Dilettante (Syngonium podophyllum)

Yet another plant I brought home once, only to do terribly wrong and then throw out. This one, though, has a happier ending than most, since I eventually made up for the failure by growing a few that, knock wood, are doing okay.

My current collection of Syngonium podophyllum.
I don't see a lot to be gained by rehashing the whole story in tedious detail, especially since I've told it elsewhere. (The link also includes, as a bonus, the list of song titles on my country album, which are down towards the bottom of the thread: I think my favorite of those is "(Why Can't You) Love Me Like My Pothos Loves Me." I'll have to work on coming up with some new material.¹)

So, one important feature of the plant: don't repot it in the middle of winter, too deep, in heavy, wet soil, while traumatizing the roots, and then overwater it, okay?

Syngonium podophyllum is native to Central America north into Mexico, which is more or less also Monstera deliciosa's stomping grounds. They've hit on similar solutions to the problems of the environment: both are climbing vines that have heart- or arrowhead-shaped² entire leaves when young and develop a more complex shape as the plant gets older. In the case of Monstera, the older leaves remain basically heart-shaped but become increasingly perforated as the plant matures; with Syngonium, the plant's more mature leaves are split into multiple thin ovals (pedate, for those of you following along in your dictionaries). This page has good (black and white) pictures of mature leaves; a color picture showing both mature and juvenile leaves at once can be found here.

Syngonium podophyllum 'Emerald Gem'
Generally, only the juvenile form of the plant is grown indoors; a lot of people apparently aren't too keen on the lobed, climbing version. I'm not either, though I've never seen a climber that was variegated or otherwise interestingly colored, and I'm curious about how that would turn out. (Maybe a climbing, lobed 'Neon' would be awesome.)^2.5 A plant that is beginning to vine can be disciplined by cutting the particular stem in question back to the ground, if you don't want vining.

Syngonium in the industry is mostly produced from tissue culture, these days: everybody loves tissue culture because 1) there's a high cost of entry, which limits the number of people doing it to a very few, very large players; 2) it's possible to produce a large number of plants from a very small amount of starting material; 3) unlike taking cuttings, it works quickly and avoids transmission of diseases and pests from one generation to the next; 4) plants produced from tissue culture tend to spend more time in the more desirable clumping, juvenile-leaf form. Syngonium happens to be especially suitable for tissue culture because plants reach mature size very quickly this way, so one can, at least in theory, pump plants out the door as fast as the consumers can kill them.

Surprisingly, I was unable to find any evidence that Syngonium has been involved in genetic engineering, which surprised me, considering how many new cultivars have appeared on the market lately.³ (A couple pages with pictures are available here and here, but there are plenty others that aren't on those pages.) Syngonium, like English ivy (Hedera helix), has a tendency to sport frequently, or throw out a vine that has a different shape, color, or pattern to it, and these new forms can be maintained through vegetative propagation, or (apparently) by tissue culture as well. The 'Allusion' series of cultivars ('Berry Allusion,' 'Bob Allusion,' 'Pink Allusion') are said to have started from vine sports this way, as well as the popular cultivar 'White Butterfly:'

Syngonium podophyllum 'White Butterfly'
So Syngonium is kind of its own experimenter, which I guess is a neighborly way for a plant to be. There is, of course, a darker side, this being that it likes to try on new habitats as much as it likes to try on new colors and shapes.

Yes, it's yet another invasive. (Sigh.) Like Florida doesn't have enough problems.

The most talked about problems with Syngonium seem to be in Florida, where the plant has escaped cultivation in the Gainesville, St. Augustine, Daytona Beach, Miami, and Tampa areas. Plus probably some others that didn't make the list. (See the map at the University of South Florida site.) However, the plant has also spread itself around in American Samoa, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Galapagos Islands, and in the Christmas Island area near Australia. Removal is a big hassle, wherever it's spread, because the plant can tolerate low light and reproduce from a single node. So, some of the removal is going to have to take place in forest cover, mostly by pulling the vines off of trees, and when you do, you can't let any of the plant fall to the ground and slip under some leaf litter, or else you'll be back again in six months to do the exact same thing. Realistically, Syngonium species are probably going to remain anywhere they've become established, unless it's a very, very small, very, very isolated spot. I have yet to see any reports that Syngoniums have caused serious environmental damage anywhere, but that doesn't mean they're innocent, and even if it hasn't yet, that's not very consoling, because they almost certainly will at some point. You can't bring a fast-growing, shade-tolerant plant to an established ecosystem and not make some ripples.

This plant occasionally still goes by the name Nephthytis in the trade, which is aggravating to me personally: not only is it not the right name, it's not easy to say. But it does happen. We've had plants shipped to us that were identified on the invoices as Nephthytis, even though there is an actual Nephthytis genus which isn't related to or similar to Syngonium. I know these things happen, but it's been at least 30 years: surely people could make the switchover, given 30 years to adjust.

Syngonium podophyllum 'Orientals Shanghai' (?)
So what we have is a plant that changes leaf shape over the course of its life, changes color and variegation pattern all the time, changes its habitat often enough to be annoying, and changes its name occasionally. One almost wants to yell at it to focus, already.

Fortunately, its unwillingness to buckle down and stick to a particular kind of life makes the transition to indoors pretty easy. It's adaptable to almost any kind of light, from low-moderate up to full sun (bright indirect to filtered sun would be the ideal, but really, you can do almost anything – the only thing to watch for is, variegated leaves will lose variegation if the light is too low, and plants will become spindly and weak-looking, with tiny pale leaves, if there's not enough light. I think some of my own plants, in fact, need more light than they're getting. Syngonium is also fairly prone to sunburn, if light intensity is increased too much, too rapidly.), and it's very easy to propagate from cuttings, or even just nodes with a single leaf attached.⁴ Grooming is minimal. Fertilization is kind of a weird case: my growers' guide says that Syngonium will grow more or less the same regardless of how much you feed them (though he hedges his bets by saying that plants grown in brighter light should be getting more food). Pests aren't normally a huge problem, either, though there are several bacterial diseases that can cause leaf spots (including a strain of Xanthomonas that is specific to Syngonium) – this is more common when foliage is left wet – and there are a number of fungal diseases as well that are pretty much not worth getting detailed about if you're just growing plants at home as a hobby.⁵

Actual insect pests are relatively uncommon, and limited to the usual suspects: spider mites and mealybugs. I've never had any problems with either, though, nor do I recall having any insect problems on the plants at work. The latest batch of Syngonium we've gotten had a few brown spots on the leaves, probably from one of the aforementioned bacterial diseases, but otherwise they tend to be pretty healthy.

Humidity seems to be flexible, though a lot of plants don't require humidity but do better with some anyway: Syngonium is such a plant. About the only real trick with these is watering, and watering isn't terribly tricky compared to some plants. In fact, if you want to grow this in nothing but water, it's one of the better candidates: it makes the transition very readily and can sustain itself for quite a while. It goes pretty much the way you'd think: shake the dirt off the roots, stick it in water, replace the water periodically. It's also, naturally, a good candidate for hydroculture (which is different from growing in water), but Water Roots is really more the person to ask about that.

Advice about watering plants in soil varies, but everybody is pretty clear that you don't want to leave the plant soaking wet all the time, and you don't want it to dry out completely. I water mine mostly by weight, which is hard to describe, but it winds up something like, when the soil is dry to between 1/4 and 1/2 of the way down.

Syngonium podophyllum, NOID (probably something in the 'Allusion' group, but who knows: These were Lowe's rescue plants when I got them, and the tags said the variety was 'Maria,' but you know how reliable tags are.)
In very dire situations of over- or underwatering, Syngonium will wilt. If you see wilting happening, you need to be very, very certain that you know which direction the problem lies before trying to fix it. The solution for underwatering should be pretty obvious; there's not as much you can do about overwatering, but bottom heat may be helpful: these plants are supposed to be more tolerant of heat than most, so as long as you don't get carried away, you might be able to evaporate some of the excess by setting the plant on a DVD player or other warm piece of electronics. I wouldn't leave it there indefinitely or anything, though.

When they're reasonably well-established, Syngonium tend to be pretty quick-growing, and they are more year-round growers than a lot of plants, too, so if you do something wrong, they'll let you know pretty much right away. So long as you don't plant them outside in a tropical climate or try to suffocate them, everything should be fine.

EDITED 20Dec08: There's an unfinished business post that shows what happens to variegated plants that begin to vine (though not what happens when the leaves develop lobes) here.

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Photo credits: all me.

¹ No, I don't really have an album. And I don't know how those songs would go. But I'd like to hear them, if they ever get written. Also, poetic license with the title I quote: my pothos actually seem to like the husband considerably more than they do me.
² In the jargon: cordate and sagittate, respectively.
^2.5 Alas, I have since been directed to this paper, which says that the specific variety 'Maya Red' loses its pink color in mature leaves. I think we can probably safely infer that this is a general characteristic for Syngonium, which is disappointing to me but not wholly unexpected. It does explain why I never see any plants with mature, variegated leaves for sale: I'd expect those to sell well if they existed. Perhaps this is something for some well-funded aroid grower with tons of experience (coughcoughcoughplantdaddycoughcough) to get cracking on. (Well? I'm waiting. . . .)
³ Not that I'd mind. I have no particular problem with genetic engineering in some places: I think it's fine in some situations, and I don’t see it as being especially different from the natural genetic reshuffling that happens when a flower gets pollinated and forms a seed. I do object to inserting genes that code for natural pesticides (like BT toxin, a protein from a bacterium that can kill insects), because that turns a natural beneficial item into a commodity and will eventually drive the evolution of pests which are resistant to the toxin, effectively making the bacterium useless for any further pest control. I don't think Monsanto or ADM or whoever have earned the right to take a global public good and ruin it for everybody forever. (Call me a radical.) I also don't approve of producing plants that require seeds to be treated with a chemical activator in order to sprout, or in order to produce commercially viable plants. Most of what you could want to know about that can be found in Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire, in the chapter on potatoes, which is definitely worth the $10.17 it'd cost you at Amazon, and really really really worth a trip to your local public library, even if you have to fill out an interlibrary loan request. Seriously. Run, don't walk. You'll thank me later. [beat] Why are you still here? Go! Go! I give you leave to go!
⁴ I actually managed to get a node with no leaf on it to root in water, in the aftermath of the disastrous experience I mentioned at the top of the post. I didn't hang on to it because the new growth was disproportionately tiny, it didn't make the transition to soil well, and by the time it got going I was so sick of Syngoniums that I never wanted to see another one. I got over it, but this means that I didn't salvage anything from the doomed plant, either. Fortunately, I think the doomed plant and the one labeled above as 'Emerald Gem' were both cuttings of the same original plant, which happens to be one that's still for sale at work, so even if there's no real continuity, there's a kind of abstract sense in which my current plant redeems the one I killed. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. (La la la la la -- I can't hear you. . . .)
⁵ Though it's maybe worth noting that the recommended treatment for one of them, Ceratocystis, is to take cuttings and then dip them in 120ºF (49ºC) water for thirty minutes. (!) Syngonium has a reputation for being very tolerant of high temperatures, but even so, I was kind of shocked to read this.

Unfinished business re: Cordyline fruticosa 'Kiwi' flowers

So I posted about this about three weeks ago, and frankly, I didn't figure we'd get to the end of the story because I thought the plant would probably sell before I saw the flowers do much more. This is one of the frustrations of working with plants in retail: the Ficus maclellandii that grew figs has sold, so I can't follow their development. All of the Ludisia discolor with buds sold right before Christmas, so it looks like I'm never going to get to see what the flowers look like. Etc.

But in this case, we do have follow-up events to report. It's actually a bit prettier than I was expecting. The original picture was from 9 December:



By 17 December, it had progressed to this:



And then on 4 January, we had this:



So now you can say you know what a Cordyline fruticosa flower spike looks like. I think it's nice. Not so nice that people are going to start growing them for the flowers instead of the foliage, but still. The big question remaining is, are the flowers self-fertile, and will there be seeds? I'm thinking probably not, but it doesn't hurt to be hopeful.

Paranoiac (Euphorbia trigona)

This is one of a series of plants I bought during a quest to get one particular plant. The plant I wanted was Euphorbia ammak; I wound up buying E. trigona and E. pseudocactus first, and then eventually got two enormous cuttings of the one I really wanted from someone on Garden Web.¹

The nice surprise is that all three have turned out to be great additions to the group, though in different ways. Euphorbia trigona had one quirk that I haven't seen anyone else describe before, though, which was: it waited to see if I could be trusted before it started to grow. Or at least that's how it looked to me.


The original plant had both of these stems potted together; I divided them when I bought it and gave them each separate pots. And then for the next year, they just sat there. The taller of the two got a little taller (less than an inch, but enough to be detectable), and that was all. Then, suddenly, around September of this year, they started to branch, and they both got taller as well, and now I guess we're off to the races. Apparently they finally decided that I wasn't going to hurt them, or something like that.

There was one other odd moment with these. At some point last winter, they both started to get brown and tan patches in the center of the main stems, though only on one side:


I never figured out what started this, and I never figured out what to do to stop it. The plants just kind of quit on their own. My best guess is sunburn, which fits in some respects (the affected sides were the ones facing the window, and the brown started with a reddish color, like some plants get when they're sunburning) and not in others (this all happened in winter, the season without a lot of sun). I suppose if it starts up again this year, we'll have a theory.

This is not a difficult plant to keep, though there are some things to bear in mind if you're going to get one. First, they are a Euphorbia species,² and as such, there's some dangerous sap involved. How dangerous? Hard to say. I have seen one account recently (in the comments) by a guy who says he got Euphorbia trigona sap in his eyes and was blind for two days as a result. Also there was apparently excruciating pain. There are also a number of accounts of people getting blisters when Euphorbia sap (not necessarily E. trigona) dripped on them, and occasional, impossible-to-verify reports of people having reactions just to breathing the air in the vicinity of a cut plant.³ I suspect that there's some hysteria and suggestibility involved here, and also that people may be getting different species mixed up, but even so, Euphorbias are not wholly benign and should be treated with a certain amount of respect and common sense. Eye protection, in particular, is probably a good idea: they squirt latex when cut often enough, and the consequences if you get some in your eye are severe enough, that taking the ten extra seconds to put on a pair of goggles (or wraparound sunglasses, even) is going to be worth it, on average, if you're going to prune one. The only other thing I do with Euphorbias is make sure to have some paper towels handy, if I'm going to be making a cut. I try to cover the side of the cut closest to me with the paper towel, so that if it should squirt latex in my direction, I won't get sap shot into my face. (It's also handy to have paper towels because sometimes they drip for a while after being cut.)

For less traumatic plant maintenance, like picking off dead leaves, or repotting, I personally don't go to any extra trouble to protect myself, but then, I don't react to Euphorbias particularly. Occasionally I get a little itchy.⁴ Even so, I wash pretty carefully after dealing with these plants for any length of time; my skin may be fine, but if I forget about the Euphorbia sap and rub my eyes, I'm screwed. So I wash anyway. Rubbing alcohol is said to be useful for dried sap, by the way, if you find some you'd forgotten about.

So, if you have pets or small children, this is probably not the plant for you: even setting the sap aside, there are still thorns, and the plant does tend to be top-heavy over time. This is not a good plant for high-traffic areas, for people with small children that might stick pieces of it in their mouths, for people with large pets that could knock it over, or for placing on tall stands.

Now that I've completely scared you away from ever wanting one of these, let's talk about how you would care for them if you were to get one, which you won't.

Light and watering are the primary things to watch here; there are Euphorbia pests, but they tend not to be a huge deal. (At one time, I thought that mine had had whitefly, but I'm doubting this in retrospect; mealybugs or scale are probably more likely and/or more damaging. Euphorbias in general are pretty hardy folk.) Most propagation is by cuttings – just lop off a piece, let it dry for a few days to a few weeks, and then plant it. Start watering when you see new growth. My impression is that cuttings rarely fail, but are slow enough that they can try one's patience: I have yet to see the Euphorbia ammak cuttings I mentioned earlier do anything, despite having had them for six months (on the other hand, a E. lactea cutting I took at work has rooted already, so there's some variation from species to species and situation to situation). And of course you do have to feed once in a while, but that's not really a big deal. Light and water are big.

Light: These don't necessarily have to have full sun, but they do need very bright light or they will become thin and weak. Drastically increasing light intensity can lead to problems: if you're going to bring an indoor plant outside, do so gradually, in steadily-increasing intensity and duration. If you just chuck it out into the middle of the front yard, it'll burn and burn and burn.

Water: Euphorbia trigona actually tends to be a pretty problem-free plant, when left to its own devices. As with any succulent, rot is a concern, but it's not inevitable. Drench the plant with water when the soil is almost completely dry, then allow it to dry out almost completely before watering it again. If a plant has begun to succumb to rot, cutting the rot away with a clean knife is more likely to work than trying to poison it away with a fungicide. On a large plant, one may be able to cut away the affected tissue with a clean knife, though this depends on where the problem is located and how widespread it has become. If the plant's base is completely gone, you can still take cuttings and root them, as described above.

There is at least one cultivar: I'm unclear on the name, but I've seen it labeled 'Red,' 'Royal Red,' or 'Rubra.' It is, as you would expect, red:


I haven't seen anything to suggest that it is any more or less difficult than the normal green variety. (UPDATE: I did eventually get one. They're not any more trouble than the green variety, though the red color will fade if the plant's not getting enough light.)

E. trigona is often confused with another commonly-sold Euphorbia, E. lactea. The confusion is understandable; the stems are remarkably similar. Once a plant has branched, though, it's easy enough to tell the difference: E. trigona branches, once sprouted, remain close to the original stem, and grow parallel to it. E. trigona also grows small leaves on new growth: the leaves form between the thorns. In E. lactea, on the other hand, branches grow out away from the main stem at an angle, and may or may not ever wind up vertical. The result is that E. lactea has a more open, treelike form, and is thus unpleasant to bump into from any angle, and takes up more space, pound for pound, so you're more likely to bump into it; E. trigona is harder to hurt yourself with, unless you ignore warning signs about a shifting center of gravity.

Euphorbia lactea
Finally: I would hope that nothing written here deters anybody from buying one of these plants, if that's what they want to buy. I figure it's important to get people's attention, so they have a safe amount of respect for the plant, but it's not like the plant is going to come after you in the middle of the night with a sawed-off shotgun. It's all common sense, really, I swear.

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Photo credit: all mine.

¹ Enormous to the point where I was a little concerned that people might think I was getting severed human arms in the mail. Apparently, either 1) nobody thought that, or 2) people send one another severed human arms all the time.
² Also: Euphorbias are not cacti. Very few things will rile up a pedantic cactus and succulent collector quicker than calling a Euphorbia a cactus. A lot of them have spines like cacti, they come in the same shapes as cacti, they serve the same general function in their ecosystems as cacti, you can root cuttings of them like cacti, and they are virtually interchangeable with cacti in every other respect, but they are not. Cacti. What's the difference? Oy. How about we go back to the main text and let me tackle this some other time? Or, if you just can't wait to find out, you could read this: it's not inaccurate, though I think it fails to make some distinctions that need to be made. It was the best answer I could locate, though.
³ Particularly the species E. cooperi, which has a fearsome reputation, and gets mentioned often enough that one assumes people aren't just making up stories about it. E. tirucalli ("pencil cactus," or "Firesticks") also has a lot of stories out there, and I'm more careful with that one, too. E. trigona, our subject here, has a lot of warnings, but few actual stories about it causing damage or irritation, and it's pretty widely sold, so it's clearly not a total ninja like E. cooperi that can kill you seven different ways in the blink of an eye. So don't panic: just don't forget what you're working on, and that you need to be mindful of where the sap is going.
⁴ Though, for itchiness, nothing at work has been worse than picking dead and yellowing leaves out of Ficus benjamina trees, which I can literally only do for a couple minutes before I have to run screaming to the sink. I suspect this is at least partially psychological, since I'm beginning to itch right now as I type this, but even so: there's something about Ficus benjamina that makes me itchy even when I'm thinking about other things entirely. My current theory blames pesticide residue, since the same thing happens sometimes when I weed under the tables in the greenhouse.

Random plant event: Capsicum annuum flowers

We got a few of these plants in the fall, and they all sold except this one, which has gamely been killing time ever since. I was surprised to see it flowering a couple weeks ago. A number of people have picked it up or looked at it like they were going to buy, but so far, our lonely ornamental pepper is always a bridesmaid, never a bride.


I tried planting seeds from one of the peppers, just to see what would happen, but I clearly didn't get something right, 'cause they haven't gone anywhere so far. Or possibly I'm just impatient.

How Often Should I Water This?

WARNING: The following contains a bit of a rant. Readers of delicate constitution or sensibilities should not continue reading. Neither mr_subjunctive nor Blogger, Inc., nor mr_subjunctive's unnamed employer, nor Google, Inc., owners of Blogger, nor your internet service provider, are responsible for any injuries, whether physical or mental, nor any distress or anxiety, incurred by readers who proceed below this point. Readers with rant sensitivity disorder are welcomed to the internet and advised: You're so going to hate it here.

Maranta leuconeura 'Marisela'

How often should I water this?

Almost everybody asks this at some point, if I'm helping them choose a plant. Which is good, as far as it goes. I mean, you should want to know how often to water, the same way you should want to know how much light to give the plant.

And I always say, you should water this one when the surface of the soil is just barely dry, or when the top inch and a half is dry, or when it's dry about halfway down, or something like that. There's a subset of customers for whom this is not good enough, though. I've been asked, in all seriousness, how one would know when the surface of the soil is dry. And when I answer (probably with a stunned facial expression) that the way to tell is to, you know, touch it, they act like I've suggested something completely ridiculous and unreasonable. Oh no. No, I couldn't possibly.

Anthurium NOID

Fortunately, I have a backup, which is to say, well, you can pick it up and water when it's light in weight. People have, on occasion, acted like that's ridiculous, too. (You must be joking. Surely one shouldn't have to touch a plant in order to care for it. And I'm certainly not going to lift it. What are you, crazy?) At that point, I should tell them about our water meters, though I'm always so shocked and appalled (The stupid! It burns!) that it slips my mind that we have them, and anyway I've never used one so I'm not sure if I trust them or not anyway. Though I suppose for customers like this they'd be better than nothing. I mean, the plant is not going to communicate telepathically with you, to let you know when it needs to be watered.¹

What people really seem to want is for me to tell them to water every Thursday, or every ten days, or only on the 15th of the month. They don't realize that plants don't use calendars, and don't know what day of the week it is. Plants need water when they need water, which is to say, when their soil has dried out to a certain degree. And even if a plant could be watered on a schedule like this, I have no idea what your home is like or where you're going to be putting the plant, so I couldn't give you a schedule anyway. A plant that needs water only every ten days in a dark, humid bathroom might need water every six days in a bright, warm kitchen, or every three days in a sunroom. The best I can do is make a guess based on what it would need in my own place.

Begonia rex-cultorum 'Harmony's Red Robin'

And this whole phenomenon makes me want to scream, and occasionally to throw things, because if you aren't willing to occasionally touch dirt or lift a pot, then you have no business owning live plants at all, and you should get the hell out of the store right now. Also, you probably shouldn't have an aquarium or a hamster, either, and you should definitely not be allowed to have a cat, dog, or child. In fact, I'm not entirely sure you should even be going home by yourself, so is there someone we can call to come pick you up? I mean, I know that there are people out there who have happened on a schedule that works for their plants, and they've been watering their jade plant (Crassula ovata) every Saturday afternoon at 3 PM for the last twenty years and it's doing just fine. But what the people who do this won't tell you is, they tried keeping the same schedule with fifty other plants, and the jade is the only one that survived.

So, just to be clear: if you're thinking about buying a plant, keep in mind that you may have to get a fingertip dirty from time to time. If this is too much for you, I hear they're doing lovely things with artificial these days.² Watering on a schedule is not a good substitute for, you know, paying attention.

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Photo credits: all me (my most recent batch of acquisitions from the Dec. 30 order, actually. Two birds, one stone.).

¹ At least not right away. Telepathy takes months, sometimes years, to develop. I'm only sort of kidding.
² This is a lie. I've seen the stuff they're doing with artificial plants, and it is my fervently held belief that none of it is lovely, and it's very rarely even competent. But if you're not willing to dirty your finger then I really don't care what your place looks like, and I sort of strongly doubt that you care either. Or else you care too much. Either way, I can't relate to you, so buh-bye.

I can has frog: the conclusion. . . .

Those of you following the harrowing two-day saga of the green tree frog I found in the box of plants (original post here) will be pleased to know that the frog has been placed in a suitable home. Apparently one of the Iowa City Water Treatment sites has a good-sized terrarium in its lobby, and my husband took him there this morning at the advice of the local animal shelter.

Since the camera was with me today, I have no pictures of the new home, but I'm assured that it's nice, and I'm encouraged to come by and visit sometime.

The frog could not be reached for comment.

Brain (Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash')

And in the thrilling conclusion to the Breakfast Club plant series, we have . . .

More name confusion. The species name is given in different places as Chlorophytum amaniense, C. orchidastrum, or C. orchidantheroides, and a few places say it's a hybrid and just call it C. x 'Fire Flash.' We will be emulating the example of the last one there, because I have no way of figuring out who's right, and neither do you (probably),¹ and it's not the most important thing to nail down anyway. There's more confusion about the cultivar name: sometimes it's the poetic 'Fire Flash' or 'Fire Glory,' sometimes the bluntly descriptive 'Green Orange,' and occasionally the sort of opaque 'Mandarin Plant.' 'Fire Flash' seems to be the name by which it's most commonly known, so that's what we're going with here too.²

Care information for this plant on the web varies from site to site. I have not found it to have any really hardcore preferences whatsoever, though some sites disagree with me on that. I suspect that what all this confusion about names and care signifies is, it's relatively new to the industry (it seems to have first shown up in the late 1990s), and everybody just grows it in a way that's convenient for them and calls it whatever they think sounds best, and tries to inflict these preferences on everybody else. But I don't know for sure or anything.

What we have here is a relative of the spider plant, Chlorophytum comosum. It doesn't form runners and offsets, though: what it does instead is, it throws seeds everyfuckingwhere. The seeds don't have the best germination rate (in one set of 50 last winter, I got three to sprout; this seems to be more or less typical), but what they lack in vigor, they make up for in sheer quantity.


I couldn't come up with a picture of a flower: none of the ones at work or at home are in flower at the moment. If you've seen a spider plant flower, though, you've more or less seen it: the flowers are about 1/2 of an inch (1 cm) in diameter, white, and have six petals. They generally last a day. On 'Fire Flash,' the flowers are borne in groups, though, instead of singly like with C. comosum: a spike rises from the middle of the plant, flowers bloom and fade over a period of a week or so, and then each flower becomes a small triangular pod. (Flowers will form pods whether or not they're pollinated: like "Brian" in the movie, 'Fire Flash' is a virgin. At least usually.)

I don't know of any way to make the plants flower: both of mine were either already in flower when I bought them, or flowered right after I got them (which was in December), and neither has shown any inclination to go again in the year since. It's possible that they only flower once, but I'd guess that they probably just have particular environmental triggers that I haven't provided. The ones at work in the greenhouse haven't flowered since I've been there either. Maybe it's a day-length thing. (UPDATE: See this post for more about flowering.)

Spider plants also get these pods, occasionally, which I didn't realize until very recently: it seems to be a family characteristic, though spider plants' pods are beige to light orange, and 'Fire Flash' gets pods which are the same pink-orange color as its stems. The pods can remain on the plant for a long time: though they will eventually, left to their own devices, go black/brown and dry up, this can take weeks. It seems to be okay to cut off the flower spike after a couple weeks of waiting, which will make the pods dry up faster; I don't know if this affects the germination rate or not.

Seedling, roughly 9 months old
Each pod contains three rows of seeds, which are small (about 2 mm across), rounded, and black. Each row has three to five seeds in it. Plants seem to vary a lot in how many pods they produce per flowering, but 30-70 is more or less the range. If you do all the math, like a Brain would, you can see that one flowering is good for roughly 270-1050 seeds, which even at a germination rate of 3 in 50, means that you could expect one flower spike to get you between 16 and 63 new plants.

Getting the seeds out is relatively simple: when the pods turn black, they also become crumbly. You can open them up with a pair of tweezers and shake out, or pull out, the seeds.³ If seeds are kept in a dry, room-temperature spot, they seem to last for quite a while, though I assume the germination rate declines over time, and they can develop mold even in dry storage. I'm testing a batch of seeds now to see if mold makes them less sproutable. (UPDATE: It does. If they're moldy, toss 'em out. You can always get more.)

As far as sowing seeds goes, I've always just sprinkled them over damp soil and then covered them with a very light layer of dry. Nothing more complicated than that. Sometimes I don't even bother with the layer of dry soil. Judging from work, what's more successful is to throw them back in with the parent plant and go on about your business: I don't know if this actually improves the germination rate or not, but it's easier to get the soil moisture right for germination if you don't have to think about it at all, and if it's in with the parent, you don't have to think about it at all. If the flower spike is not removed, plants will self-sow eventually regardless, as we can see in this plant from work:⁴


Self-sown plants in the soil of an older plant

I transplanted my seedlings to individual pots when they got their third leaves, which is about three months after sowing, give or take a few weeks. Seedlings lack the orange coloration until they're about six months old and about three inches across, at which point they're still tiny, but they start looking like small versions of the plant they came from.

But wait! There's more!



In addition to being absurdly prolific, which would be a smart enough thing for a plant to do, 'Fire Flash' is also very difficult to kill. It tolerates very low levels of light. It also tolerates high levels, though with too much light the leaves will develop hideous black patches or bleach out to an unhealthy-looking yellow, usually both at once, so it's best not to get carried away.

'Fire Flash' is so easygoing about watering, I don't even know what it might prefer. Water it every day, water it every six months: it doesn't seem to have an opinion. I mean, I know it must have a breaking point somewhere, but I don't know what it would take. The secret to drought survival is, apparently, the little root nodules visible in the above photo, which store water. They have about the same texture and consistency as a potato,⁵ but as far as I've been able to determine, they aren't capable of sprouting new plants like potatoes are: they store water, and maybe starch, and that's all they do. On-line consensus seems to be to keep the plants fairly moist, but if you miss a week, or two, or five, don't sweat it.

Humidity levels are a big point of disagreement on-line, with some sites insisting that 'Fire Flash' has to have 40% humidity, minimum, in order to do well, and others not mentioning humidity at all. I can't say I've seen any evidence that the plants care about this either, and 40% isn't all that much anyway, so I'm inclined to say this isn't worth going to any trouble over. (If you see a lot of black leaf tips, you might try misting just to see if it helps.) Air temperature also doesn't seem to be a big deal, though one site says that they suffer chilling injury (undescribed, of course) if temperatures go below 50ºF for more than 12 hours, and I suspect I've lost leaves here and there from cold damage on the plants at home, which are near a cold window.

In fact, the only serious issue I have with these is grooming: the petioles ("stem" connecting the leaf to the stalk) are brittle and easily broken. Because of this, it's not a good plant for high-traffic spots. Old flower stalks go black and become unsightly, and need to be removed. Any tear in a leaf or break in a petiole will develop black marks outlining the injury. Unwanted seedlings may pop up in the pot from time to time in older plants, though that's minor: the only reasons you might care are 1) if you want some smaller plants or 2) if the seedlings get tall enough to cover up the orange stems on the parent. Black scorch marks appear on plants in very strong light, or in cold temperatures, and some of the plants at work have burnt tips and some don’t. So there is some maintenance, which is not intense but is constant.

I have seen the claim on-line that this plant, like Chlorophytum comosum, is extremely sensitive to fluoride and will develop black splotches and tips if you even talk about fluoride on the phone while in the plant's vicinity. I think this is probably overstated, but it's something to keep in mind if you have plants that are consistently getting black tips: make sure they're not hot, cold, or getting too much light, and then if that doesn't work, try humidifying and using distilled water. I water my own plants with fluoridated tap water, and they do have brown tips, even though I flush the soil at each watering. Whether there's a cause-effect relationship there, I don't know, but it doesn't bother me enough to try to change what I'm doing: the tips aren't that pronounced. Anybody whose experiences differ significantly from what I've described here is encouraged to comment or e-mail.

Clay pots might be helpful with respect to the fluoride issue, since they do have a tendency to concentrate minerals outside the pot. The main reason my larger 'Fire Flash' are in clay pots, though, is because the colors of the pot and plant match really well and I think this looks nice. Granted that as the pots age, the match is increasingly imperfect. But oh well.

It bugs me sometimes, a little bit, that more people aren't interested in this plant. They don't sell well, and I feel bad for them. At the same time, I understand. It's difficult for us to keep them looking nice: they especially suffered this summer, when the greenhouse got hot – and the fact that we had several of them in high-light spots didn't help either. I felt kind of the same way about Brian, in the movie – it didn't seem fair that everybody else pairs off and he's stuck writing the essay.⁶ With any luck, we'll figure out a way to keep them cooler and darker this summer, and people will realize that they're not that bad, but I suppose it can't take very long to saturate the market on 'Fire Flash,' either. If they're hard to kill, and everybody can make as many of their own as they could possibly want . . . maybe they're not really the plant to stake a business on. I dunno.

In any case. I think what we've learned here is that each of us is really a Ficus, and a Monstera, and a Murraya, and a Philodendron, and a Chlorophytum. Or something like that. As much fun as this has been, I'm not in any big hurry to try something like it again. Some of these were hard. Though ever since the comments for Criminal, a few days ago, I'm kicking myself over not doing the self-heading Philodendrons as the girls from Heathers, so . . . well, so I'm not saying it couldn't happen again.

UPDATE: Here's a link to an Unfinished business post on this plant, which includes a picture of the actual flower and some seed pods.

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Photo credits: Anthony Michael Hall: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: my own.

¹ But hey, if you do, drop me a line.
² There is an outside chance that the different names might refer to actual different cultivars, though all the pictures I've ever seen look like the same plant to me, regardless of what they were called. The differences, if any, must be damned subtle.
³ The seeds roll, so it's good to do this over a plate or something, if you're interested in maximum seedage.
⁴ We have little incentive to pull the seedlings. They could be potted up on their own and sold, but there are so many of them, and the plants are just not strong sellers. So they sit in there with the parent.
⁵ I have, in fact, been tempted to nibble on one, just a little, just to see what it's like. It'd probably be safe – Chlorophytum species aren't renowned for being toxic in the way that Dieffenbachia or Euphorbia tirucalli are – but it's probably just as well I've been able to resist so far, 'cause you never know.
⁶ A lot of my feelings on Brian in the movie are because that's who I would have related to best, in high school (college too, as far as it goes). I was a Brain, and most of my friends were Brains, Basket Cases, or both at once. Occasionally there was a Princess or Criminal. The Athletes were underrepresented because I was completely unable to relate to them and far too attracted to them, both of which bring down the quality of conversation.