Random plant event: Farfugium japonicum 'Crested Leopard' flower buds

We are periodically offered, from our Florida supplier, boxes of what are called "assorted colorful foliage." This is always our best bet for something weird or cool: we've gotten bizarro Alocasias (including, most recently, 'Frydek'), Calathea ornata, Homalomena 'Selby,' and a number of other things that aren't offered any other way. Which is good. The problem is that these boxes also almost always include plants that we really don't need or want, like Alocasia 'Polly' (I swear, they sit around down in Florida trying to think of new ways to trick us into taking more 'Pollys.'), plants we can't really use (Cordyline australis, which are really only useful in group plantings in the spring -- and they sent us a couple in August), and plants that are not especially colorful or exotic at all (Dieffenbachia 'Camille,' Syngonium podophyllum 'White Butterfly'). So it's very much a gamble, with the assorted colorful foliage: there's usually something worth getting, but you have to take other stuff with it that's not worth getting.

In this last round, we got a Farfugium japonicum 'Crested Leopard.' Or at least that's how it was identified to us; the picture of f. japonicum 'Aureomaculatum' at davesgarden.com looks basically the same as our plant. If this looks familiar to any outdoor perennial gardeners in the audience, that's because this same plant is also called Ligularia tussilaginea, and resembles other Ligularias grown as perennials.


Anyway. WCW and I weren't sure what to do with it. Farfugium isn't a genus normally grown indoors (though I have a houseplant book at home that includes it, so I know it's possible to do), but we also had no idea whether it would come back if we put it outside with the perennials, plus the tropicals are more expensive than the perennials and we'd paid a lot for the plant. So in the end, I kept it in the greenhouse but priced it lowish, in the hopes that someone would snatch it up and get rid of the problem for us.

Hasn't happened. However, the plant's decided to bloom, which means it's going to sell. Probably before I can get a picture of the flowers. And I'm just hoping that nobody asks me how to take care of it, 'cause at this point all I have to go on is what my book at home says, and that makes it sound like the care is basically like for a Podocarpus macrophyllus: bright indirect light, wet, cool temperatures, humid. If the book is wrong about this, of course, that's the perfect recipe for rot. So I'm hoping I don't get asked.


If the plant sticks around long enough that I can get pictures of the flowers, obviously I will do so. But I'm not optimistic.

On Sentimentality

After a year at the greenhouse job, I'm sort of sitting around trying to think of what I've learned from it all, how I'm different than when I started. And I think the biggest difference, besides having twice as many plants at home as I did when I started (from 208 to somewhere in the low 400s, in a year), is that I'm a lot differently emotionally attached.

I was going to say "a lot less emotionally attached," but that's not quite it.


It used to really pain me to have to throw out a plant. Consequently, I wound up with a lot of plants that didn't look so great, and my plant area looked like hell, and none of us were happy. And it was usually my fault that they didn't look good: not enough light, erratic watering, or whatever, so I'd get that special pang of guilt every time I looked at them too.

The reason for keeping them was always basically the same: they were Special Living Beings With Feelings,¹ and I didn't want to see one looking at me from the kitchen wastebasket. The agreement I had with the plants then was that they could do anything they wanted to do, and I'd do my best to keep them alive, and if they wanted to branch or propagate or offset or whatever, they could, but I wasn't necessarily going to encourage it: it had to be their idea. Nor did they have to look presentable if they didn't want to. Alive, or not, those were the choices. Which is an easy enough policy to have when you only have 20 plants² and are just starting to learn what you're doing.


When I started working in the greenhouse, I had the same impulses: if a plant was even remotely sellable, I'd let it hang around. I probably wasted a lot of time, initially, on trying to groom and tend plants that nobody was ever going to buy. If I had to prune something back and wound up with a ton of cuttings, I'd try taking them home to see if anything could be salvaged. Brought home tons of cuttings, and sunburnt plants, and plants that got too dry, leaves that had been torn off but might sprout new plants, plants that were fending for themselves on the greenhouse floor, anything and everything. Anything to save them from going in the trash, anything to give them one more chance. And it's not like this didn't sometimes work out.

But over time, this has changed. Plants, I'm realizing, are replaceable.


So that is the particular kind of sentimentality that I'm over. I no longer feel guilty when I have to throw away a cutting that didn't work, a geranium that got too wet, a Dieffenbachia that got leggy and ugly and unsellable. Part of this is just because I've hit, then exceeded, the practical limits of how many plants I have room/time for (and then exceeded that number over and over and over). Part of it is just that the sheer volume of failures, over the course of the year, makes it impossible to mourn every single one. But also:

When you're an amateur collector of houseplants, every one is special and every one was, in a sense, grown just for you, and since it's a special one, with a unique bond to you, it's not replaceable, so you're responsible for keeping it going. Or at least that's the fantasy, that's part of what we're selling.


When you deal with plants eight hours a day as part of your job, unpacking box after box of eerily uniform plants, and then come home and water plants for another three hours, they are no longer automatically special, unique beings. It's taken a lot of time to get used to that, actually, that we could order a box of twelve whatevers and have them all look more or less exactly the same when they arrive. It wrecks the illusion of uniqueness and specialness.

I used to, when I bought a plant, bring it home, repot, water it in, and then wipe all the leaves off with a damp paper towel. It was a bonding thing. Now, I don't bother to clean them up (unless they're very dirty -- that gray crusty stuff that plants' leaves have on them when they arrive from the growers is the bane of my existence³), I don't repot until it's really necessary, and we take more of a so now you're here. Live if you want to, kind of approach. The survivors are rewarded, the casualties are mourned or not depending on how big of a mistake the whole thing seemed to have been. Sometimes plants are restarted, sometimes I realize I never liked it that well in the first place.


My point being that I no longer feel obligated to keep a plant around just because its a Special Living Being With Feelings. It may also be a Special Living Being With a Death Wish, a Special Living Being With Mealybugs, a Special Living Being That Wants to Piss Me Off, or a Special Living Being That's Just Not That Into Me.

The line that keeps sticking in my head is one from Louise Glück in The Wild Iris (again), from a poem titled "Early Darkness:"

How can you say
earth should give me joy? Each thing
born is my burden; I cannot succeed
with all of you.

Some of them fail. For one reason or another, despite my best efforts, I cannot succeed with all of them. So I've learned not to take it personally.


I see these same thought processes and patterns sometimes when people bring in plants they're having problems with: often the most practical solution is to throw out the plant and buy a new one,⁴ which I hate to tell people. I especially hate to tell people this when the plant in question is something they got from a loved one's funeral, which it seems is often the case. And I understand, I do, so I don't usually wind up saying that quite so bluntly. (People have feelings, whether their plants do or not.) But -- even when there are things to be done, plant owners are not always willing to listen. Cut it back to the ground, rip off the weird side growth, cut off the flowers, slice the root ball in half with a knife, prune it back hard, spray it with soap / pesticide / rubbing alcohol / water – a lot of these sound too drastic, too risky, too painful, to inexperienced plant owners. And I get that, too, having been there once. But even so.

And I frequently find myself explaining to customers that plants don't actually have feelings, or that if they do, their perspective on things is so alien that it's useless for a human to try to understand. If somebody ripped my arm off, I'd be pretty upset about it. Unambiguously so, even. (Try it and see. Or better yet, just take my word for it.) Take a cutting of a plant, which looks a lot like the same thing, and it suddenly becomes a weird question: are they upset about losing the "arm," or happy about reproducing? You'd think happy, given that reproduction is what they're all trying to do⁵. But are they hurt, even briefly, by having a branch cut off? Who's to say. Our emotional intuitions just aren't going to work, when it comes to plants. For all you know, your houseplants may not mind being debudded or pruned, but completely lose their minds with worry every time the air conditioning kicks on, every time you turn a light off, every time you open the oven door, every time a butterfly flies past the window. No way to ask.


So I'm okay, now, with cutting plants back to the ground, throwing plants out, leaving them in cramped little pots, or whatever it is that used to feel like abuse.⁶ And, conversely, I get a lot more frustrated when I talk to someone on the phone who says that their Ficus tree was dropping lots of leaves and dripping sticky stuff on the floor, so they gave it a bunch of fertilizer to help it out. The intentions are good, but they're thinking like people, not plants.


This de-sentimentalization of plants is a weird feeling. There's a bit on pages 212-13 of Flower Confidential (Amy Stewart) where she's talking to a PR person at the Dutch flower auctions, and Stewart asks whether she ever brings home a bunch of flowers for herself, just to enjoy. The answer is no, that once upon a time, her ex-husband had, but that it got to be excessive:

"No," she repeated. "My ex-husband is a buyer on the auction clock here. When we were together, he would bring me so many flowers! Everything that is too old, he can take home."

"And you got tired of getting flowers?" I asked.

"It was too much. The house was filled with flowers. It was unbelievable."

I was trying to be sympathetic to this point of view, that a husband could bring his wife too many flowers. "I guess if he's just bringing you flowers he got for free, it's not the same," I said.

"Ja," she said. "It was terrible. It was just not nice anymore."

Dispensing with certain impractical warm fuzzies is fine, as far as it goes: if it helps me take care of the plants better, if it's what brings in the money, etc., then okay. But I don't want to reach the point where plants are "just not nice anymore." I mean, so far so good, but I can see how it could be an occupational hazard.


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Photo credits: Pictures used in this post were mostly old pictures of my own that I made more abstract with the "Cutout" filter in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. This seemed more appropriate to the post than a bunch of random realistic pictures would have been.

¹ Not that I would have thought at the time that it was likely that they really had thoughts and feelings and stuff, just that I'm frequently tender-hearted that way.
² I know, some of you are going to read that and think, only twenty? Only twenty? All I can say is, when you go from 15 to 400 in two years, you have to do a lot of upward adjustment of what a "reasonable" number of plants is. I doubt I could cut my collection back to twenty now even if my life depended on my doing so. Hell, I couldn't even pare the number of plants in the room in which I am currently sitting down to twenty. (If the spreadsheet is correct, there are 68 in here with me. In fairness, that's an exceptionally tough call: most of the plants in this room are here because I like them better, since this is the room where I spend most of my time.)
³ Or maybe just one of the primary banes. In the top 20, certainly, up there with cheese, unexpectedly stepping on cold wet things in bare feet, my inability to be independently wealthy, and mealybugs. Oh, and the failure to become a supervillain. Which I'm still working on my application to the Evil League of Evil.
⁴ And I'm not saying this because it's in my personal interest to sell plants. It is frequently the case that if you let a plant go downhill long enough, you're just never going to restore the plant to its previous glory, not without relocating the plant to Florida. And Florida might not be enough, either, if the plant is really suffering. Or sometimes, with certain insect issues, the amount of time and effort it would take to bring the plant back -- two hours of Q-Tips and rubbing alcohol per week, two $7.99 bottles of spray insecticide, relocation to a quarantine area -- is greater than what it would cost you to just start over with a new plant, from a time-is-money perspective.
⁵ All plants, I firmly believe, are utterly devoted to one cause, and one cause alone: eliminating all other plants and animals (except possibly for a pollinator or two) from the planet, so they can have all the land mass, all the sunlight, all the carbon dioxide, entirely to themselves. Some plants are more up front about this than others. In the end, it's all going to be dandelions. Or prickly pear. Or purple loosestrife. Or kudzu. Something like that. You just watch.
⁶ One exception: there are a couple pink Anthuriums of mine that I've had since January 2007. They've gotten really tall and sprawly, and both people at Garden Web and WCW have told me that it's okay to cut them back and re-root them. So far, I haven't been able to bring myself to do it. It's not that I don't think it'll work. The idea just kind of freaks me out. I don't know what my problem is.

Site-related: Blotanical results (with links)

PATSP has received the Blottie (I'm gonna call them that, even if nobody else does) for Best Indoor Gardening Blog. (Full list of winners and nominees here.) I considered going into an Oscar-acceptance parody speech here (". . . and I wanna thank my parents, and Jesus, and all the little people. . . .") but decided that the better way to go was to play it a little straighter than that.

So I'll just say that I appreciate Stuart's efforts to put the awards together, especially considering that the awards and the ongoing feed issues hit at more or less the same time, which I'm guessing means he was doing twice as much work on Blotanical this month as he was expecting, and very possibly four times as much as he usually would. (Stuart's Blog, Gardening Tips 'n' Ideas; Blotanical home page)

I'd also like to sincerely thank everyone who voted, whether for me or not. As a lot of you know, blogging is kind of a weird gig, in that you start doing it before you know whether anybody's listening or not, and sometimes you get feedback about whether you're doing it right, and sometimes you don't. Those of you who voted for me presumably think I'm doing okay, which is nice to hear, and those of you who didn't have just pointed me to four other blogs from which I can steal ideas.


[evil laughter, lightning, crash of thunder]

So but anyway.

Soliloquy doesn't really need the extra attention, as she already won two Blotties (Best Canadian Blog, Best Commenter) and was a nominee for two others (Best Photography, Blotanist of the Year).

Balcony Gardener is, as it sounds, not so much an indoor gardening blog as a small-container gardening blog, but there are obvious overlaps between the two. Neither of us use shovels much, for example. Also some good, solid close-up photography, which is always nice. And Canadian, which I am trying very hard to suck up to as many Canadians as possible until I know how the U.S. election has turned out. (At which point I will either return to my normal level of trying to ingratiate myself with Canadians, which is still high for an American, or redouble my efforts, depending. Anybody who knows of any good Canadian horticultural programs should really, really get in touch with me. No, seriously. You should.)

Houseplants is a friend of the blog from way back, with a particular interest in the early conservatories and Wardian cases and so forth. Plus also lots of orchid pictures.

Indoor Gardener makes me think, well, maybe we could grow basil in here after all. (There was a previous bad experience.) The question is more whether the various Euphorbia, Cereus, Synadenium, Aloe, Pandanus, Coffea, Yucca, Hatiora, etc. specimens could be persuaded to share their window with something edible. I kind of hate to ask (you know how cranky Euphorbias can be). But if I ever were to decide that I wanted to grow herbs and vegetables in the apartment, Indoor Gardener is the first place I'd go to find out how. Until then, the husband and I will just keep eating frozen pizzas.

And finally, since the celebratory Gazanias have been used very recently, as well as the Gerbera of Accomplishment, we're going to have to go with a different flower for this occasion. So: the Streptocarpus of Public Recognition.

Streptocarpus x 'Purple Martin'
In about three weeks, we'll have a blogaversary (blogIversary? Which is it? Neither one looks right to me.) happen, too. When it rains, it pours.

Pretty picture: Eschscholzia californica 'Orange King'

This isn't a current picture; I took it in May. We haven't had these since slightly after May, because we didn't have many to begin with, once they got flowers they sold pretty quickly, and a few of them got too wet and died. So I have no idea how they actually do in Iowa, but my impression is that they need slightly drier conditions than catastrophic flooding.

Random plant event: Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei' resprout

This poor Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei' has been through a lot. I got it at Lowes, on clearance, because it had a lot of blackened leaves and I figured it wouldn't be that hard to rehabilitate, that it had just been overwatered like everything else at Lowes. Got it home, unpotted it, checked out the roots and stuff, potted it back up, and then watched it slowly drop most of the leaves it had, plus the new growth turned black at the base and pulled out. I wasn't sure if, when all was said and done, the plant was going to come back or not.

It did hold on to about five leaves on each branch (you can't tell from the picture, but the plant is one of those that's been cut back and allowed to resprout in two places), though, even though the growing tips themselves died. And then we waited.


I should clearly have had more faith. I'm unclear about what's actually going on, but it seems to have produced a new growing tip somewhere down in the rosette of old leaves, at least on one side. The other side hasn't done anything yet, but clearly there's reason to have hope.

Pretty picture: Calibrachoa 'Callie Sunrise'

We didn't do so well with the Calibrachoa this spring. Some varieties did just fine, but a few of them went chlorotic (yellow) early in the season and then stayed that way; in the end we had to throw some of them out. This is, I'm told, something that happens with them a lot (Petunias too), and can be corrected if they're fed enough and at the right times.


We also brought in some prefinished baskets in various colors: we could, in theory, make our own, but for various reasons we'd never be able to get them presentable as early as we'd need to, so we buy them instead.

'Callie Sunrise' is a variety we didn't have in four-inch pots, one that came in only on the prefinished baskets. We did have 'Tequila Sunrise,' which is similar (a little pinker), and which was thankfully not one of the plants to go chlorotic on us. (It's a good seller; we had a lot of them.)


I liked the red ones better, myself, but any Calibrachoa in good condition is pretty striking.

Actually, any Calibrachoa in bad condition is striking too, as far as that goes.

LOLAnthurium

I'm not sure there's anything I can say that would add to this.

Milestone: 100,000th hit

Moments ago, at approximately 10:05 PM (CDT) on September 24, 2008, PATSP got its 100,000th page hit. It was from someone with a Portland, OR IP address, who as best as I can tell was doing a Google image search for "coffea arabica neighborhood (public domain)."

This seems like a big enough deal to dust off the Celebratory Gazanias again:



Plus, what the hell, let's have a Gerbera of Accomplishment, too.

The Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina)

The story of the Wandering Jew is both very old and very stupid. I mean, I'm sorry, but there it is. It's a dumb story. There are several versions, some more pleasant than others, but they all revolve around the same basic idea: that somewhere out there, for some reason, is a Jew who has been alive since the Crucifixion of Jesus, and who has to remain alive until Jesus returns. In some versions of the story, he has no given name; in others, he's called Cartaphilus,¹ Malchus, or Ahasuerus. The connection to Jesus was kind of new in the Middle Ages, when the story really took off, but there have long been stories about people who were immortal for one reason or another, some of whom were also doomed to wander the earth.


Anyway.

The most typical version of the story² seems to be that the Jew in question goaded Jesus as he was carrying the cross to Golgotha, telling him to hurry it up, or something similar. Then Jesus, who was about to be infinitely, divinely forgiving of the sins of the entire world, turned to him and said something to the effect of, "yeah, yeah, I'm going, I'm going, and you're going to wait for me to get back, sucker." I mean, not that we wouldn't all be tempted to say something like that in Jesus's place, but come on, either you're the Son of God or you're not, right? "Forgive them, they know not what they do?" Consistent much?³

So but then the character of the Wandering Jew turns up in various spots throughout literature and movies and who knows what all else. Check the Wandering Jew FAQ if you're interested.⁴

It's hard for me to imagine Tradescantia zebrina snarking at Jesus en route to Golgotha; they seem too upbeat for that. It's also hard for me to imagine Jesus cursing and withering a Tradescantia zebrina, as far as that goes, mostly because I can't imagine anyone, Son of God or no, being able to stifle a Tradescantia zebrina for very long. I could maybe see a kind-hearted Tradescantia letting Jesus think it had been cursed, and then hurriedly regrowing once Jesus had gone on.


I assume that the reason why the story and the plant became associated with one another is that, like immortal wanderers, Tradescantia zebrina does, eventually, get everywhere. It's originally from Eastern Mexico (Tamaulipas south and east to the Yucatan), but it's been introduced all over the place since then, and can be grown as an outdoor perennial ground cover anywhere in U.S. zones 9a to 11 (One source said 8-11, even.), hardy down to about 20ºF (-7ºC).

Like its close relative Tradescantia pallida,⁵ T. zebrina has invasive potential, and is, if not actually taking over any ecosystems, at least being very closely watched. The main problems with T. zebrina are: 1) the roots are capable of sprouting new surface growth on their own, though in practice they seem not to do this all that often. 2) most pieces of an existing plant are capable of rooting and growing another plant (I'm not even sure you have to have a node, necessarily. I keep meaning to experiment with this.). 3) The stems are ridiculously brittle.⁶ Eradication, consequently, depends on one being able to collect every piece of plant from the area to be cleared. For small areas, this isn't that tough, but the bigger the patch to be cleared, the more careful you have to be. And forget about using Roundup, too. Doesn't work.

So it's like the mythical Wandering Jew at least in one respect: it will certainly still be here until the Second Coming. Whenever that might be. Whether it wants to or not.

As is usually the case, being flexible and prolific enough to be an invasive means that it's a great, easy houseplant. It's not a plant that likes to be neglected, particularly: it's more the plant I recommend to someone who's really into houseplants but has never had that many before, the plant you give to somebody who really wants to fiddle with a plant. (It's also, I'm told, useful for a lot of situations in botany classes: quick growth, quick propagation, easy to examine under a microscope because the cell layers separate easily from one another.)

LIGHT: Tradescantia zebrina can survive without much light at all, though without at least filtered sun (full sun preferred), the leaves' colors will be less intense and more green: it takes a lot of light to get the purple color.


WATER: They're fairly tolerant of both extremes, though I find that they do better if I aim to keep them pretty wet. If they're allowed to dry out regularly, the older leaves turn brown and crispy, which eventually leads to a mass of bare stems tipped with foliage. This is kind of an inevitable look anyway (see GROOMING), but keeping them more moist can slow down the process.

TEMPERATURE: Individual leaves will burn, and stems will die back, at around 32ºF (0ºC), but the plant can regrow as long as it doesn't get colder than 20ºF (-7ºC). Anywhere in your home should be fine.

HUMIDITY: Tradescantia zebrina tolerates dry air very well, in my experience, though sometimes people blame dry air for older leaves dying or burning. My personal suspicion is that this is probably either a temperature or watering issue, but I am sometimes wrong, so I'm passing this on. Take cuttings and experiment for yourself.

PESTS: I've never seen any pests on the work plants or on my own plants at home; this doesn't mean it's not possible, but they do tend to be healthy. Aphids can be an issue for plants that spend summers outside.

FEEDING: They're fast-growing, and consequently do need more food than most other indoor plants. Keep in mind, though, that if you're guessing how much food to give them, more is not automatically better. Package directions, or slightly more than package directions, should be plenty.


GROOMING/PROPAGATION: Because they grow very quickly, and because they tend to drop the lowest leaves on a stem over time, older plants often get scraggly-looking. Outdoors, this isn't a huge deal; stems grow in all directions, and if a spot is bare, a new stem will cover it up soon enough. Indoors, though, things are slower, and you do have to help the plant along a bit by starting new plants in the same pot. Propagation of Tradescantia zebrina is very easy: it will usually work to break off the end of a stem, make a hole in the dirt, and shove the stem in the hole. This works about 80-90% of the time whether you know what you're doing or not. Plants are also easily started as cuttings in water, which is the same process but with water instead of a hole in dirt: this works essentially 100% of the time. Usually roots will begin to grow within two weeks; often within one week. Pot them up whenever.

Tradescantia zebrina also grows quickly below-ground, so they tend to need frequent repotting, dividing or root-pruning, if you're wanting to keep the same plant going. In practice, it is often easier to just chop the whole thing back and use the pieces to start a brand-new plant. Moving a plant to a new pot that's two inches wider isn't necessarily a bad idea, but the bigger the plant gets, the less two inches is going to matter, and there comes a point where repotting is kind of pointless.⁷

The dead leaves have a tendency to crumble to dust when you try to take them off, which is sort of frustrating. On very large or old plants, one will also sometimes have to pull out dead stems,⁸ which is easier.

It's a safe plant to have around pets and children, though the sap can apparently be irritating to skin.⁹ So I don't advise eating it on purpose, regardless of age or species. The Wikipedia entry for Tradescantia zebrina contains a sentence saying that a tea is made from the plant in some parts of Mexico, which seems like a suspicious piece of information to me. Might be true, might not, probably best not to experiment on yourself (or other people!) in order to find out. There seem to be a lot of things like this in Wikipedia entries for plants: I'm starting to think that there must be someone who goes around and adds stuff like this to all the plant entries in the hopes of getting people to poison themselves (see also Zamioculcas zamiifolia and Pedilanthus tithymaloides).

Like all (all?) Tradescantias, this one does flower, though I don't think it forms seeds.¹⁰ The precise color of the flowers varies depending on the particular cultivar, but they are all small (about 0.5 in / 1 cm), three-petaled things in varying shades of purple, much like Tradescantia pallidas but slightly bluer and smaller. The flowers are pretty, but each individual flower only lasts a day. Good light and adequate feeding seem to be necessary but not sufficient for flowers: in the greenhouse at work, all the Tradescantias bloom at random moments throughout the year. (It doesn't seem to be seasonal, though admittedly I haven't been paying terribly close attention.) As I write this, the sillamontanas are flowering heavily, but not the zebrinas or pallidas, and I have yet to see the spathaceas at work ever flower. Earlier in the year, the pallidas were flowering but the sillamontanas and zebrinas were not.


At work, we have three different cultivars of T. zebrina at the moment; I don't have names for any of them.¹¹ The first is the one I think of as the "normal" wandering Jew. It has purple leaves, with clean-edged silver stripes on them. As best as I can figure out, this is the only one that was available back in the 1970s when wandering Jew was one of the big, popular houseplants, and it's still (arguably) the most attractive.

The second is also purple and silver, but the stripes aren't clean-edged: purple and silver fade into one another in spots, and there aren't many spots that are all purple or all silver. The leaves also seem to me to be a little broader than the standard version, and it's a little bit greener overall, whether in good light or not. The second picture in this post, waaaaay up there, is of this cultivar.

The third is almost entirely purple, and it's a redder purple than the other two. I wasn't initially that impressed by it, until we had to put some flats of it up high to get them out of the way, when I realized that they're downright gorgeous when they're backlit by the sun. In very bright light, some of the leaves will get partial silver stripes ("chevrons," one site called them), though only some.


There's also a green-and-white version, which I've seen occasionally. We don't have it at work, and I'm not positive that it's zebrina, actually, but it looks essentially the same except for color and most of the sources I ran across that mentioned it list it as a zebrina. I only know of one named cultivar, T. 'Quadricolor,' which is thought to be a hybrid of T. zebrina and T. fluminensis, and has pink, green and white stripes on the leaves' upper surface. We have something like this at work, though the leaves are significantly smaller and I'd assumed that it was probably a different species entirely. Also the variegation in the work ones has been disappearing; most of the stock now is just a plain, dull olive green on top and purple underneath. We can't seem to interest the customers in it whether it's variegated or not.

The regular variety, though, sells quite well, during two specific periods. We sell it in four-inch pots as a spring annual (I can't believe that so many people would pay so much money for something that would overwinter so well, but they do.), and it's been doing well this fall as an indoor houseplant in a hanging basket, partly (I suspect) because it's priced a little lower than most of the other plants of the same size. So we always have some of it around, though the form and amount vary a lot.

I don't know how much the name "wandering Jew" bothers people. It bothers me a little bit sometimes, though none of the alternate names (inch plant, spiderwort) are as specific or as well-known. I know at least one customer who bought it specifically for the name, though: I overheard one customer this spring talking to someone with her, to the effect of, "Oh. 'Wandering Jew.' Well, that's appropriate, right? Should we get it for them? You think they'd appreciate it?"


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Photo credits: Mine, except for the picture of the flower, which comes from Wikipedia and is credited to "ruestz."

¹ Which unless I'm very confused means "lover of maps" in Greek: carta meaning map, as in cartography, and philus being lover of, as in Philodendron, necrophilia, or philanthropy. (Carta could also mean paper/charter/document, apparently, as with the Magna Carta, so perhaps he just loved paper. Which is understandable.) Which I suppose if you were doomed to wander the earth for 1,975 years and counting, you would probably eventually get very good at reading maps, but you'd probably get pretty good at a lot of other things too.
² Nothing even a little bit like this is in the actual Bible, so there's no authoritative or definitive version of the story.
³ I suspect that this snarky aspect of the story comes from people who heard about Jesus being a badass in the temple with the moneychangers (Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-46) and fearlessly taking on a Ficus carica tree (Mat. 21:18-22 / Mk. 11:12-14 and 20-24), and assumed that he was then obviously a macho stud who kicked ass and took names everywhere he went, especially the asses/names of those filthy, filthy Jews who killed him. A lot of Christians, I'm afraid, have absolutely no idea what Jesus was talking about and have never made even a tiny effort to read up on this or apply his teachings to their own personal lives. Either that, or they aren't even particularly interested, and only claim to be Christians because it's politically expedient to do so. I'm thinking of a few people in particular.
Either way, random Jew-cursing on the way to Golgotha is really not in character.
The withering-the-fig-tree business, either why Jesus did it or why anybody found it impressive, has always confused me. I mean, shit, I've withered some Ficus trees in my time; it's neither difficult nor impressive. And isn't it kind of, well, silly to curse a tree? Are we to understand that the tree could have had figs and for some reason chose not to? 'Cause if plants have free will, then we may as well throw this whole blog out and start over again.
⁴ Yes, there's a Wandering Jew FAQ. There is a webpage for everything. E.g. 5 Cats That Look Like Wilford Brimley. Or Japanese Women Slapping Each Other in the Face: the Game. Or Dramatic Readings of Break-Up Notes (don't listen if you're at work. It's not so much that it's NSFW, it'd just be embarrassing and weird to have people catch you listening to it.). I very much love the internet sometimes.
⁵ Names get confusing. With T. pallida, there seems to be fairly good agreement now that Tradescantia, and not Setcreasea, is the correct genus, but one still sees Tradescantia zebrina and Zebrina pendula used more or less interchangeably, and I honestly had to make a guess on the name for this post. Since the trend lately has been to lump plants together into a limited number of large genera, rather than splitting plants apart into many small genera, I'm going with Tradescantia zebrina. I'd love to know what the actual situation is: if anybody knows what the taxonomic consensus is these days, please, leave a comment.
⁶ This is especially bad from a retail perspective, because it means that plants aren't likely to ship very well. You can load the most beautiful plant in the world onto the truck, but if it arrives shattered into a million pieces, you've just wasted a lot of time. It's actually probably more economical (and less frustrating!) to mail the pieces and have the recipient plant them and grow them out. I try to remember to tell customers that although some of the plant will break off while they're getting it home, the pieces can be stuck back in the soil and will actually make the plant look better in the long run.
⁷ There are a lot of other relatively common houseplants like this, where it's often simpler to restart the plant than try to up-pot and shape it to look attractive. I'd include Plectranthus verticillatus in this category, as well as Hypoestes phyllostachya, Tradescantia pallida and Pilea cadierei.
⁸ Most dead stems result from accidental breakage of a plant as it's being moved; one doesn't notice that there's been a break immediately because the plant can keep going, recycling the water from old growth to build new growth, for a long time. Sometimes, too, in very old or dense plants, stems can weigh enough to starve one another of light, or crush one another under the accumulated weight of all the vines at once. It's not really a big deal either way, and the occasional dead stem doesn't mean the plant is dying.
⁹ Not a problem I've had personally, but people always mention this when talking about it so I figure I'd better as well.
¹⁰ I had a disagreement with one of the nursery lot guys about whether plants that flower necessarily always produce seeds, or are even necessarily capable of producing seeds. I said they don't and aren't. I can't prove this, but I'm 99%+ sure that I'm right about plants in general, that somewhere out there, there are entire species of plants that go through all the motions of flowering but are nevertheless completely sterile anyway. And I'm about 98% certain that some of those plants are Tradescantias, specifically pallida, zebrina, and spathacea. Maybe fluminensis and sillamontana too, even. He used to teach at a community college, though, so it's hard work to convince him of things he doesn't already believe.
¹¹ It's very likely that nobody sees the point in patenting a plant that propagates this easily: sure, you could get a patent, but enforcing the patent would be essentially impossible.

Pirates / Hiatus / Figs

Ahoy! Talk Like a Pirate Day 2008 be upon us already. So swab the decks, kick the bilge rats overboard, and let's all drink grog 'til we can't drink grog no more!


Or something. I'm just trying to hide the fact that I didn't buy you guys any presents.

This is my last posting day before a briefish and badly-needed four-day hiatus; I know it doesn't seem like I'm actually exerting myself that much, but I've actually posted more than 10000 words so far in September alone, not counting this post, anything I've written on drafts of posts that haven't gone up yet, or the time it takes to take and edit photos. Plus, I worked yesterday and found mealybugs on two more work plants (or at least one: the other had obvious damage from something, and it looked like mealybugs were the likely culprit, but I couldn't actually see any. Sprayed it anyway.), and one of my plants at home. So that's been a little discouraging.

The next post will be on the 24th of September, and I'll probably be working on more stuff during the hiatus, which will then be posted once I come back. I.e., I will be blogging during my blogging hiatus: the actual hiatus w/r/t blogging is going to be after I "come back," hopefully with lots of stockpiled small posts that I can use while I work on the big ones. I'll still be checking e-mail and comments and so forth during this time. I'm not disappearing from the earth, just relieving myself of the pressure to post something every day for a little while.

Anyway. Just so this post isn't completely without plant-related content, I've got a Ficus triangularis at home that recently produced a bunch of figs all over the place (the earlier post about Ficus triangularis figs was incorrect, I think: I now think that that plant was probably Ficus deltoidea instead. Or else the plant in this post is deltoidea.), and a Ficus benjamina that I started from cuttings at work last winter is figging out, too, but in a more colorful way. According to a PBS special I watched semi-recently, Ficus trees, or at least Ficus carica, the edible fig, produce figs at random points throughout the year so as to maintain the population of animals that spread and pollinate them. So the fact that there's been no consistency to the time of year on the figging-out posts previously (December/maclellandii, April/deltoidea, July/benjamina, September/triangularis and benjamina) is, actually, exactly what we should expect. Assuming that carica works the same as benjamina and triangularis and maclellandii and microcarpa/retusa and religiosa and all the others. Which may or may not be a safe assumption. We'll have to wait and see if different plants consistently flower at certain times of year.

So I leave you with: figs.

Ficus triangularis (unless it's deltoidea).
Ficus benjamina.
Ficus benjamina, slightly closer.

Pretty picture: Portulaca 'Tequila Mix,' one last time

I love Portulaca. I do. It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to be doing for my moss rose in my planters: I was initially not watering as often as it would have liked. But we figured it out together, and I think it's now my First Annual Friend. Next year, and every year.


Portulaca isn't the only annual I became friendly with this year, but it's the only one that came home with me, to live outside. I may experiment with additional plants next year. I found Osteospermum intriguing. I remembered that I like the smell of Petunias. I can finally see the appeal of Pelargonium. I think Zinnia might be worth trying eventually. But there's just something about Portulaca.

Random plant event: Disocactus fruits

UPDATE 4 Aug 2009: The plant in this post is in fact not a Disocactus. What it is, is a Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa. It was sold to us (where I used to work) as a Disocactus, so that's what I called it. I would rewrite the whole post to reflect this, but that would be an awful lot of work to go to for an old post that nobody is likely to read anyway, so instead I'm saying this. Sorry for any inconvenience and/or confusion.

This is a Disocactus. Maybe. Still shaky and hesitant on the ID: posters earlier suggested that the more accurate name might be either Rhipsalis or Pseudorhipsalis, and maybe that's true. I have yet to see any really good photos that make me think that it's definitely anything, so for the time being we're going to keep calling them Disocactus. (Among other reasons, that's what the tags for them that I printed up at work say they are, so I have a certain personal interest in seeing them remain Disocactus.) Anyway. I wrote about them previously, because they had all flowered and that seemed noteworthy.


This is the flower, along with, underneath it, a couple of fruits. I had originally assumed that the fruits would probably only contain one or two seeds, not for any good reason, really. I guess I just figured the fruits were pretty small already, so the seeds would probably take up most of the volume of the fruit. Like an olive or something.


This, then, is what happens when a ripe fruit is squeezed a little bit. Seeds start popping out of one end. The overall texture and feeling is kind of like squeezing jelly out of a plastic bottle.

This is cool, but we're not done yet, because the gunk in which the seeds are embedded has interesting properties of its own:


The gunk is almost exactly the texture of snot. Or slug mucus. Something that is simultaneously very viscous and sticky, but becomes slippery if dampened (making it fun to try to get off). The whole point in touching them in the first place was because I wanted to plant them, and that didn't work out well at first: anything I tried to plant them in would just stick to my finger.

Eventually, I resorted to washing them off in a glass of water. The seeds from any particular pod all stay stuck together in water, like a phlegm globber, so, after adding several more, I stirred hell out of the water and then pulled out the -- I guess you'd call them "rinds?" This did sort of separate the seeds from one another well enough to make them plantable: I basically then just poured the water out on vermiculite, and we'll see whether that's good enough.

The interesting part of that was that the seeds actually made the water noticeably thicker to stir. Not by a lot, but enough that you'd have no trouble telling the difference between a glass of ordinary water and a glass of water that had had Disocactus seeds stirred in it and then filtered out. This is impressively viscous glop. It really just cries out for an industrial application of some kind. I have no ideas about this personally, but there's got to be something.

It's all kind of beside the point, because they're very easy to propagate from cuttings anyway (like Epiphyllum, which it resembles). I in fact have one at home, which came from a cutting of one of the work plants. Seeds are hardly necessary.

But: they're fun.

Work-related: Dendrobium Yellow Splash No. 7 pictures

So, to summarize life lately,

We finally get cooler temperatures, so work is suddenly a lot less life-threatening, and I think, oh, finally, things are going right again, and then immediately I discover scale on some of the bigger Cereus peruvianus and Agave lurida at work, plus one Dracaena deremensis 'Janet Craig Compacta' but apparently not any of the others that were right next to it, go figure.

These are at least related to scale somehow, because they're only on the scalier plants. I've just never seen anything that looked like this in the plant books. I'm assuming a juvenile form of some kind? We're trying to save the plants, but none of us are at all optimistic about it. I wouldn't be bothering if we didn't have a lot of money sunk into them already. And even if I get them cleaned up to the point where I can't see scale on them anymore, I still don't know that I'd trust them enough to put them out on the floor again. There's never a way to be sure you've gotten them all.

Then I find mealybugs on, to date, about six hanging baskets of 'Hindu Rope' Hoya carnosa (within, literally, seconds of telling a customer that we hadn't had mealybug problems in the greenhouse for quite a while -- I suppose I was tempting fate by saying that, but fate was clearly not even trying to resist temptation, either), assorted Hedera helix three-inch pots, one Aglaonema, one Crassula ovata, a really pretty Eugenia bonsai (still pretty, though one wonders how long that will last), and two large Dizygotheca elegantissima. This after a longish stretch of not having any mealybug problems at all. The afflicted plants have been located all over the store, not in any one particular area, so there's no way to know what plants they might have come in on or where they might still be, and everything is going to have to be checked, at some point, which could easily take three weeks to do. I'm betting that the last Florida order is at least partly responsible. The only response I get from anybody at work is, spray spray spray, never mind that we spray every goddamned week and it hasn't seemed capable of doing much, I mean seriously, we may as well be blowing kisses at the bugs, it'd be just as useful.

And then I think our entire stock of larger Codiaeum variegatum, anything bigger than a four-inch pot, has spider mites. As does our one remaining citrus plant (impossible to get citrus now because our supplier in Florida, and the rest of the state, are under a quarantine for citrus canker or something. We could buy from Texas or California, but neither the boss nor I especially want to go to the trouble to track down a new supplier and all the headaches that go with that just for a few lousy citrus trees.), some of the Alocasia 'Polly,' and I think a few of the Hibiscus (though the Hibiscus, some of them, have been outside until recently, and so they could have actual spiders, rather than spider mites. Not enough time in the day to check everything).

All of the orchids have come down with varying kinds of black spots on the flowers, and / or root rot (the root rot makes sense; they've been rained on a lot -- this last batch got shipped just after Tropical Storm Fay soaked them, and then we put them outside because the greenhouse was too hot, where they've also been rained on a lot, because all it's done this summer is rain), and those that aren't rotting need bigger pots.

The latest batch of six-inch Adenium obesum all dropped flowers and buds on arrival, as well as a lot of leaves, and I think it's likely that I haven't actually found all of the problems yet that are out there, because I've been too busy dealing with the ones I know about.

And we've got poinsettias coming in about a month.

And I mean, seriously, most of this shit is new as of a week ago. And then my favorite writer kills himself and Blotanical still won't pick up my feed (not that I'm upset with Stuart about this; I'm just upset in general) so even though I'm still trying to keep up the blog nobody's reading it anyway, and all the customers at work have suddenly turned high-maintenance and impossible to please and douchbaggy. Or, well, not all of them. But the customers do get snippy this time of year, for reasons I cannot fathom, and it's a large enough percentage that it makes work more unpleasant. And I don't even want to think about the election.

So the question is: can orchid pictures make me happy again? If I was happy to begin with, that is? Will orchids make everything better?




That'd be a no. Oh well. Worth a shot.

I can only assume that the moral of the story is, never think, oh, finally, things are going right again, or tell a customer we haven't had mealybug problems in forever. I don't dare try to be happy that at least there's no whitefly. In fact, I probably shouldn't even have mentioned them.

Random plant event: Pogonantherum paniceum flowers

Bought a "house bamboo" (Pogonantherum paniceum) a while back in the Quad Cities, and although I have trouble keeping up with the amount of water it needs, it's surviving so far. And it's a cool little plant:


I tried to bring some in on the last tropical order from Florida, but there's apparently a difference between a plant being available and a plant being something you can actually bring in: a lot of times we're told that something is available and then at the last minute we can't get it anyway, because the crop in question looks bad, or because we're not ordering enough to make a minimum order for some vendor or another, or because it was a mistake and that was never an available plant in the first place. It makes for a frustrating experience sometimes.

Anyway. So now I'm wondering if it wasn't all for the best that I couldn't get them, because mine at home has started to bloom:


I know just enough about bamboo to be worried (some species flower and then die, all at once, all over the world), but not enough to be sure what's going to happen to this one in particular (P. paniceum may or may not be one of the plants that do this). I'm not sure where I'd even look to find out.

Meanwhile, after spending yesterday trying to figure out what I'm feeling about David Foster Wallace's suicide, I think I've settled on an emotion: unsettled. I'm not angry, I'm not depressed, I'm slightly sad, but mostly I'm feeling disturbed. Anxious. Restless. Like there's something I'm supposed to do about this.