Thursday, August 14, 2008

Random plant event: Rhapis excelsa flowering

This had me worried, a little bit, because for some reason I was under the impression that Rhapis die after flowering. This is a problem because, obviously, the plant hasn't sold yet, and it's big enough and expensive enough that that's a lot of money for the business to have to eat. But it's okay. Momentary confusion with bamboo. I got better. The plant will be fine.


Thus far, not much to look at, really, and the flowers are actually surprisingly similar to Chamaedorea flowers (which one can see here and here and here). I guess it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a kinship.


It's possible that the flowers will get more colorful or something later on, in which case I'll do a follow-up post of some kind, but this is what there's been so far.


The Rhapis excelsa profile post can be found here.


2 comments:

Eric Bronson said...

Flowering would be a problem for you if it was a bamboo. If this is a small palm you may want to cut the flowers off so the plant doesn't put it's energy in flowering!

mr_subjunctive said...

Well, it's not huge considering how big they're capable of getting, but it's pretty good size, maybe six, six and a half feet tall. I think it'll be okay.