of light, so I don't recall him mentioning this last winter. I, if anything, have the other SAD: the one where you get depressed / irritable / apathetic in summer, though I figure that's got to be a heat thing, more than a light thing.
¹⁰ Interval periods given for comparison purposes only. I do not actually water my plants on a fixed schedule. Do not water your own plants on a fixed schedule: not only is it usually bad for the plant, it's sinful.
¹¹ If you're one of those people who are worried about your plants suffocating you to death at night, when they absorb oxygen and release carbon dioxide, and you don't trust me when I tell you that this is not something you should be worried about, you might consider buying some of the plants from this list, since they can take up the carbon dioxide from the other plants at night and in theory everything should balance out, then. Or you could just believe me, based on how you've not suffocated in your sleep every night of your life so far. Your call.
¹² From malus, Latin for apple. You'd recognize it if you tasted it, as it's one of the main components of sour edibles like green apples, SweeTarts, grapes, Jolly Ranchers, etc. For this reason, supposedly the leaves of plants that do this taste sour in the morning (when malic acid storage is at maximum) and sweet (or at least less sour) in the afternoon (when most of the malic acid has been metabolized). I'm skeptical about this myself, but I'm not going to start eating the houseplants twice a day to check.
¹³ (Someday, we're going to run out of alphabet, and then the biologists are going to be fucked. . . .)

Tin Woodsman (Pachypodium geayi and P. lamerei)

(This is part 4 of the Wizard of Oz series of plant profiles.)

I really like Pachypodiums. I like the look of them; I like that they're not unreasonably difficult to care for; I like that I got mine outrageously cheap.¹ I even like the thorns -- kinda. They certainly make it look more intense and dangerous, and along with the silvery gray (dare I say tin?) color of the trunk, they give it a sort of industrial / Alien / sculptural look. I mean, if you had never seen one before, you could maybe believe it as some kind of plant from the future, some kind of machine-plant combination made from nanobots! by space aliens! or whatever.


However. I spend a lot of my time at work moving plants from one place to another. I try not to move the Pachypodiums so much, but I still have to move things that are near them, and, well, there is only one plant that's resulted in more lost time with the tweezers, trying to pull thorns/spines out of my body.² The Pachypodiums also like to team up with the Agaves so that one lightly pokes me from one side, causing my hand to jerk away from it involuntarily into the other plant: whether I jerk into the Pachypodium or into the Agave, I wind up getting stabbed deeply, and the Pachypodium spines like to break off in my skin, so then I have to take my hand apart to remove the broken-off piece.

If they only had a heart. Or hearts, plural, I guess. You know?

But even so. In the course of poking around the web looking for interesting stuff about the plant, I found a lot of people saying things like, "This is my favorite plant." Which is pretty high praise. I wouldn't go that far, personally, but it's been kind of delightfully unproblematic, and as we know from some of the other profiles, it's not like I necessarily object to being surrounded by plants with thorns, spines, sharp edges, potentially deadly poisons, or whatever. If that's the most dangerous kind of thrill-seeking I do, I should be able to live a long and healthy life anyway.


The common name for these, "Madagascar palm," is half correct. They are from Madagascar. Pachypodiums are not palms, however, even though they look a little (a very little, in my opinion) like one. Besides the 25ish³ described Pachypodium species, the family Apocynaceae includes several other ornamentals like Nerium oleander (oleander), Adenium obesum (desert rose), which I'll be profiling shortly, Mandevilla/Dipladenia,⁴ Vinca, Catharanthus (also - incorrectly - called Vinca), and Plumeria (frangipani). Of these, few are grown indoors, though I've heard of Adenium, Nerium, and Plumeria being used as houseplants to some degree or another.⁵ (Of course, with Plumeria, pretty much the only person I know to attempt it indoors is WCW, who is always pushing the envelope on what range of species might be called "houseplants.")

Pachypodium's closest relatives would be Mandevilla, Adenium, and Nerium, which are all not only in the same family but are also in the same subfamily. The family resemblance is not particularly obvious from the various growth habits: it's not a vine like Mandevilla or a dense shrub like Nerium, and although young plants resemble a spiny Adenium, the similarities fade with age as the plant's trunk elongates. The stems of Mandevilla, Adenium and Plumeria do all, at some point in the plant's life, have the same gray-metallic sheen to them. Also the flowers are fairly similar in all the cultivated plants: five-petaled, usually red, pink, or white with a yellow center, and often though not always trumpet-shaped. So the family resemblance is there; you just have to look for it a little.

Pachypodiums flower too, but it's uncommon, and plants have to be fairly large, apparently, before it happens. It's not likely to happen indoors. I'm told the flowers are white, trumpet-shaped, and fragrant. There are pictures of varying quality at these four sites: (1) (2) (3) (4). I especially recommend #4.


Another common feature of the Apocynaceae is poison.⁶ All parts of Pachypodiums are poisonous, though I've never had any reactions as extreme as the one described here, which describes pain, numbness and swelling as the result of being stabbed by a thorn. I've heard rumors that the entire plant may not be poisonous: plantzafrica.com claims that the pith at the center of P. geayi can be strained through a cloth to yield a really unpleasant-sounding but technically edible sap. (Don't try this yourself, obviously.) I didn't see this confirmed anywhere else, though, so I'm kind of still skeptical about it being true.

Also unconfirmed: Plantzafrica.com also claims that certain rural African peoples use P. geayi as a makeshift beehive, after hollowing it out, though there are no details about how this is done or why it would be necessary. Nice bit of coincidence: in the movie, the Wicked Witch of the West threatens to turn the Tin Woodsman into a beehive.

But I'm digressing.

P. geayi and P. lamerei are, as best as I can tell, the two most commonly grown indoor species, and not particularly easy to tell apart because there aren't a lot of pictures of the two side-by-side around to compare to. Most Pachypodiums in the retail horticulture world are P. lamerei: the main way to tell it apart from P. geayi is that geayi has small hairs on the leaves, particularly on the underside, and the leaves tend to be longer, darker, and bluer in color than on lamerei. The absence of hairs doesn't necessarily mean you have lamerei (sometimes geayi doesn't have the hairs, especially on young plants), but if hairs are present, then it probably is geayi. I thought for a very long time that my plant was probably geayi, then was informed by a PATSP reader that no, I probably had lamerei like everybody else.

Those websites expressing an opinion said that lamerei is the easier of the two to grow.


These can do very well indoors, though like a lot of plants, they do benefit from time outdoors if you can swing it for them.^{7, 8}

LIGHT: The more, the better, within reason. These are best in a bright, large, unobstructed south window. They might get by in an east or west, but I make no promises. Haven't tried it, don't intend to. My own plant is in a south window but has to compete with a lot of other plants, and gets moved around a lot, so its situation is probably best described as partly-filtered sun, and this is apparently acceptable.

WATERING: This is a little bit tricky. During the winter, they go semi-dormant and need very little. During the summer, they need to be watered much more often. How much is "very little?" How frequently is "much more often?" Well. During the summer, the plant is relatively flexible, and it's not a big deal to water when the soil is dry to about half the depth of the pot. During the winter, aim for watering a couple days after the soil gets completely dry. (The thick trunk stores water. It'll be okay.) During the spring and fall, letting it go almost but not completely dry is good. Watering too much will result in leaves yellowing and dropping. Watering way too much will result in rot. The best defense against overwatering, if you're worried that you just won't be able to help yourself, is to use a clay pot and soil with really excellent drainage. Underwatering is really hard to do, but leaves will turn crispy and drop, and I'm guessing the trunk will also shrivel as the plant uses up the water it's stored. The shriveling may or may not actually be noticeable.

HUMIDITY: They don't care.


TEMPERATURE: Information about this on-line varies, and I don't have any personal experience with trying to see how cold they'll let me get. The most conservative range, from what I see, is 50-100ºF (10-37ºC); a few sites say you might be able to go down to just above freezing, but I wouldn't try it. Our plants at work have, until recently, been along a wall in the greenhouse, where they get hot, dry air blown directly at them from underneath whenever the heater comes on. This has been a problem only insofar as the heat dries out the soil faster, and leaves me confused as to when I should water, which I have a tendency to overdo with the succulents anyway. But the heat itself is not the problem.

PESTS: I've never had a problem with pests on mine, or the ones at work. Rot can be a big problem, even on well-established plants, particularly if the plant has been injured. Mealybugs are not unheard of, and spider mites are a problem for everything else in the Apocynaceae, so I wouldn't be surprised by spider mites. None of these are particularly likely, persistent, or damaging, but they are contagious, so it's good to keep an eye out anyway.

PROPAGATION: Usually, Pachypodium are grown from seed, and different websites report different degrees of success getting the seeds to sprout. The seeds don't store well, and are best used as soon as possible. They are also somewhat slow to germinate (about a month?) and not necessarily all that easy to find in the first place. As plants will occasionally branch on their own, sometimes from the base, people do occasionally take cuttings, for which the procedure is more or less the same as for cacti or Euphorbias: cut off a piece (mind the sap! And the thorns!), let it callous and dry in a bright but sunless spot for a week or two, then plant it upright in soil with unbelievably good drainage and water very conservatively until there are signs of rooting. If your plant begins to rot, taking a cutting of a healthy part of the stem, if one exists, is your best bet at salvaging something.


GROOMING: Plants will usually shed leaves in the fall or winter, as they go dormant, though if you slow down watering properly, this is less likely: they don't have to drop leaves, necessarily. There shouldn't be a lot of leaves to clean up if your plant does defoliate, mostly because your average Pachypodium doesn't have all that many to begin with. The down side is that they're harder to clean up than your average dropped leaf, because of their tendency to wedge themselves between, or impale themselves on, the thorns.

FEEDING: More or less what you'd expect. Light to normal for spring and summer, slow down in fall, don't feed in winter.

There are no cultivars of Pachypodium as far as I can tell: if there are varieties grown for the color of their flowers or the variegation on their leaves, I couldn't find any. There are also no thornless varieties, at least not of these species (other Pachypodium species may be less extreme, with the thorns), though on older plants, the thorns sometimes get broken off, leaving a smooth patch. I did find some pictures of a cristate plant, which is satisfyingly different, and even freakier and more alien-looking, but also probably not available for sale.

According to the movie, one's "heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others." This is really questionable logic (like the Wizard's other pronouncements, actually), but in this case, it kinda works. Spiny, complicated and poisonous though they are, people do love Pachypodiums. Myself included. Just, you know, tempered with a certain amount of respect. And fear.⁹

-

Photo credits: Tin Woodsman photo via shawnnacox.com. Pachypodium pictures are my own.

¹ It was a fluke Wal-Mart thing: they had some with the little flowers glued on, which always makes me feel bad for the plant, and I'd wanted to try a Pachypodium anyway, so I picked one up, prepared to pay $3.97, and then when I got to the checkout, it scanned at $0.50. I said something about this to the cashier, she rang it out and then back in again, and it was still $0.50. Then she consulted briefly -- too briefly, really -- with another cashier and came back. She looked at me, I looked at her, we gave a mutual shrug, and then I paid my 53 cents. Oddly, a large chunk of the people who talk about either of the Pachypodiums at davesgarden.com (lamerei, geayi) say they got theirs at Wal-Mart too, and I don't think it's just because a lot of people buy a lot of things from Wal-Mart. Not that I have a theory about why Wal-Mart would be the national Official Box Store of Pachypodiums. Just something I noticed.
² It's a particularly mean trailing-type cactus (not an Aporocactus, though, or at least I don't think it is) that I really kind of hate and would love to be able to sell to somebody so that I never have to deal with it again.
³ When people talk about the number of species in a particular genus or location, even if the number given is a precise one, reality is often a bit more fluid than that, because taxonomists always have different ideas about whether to split similar-but-not-quite-identical populations off into a separate species or not. Also there may be species out there that have simply not been described yet, or there may be a species going extinct, or whatever. Hence, "25ish," rather than just 25. This is precisely the sort of thing that would have driven me absolutely insane as a child: I was very troubled by categories with fuzzy boundaries. I still don't like fuzzy boundaries, but I deal better than I used to.
⁴ The genus Dipladenia no longer exists; it was lumped together with Mandevilla. However, some growers (and very probably some customers also) have been unwilling to let the Dipladenia name rest in peace, and have resurrected it for specific Mandevilla cultivars even though it's still not the botanically correct name.
⁵ Also, a lot of people try to keep Mandevilla indoors, but from what I've read, this rarely goes well. They are extremely prone to spider mites and other pests, and if the bugs don't get you, the lack of light will. Not recommended. We actually have trouble keeping them in the greenhouse at any time of year, but they're particularly difficult during the winter.
⁶ Oleanders (Nerium) are particularly, famously toxic, but as best as I can tell, toxicity is a family characteristic and all of the Apocynaceae are poisonous to some degree or another. You wouldn't think that Pachypodiums would bother -- surely the gigantic spines would be deterrent enough -- but no, apparently there's something on Madagascar that could get around the spines.
⁷ Things to remember if you want to do this: plants, even desert plants, even desert plants that have been in full sun indoors all winter long, will still sunburn if you do not introduce them to outdoor light gradually. This means an hour one day, a couple hours the next day, a little more time the day after that, and so on. The reverse applies when you bring it back in in the fall. If you don't have the time or motivation to spend a week or two on the gradual thing, you have two options: one, you could just keep the plant in. Seriously. It's not that smart: it won't know that you're not letting it play outside with the other plants. Two, you could set it directly outside into some heavy shade and let it be. It'll still be getting more light than it probably would indoors, and it's a lot less likely to burn.
⁸ Another thing to remember: I had a customer last Friday who was looking for some new houseplants, but he kept telling me over and over that he'd had repeated problems with plants doing great for a few months, and then going into sudden declines, which he was blaming on Iowa (since in Louisiana, where he'd lived previously, this didn't happen). He shouldn't have been surprised by this: it's perfectly normal, and in fact maybe even expected, for a plant that's been growing in all the warmth, humidity, light and water it can handle to balk a bit at going inside for the winter. I suspect that the problem was impatience: a lot of people apparently assume that if a plant begins to fall apart, they have to do something about it, so they feed it, or water it more, or spray it for bugs, or something, not realizing that all of these things are likely to make the situation worse. And then they blame the plant for being difficult, or blame the state of Iowa, or whatever, when the plant is actually behaving perfectly sensibly for the situation.
⁹ Incidentally: the origin story of the Tin Woodman (not woodSman, originally) as presented by Frank Baum in the Oz books is that he was once a normal human person who chopped down trees. The Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his ax, so that it would chop off his limbs. This was somehow related to him being in love with a girl -- I don't know why the witch would care, but the purpose of the spell, in any case, was to prevent him from marrying. Each time he lost a body part, he would replace it with a tin prosthetic. Eventually there was nothing left of the original body, and everything had been replaced except for his heart, which was apparently overlooked in all the gore and metalworking, leaving him not only made of metal, but unable to love the girl he'd fallen for in the first place. This isn't really very related to the profile, but I couldn't bear not to include it once I found this out, as I'd never heard it before.