Practical Joker (Alternanthera dentata 'Purple Knight')

This plant is the oddball of the large and motley group of plants in the greenhouse at work. For one thing, nobody knows what it is: I get asked on a pretty regular basis about it, and by employees as well as customers. (I've even been asked on more than one occasion by the same employee, which I would make fun of, but alas, I had to ask twice myself.)


What it is, is Alternanthera dentata 'Purple Knight,' also known as "joyweed."¹ The story is that it was brought in in the summer of 2006 as an annual, and when everything got brought in for the winter, they brought this in too, and it's been living in the greenhouse ever since, getting huge and changing colors and confusing people.

The above picture is a plant I produced from cuttings and brought home: you can see that the stems and main veins are a dark reddish purple color, but the leaves are green. This is because the plant apparently needs ridiculous amounts of light in order to maintain the purple leaves for which the variety is named. This is the main one from work, which looks more maroon than purple²:


The white bits in the second picture are flowers, which are tiny clover-like things that eventually drop seeds everywhere: I've found quite a few Alternanthera seedlings growing on the greenhouse floor. I haven't tried to plant any seeds deliberately yet, so I don't know how easily sprouted they are, but I'm guessing they're not difficult, considering the common name.

My own plant came from cuttings, which is sort of an entertaining experience with Alternanthera: when you first take a cutting, it will completely collapse within a few hours. And I do mean completely. Then it will remain that way for about a week, leading you to think something along the lines of crap, I killed it, at which point you will pull it out and throw it in the trash and hope for better luck next time, unless. . . .

You forget about it and go on about your business, in which case about 75% of the time, it will pop right back up, yell "Surprise! Fooled ya!" and begin to grow. That remaining 25% of the cuttings really are dead, but you have to wait until they go black and start to rot before you can be sure.

I don't know why it's considered an outdoor plant more than an indoor one; obviously it can perpetuate itself indoors for a while in greenhouse conditions, and mine hasn't shown any real signs of decline since bringing it home,³ which makes me think it can handle normal home conditions too. It's possible that they get scraggly-looking or something after a while: the one at work got really wild and leggy all at once when it decided to bloom, and so far I haven't really managed to get it under control. It seems very focused on building long, mostly leafless stems for the flowers, and cutting these back just makes it try harder.


Care seems to be remarkably easy: I keep it pretty evenly moist – it doesn't like to be dry – and give it the brightest light I'm capable of (which is apparently not enough to maintain leaf color, but at least the leaves are still reasonably large, and it continues to grow more of them), and pinch back the growing tip when it looks like it's getting too tall. It grows fast, befitting the "joyweed" name, and doesn't seem to have slowed down any yet, so it may be the case that it's one of those plants like Tradescantia pallida that you can count on to keep you busy during a long winter. Though it could just be playing with me.


UPDATE: I didn't have a picture or a cutting handy when I wrote the original post, but I had my plant collapse on me, so there is now a small follow-up post available here with a photo of a collapsed plant. If you wanted to know what that looks like.

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Photo credits: all me.

¹ [puzzled look]
² It also looks that way in person, though like I say, the color changes a lot: bright green in lowish light, maroon if it's hanging up near the top of the greenhouse in full sun, and sort of a dark purple if it's getting bright light but not full sun.
³ Granted that I also have it in greenhouse conditions here, kinda. I'll have to do a post about my jerry-rigged mini greenhouse sometime.

Random plant event: Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei' sport?

One of the first things I got to do when I started the new job was cut back a big Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei' that had one cane that was too tall, and beginning to fall over. The particular plant in question was having all kinds of other problems too, mostly from being too hot and in too much sun, but there wasn't much we could do about that in late August.

So I cut part off and shortened the cane and stuck what was left over back into the soil, and it eventually (after about three months) rooted and everything, and after a little bit of cleaning up, it's . . . well, it's still not going to be winning the Miss Dracaena Pageant anytime soon. But it's still looking better than it was.

The raison d'post here is that when the cane I cut resprouted, it did so with an interesting variegation pattern of green leaves with a broad white stripe in the middle:


It remains to be seen whether this is going to be stable, or whether it's just something it's doing with the new small leaves before it gets back to business as usual. There's potential money in this if it proves to be stable and propagatable, though I'd be surprised if this is something we're equipped to handle, legally and practically: patenting requires proof that it's a stable mutation, among many other things, and we don't have the space to devote to a large number of slow-growing plants, and so on and so forth. I'd be surprised if it were stable, too, as far as that goes. But I suppose even if we didn't do the propagation ourselves, we could still patent it ourselves and then sell the rights to someone else, so it's worth keeping an eye on. If I had any room at all inside the apartment, and a lot of extra money laying around, I'd consider buying it myself, just to see what it's going to do.


UPDATE: There's considerably more on this plant at the profile post for Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei,' including its identification as a previously-known variety and a lot more detail about plant patenting.

LOLSpath

I have to say, I'm surprised that Spathiphyllum would be the plant that I would choose for this project. Or that it would choose me. Whatever. I suspect the ultimate reason is that "cat" and "spath" share a vowel sound, so the progression from LOLcat to LOLSpath seemed more natural.

I'm not saying it's meaningful or important, just that it's surprising to me.

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As with previous LOLSpath posts, confused persons are invited to look elsewhere on line for an explanation. A new page I'm recommending is here, though this, which I was recommending previously, should also more or less work.

Avant-Garde Artist (Lithops spp.)

I feel like a bit of a rube when it comes to Lithops spp. I don't really . . . get them. It's not that I don't understand why they are the way they are, and they're unusual, so I get why people would find them interesting. But I don't feel the interesting, personally. What I feel about them is more like a non-sophisticate in a trendy Manhattan art gallery.

"Check this one out, Ethel. It's a plant, but they made it so it looks like rocks."
"Oh my. What does it . . . mean?"
"Mean?"
"You know, what's the artist trying to say with it. Are those supposed to be windows?!"
"Windows?"
"Yes, George. Right there in the top. See how they're kind of translucent?"
"No."
"I'm pointing right at it."
"."
"Look where I'm pointing. Look where I'm pointing."
"Well I'll be damned. Windows."
"So it's a plant, but it's a rock, and it's a rock, but it's a building. But it's a plant. What do you think it all means?"
"Aw, hell. I don't know about art, but I know what I like, and I don't like this. Probably just trying to say something about alienation or nucular disarmament or some garbage. Let's see if they have a gift shop."

Photo credit: "dysmorodrepanis," at Wikipedia

This is, of course, my problem, not the plant's. The plant doesn't need me to understand it. And there have been other plants that I've not really seen the appeal of until I brought one home (the most dramatic example being strawberry begonias, Saxifraga stolonifera, but there have been others). So the fact that they leave me kinda cold aesthetically is of no consequence, really. I might like them if I got to know them.

But. I find them a little intimidating, mostly because I've seen several of them now just shrivel and die, more or less overnight, over nothing in particular that I could see. Not only at my present job, either: this is something that Lithops spp. just seem to do, and it's bugged me. Why? What did I do?

What I did, most likely, is I watered them when I shouldn't have. They have a more complicated yearly watering cycle than most houseplants, with two wet periods and two dry periods. The first wet period is in late spring and early summer, and the second wet period is in late summer and early fall. So one might wind up watering only in May, June, September and October, or something sort of like that, and even then you don't necessarily want to water very much. During the midsummer dormancy, you can water if they start to shrivel, but otherwise keep them dry, and in the winter dormancy, don't water at all.

A lot of customers ask about them, but then they don't buy one. Sometimes this may be because I discourage them,¹ but even when I don't discourage, it doesn't usually result in a sale: they're odd, and kinda cool, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your average person is going to want one in their house, you know? I mean, David Lynch is also both odd and kinda cool,² but I wouldn't want to buy one to take home, if someone sold David Lynches.

But I digress. At some point before I started work, someone brought in a whole bunch of them, in little 2-inch pots. I don't know how many, exactly, but we had two full 4x8 flats when I took this picture,


and we used to have more than that. So maybe three flats' worth, let's say. Whether someone got a good deal, or just got overly optimistic, I'm not sure (I wasn't there when this happened.), but it will be interesting to see how many get thrown out and how many get sold, in the end.

The biology here is interesting. Lithops spp. (and there are several species, some of which have multiple varieties, and then we get into hybrids and cultivars, so good luck identifying which particular one you've got)³ have a number of adaptations which enable them to survive an environment which you wouldn't ordinarily think of as a place likely to grow plants.

The western part of South Africa is dominated by two similar but distinct types of terrain, called Nama Karoo and Succulent Karoo. Both have very rocky, lime-rich soil and low rainfall: Nama receives between 100 and 520 mm (4 to 20 inches) of rain per year, and Succulent receives 20-290 mm (0.1 to 11 inches). If that weren't bad enough, what little water there is tends to be quickly evaporated, by hot, dry winds, perpetually clear skies (pretty much) and temperatures which are routinely above 40ºC (104ºF). What's a plant to do?

What Lithops species have done is, essentially, to jettison everything that doesn't directly assist with reproduction or water conservation. Some of these adaptations are pretty drastic when you think about it: Lithops has gotten rid of stems. (Stems!) The taproot connects directly to the leaves. The plants also often grow mostly buried, and the top of the leaves are translucent (this enables light to travel into the leaf, which is lined with photosynthetic tissue,⁴ permitting essentially evaporation-free light collection). They only ever have two leaves at a time (presumably, annual replacement of the leaves is their way of coping with leaf damage – which if you'd been sandblasted in a furnace for the last twelve months, you'd probably be looking to freshen up too), and offset only occasionally. They are also very slow (hence patient) plants, which can live to be 40-50 years old, or possibly over 100, depending on whose sites you're inclined to believe. Old, in any case.

Some poison would probably be helpful, since they apparently are edible,⁵ but I suppose camouflage is a nice alternative. It's certainly awfully effective.

Photo by Christer Johansson at Wikipedia
My favorite bit of Lithops-related trivia that I've run across is that they are apparently known to the people in their native area by names like beeskloutjie (cattle hoof), skaappootjie (sheep hoof) and perdeklou (horse's hoof). I would never have come up with this on my own, since sheep hoof-prints aren't something I encounter in everyday life, but since I read this, I can no longer look at them without thinking of hoof-prints.

Late addition: I found a very short (3 second) time-lapse video of a flowering Lithops, which may or may not be interesting to you: link.

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References: Susan Mahr, at theUniversity of Wisconsin.
South African National Biodiversity Institute 1 (Succulent Karoo) and 2 (Nama Karoo)

Photo credits: see text.

¹ Which I often feel guilty about, but I don't consider them beginner plants (although many people, apparently, do). So if I know someone to be new to houseplants, I'll steer them elsewhere, just to avoid the heartbreak.
² I think, anyway. He seems to have fallen on losery times lately, a bit.
³ This does mean, though, that you are likely to be able to find a Lithops that matches your interior décor, as long as your interior décor is mainly some kind of washed-out, low-saturation earth-toney kind of thing.
⁴ Other succulent species have had the same idea: many Haworthia species, including H. retusa, H. truncata, H. transclucens and several others, Senecio rowleyanus ("string of beads") and S. radicans ("string of bananas"), Peperomia graveolens, etc. The Haworthias and Senecios are both also native to Southwest Africa, which suggests that maybe there's something about that area in particular that encourages plants to evolve window-leaves. The Peperomia, though, is from Ecuador, though.
⁵ At least, that's the rumor. I wouldn't be inclined to test it personally. (Unless I were very, very thirsty, I guess.)

Blind Date (Alworthia x 'Black Gem')

I got this plant in a trade from a Garden Web member back in April 2007. It wasn't something I'd asked for, to trade – I had actually asked for an Aloe variegata (partridge-breast aloe), and the person with whom I was trading included several bonus Aloe cultivars and species in addition to the one I'd asked for. ¹ So the plant and I were "set up," if you will.


I was pleased to have bonus plants, but not so pleased to have Aloes, which I've never been all that keen to grow. ² I've heard a lot of stories about Aloes being prone to sudden declines over nothing in particular, which tends to make a person wary, and Aloe vera leaves me kind of cold aesthetically, probably a case of familiarity breeding contempt. But 'Black Gem,' along with another cultivar ('Walmsley's Blue,' not shown), have both done quite well for me, offsetting multiple times and having no watering or pest problems to speak of, and all of the others save one (A. nobilis, which rotted on me over the summer) have done fine here. So I've come to like them, and for a blind date, you'd have to say it's worked out well.

But about 'Black Gem' specificially: it's an attractive plant. It has a nice color (evenly dark green in lower light, dark red-green in high light: it's tough to get enough light on it indoors to see it change color, and you can't see it in the photo at all, but it's happened once, briefly), it's not sharp or thorny, it seems to offset freely, and it doesn't seem to be particularly attractive to pests. So I'm pretty happy with it. I worry about overwatering, and getting it enough light, but that's about it. I'm looking forward to when I can separate the offset and grow it on its own, but that's probably going to be a long wait: it's growing pretty slowly.

Trivia about the plant: well, there's not a whole bunch. I did find one site, which, alarmingly, notes that this plant is "fire retardant," leading me to wonder what kind of nutbar worries about his plants getting set on fire. Since when is this a selling point? Aren't most plants fire-retardant when they're not dead (Eucalyptus and Pinus aside)?

Anyway. Care is pretty much what you'd expect: bright light with at least some sun, water when dry, propagate from offsets. Humidity, feeding, underwatering, pests, temperatures, and grooming aren't huge issues.

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Photo credit: me.

¹ (brevifolia, greatheadii var. davyana, nobilis, maculata, 'Black Gem,' 'Minibelle,' 'Walmsley's Blue')
² (Though for one reason or another, I've sure wound up with a lot of them. I've also been given an A. aristata hybrid and 'Doran Black.' Additionally, I've actually chosen and purchased 'Crosby's Prolific' and A. harlana. I only actually paid for two, yet I have ten different varieties (and seventeen individual plants) – does that seem right to you? Clearly I have some kind of Aloe-related karmic thing to work out. Maybe I was an Aloe in a previous life. That'd be weird.)

Work-related: flocking room

I had always assumed that the fake snow people put on Christmas trees was something akin to Silly string, some sort of petroleum-based plastic that needed an aerosol can to be applied. And I have seen do-it-yourself kits for fake snow that seem to operate in more or less that way. At work, though, we fill orders for flocked trees by spraying trees with a mixture of water and glue, I'm told. The process is kind of elaborate and difficult-sounding.

First, the tree to be done is placed on a metal stand to hold it upright. Then, each and every one of the branches is forced to stand more upright by wiring it to the trunk -- this is because without the wiring, the weight of the wet flocking will pull down the branches at the bottom, but not the ones at the top, leaving a big and unsightly gap around the center of the tree. Wiring is a time-consuming and tedious process, and not anybody's favorite part of the job (I'm told).

The wired-up tree is then stood on a tree-sized turntable, and the glue-water mixture is sprayed up and down it as it spins around until everything is covered, after which it's left to dry. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact mechanism of the mixer and hose and all that; it's possible that I wouldn't recognize them if I saw them (I've never been in the room while this was actually being done.) Drying takes approximately a full day, potentially longer for larger trees: we ask for people to give us at least two days between order and delivery, and three is really nice if they can manage it, and this is mostly related to drying time (though availability of delivery drivers is also a factor sometimes). I've not done any of this personally, myself: it's mostly the nursery lot people who do it, though they've also brought in at least one seasonal person who does nothing but tree-flocking and related tasks.


All this glop being sprayed around winds up coating the room where the flocking is done, (uncreatively, but accurately, called "the flocking room," though it has other uses outside of the Christmas season) leading to scenes like the above. The first time you see it, it has kind of a surreal charm, but this wears off quickly.

Random plant event: Hibiscus acetosella 'Brown Sugar' flower

The random plant events are almost happening faster than I can keep up with. By the time some of these posts get put up, the event will no longer even be happening.

This particular post is a follow-up to a previous post, where I noted that this plant had buds. A week later, we have the thrilling conclusion.

The above flower was going on Friday (23 Nov) when I left for work (about 7:45 AM), and had already deflated and shriveled by the time I came home for lunch (about 1:15 PM). So I literally only got one chance to see it. In my memory, the flower was more of a wine color -- darker than this, and with more purple, which may or may not have been the real situation.

There was a repeat performance today (Saturday 24 Nov):


The color in this second picture is a little closer to my perceptions of the flower yesterday. It remains to be seen how long this second one is going to last.

UPDATE: Not long at all, it turns out. The second flower opened around 6 or 7 AM, and it had closed up again by 10:30 AM. The first one fell off the stem in the same time frame, crushing hopes that it might re-open.

Sacrificial Virgin (Dionaea muscipula)

When we were placing the big mid-October plant order from Florida this year, I, the boss, and WCW¹ were scrolling through the list of offered plants on an Excel spreadsheet, and we got to a listing for venus flytraps. And I remember there was some kind of discussion of whether we needed to buy more, with WCW and I saying that we didn't because we couldn't keep them alive anyway and what was the point.

You can guess how this turned out:


The boss claimed that whenever kids enter the greenhouse, they always want one of these, and that may be true, but 1) just because they want one doesn't necessarily mean that they go so far as to ask their parents for one, 2) just because they might ask for one doesn't mean their parents are actually going to buy one, and 3) they invariably stand there torturing the plants for some period,² regardless of whether they ask or buy or any of that, which is not good for the plants and doesn't really do us any favors either. So it looks like we've bought them to throw them away.

Even if they weren't being tortured to death by small children³, we would have trouble keeping them: they need very bright sun when they're actively growing, which we only sort of have in the greenhouse (the roof reflects a lot away, and when it's too hot, we pull shade cloths over most of the house). The mineral content in tap water is a problem too. And then there's the dormancy, when they need to be just above freezing all winter, which we're not going to manage in the greenhouse, though there are other options. Point being that we're not really set up to be able to care for them, and so it's a little aggravating to have to try.

They're not actually impossible plants, though: if you're interested in keeping one, there are plenty of sites out there, notably this post at Mr Brown Thumb, that will tell you how to do it. (Then see this thread at the Garden Web carnivorous plants forum.)


Since I'm letting Mr. Brown Thumb deal with the rest of the care information, I'm free to talk about other things. Dionaea muscipula is one of very few houseplants native to North America (The other one I can think of is Tolmiea menziesii, the "piggyback plant," though no doubt there are several cultivated cactus and succulent species native to the Desert Southwest. None of these are especially common houseplants, but still.), hailing from southeastern North Carolina and the South Carolina coast,⁴ though it has been introduced to, and somewhat established in, Florida and New Jersey. It's not technically "endangered," but it is on North Carolina's "special concern" list, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), which according to Wikipedia is the world's main authority on endangered species, classifies Dionaea muscipula as "vulnerable," which is defined as "a species which is likely to become endangered unless the circumstances threatening its survival and reproduction improve." To put this in context, the various classifications, in ascending order of seriousness, go:

Domesticated: are widespread due to deliberate human cultivation and, while they may be genetically distinct from wild members of the species (which may or may not be extinct in the wild), are in no danger of population extinction.
Least Concern: we're worried enough to have assessed the status of the population, but the species is not considered at risk of population reduction.
Near Threatened: have been reduced in numbers or range enough that the species could conceivably qualify for Threatened status in the near future.
Conservation Dependent (no longer officially assigned): would become threatened within five years, were it not for conservation efforts directed at maintaining the numbers of that species.
Threatened: could possibly become extinct in the near future.
Vulnerable: likely to become endangered unless threatening circumstances (loss of habitat, competition from invasives, etc.) improve.
Endangered: at risk of becoming extinct.
Critically Endangered: are at extremely high risk of becoming extinct (more or less, expected to go extinct, though nobody actually phrases it that way).
Extinct in the Wild: no members of the species are alive anywhere on the planet except in captivity.
Extinct: no members of the species are alive anywhere on the planet.

Because of the precarious position of the wild plant, plants for sale are usually derived from tissue culture (generally they will say something to this effect on the tag or packaging; it's probably a good idea to pass up any plants that don't make this explicit) and are likely still pretty young when sold.⁵ So the virgin in "Sacrificial Virgin" is not just poetic and anthropomorphic: not only have plants in stores probably never flowered, neither did the plant they came from.


One of my minor personal goals is to keep the Venus flytraps at work healthy enough that we won't have to throw them out. To this end, I've talked to the boss about maybe getting them a winter dormancy, and she's agreed that this is something we can try, eventually. (Possibly they'll even get distilled water!) If I manage to pull it off, I'll be very happy with myself: sparing the lives of the current crop when nobody else has bothered to before would feel like a real accomplishment. It bugs me any time I have to throw plants out. Of course, I'm not going to count on being able to keep them going, either.

UPDATE: Found a time-lapse movie of Dionaea muscipula growing; my post about it is here.

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Photo credit: plant with finger - annia316 at Flickr.com
all others: me (map: edited and hand-colored from an original at eduplace.com, using data from usda.gov)

¹ (=wonderful co-worker)
² Though it's totally understandable that you'd want to see it, standing there poking at the traps until you get one to close can easily damage the trap, and even if it doesn't physically damage the plant, it still uses a lot of energy that would otherwise be used for growth, stunting the plant. One of the nursery guys dealt with this by getting one and gathering a small crowd around him before triggering a trap or two, so everybody could see it without each person having to do it for themselves, which is smart.
³ (Which is not anybody's preferred way to go, please note.)
⁴ Approximate natural range:


⁵ Tissue culture is cloning using small chunks of plant tissue in a sterile medium. Plants are cleaned, sterilized pieces of the plant are removed and divided, and then the groups of cells are placed in a nutrient medium containing hormones which induce the cells to reorganize and form a plant. If this sounds freaky to you, and you're alarmed about biotech scientists playing God by cloning in this way, consider: cloning is also what you're doing if you take a cutting and root it in water, so calm down already.

John Q. Public (Epipremnum aureum)

Is there anything that can be said about Epipremnum aureum that hasn't been said already? I have my doubts. I spent a long time on-line doing search after search after search, trying to uncover something odd, or interesting, or even just new about it, and I got nothing.

What they usually look like. Viney, eh?
It's so ordinary, in fact, that a large percentage of the posts about it at Garden Web are just people asking for identifications on it – it gets mistaken for a Philodendron a lot, but that's not unexpected, since they're related. It's also had more than its share of names, both scientific and common,¹ which makes for confusion. By and large, though, you know it when you see it, because you see it all the time. It's very tolerant of all kinds of indoor conditions: humidity is no big deal, low light is peachy, and it can go for a long time without water and then bounce right back when it gets it again. It still can get pests, though this doesn't seem to happen real easily or often.² The only real worry is overwatering: they do not like it, and it will kill them. All of this taken together means that the odds are very good that there is a pothos somewhere within 50 feet of you as you read this, and if you asked, it would probably tell you that it's doing "fine."

The species itself.
Somewhat less widely known is the fact that indoor plants are almost always juveniles; as with Dizygotheca elegantissima,³ Syngonium podophyllum, Hedera helix, and (sometimes) Monstera deliciosa, plants sold as houseplants have a different leaf shape, or growth habit, or both, than fully-grown adult plants. In the case of Epipremnum aureum, plants allowed to climb a pole or tree in good light and humidity will eventually develop Monstera-like perforations and splits in the leaves, though this often won't happen until a good amount of height has been attained first, and isn't easy to achieve indoors. Mature leaves can be as big as 30 inches (75 cm) across. Only adult plants flower, and not very often, though it can be done in cultivation. Epipremnum aureum is available in at least a few different cultivars. Besides the species, which is variegated in yellow and white, there is 'Marble Queen,' which has finer variegation in a sort of cream-white color, and 'Neon,' which has solid yellow-green leaves with no variegation. There are, according to some references, also at least three (kinda-redundant) all-green versions,⁴ and at least one more yellow+white cultivar,⁵ though I think I've personally only ever seen four ('Marble Queen,' species itself, 'Neon,' all-green).

'Neon,' my favorite.
By far, my most serious problem with pothos has been a root disease called Pythium splendens, which causes infected stems to shrivel and go black from base to tip. This has happened not only to a number of plants from work, which is bad enough, but it happened to a plant at home that I was actually kind of attached to, a 'Neon' in a 4-inch pot that had been doing so well for me that I decided to up-pot it. Almost immediately after the up-potting, it started dying, which was very depressing. I took cuttings, and we'll see whether anything is salvageable. Pythium mostly attacks plants that are too wet (I told you overwatering was bad.), and spreads via splashes of water between plants, or by hands or tools that have just touched infected soil or plants. My reference book says it can be fought off with antifungals, but it rarely seems worth bothering to treat it, since anything I bought to get rid of the fungus would likely cost more than a new 4-inch plant would. Or just propagating a new plant, which with pothos is incredibly easy. I personally favor water-rooting, because my success rate with water is very nearly 100%, and with soil, I only get about 60% success because Pythium, or something else, gets them before they establish roots. Water may not be the best thing for the plant once it's transplanted to soil, but they do at least all survive that way. But that's about the extent of it. The vines, even when they're not climbing, can get pretty long: I've seen vines that were easily five feet long growing along the top of a cabinet in someone's office. For some people, this is the supposedly easy plant that they can't grow,⁶ which I think likely means that they try to overwater it. But otherwise . . . Aha! I've come up with something new to say about Epipremnum aureum that I'm pretty sure nobody else has ever reported: it's an anagram for "a pure, premium menu."⁷ There. Not really relevant, or interesting, but by God it's new. So there you go.

'Marble Queen.'
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Photo credits: plant in basket – anonymous Garden Webber. foliage close-ups – me.

¹To wit: pothos, Epipremnum aureum, Epipremnum pinnatum 'Aureum', Scindapsus aureus, centipede tongavine, taro vine, hunter's robe, ivy arum, devil's ivy, Pothos aureus, Scindapsus pinnatum, Philodendron nechodomii, etc. Plus, plants are frequently referred to only by cultivar name, e.g. 'Marble Queen,' so those probably count too. It's unclear whether the current correct botanical name is Epipremnum aureum or E. pinnatum, but I had to pick one, so I went with the one that was more familiar to me. I'm also more than a little puzzled about whether E. pinnatum and E. aureum are the same plant or not – some sites say yes, some sites say no, many sites only acknowledge one or the other and don't mention that there's even a question.
² Super-duper plant reference book says that they're often spider-mite magnets, but I don't think I've ever seen this personally, and it's not something that comes up often at Garden Web either (it does once in a while, but if you wait long enough, anything will come up once in a while at GW. Remember that guy who had penguins on his Polyscias fruticosa?). No reason not to check a plant over carefully if you're going to buy, but I think Mr. Griffith exaggerates.
³ Now, technically Schefflera elegantissima, but Dizygotheca sounds so much better in my head that I hate to let go of it.
⁴ 'Green Gold,' 'Jade,' and 'Tropic Green.' I do not know in what way these are different from one another. At least one of them is probably a version of 'Marble Queen' that went all-green from low light, which 'Marble Queen' in particular is prone to do. I think that a stem that's reverted to solid green stays that way, even if it subsequently gets good light again, though I'm not positive on that.
⁵ 'Hawaiian.'
⁶ I am very nearly convinced that everybody has one "difficult" plant that they find really easy to grow, and one "easy" plant that they can't grow at all. My "easy" plant that I can't grow changes from month to month but often seems to be something in the Philodendron family.
⁷ Also "immune urea pumper," but I liked the other one better.

FYI:

1) I do not know why the site was inaccessible for part of the day on Monday the 19th.
2) I do not know why all other blogs using Blogger (now Google?) were also inaccessible.
3) I do not know whether this might happen again, how soon, or for what period of time.
4) It does seem to be over for the time being, though.

This has been an episode of "Useless Answers to Perfectly Reasonable Questions." See you next time.

Random plant event: new purchase needing ID

Bought this plant from work yesterday; I thought when I got it that it was a
Gasteria, but the only Gasteria gallery I could find made me think that it couldn't be, because its leaves really are arranged as a rosette, not stacked up in two opposite orientations like almost every Gasteria I've ever seen.




The leaves are smooth, with two exceptions: the tip of each leaf comes to a sharp point, and the outside ends of some of the leaves are bumpy, with light gray markings. Every leaf has the sharp point, but only a few have bumpies.

If anybody knows what I've got, or could point me to a gallery that might help me narrow it down, please let me know, either in the comments here or at Garden Web here, on the cactus and succulents forum.

UPDATE: I believe we have a winner: Gasteria x 'pseudonigricans,' as best as I could determine from poking around on photo sites and from "rjm710" at Garden Web. What did people do in the days before the hive mind of the internet? Look stuff up in books or something? Sounds terribly inefficient.

Random plant event: Peperomia caperata sprouts

I broke some leaves off of a Peperomia caperata at work maybe a couple months ago, by accident. I figured I could try to salvage something by planting them, since Peperomia, like Begonia and Saintpaulia (African violet), are supposed to have the ability to generate new plants from single leaves, though I'd never tried it before and was kind of skeptical about whether it would work. (So many things we try at work, propagation-wise, don't work out that well, so anymore I just assume everything is doomed when I start it.) In fact, the leaf in the picture here nearly got thrown away a time or two, because it wasn't moving fast enough to suit me, but last week I was looking around in the cuttings table, and lo and behold -- sprouting!


So I am now a believer. This also makes me like the Peperomia genus a little better, too: I was not previously a fan, owing to some bad experiences many years ago.

Dancer (Cereus peruvianus)

To be honest, I find the whole cactus family to be one big confusing blur. I know a lot of the names – Mammilaria, Ferocactus, Opuntia, Rebutia, Cephalocereus, Echinocereus, Parodia, Myrtilocactus and so forth – but telling them apart from one another is often more than I can manage. It doesn't help that the names change sometimes, further mixing up any small bits I've been able to pin down.

So for me, the cactus table at work is sort of like a huge family reunion for someone else's family – it's a big blur of individuals who all kind of look the same, more or less; at the same time, I can also tell that some of them are more closely related to each other than others. There are far too many of them to be able to meet them all, so I just greet everybody with a hearty cry of, "Heyyyy . . . uh, you. Guy," and hope that's good enough.

The exceptions are relatively few and far, but Cereus peruvianus is one. If that is, in fact, its real name (something I'm also confused about), and if I've identified it correctly (if I got it wrong, it's not for lack of trying; I've looked at so many pictures of bluish, columnar cacti with reddish spines that were all identified differently that I eventually despaired of ever getting a species ID and instead just wanted to get the right genus. Which I think I did.).


I bought these two guys in late February of 2004. They were, at that time, 17 inches (43 cm) tall, and that includes the height of the gallon pots they came in. They are now tall enough that they can look me in the eye: I think the last time I measured, they were five feet five inches (1.65 m), and that's been long enough ago that I know they've grown some since.

I liked them so well that I bought more, almost exactly a year ago:


These were at K-Mart, three to a pot, and I bought them and separated them and then spent many months trying to get the mealybugs off of them. ¹ I'm not sure whether this has been successful or not; so far, every time I think I've gotten them all, I've wound up finding more soon after. Though it has been a couple months, now.

They've been doing reasonably well so far, even though (as you'll notice) the smaller ones are in plastic pots. Clay would be better, but I'm not going to worry about it until they need to be repotted: they're doing fine where they are, and they've been fine there for over a year, so I'll move them to clay when they tell me they want to be moved.

They will flower, though none of mine ever have. A recent customer of mine told me that she had one at home that was getting close to eight feet tall (!), that produced flowers. She was in the store because she wanted to cut it back and needed advice, though: apparently her plant is not only getting too tall for her, it's leaning badly, and when it produces flowers, the buds form next to the window it's leaning on, causing them to become deformed and never open properly. Which is a little bit tragic, for those of us who haven't been able to see it for ourselves.

The flowers are lovely, what pictures I've seen of them (I was unable to locate a public domain photo of one before this post; however, you can see some excellent pictures of unknown legal status here and here.), and it would, of course, be extraordinarily cool if one or both of mine did sometime, but I don't actually mind if they don't.

As Christmas approaches, they often like to pretend to be the Radio City Music Hall's Rockettes. I have no idea why.
I've been surprised by customers' ideas about watering cacti. People want to know why their cactus died, and when I ask how much water they were giving it, they almost always say almost nothing at all, honest – I watered it maybe twice a year at most, or something similar. People. You do have to water cacti. Kinda regularly, even. They'll die if they get too much, but that doesn't mean you should never give them any, or that you should only water them when it rains in Tucson (unless you've accurately reproduced the Tucson climate in your living room, which I kinda doubt), or that you should only give them a teaspoon at a time.

Also. Something about cacti seems to make people want to be mean to them, generally in a way that involves glue. They glue fake flowers to them, or cartoony googly eyes, or they top off their soil with pebbles and then glue the pebbles together so that you actually can't water or repot them (which is an ongoing frustration for me personally). I understand all these practices in some way or another – gluing the pebbles together makes them easier to ship, gluing flowers and eyes makes them more attractive to impulse buyers – but, again, you're selling the plant, right? So why wouldn't you want the plant to be good quality, likely to survive, and all that? Apparently not.

Snapshot taken during the All-Cactus Revue's Annual Tribute to Busby Berkeley.
Another bizarre thing people do to sell this species of cactus in particular is to claim that it's especially effective at reducing the radiation (or, in some cases, the static electricity) from cathode ray tubes. One site claimed that Cereus peruvianus is a natural negative-ion generator (read through the comments to see the specific claims). Another said that it can absorb radiation in general. A third claimed that just an extract of Cereus peruvianus would give a person "great protection" from "emission and other negative powers." This is a load of hooey, of course, on multiple levels. ² There's actually so much accumulated hooey in these claims that it would take a whole separate post just to dismantle them, but I'll stick the short version in a (long!) footnote instead and you can read, or not read, as you like. ³

Anyway. Cacti need to be watered in general, and Cereus peruvianus in particular seems to do well if I give it a good, thorough drenching in my shower⁴ when the soil has gotten pretty dry, or completely dry: in practice, with the 5 ½-foot plants in the first picture, this means about every week and a half to two weeks, and for the smaller ones it's closer to every two or three weeks – I'm more conservative about them because they're in plastic, and their soil mix is also (accidentally) heavier, so I'll let them dry out, and then make them sit for another week or so before I water, just to be sure. In the winter, this slows down in both cases, due to all sorts of things (less light, colder temperatures, semi-dormancy), so it might be twice as long between waterings, but even then, they still get water from time to time, and I don't tease them with little sips.

The other necessary cactus care item is light. Indoor cacti need as much direct sun as they can get, generally speaking, but you can't actually move them out into full sun as soon as the weather warms up. They're not expecting that intensity of light, and it will bleach, scar, disfigure, or kill them to experience it all at once. Seriously. Indoor light and outdoor light are entirely different ballgames. Not even ballgames. I think one of them may be hockey.

Cereus peruvianus at work, photographed during a pirouette.
That said, if you have enough light for them, they're not terribly difficult. Given proper care, they're also quick-growing, which is a plus for me, though it wouldn't be for everybody.

I also appreciate that they're not spiny in every direction: when I'm taking the tall ones to the shower, I kind of have to hold on to the plant itself, somewhere, lest the plant start to tip and then smash itself into a wall. With some cacti, that's not really possible, but Cereus peruvianus has relatively minor spines, in fairly avoidable spots: I can grab either side of one of the ribs between thumb and forefinger and off to the shower we go. Easy care, relatively painless, quick-growing, and - you should see these babies dance.

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Photo credits: all me.

¹ A lot of cactus species naturally have white, slightly fuzzy spots near the areoles (the spots where the spines emerge), which makes it really easy to miss the presence of mealybugs, especially if you've been searching for the plant in question and are all adrenalized over having finally found one. As mealybugs and cactus go together like toast and . . . something that goes really, really well with toast, it's important to check these things.
² Actually more like a hooey split: three scoops of hooey, on top of a flim-flam cut in half, served covered in snake oil and sprinkled with bullshit.
³ The central argument here seems to be the three-part claim that: 1) Cereus peruvianus specifically, 2) absorbs radiation emitted from cathode ray tubes (the newer liquid crystal displays, and other new types of displays, don't really emit anything dangerous and are therefore irrelevant), 3) which would otherwise reach you and cause you harm.
2) is true, but it's equally true of anything else: a piece of tissue paper, a coffee mug, a can of creamed corn, a corpse – all of these also absorb radiation. 3) is debatable, but plausibly true: cathode ray tubes, especially older ones, are capable of emitting some x-rays along with light, heat, and other kinds of radiation. Whether these are produced in large enough amounts to be worth worrying about, I'm not sure (I doubt it), but the most damaging, high-energy rays aren't going to be stopped by anything short of a few inches of lead, and putting a few inches of lead between yourself and your computer monitor sort of defeats the purpose of having a monitor. 1) is plausible, but I couldn't find any actual evidence that anyone has tried to test this, and the one sort-of reference I found just said that it had been found ineffective. It's plausible because, in theory, a plant that accumulated heavy elements (lead, thallium, mercury, gold, bismuth) from the environment would be capable of blocking radiation better than nothing at all, heavy elements being, generally, better blockers of radiation right up until you get to the really heavy elements, like thorium and uranium and plutonium, which are radioactive and therefore sources of radiation. Again, though, with our hypothetical bismuth-concentrating cactus, we have the problem of trying to read your monitor through a plant.
The claim is typically that placing the cactus next to your monitor will reduce radiation, but any radiation going out the side of your monitor was never going to affect you in the first place, and anyway if you're worrying about all radiation in every direction, your best bet would be to quit screwing around and encase your monitor in concrete already. At the very least you should surround it with lots of Chinese-made toys.
⁴ Like I do with all of my plants except one Cordyline: it's huge on its own, and in a massive clay pot, which is huger, the combination of which makes it more or less unliftable except for extremely special occasions.

Work-related: final points pic for a while

Different angle, bigger picture, but it's more or less the same stuff we've been seeing all along. Probably not going to be posting these for a while now, until there's some kind of noticeable change in color or number or something.

We do still have a few that haven't really bloomed yet; some of the plants in the foreground have been close enough to the entrance into the store (which is sort of behind and to the right of me, in this picture) that the lights from the store kept them from getting long enough nights, so they're lagging behind everybody else. Also one of the cultivars (Cortez Burgundy) seems to just be slower in general. But this is basically the shot we've been working to get for the last month.

Click the picture for the full 2816 x 2112 px shot. It'd make a good jigsaw puzzle, no?

Random plant event: Hibiscus acetosella 'Brown Sugar' buds

My wonderful co-worker¹ has one of these at home, I guess, which she took a bunch of cuttings from in the spring, and brought in to root and sell. Then, I guess, spring happened, and was busy, and so they never actually got put out to sell even though they apparently rooted pretty easily.

Then this fall, she found the tag that went with the original plant, which identified the particular variety (Hibiscus acetosella 'Brown Sugar') but also noted that it was a patented variety, and was consequently illegal to propagate and sell. Which meant we had 32 small pots of this plant sitting around, and there wasn't anything we could really do with them. They're not a hardy variety that could be planted outside just to be decorative, we couldn't sell them, and there was way too much of it there for any one of us to take it home as a houseplant. (Plus, wonderful co-worker² has more plants than I do, and isn't necessarily looking to get more of them, and especially not more of something she already has.)

So I wound up taking four of these home, and potted them together. WCW had told me before I did so that this particular variety wasn't all that satisfactory to her anyway, that it had a serious tendency toward legginess, and it wasn't a strong flowerer either, so pretty much the foliage was all there was to get excited about. Which was fine with me. I like foliage.

But now: buds.


I have no real idea what to expect. The plants at work (granted, a different species and all that) like to sit on their buds without doing anything at all³ for extended periods, before the flower actually forms. So there could still be a lot of time for things to go wrong here. But nevertheless, it looks like I've got two stems with three pending flowers apiece, which seems like a lot, for as small as it is, and not being a strong flowerer. There will be updates, of course, and pictures, eventually.


Just in case anybody was wondering: I'm not actually intending "random plant event" to mean "something just flowered" every time I use it. It's just that that's what all the recent plant events have been.

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Photo credits: me.

¹ (Still not sarcasm.)
² (Henceforth, "WCW," because that's a lot to type otherwise.)
³ (I myself like to sit around on my bud for a while when I get home from work.) (People say they don't like puns, but I choose not to believe this.)

Femme Fatale (Calathea ornata)

Let me be up-front about this. This is not an easy plant to grow indoors. Not an incredibly easy plant outdoors, either, though that's going to depend somewhat on where you find yourself when you open your doors, I suppose.


I can't even pretend to be unbiased about this one: I don't consider it an indoor plant at all, period, full stop. Now I know there are people out there who are going to read this and say, but I've had one for fifteen years, growing beautifully, and it's never given me a lick of trouble.¹ And to you I tip my hat and say a sincere and slightly envious "Congratulations." But no way, not outside of a terrarium. Or, now that I think about it, not inside a terrarium either. I do not like them in a house.²

Okay, okay, mr_subjunctive, you think they're too difficult to grow indoors, we get it already. What's your problem?

See, the thing is, Calathea ornata kinda broke my heart, once upon a time. It was about a year ago, when I was much younger and as naïve as an egg. The latest round of plant obsession was just getting cranked up – and then I saw her. She stood out like a gun on a jailhouse floor. Roots a mile long, and stems that let you know she'd sell her own mother for a Hershey bar. Face all painted up in pink-white stripes, she was looking for someone that evening. She was looking for me.

I drifted over to her and looked her over. She was into me too; I could feel it. It felt like that rush you get when all the cards are coming up your way and there's a nice little pile of chips on the table.

"Buy you a drink?" I asked.

She turned slightly pinker before answering, "20-10-15." I signaled the bartender to bring us a couple glasses.

"I'd never ask you to trust me," I said, "but I'm gonna be going back to my place later, and it would look so much better with you in it."

She gave me a look as sharp as an Agave with a machete. "Maybe you shouldn't trust me, either. How do you know you can make me happy?"

"Maybe I can do something for you that other men can't."

She thought about it. "Maybe. I might have a job for you, if you're interested."

"I'm interested. Tell me."

"Maybe later. Let's see your place." Something smelled hinky, but a man could get lost in leaves that beautiful. Who am I, Saint Subjunctive? I took her home.

We had a beautiful night together, then another. Every time I asked about this job of hers, she said, "maybe later," and asked me to breathe on her again. Or water her. Or clean off her leaves. It was always something. Finally, after a couple weeks of this, she told me about the job. A gang of spider mites had been giving her a hard time, and she wanted me to make them go away. Far, far away. To China, to the ocean floor, to the moon. She didn't know where they were right that minute, though. I put on my hat and went out to track them down.

I saw a speck of dust here, the glint of webbing there, but as soon as I got close, the mites disappeared into the shadows and alleys. I began to doubt my own senses. What was I really seeing? Were there any spider mites at all? Meanwhile, I could no sooner get into the office but the phone would ring: it'd be her, of course, wanting to know if I'd caught the mooks. Then when I said so, she'd ask me to come over to her place. I need water, I'm too cold, I'm too wet, I need your sweet, sweet carbon dioxide. We went on like this for days. There was always some little bit of care she needed, just one more thing that I had to do and then she'd feel all right. But she never felt alright, and I wasn't making any progress on the mites. Some of my other plants were feeling neglected. I had to draw the line somewhere.

"Look," I said to her one night. "I've got you set up with plenty of water, there's no drafts or vents for miles around, you got your aquarium here to give you humidity, there's a huge bright window right over there, and still you're always tearing yourself apart, throwing leaves at me, telling me it's not enough. I can't do this anymore. Either you learn to take care of yourself, or we're through."

Dame was hysterical. (Dames usually are.) "You can't just throw me out there to fend for myself! The mites will eat me alive!"

"Pull yourself together!" I said. "The mites are all in your head!"

"No, they're real! Real, I tell you! They'll suck me dry!" Her beautiful leaves flexed up and down like she was trying to fly away.

"If they're real, why haven't I seen them?"

"I don't know! Maybe because you're not a very good P.I.!" I put on my hat and headed for the door. "No, wait, I didn't mean that! Come back!"

That was the last time I saw her alive and well. The next time we met up, she was neither, covered in spider mites, spotlit by a fluorescent light in my bathroom like an angel. A cracked, dry, dull-colored angel with bent stems, covered in webbing. As I gently lifted her into a garbage bag and heaved her in the dumpster, I vowed to her that I would get revenge on those damned spider mites if it was the last thing I did. I haven't been able to look at another Calathea since then.

THE END

Epilogue: A few of the details have been changed, here: there were actually two plants, they only lasted about 2 months, and there was never a honeymoon period where things were okay: it was all downhill from the moment I brought them home. I never did figure out what, specifically, went wrong, but the list of possible suspects is huge: too hot, too cold (it was Oct-Dec last year, so cold is a strong contender), too wet (soil), too dry (soil), too dry (air), high soluble salts in the soil, too much light, too little light, fluoride toxicity, heavy soil. Even now, after a year of fairly intense study of plants (at GW and elsewhere), I have no idea where it all went wrong, but I suspect that my first mistake was bringing them home. Not going to happen again. Never ever ever. One true bit: the leaves did raise and lower by a noticeable amount, which I knew Marantas did that but I didn't know that Calatheas would also.

-

Photo credit: me.

¹ Why is the standard unit of measurement for trouble "licks?" Was licking stuff generally more dangerous in the past or something? When did this happen?
²(I do not like them with a mouse. I will not grow them in a box; I will not grow them with a fox. Etc.)

LOLSpath

I know these aren't everyone's taste. (Not that anybody's complained -- I just know they're not.) But this one, when I saw how it turned out, actually did make me chuckle a little. So I hope everyone will be willing to indulge me from time to time.


(Explanation of lolcats, from which these derive, was here.)

Landlord (Aechmea fasciata)

If you're reading this (and apparently you are), you probably already know a thing or two about bromeliads. For example, you probably know that most of them are grown for their pretty spectacular flowers¹. You might know that most of them are epiphytes, and grow on tree branches in the wild, not in soil. You probably know that pineapples are bromeliads, and that they're one of the exceptions to the epiphyte thing.


But you may not already be aware that they're also a convenient place for some creatures to lay their eggs. The center of the plant collects rainwater, and also organic debris from higher up in the tree (dead insects, bird droppings, fallen leaves), which serves as a stable supply of water and fertilizer for the growing plant. Mosquitoes need stable pools of water in which to lay eggs, so bromeliads are a natural and convenient place for them to go. (Sometimes, apparently, they hover over the water and drop eggs in from above, even.) Certain kinds of mosquitoes apparently don't lay eggs anywhere else. Some beetles do likewise.

Frogs, too, need water for their tadpoles, and the best kind of water, from a frog's perspective, is water that's not already full of tadpole-eating fish and other predators. So they join up, too. The brightly-colored poison arrow frogs are the most famous tenants, but there are others.

The strawberry poison-dart frog, Oophaga pumilio, "blue jeans" morph.
But don't go thinking that this sort of thing only happens in the wild. Here is a video describing a bromeliad-facilitated invasion of tree frogs ( Eleutherodactylus coqui, common name "coquí:" it's native to Puerto Rico but has spread to other areas, and has become a severe invasive pest in Hawaii²) in the biology department greenhouse at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. I advise my readers to skip the comments. ³ The high point of the video for our purposes is the part where the greenhouse manager shows the camera an Aechmea fasciata in some detail.

Special thanks to the Invasive Species Weblog, kept by Dr. Jennifer Foreman Orth, for linking to the video in the first place. You'll be seeing plenty of links to ISW in the future. Why? Because it's important.

But should I say something about the plant itself? I probably should. Well, they're great, actually. It's difficult to find one in stores that's not in bloom (though we have some at work right now), and that's a complication, because they die after flowering. The dying can take over a year, though (I've had my mother plant for almost exactly a year, and it's still very much alive, still kicking out offsets, though I killed the last two, alas. The one pictured above is an offset, or "pup," from the one I bought. I don't know how long it had been in the store, in flower, when I bought it, but I know it was at least three months, and very probably six), during which time it will offset. Pups can be removed and planted up by themselves when they're of substantial size (the rule of thumb I usually see is, they can be removed when they're about one-third the height of the mother: I don't know whether this is actually a hard and fast rule or if it's just something people say.). Precisely how many pups a plant may produce before it kicks is variable, but my Aechmea fasciata has thus far tried three times, with a fourth in progress at the moment.

Pup #4
Care is a piece of cake, though.

Light: The books say bright indirect light with no sun; mine haven't seemed to mind some filtered sunlight.

Feeding: Feeding is a bit tricky, in that feeding is generally done directly into the vase ('cause, remember, you're trying to imitate tadpole poop) at greatly reduced strength. Feeding the roots is fine, too, and foliar feeding (spraying a fertilizer solution directly onto leaves) is also popular. However you do it, remember to go easy on the feeding. We're trying to simulate tadpole poop, not elephant poop. More is not better. ⁴ Aechmea does have a higher than standard requirement for magnesium, though this is probably not worth going out of your way to supplement, if you're growing a plant at home for your own enjoyment.

Water: The vase does not have to be full of water at all times, and in fact some growers advise against putting water in there ever, in interior situations. If you do keep water in it, remember to rinse it periodically, to keep mineral deposits, fertilizer, algae, etc., from building up and disfiguring the leaves. I personally do keep water in the vase of my plants . . . when I remember to. They don’t seem to notice whether I do or don't.

Soil: Use a barky, woody mix, with osmunda fiber and perlite or sphagnum or something in there that can hold some water. But there's no need to get carried away with the specialness of the occasion. My own plants are in the usual potting mix I use for everything; lots of perlite in a peaty kind of Miracle Gro base, with random bits of other stuff (sand, bark, gravel) floating around in there. It's not good for starting offsets, I've learned the hard way (too wet, not enough roots), and wouldn't actually be what I'd recommend for other people to use, but since the plants seem happy, I'm not inclined to make any drastic changes. If and when I need to repot, or when I take off that fourth offset, I might change the soil, though, having recently had the importance of good soil impressed upon me.

Temperature: The books advise against letting Aechmea fasciata go below 50ºF (10ºC); cold will cause dead spots to form on leaves and other kinds of badness.

If all that sounds complicated, it's really not that bad. Getting a plant to bloom is sort of a circus, potentially, and I don't really want to get into it here and now, but it should be mostly a matter of time. Plants are generally ready to flower when they're about three years old, though they may or may not do so. Growers have ways to force flowers early, when plants are about a year and a half old, but this isn't really practical for home growers. And besides, what's your hurry?

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Photo credits: Aechmea fasciata, me;
strawberry poison-dart frog, "pstevendactylus" at the abovelinked Wikipedia entry;
pup, me again.

¹(More correctly, their inflorescences. The individual flowers are nothing special, but the massing of them together, and the brightly-colored bracts, are what make them a big deal.)
² If this seems familiar, it's because we've seen it before. I kind of get the impression that it's always a bad idea to bring a new species to Hawaii.
³(In fact, as a matter of general policy, it's almost always a good idea to skip the comments at YouTube, which seem to invariably degenerate into racism and homophobia and dumbass macho posturing regardless of the subject matter of the video. The consistency is remarkable and mind-blowing and possibly a little admirable, even – imagine if this single-mindedness were used for good instead of evil! – but a little goes a long way.)
⁴ More is almost never better. Err on the side of starving your plants, as a rule. Too much food will cause bizarre growth, dead roots, burned leaf tips, and other problems, like death.