Supermodel (Dizygotheca elegantissima)

Readers who like mood music with their plant-related reading, and are by and large cool with drag queens,¹ are encouraged to play the video below. Or anybody who just misses RuPaul, for that matter: what has she been doing lately? Everybody else can just proceed to the text.

Skinny leaves, skinny stems, skinny petioles, fussy, high-maintenance, tall: what could Dizygotheca elegantissima be but a supermodel?



I happen to like this plant, though I hadn't given it a lot of thought until a few months ago. They have a reputation for being buggy, and, frankly, I have enough bug problems to worry about already. But . . . you know how it is. You see a plant every day, you develop a kind of obsession about it, you do the math one day and find out you could buy it with your employee discount for less than $3, and then suddenly it's sitting on the back of the toilet. Whoops.

Shortly thereafter, K-Mart had a bunch of these too: 4-inch pots containing three plants for about $3. So I bought three of those as well. Double whoops.

And the results have been, shall we say, mixed. They were all doing nicely until one of the periodic plant rearrangements moved the K-Mart batch to the mini-greenhouse. They sat there happily for a while and then suddenly began pitching leaves left, right and center. I don't know what happened precisely: there may have been a situation with some spider mites, though I was never sure if I saw any or not. In any case. No air circulation + soil that was basically pure peat² + possibly some contributing spider mites = badness and leaf drop.



I took them back out, sprayed them with some neem oil, and gave them spots with better air circulation, and things improved, though most of the plants had bare spots where leaves had been lost, so I potted them all up together in a single pot to hide the pitifulness. I have no idea what's going to happen now: they have better soil, which should make them happy, and the grouping of them should keep the local humidity a little higher, but at the same time, air circulation is down, and they're in a warmer spot, which might encourage spider mites. Really no way to know until it happens. So far, things seem to be okay, though there are some early signs that there's going to be another round of leaf drop before it's over. Call it a hunch.

I should probably mention sooner or later that Dizygotheca elegantissima is not the correct name for this plant anymore. It is now placed in the genus Schefflera, along with the more common houseplants Schefflera actinophylla and S. arboricola. The family resemblance is sort of difficult to see with young plants, since elegantissima has very long, thin leaflets (as opposed to the others' oval ones), which are a dark, almost metallic black-green (as opposed to the others' plain green, or green with cream-yellow variegation), and so on and so forth. But if you look at more mature plants,³ and others in the Schefflera family (e.g. the pictures at davesgarden.com of S. digitata, S. taiwaniana, and the 'Nova' cultivar of S. actinophylla⁴), it becomes more obvious that no, Schefflera is probably the right genus. Readers who are still not convinced should look at this photo, also from davesgarden.com, which shows mature and immature foliage side-by-side, or this one, which shows mature plants.

This, to me, is a tragic loss of a good botanical name. More than that, really, because "Dizygotheca elegantissima," to me, somehow sounded the way the plant looked. It was just the right name for this plant. So I am making the conscious and public decision to continue to call it Dizygotheca for at least a little while longer, even though I wouldn't ordinarily don't do that, and I resent people who perpetuate inaccurate names, because I'm just not ready to give it up yet.

Anyway. There are at least a couple cultivars, which I wasn't aware of until pretty recently. Asiatica Nursery has one for sale which is called 'White Parsley;' I've also seen a plant going by the name 'Gold Crest' at Lowe's, which is different in having cream variegation around the outside edge of the leaves, and the Exotic Angel website lists a 'Galaxy' that they seem to think is something special, though I'm not clear why they think that, a variegated 'Galaxy,' and 'Olympia,' which seems to be the regular plant with unusually fat leaves – it's possible that this version grows mature leaves at a younger age, or it may just be that the leaves are broader all the way around.

I haven't met any actual human supermodels, but what I hear is that they're frighteningly skinny and demanding. So you can guess where I'm going with this.



One of the reasons you don't see Dizygotheca in more stores overlaps with Dracaena sanderiana: they aren't busy, fluffy, full-looking plants unless you stick a bunch of them together. There are up sides to this: they rarely take up much more horizontal space than their pot does, which can be useful in filling specific empty spots in a home, or in a group planting.⁵ But even so.

Older plants do get wider (because they develop longer petioles with age: this is also a general Schefflera characteristic), though they don't branch spontaneously. Cutting off the growing tip may encourage a too-skinny plant to bush out a little, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had to be done a few times before it took, or if the end result wasn't really all that great. (You think Gisele Bündchen does everything she's asked, the first time, precisely as instructed? Puh-leeze.)

This all makes Dizygotheca a plausibly good plant for apartment-dwellers or the otherwise space-challenged: they might get taller, but they're not going to push everything out of a small room like a Pandanus veitchii (screw pine) might. But. There are plenty of easier plants available for that situation, foremost among them the Dracaena family (D. fragrans in particular).

So far, mine are doing okay, and I’m pleased about this, because they are charming plants, especially when they're small. I especially love the weird metallic green-black color, which is unusual in the plant world. There aren't any other plants like it. But -- I worry about their long-term future here.

Which brings me, after 1600 some words, to the real problem with Dizygotheca elegantissima: she's a diva, in the Naomi Campbell mold. She doesn't like temperature swings, doesn't like dark places, doesn't like dry air or dry soil. Of course, soil that's too wet is also unacceptable, and good air circulation is a must (it just has to be air circulating at exactly the same temperature as all the previous air: no sharp changes.). Also all of the drinking glasses must be triple-wrapped in plastic, and if there are M-n-Ms in the dressing room, the blue ones must be removed.

Bugs, also, are potentially a huge issue. Spider mites love the Araliaceae family in general, and Scheffleras in particular, and as far as I can determine, the situation is even worse when it comes to mealybugs. So at the very least, if you're going to keep this one, you need to be prepared to be ready to jump to attention at the first sign of any trouble, because it can get out of hand really quickly. And girl, if there is a bug problem, you better work.



-

Photo credit: all me.

¹ Though RuPaul is in kind of a class by herself, as "drag queens" go. For those readers not up on gay culture, which I'm going to assume is most of them: being a drag queen is different from transvestitism, which in its strictest sense is a sexual fetish (man derives sexual pleasure from dressing up in women's clothing), and it's different from being transgendered, which in its strictest sense is a psychological and medical condition (more or less the "woman trapped in a man's body" thing). Most of the time, someone who does drag does so as theater: there is an event involved, like a lip-synching contest or a fundraiser or a parade, and the performer dresses as a woman to become the character they play for such events (a given performer typically only "does" one character during any given time period, though there are exceptions). The performer may or may not try to pass for (appear to the casual observer to be) a woman, depending on individual tastes and the demands of the event.
The point here is to make it clear that drag queens, and gay men in general, do not believe themselves to be women, nor do they, in most cases, want to be women. Drag is primarily theater. For this reason, the term "female impersonator," which is sometimes used for drag queens, can be offensive in certain contexts. They're not impersonating women; they're impersonating drag queens, and that's a whole different category.
The correct pronoun to use for a drag performer in costume is "she." Out of costume is "he." There are exceptions, including some performers who are genuinely indifferent to which pronoun you use, but this is the safer way to go until you hear otherwise.
I've only really had extended contact with one drag queen in my life, who may not be typical but who did take me with him to a drag show in Waterloo once: he did a lot of fundraisers for various worthy causes, and as performers are usually compensated for participating in this kind of thing, he made enough money doing it to sustain it as a hobby. He lip-synched, mostly to very sentimental, down-tempo stuff by Reba McEntire. Nice guy, though I worried about his safety sometimes, and still occasionally do. Worried a bit about my own safety, actually, that night, when he and I and several other people (some still in drag from the show and some not) went to Perkins for a 2 AM meal. But it was kind of worth it: I didn't have any desire to do drag at the time, and I still don't, but it's a pretty wild subculture, as subcultures go. I mean, the outfits alone. . . .
² That's what they were planted in when I bought them, and I didn't change the soil because I didn't want to traumatize them unnecessarily. Bad call, it looks like.
³ (Continuing the trend we've seen with Monstera deliciosa, Syngonium podophyllum, Epipremnum aureum and others)
⁴ WANT!
⁵ Not that I approve of group plantings, as a rule. It's not impossible for them to work out, but even your longer-lived group plantings are still short-term: the plants with more aggressive root systems will, sooner or later, choke out the slower-growing plants, and then you either have to split the group up or let them die one by one. There's not really a middle ground here. And even that protracted unhappy ending is only available in the situations where you can get together a group of plants that 1) look okay together and 2) need more or less similar conditions. I've tried to assemble such groups for work purposes from time to time, and although there are occasionally combinations that turn out shockingly well (Peperomia argyreia, the "watermelon Peperomia," plus Dracaena sanderiana, plus a white-striped Chlorophytum comosum, or spider plant, all works out reasonably well. The Peperomia has gray and green stripes, the Chlorophytum is green and white striped, and the Dracaena ties it all together by being gray and green and white, and striped. I'm very proud of that one, though so far nobody's wanted to buy it.), by and large it's tough to do. A flower will be just a couple shades too orange, or a perfect fit will need a completely different watering regimen, or whatever. I suspect the flower shop guys get around this by just ignoring cultural requirements entirely and going with whatever looks good in the moment.
There. I said it. And I'm not sorry.