LOLSaxifraga

(THEY SEE MY STOLON -- THEY HATIN')
Those of you who get this will, I hope, find it very funny.

 

 

(What a "stolon" is.) (Song being parodied.)

List: Houseplants With Totally or Partially Pink Leaves

As I was composing this list, I had the strong feeling that I'm leaving out something really obvious, but I couldn't figure out what. It's possible that my brain is trying to insist that flowers are leaves. It does that sometimes.

In any case, if you think of any other houseplants that aren't somewhere in this post, let me know in the comments and I'll add it.

Cordyline fruticosa 'Florica' and other cvv. (ti plant)

Cryptanthus 'Elaine' and other Cryptanthus cvv.

Dracaena marginata 'Colorama.' (Madagascar dragon tree)

Ficus elastica 'Tineke.' (rubber plant, rubber tree) (new growth)

Hoya carnosa 'Krimson Queen' and other cvv. (wax flower) (leaf edges or centers)

Hypoestes phyllostachya (polka dot plant) (species and some cvv.)

Pedilanthus tithymaloides, variegated (devil's backbone) (with temperature fluctuations)

Peperomia griseoargentea cv. (some cvv.)

Stromanthe sanguinea 'Triostar.'

Syngonium podophyllum 'Neon.' (arrowhead vine)

I'm pretty fond of Hoya carnosa (though the 'Krimson Queen' in the picture is getting a little cranky lately: I think I made it wait too long for water), and I like Pedilanthus tithymaloides so well that it feels borderline unfair to even mention it. Cryptanthus spp. are also very nice plants, though I'm a little pissed at the genus at the moment, because one I bought from the consignment store this summer turned out to have mealybugs (I checked it, though! I swear I checked!), and they spread to (at least) one of my other plants before I found out and threw them away. Still, aside from that, they've always been good plants for me, and are pretty easy.

Not Pictured:
Aglaonema cvv. (a few relatively uncommon varieties)
Aloe striata (coral aloe) (leaf edges, in very bright light)
Alternanthera ficoidea 'Partytime' (large portions of leaves)
Ananas comosus (ornamental pineapple) (some cvv.)
Begonia rex-cultorum and some other Begonia cvv. (some cvv.)
Breynia disticha (=Breynia nivosa) 'Roseo-Picta' (snowbush, snow-on-the-mountain)
Caladium cvv. (some cvv.)
Calathea ornata
Calathea roseo-picta
Echeveria cvv. (some cvv.)
Episcia cvv. (flame violet) (some cvv.)
Fittonia albivenis (nerve plant) (some cvv.)
Neoregelia cvv. (some cvv.)
Peperomia clusiifolia 'Rainbow' (leaf edges, in bright light)
Philodendron 'Pink Princess'
Saintpaulia ionantha cvv. (African violet) (some variegated cvv.)
Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Pink Chaos,' some other cvv. (coleus)
Tradescantia fluminensis (wandering Jew) (some cvv.)
variegated Tradescantia spathacea (oyster plant, Moses in the cradle)

Saturday afternoon morning Nina picture

I have decided, after three months of doing a plant-related Saturday morning post and a Nina-related Saturday afternoon post, that I can't continue to do both. It's not that Nina pictures aren't the easiest kind of post I do, but taking the pictures, uploading them to the computer, sifting through them to find the best one, cropping and tweaking the color, and then uploading them to Blogger, all takes time, and because my computer is kind of old and has a lot of crap on it, each step takes quite a bit longer than it really ought to.

I mentioned to the husband last night that I was either going to have to stop putting up plant stuff or stop posting Nina pictures on Saturdays, and he was all like, No! You can't stop doing the Nina pictures! So the plants have been given Saturdays off, and hopefully this will free up some time for me, and I'll stop whining so much.

As for the picture itself, this is from a few days ago, when I cleaned the walls of Nina's cage. I took her out and put her in a pitcher as a temporary home. Her open mouth here is partly the look of surprise it appears to be (she hadn't even been out of the terrarium in maybe six months) and partly, I think, an effort to scare me out of trying to eat her. I guess technically this worked, since I didn't eat her.

It pretty much ruined her whole day, is my impression, though she did eventually close her mouth again. I'm sure all will be forgiven once the next batch of crickets arrives.

Pretty picture: Euphorbia pulcherrima

Okay, now you may all commence with the poinsettias, Norfolk Island pines, gift-giving one-upmanship, incessant and inescapable Christmas music, elaborate light displays, "War on Christmas," family politics, schmaltzy television specials about the true meaning of Christmas, lethal Black Friday sales, War on the War on Christmas, charity solicitations around every corner, subtly racist anti-Kwanzaa/anti-Hannukah jokes, impossible Martha Stewart-type expectations, and so forth.

Just try to keep it away from me as much as you can, and I want it all cleaned up by Boxing Day.

First person to make any reference to "A Christmas Carol" will be kneecapped.

Pretty picture: Streptocarpus saxorum

I first learned this as Streptocarpella, but davesgarden.com now tells me that the correct name is Streptocarpus saxorum. I didn't verify this anywhere, but it seems likely enough.

I've only ever seen S. saxorum for sale in one place ("Store A"), and for some reason they have a lot of it, so I infer that it must not sell very well. Also it's clearly a pain to groom.

Fall Guy (Dracaena marginata)

Dracaena marginata is right up there with Spathiphyllum cvv. and Sansevieria trifasciata as a common indoor plant that everybody grows at some point, but almost nobody ever grows well. A lot of this is because of the way they're sold: they're a common component of mixed "tropical plant" containers, where they are typically planted with things that need entirely different care,¹ but even when they're on their own, retailers tend to portray them as good, dependable, low-light plants that are super-easy to take care of.

Dracaena marginata 'Colorama.'
And they kind of are super-easy to take care of. Or at least they're about average.² But there's the kind of super-easy that means you can do whatever you want to them and they'll be fine, and there's the kind of super-easy that means that their very specific requirements aren't hard to meet and mostly involve pretending that the plant isn't there. Dracaena marginata is firmly in the latter camp.

Hence our "person" for this profile. Dracaena marginata is the plant that gets blamed when people say they can't grow houseplants, it's the first plant in a group planting to die,³ it's the six-foot-tall (2 m) stick with the tiny tuft of limp leaves at the top that nobody wants to look at but won't throw out, either, for fear of feeling guilty.

I was unable to find much trivia: they're native to Madagascar, and according to Lynn P. Griffith (see sidebar for who he is), they're called "money tree" in Hawaii, because the first ones brought to Hawaii were planted around the Bank of Hawaii. Which is only just barely interesting. The usual common names are "dragon tree" and "Madagascar dragon tree."

Dracaena marginata, possibly the cultivar 'Tarzan.'
I'm not aware of very many cultivars, but there are a few:

• 'Tarzan' is similar to the species but with larger leaves, slower growth, and supposedly more reluctance to drop its old leaves. The odds are pretty good that any floor-sized specimen of a green D. marginata you encounter is a 'Tarzan,' though the species is still sold here and there.
• 'Magenta' has wider and darker marginal stripes on top of the green: despite the cultivar name, they're not magenta in any sense of the word. Dark purple, maybe.
  
• 'Bicolor' is a slower-growing variety with mostly cream-colored leaves, which have green and pink stripes.⁴
• 'Colorama' is the only variety I personally own, and was the hot seller at work as well: its leaves are pinkish red with a few green stripes underneath. New growth on 'Colorama' is sometimes slightly cream-colored.

All sizes of plants are sold, from tiny specimens only 4 in / 10 cm tall all the way up to 8 ft. / 2.4 m monsters (and I'm sure bigger ones exist if you've got the money). Since one plant by itself is not likely to be very full-looking, pots larger than 4 in / 10 cm usually contain multiple canes planted together. Canes may also be cut back and allowed to resprout multiple heads; this also gives a fuller look but takes longer to produce, so it usually costs more.

Dracaena marginata. Photo by BotBln, via Wikipedia.
"Character" plants have been manipulated so that the different canes grow in different directions, with crooked stalks, and are more interesting to look at (in my opinion) than the strictly vertical plants, but they also take up a lot more room, and not everybody is a fan of long stretches of bare cane. I've also seen plants with stems that had been tied in an overhand knot. I don't understand why anybody thought that was a good idea. (No pictures, alas.)

Care for any of the varieties, sizes, or shapes is essentially the same.

LIGHT: Though often listed as a low-light plant, and although they will tolerate low light for a while before showing any ill effects, this is not a low-light plant and should not be treated as such. Plants which are not getting enough light will produce small, limp new leaves.

Outdoors in tropical areas, they can be grown in full sun; however, the plants you purchase as houseplants are usually shade-grown, to prepare them for indoor light levels. Plants so grown will burn up and die if suddenly exposed to long periods of full-strength, outdoor sun.

I also don't recommend full sun, or even afternoon sun, for indoor plants. Direct sunlight seems to be a spider mite aphrodisiac.⁵ Filtered sun, a couple hours of morning sun, or bright artificial light should be fine, though.

WATERING: Sites talking about Dracaena marginata as an outdoor plant will tell you it needs a lot of water, and to keep it moist. If you're keeping one inside, forget this completely. I probably shouldn't even have mentioned it.

This plant is very easy to overwater. Never ever ever ever ever leave it to stand in drainage water or put it in a pot without drainage holes. Soil should be very quick to drain (no peat!), and don't water if the soil feels even remotely wet, as far down as you can get a finger. This is especially important if the plant is in a large pot, and super-especially important if it's in a large plastic/glazed/ceramic pot: soil can stay moist at the bottom of such a pot even when the top is very dry. When in doubt, don't water.

Ignoring the above advice is just begging for a visit from the Fusarium fairy. Whom you do not want to meet. (see PESTS)

HUMIDITY: See PESTS.

Dracaena marginata 'Colorama.'
TEMPERATURE: No colder than about 60F (16C) or warmer than about 95F (35C). Plants that are exposed to temperatures below 60F/10C are not necessarily dead, but it's more dangerous to the life and appearance of the plant the colder you go. Cold temperatures are more dangerous if accompanied by extremely dry air or high winds. (Also the case for other Dracaena spp.)

If you have exposed your plant to extreme cold, there's really nothing you can do except get it back to desirable temperatures as quickly as possible and hope it forgives you.

PESTS: This part's going to be long, so brace yourself.

Mealybugs on a Dracaena marginata 'Tarzan.' I think these are the long-tailed mealybug, Pseudococcus longispinus. There are many mealybug species. You'd think with lots of species to choose from, that at at least one of them would be really pretty, or have musical mating calls, or would shoot candy out of their butts, or something cool like that, but no. All of them suck.⁶
Most Dracaena species are pretty good about pests, in my experience, but not Dracaena marginata.⁷ They're especially bad about getting spider mites, but I've also recently spotted plants with mealybugs at multiple garden centers in my area. (They all looked like 'Tarzans,' too, by the way.) This could mean that there's a single supplier somewhere in Florida that's having a really bad mealybug infestation right now, or it could mean that mealybugs are a bigger problem with D. marginata than what I had previously thought. Either way, it's a good idea to watch your plants for signs of infestation, and check plants carefully before you buy them. Neither spider mites nor mealybugs are particularly easy to eliminate entirely, though spider mites can be kept under control by spraying foliage with soapy water and giving the plant a good shower every so often.


Also, overwatering tends to bring on bacterial and fungal infections. The most common bacterial infection for D. marginata in my experience is Erwinia, which produces mushy stems with a horrible odor. (Seriously. The worst smell I have ever smelled in a houseplant-related context was from a D. marginata cane at work that we'd been trying to propagate. I tore the stem open and got hit with a blast of . . . well, it smelled like pain. The only specific comparison I remember is "ammonia." The rest of my impressions were, I assume, wiped from my brain as the noxious gases dissolved the responsible neurons.⁸)

This was probably brought on by us keeping the cane too wet while waiting for it to root. Erwinia is not usually a problem indoors: it needs very moist conditions, and tends to happen primarily during propagation (when the plant is injured and more susceptible to infection), Griffith says.

With Erwinia, by the time you smell the smell and feel the mush, the plant is probably already too far gone to try to save.⁹ If there's a non-mushy section near the top of the cane, you can try to cut that off with a clean knife and root the top (see PROPAGATION), but you're probably best off to cut your losses and throw the whole thing out, rather than try to save it.

Never did figure out exactly what was going on here. It doesn't really look like an aerial root, and I don't think Dracaenas grow aerial roots anyway, but if it's a stem, then it's growing the wrong direction, and I'm not sure what other possibilities there are, if it's not a root and it's not a stem.
A fungus called Fusarium oxysporum is much more common indoors, and also caused by overwatering. With Fusarium, the plant will continue to look more or less fine, except for a dark spot on the cane. The dark spot is subtle: it's not an oozing black mess or anything, just a slight darkening at one particular point, usually about halfway up the stem. As things progress, the stem gets slowly and invisibly hollowed out, leaving just a thin layer of bark. The top of the plant will continue to grow, albeit a little sluggishly. People typically don't notice anything is wrong until they happen to grab the cane and feel a weird hollow spot, or the stem actually bends over.

There's not really any treatment for Fusarium either, though it's slower, so the odds of being able to salvage something are higher.

PROPAGATION: The most typical way (maybe the only way) to propagate D. marginata is by taking a tip cutting. Planting a cutting directly into soil is, in my experience, a good way to lose it to Erwinia, but damp perlite or vermiculite make good rooting media for a lot of things, and are sterile,¹⁰ so one might try that. I've never water-rooted this particular plant, though I've done so for similar and related species (Yucca guatemalensis, Dracaena fragrans) and had that work out relatively well.

Whatever you decide to root it in, to get the cutting, just take a clean, sharp knife and cut straight across the cane, then stick the cutting in whatever rooting medium you've chosen, and wait. With water-rooting, you'll be able to see when roots begin to grow, and you can pot the cutting into soil, preferably in the smallest pot the roots can fit into, once the roots are a couple of inches long. With perlite and vermiculite, wait a couple months after planting, keeping the medium damp but not soaking wet, then gently pull the plant out to see if it has roots (it very likely will). If it does, you can plant it in soil immediately.

Air-layering is also done with this plant, I'm told, but I've never air-layered anything and don't want to explain how to do it. So I won't. It's my blog and you can't make me.

Dracaena marginata.
GROOMING: Something that occasionally freaks out D. marginata owners, especially owners of large, floor-sized plants, is the appearance of clear, slightly sticky droplets on the underside of the leaves. This will usually be mostly on the topmost leaves, not all of them, and the droplets themselves will be close to where the leaf attaches to the stem. I don't have pictures, sorry.

This is just guttation. It doesn't mean much, though one should keep an eye on plants that do this because 1) it may indicate overwatering, and 2) insects (particularly ants, Griffith says) are occasionally attracted to the droplets.

It's normal for a few leaves to drop every so often, as the plant grows, so there is a little actual grooming required occasionally.

Plants also have pretty thick, quick-growing roots, and will typically need to be repotted every year or two. Don't repot just because the year is up, though: make sure the plant actually needs it.

Plants that have gotten too tall for their space (Depending on who you believe, mature plants can get between 6 and 20 feet tall, with most sources saying 10-15.) should probably be cut back and/or air-layered. This is kind of a high-class problem to have, since most Dracaena marginatas don't get old enough to outgrow their space.

Dracaena marginata 'Magenta.' The difference between this and the species is kind of subtle; I tried taking a picture of 'Magenta' and the species side-by-side, but it didn't show the difference very well.
FEEDING: Feeding is sort of a tough topic. Outdoors, Griffith tells me that these are fairly heavy feeders, but indoors, a lot depends on how much your plant is actually growing. There's no point in supplying nutrients that your plant isn't going to use, and Dracaenas can get tip burn from excess fertilizer, so too much is actually worse than not enough.

My recommendation would be to go with a normal houseplant fertilizer, ideally something with a 3-1-2 NPK ratio¹¹ and micronutrients,¹² and mix at about 1/4 of the strength recommended on the package. I don't follow this advice personally, because for reasons of historical accident, cost, and convenience, I currently use a 14-14-14 time-release Osmocote fertilizer on everything. (It's a long story, and nobody ever believes me once I reach the sentence that starts "So Scott Baio is all, 'I thought you were going to spray-paint the goldfish, and I was going to hold them down,'" so I'm going to skip the retelling. Another time, perhaps.)

I suspect this profile makes D. marginata sound like a bigger pain than is actually the case. I have seen a lot of plants that got mealybugs, spider mites, or Fusarium (in fact, probably 90% of the specimens I've seen with a problem had one of those three), but I've also seen plenty that didn't have any problems at all, and my own personal plant at home has never really given me any trouble. I'm just not a huge fan of the way the plant looks,¹³ and I was also frustrated by the way the customers at work always seemed to settle on either one of these or a peace lily, even when shown plants that were way easier or more interesting. The customers' behavior isn't really the plant's fault, of course. But it's tempting to blame the plant anyway.

-

Photo credits: All mine, except the one from BotBln.

Another site of interest: http://www.hear.org/starr/plants/images/species/?q=dracaena+marginata (many pictures of outdoor-grown plants, including inflorescences)

¹ The point, with a mixed planting, appears to be to cram a pot full of a number of different plants in a way that resembles a flower arrangement. Which is to say, the point is not whether they are mutually compatible plants, but whether they fill up all the available space and fit a certain kind of stereotyped, overfull look. Generally there's a tall thing, a trailing thing, and a medium-height thing, one or two of which may also contain some kind of non-green color which matches, or at least harmonizes with, the pot. Dracaena marginata, when used, typically fills the "tall thing" spot. The pots for group plantings typically have no drainage either, making the whole situation a death trap for any plants involved.
I dislike pretty much everything about group plantings of indoor plants. I don't like the concept, I don't like the execution, I don't like the aesthetic. I mind less with outdoor group plantings, in large part because from here it looks like it's easier to match cultural needs for outdoor plants, and also because outdoor container plants usually aren't expected to stay together for more than a season. Though outdoor group plantings still often look crammed full of plants in a way I don't like.
² "Average" difficulty, as measured by the PATSP difficulty levels, is consistently in the range of 3.5 to 4.0, though it varies slightly depending on which average I use (mean / median) and whether I'm looking at the original set of numbers or the expanded set I came up with recently. Dracaena marginata, at 3.0, is slightly to the easy side of average.
³ Because the tendency is to kill new plants by overwatering and old plants by underwatering, the plant that's most sensitive to overwatering in any group planter is generally the one to kick first.
⁴ 'Bicolor' sounds like it would be pretty, from that description, but I'm not a fan: unless you're right up next to the plant, all the narrow stripes of color blur together into the average of cream, green and pink, which is sort of a tan.

Dracena marginata 'Bicolor.'
⁵ It's actually probably more the heat sunlight generates, instead of the light itself. Spider mites love heat. (They are adapted to the conditions in their native habitat, which is Hell.)
⁶ Unless you're an ant, in which case some of them do shoot candy out of their butts.
⁷ Dracaena thalioides, sad to say, appears to be another one of those: my plant at home has been having ongoing troubles with spider mites since I bought it in June, and those troubles have gotten really serious since I stopped being able to take it outside to water. I'm told the other specimen they brought in at the same time at work (which has since sold) also had an ongoing spider mite problem.
⁸ "Did I fall asleep?"
"For a little while."
"Shall I go now?"
"If you like."
⁹ (And if you've smelled the smell, there's a good chance you're pretty far gone yourself.)
¹⁰ One warning, though: perlite does usually contain some fluoride, to which Dracaenas are sensitive, so if you're given the choice, go with vermiculite over perlite. If you don't have a choice, wash the perlite first by putting it in a colander or strainer and running cold tap water through it for a few minutes. It won't work miracles, but it's better than using perlite straight from the bag, and also makes it a little less dusty to work with. Distilled or reverse-osmosis water would be even better than tap water, but they're also a lot more expensive than tap water.
If it helps, D. marginata seems to be a little less touchy about fluoride than D. deremensis varieties or D. fragrans.
¹¹ NPK ratio: the three numbers on a package of fertilizer which tell you what percentage of the product is nitrogen (chemical symbol N), phosphorous (P), and potassium (K), respectively. They should be prominently displayed somewhere on the packaging.
Theoretically, any numbers that total less than 100 could be used, but in practice, most fertilizers sold for houseplants have ratios of either 1-1-1 (most commonly 20-20-20) or 3-1-2 (usually 24-8-16).
¹² Some fertilizers will contain, in addition to nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, trace amounts of various micronutrients like iron (Fe), calcium (Ca), copper (Cu), manganese (Mn), boron (B), and sulfur (S), though these are present in much smaller amounts and are reported differently on the packaging. Micronutrient deficiencies are rare in indoor plants, though they're not unheard of, particularly iron deficiency. I keep meaning to write a post about this, but it has the potential to be really technical and contentious, so I've been putting it off.
¹³ 'Colorama' gets a pass because of its color, which I find pleasant, especially when backlit. I also came close to buying a small 'Magenta' while writing this, but managed not to. Yay me.

Seeing the Rabbits

Cymbidium NOID.
Oh, the sacrifices I make for my readers.

Convinced the husband to take me to see the rabbits¹ yesterday, in the hopes of getting interesting pictures of some kind from one of the garden centers there, to use as blog fodder. He had business at Lowe's besides, so the Cymbidium picture above was actually taken in the Coralville Lowe's, but it was the same trip so it still counts.

And I am here to report: everybody in the world has Schlumbergeras now. Also poinsettias. Prices vary enormously, though colors, strangely, do not. Poinsettias are pretty much restricted to red and pink; Schlumbergeras you can get in white, hot pink, and red, and if you're lucky enough to be in the right store, salmon. It seems like there were more choices, for both plants, this time last year. Am I wrong?

Also, most of the non-box store businesses are running sales now. That doesn't matter as much as you'd think it would, though.

Store A has 50% off houseplants and orchids, which might make their (ordinarily insane) prices borderline reasonable, though they were incredibly disappointing, for the second visit in a row. I went in hoping to see that they still had a variegated Agave I'd been interested in but declined to buy the first time (sadly, they didn't have it anymore).

Then there's the price tags thing. About 2/3 of the plants there aren't priced at all. No tags, no stickers, no signs, nothing. Sure, I could take the plant up to the front counter and ask the employees how much it is, over and over, for each plant I find interesting, but screw that. I'm the customer; I'm not interested in doing extra work in order to buy from you. I've already come 50 miles (80 km) just to stand in your stinking greenhouse; you could meet me halfway by letting me know your prices.

At the very least they could make signs ("6-inch tropicals $22.99," e.g.), if stickering everything individually is too much work. Unlike a lot of customers, I'm willing to read signs, and I'll even seek them out, sometimes, if I have a question about stuff. But no. Not even signs.

Also, Store A, as long as I'm here, it'd also probably be a good idea not to talk to your employees about spraying for whitefly when there's a customer in the next greenhouse over, with no walls between us. 'Cause I can hear you when you speak out loud, you know, especially when you're using your authoritative, booming boss voice, and I know what whitefly is. I mean, geez, guys, I want to support independent, family-owned businesses, and I know you've had an exceptionally rough last couple years, but remembering when you have customers in the store is really simple, obvious stuff, and this isn't the first time. Last time you made me listen to an extended, one-sided cell phone conversation with a lost delivery driver. And I haaaaaate listening to other people's cell conversations. Get it together already.

Store B, on the other hand, is slicker than a slug covered in vaseline, and have all their Christmas stuff laid out all nice and neat, everything sparkly and twinkly and covered in blinking lights to within an inch of its life. If a Cedar Rapidian volcano spewed Christmas, instead of molten rock, Store B looked like it'd been caught in the pyroclastic flow. Store B wasn't discounting houseplants at all, and in fact appear to have raised their prices since I was last there, which is an interesting choice during a recession.²

They also had Christmas music on already, which, as it always does, made me want to strangle puppies. We fled immediately, leaving only a cloud of red glitter where we'd been standing.

And then there is Store C. Store C is small, compared to the others, and has about the same floorspace devoted to houseplants that Store B does, and maybe 25% of the floorspace Store A has. They also occasionally have some bug problems (mostly mealybugs), so I've learned to check the plants pretty carefully before bringing them home.

However. They're also very very cheap (ordinarily about half the price of the larger garden centers), and, more importantly, they appreciate the value of bringing in weird plants, so they're the most likely, always, to have something I don't already have, at a price I can afford. Additionally, when I visited yesterday, they were running a 30% off sale, which they seem to be doing about every second time I visit.

And no Christmas music! and very limited Christmas decor! And they've never been pushy about "do you need any help?" or given me unsolicited, condescending advice about how to take care of what I'm buying.

So I bought two plants at Store C.³ And I would do it again. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth checking Store A anymore, when we see the rabbits. I ordinarily don't bother to check Store B (and now know not to again until January).

-

¹ (= go to Cedar Rapids)
² Is it okay to start calling it a depression yet? I mean seriously. We just found out yesterday that my mother-in-law was laid off from her job. My mother doesn't work, never has, and Dad told me last week that the orders at his factory are way down, compared to previous years. He's got decent seniority, so he's unlikely to be laid off, but they appear to be cutting everybody's hours back. And of course things can still get worse.
³ A 3" Haworthia NOID and a 4" Pellaea rotundifolia. I'm uneasy about the Pellaea, but I've considered buying one periodically and held off because of concerns about whether I would just be throwing my money away. This particular plant wound up costing me about $3.50, which I figure is roughly what it would have been from Lowe's, so it's a fairly small risk. We'll see. Pictures eventually, maybe.

Pretty pictures: Mammillaria decipiens (?) flowers

I think all four of these are Mammillaria spp., but only the first three are M. decipiens. I don't know what the last one is. The file names say differently because I was in a hurry while sorting through the pictures and didn't notice that the last one was different until I'd uploaded them to Blogger.


I'm having a tough time keeping up with the blog lately. For one thing, none of the plants here at home are doing anything very interesting, so I don't have much material for new posts. (These Mammillaria pictures are from May 2008.) I tried going to the ex-job to stock up on pretty pictures, but although they got a new order in around the beginning of November, I'm told that most of what was on it was orchids and Norfolk Island pines (Araucaria heterophylla).


The orchids sound promising until you consider that 1) they were about 80% Phalaenopsis, 2) of varieties I've photographed before, plus 3) it was a dark, rainy day (so the light was for crap) and 4) I didn't get there until about 4 PM anyway, so the sun actually set while I was there, making a crappy lighting situation considerably crappier. A couple of the poinsettia pictures turned out okay, but a lot of us would rather not be looking at poinsettia pictures this time of year -- or any other time of year, for that matter -- so I'm reluctant to use them.


And I have ideas for posts, and am in fact working on two longish posts right now, but neither of those are going well, and both have already taken weeks to write. I intend to get them finished one way or the other by Saturday, but they still need a lot of work, leaving me even less time to come up with the other three daily posts this week. And and and, when I do manage to find something to post, a lot of you aren't going to see it anyway, because U.S. Thanksgiving messes up everybody's schedules. So instead of reading PATSP, people will be traveling, waiting to travel, enjoying time with family, or trying not to kill family. Which says something about your priorities, but I'll try not to judge.


So. If it seems like I'm phoning it in with some of the posts this week, it's not because I don't love you, Canadian and other non-U.S. readers. If not for y'all, I wouldn't bother to post anything. I just don't have much to post about, and I'm fairly preoccupied and frustrated by these two large posts, which may or may not be good enough to make up for the in-phoning. Forgive me. It'll get better.

Music video: "Kids" (MGMT)

This video and band are new to me as of about five hours ago; I know nothing about them. But I kind of like it.

Found via The Celebration of Music. I found The Celebration of Music via Twitter.

I don't remember how I found Twitter.

They Grow Up So Fast. . . .

One of the side effects of the (still-ongoing) yearbook pictures project is that I'm spending a lot of time looking around in the picture archives and discovering that I have old pictures of certain plants that I didn't realize I had, or noticing just how much plants have grown since I first put their pictures up on the blog. Stuff like that.

For example, my Ardisia elliptica looked like this in November 2007:

Pot: six inches (15 cm). Plant approx. 1.5 feet (46 cm) tall.
Two years later:

Pot: eight inches (20 cm). Plant approx. 3.5 feet (1.1 m) tall.
I was surprised to discover an old picture of the Big Damn Screw Pine as well, from October 2007:

Pot: six inches (15 cm). Plant approx. 2.5 feet (76 cm) tall.
And July 2009:

Pot: eight inches (20 cm). Plant approx. 4.5 feet (1.4 m) tall.
Finally, the Euphorbia trigonas. In October 2007:

Pot: four inches (10 cm). Plants approx. one foot (30 cm) tall.
And in November 2009:

Pot: six inches (15 cm). Plants approx. two feet (61 cm) tall.
I know it's not really news that plants get larger over time. Still, I don't very often bother to verify this, or figure out just how much growth there's been, and at least with these three, I was sort of surprised when I did check. The yearbook analogy is more apt than I had intended.

Some of my other plants, of course, look more or less exactly the same now as they did two years ago, and others appear to have shrunk, if anything. You can't win 'em all, I guess.

Saturday afternoon Nina picture

Random plant event: Monstera deliciosa cuttings rooting

This is not a huge accomplishment -- Monstera deliciosa is really easy to root in water -- but something about the way the picture came out, and a complete inability to get decent pictures of my first choice for a post today (Anthurium flowers are impossible indoors: any direct source of light throws patches of glare all over the damn things), made me think this would make an okay post.


I was wrong, of course. The picture is not nearly as good as it seemed initially. But this still represents a personal accomplishment of sorts: I've been needing to do something with the parent plant of these cuttings for over a year, and kept putting it off because I didn't want to wrestle with repotting it (which is what it really needs), and these cuttings mean that at the very least, I've managed to restart the plant. Takes some of the pressure off w/r/t the parent.

List: Houseplants Native to Mexico

This is not even remotely an exhaustive list: Mexico is big, and diverse, and is home to a substantial chunk of the world's succulents, and a really stupidly large percentage of the world's cacti. Also, the Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts both straddle the U.S.-Mexico border, so some of their plants do as well, which means that some of these "Mexican" plants might be perfectly normal residents of the U.S. too. Which is fine. They can do that if they want.

As before, I'm happy to add additional plants to the list, if anybody wants to suggest any in comments.

Astrophytum myriostigma (bishop's-cap cactus).


Beaucarnea recurvata (ponytail palm).


Chamaedorea metallica (metallica palm).


Echinocactus grusonii (golden barrel cactus).


Pedilanthus tithymaloides (devil's backbone).


Sedum morganianum (burro's tail, donkey tail).


Selenicereus chrysocardium (fern-leaf cactus). Also Central America.


Tradescantia zebrina cv. (wandering Jew)


Vanilla planifolia, variegated (vanilla orchid). Also in Central America, I believe.


Zamia furfuracea (carboard palm).

As far as a favorite three of these goes, well, longtime readers will not be surprised to find out that Pedilanthus tithymaloides is number one. After that it gets hard to pick, since I have all but one of these (I don't own a Vanilla) and like most of them. But the #2, 3, and 4 spots would go to Chamaedorea metallica, Astrophytum myriostigma, and Selenicereus chrysocardium, not necessarily in that order.

Not pictured:
Agave americana (also United States)
Agave attenuata (foxtail agave)
Agave victoriae-reginae (also United States)
Astrophytum ornatum
Beloperone guttata (shrimp plant)
Chamaedorea elegans (parlor palm)
Echeveria spp. (some spp.)
Euphorbia pulcherrima (poinsettia)
Graptopetalum paraguayense (ghost plant)
Mammillaria spp. (some spp.)
Pinguicula spp. (butterworts) (some spp.)
Sedum rubrotinctum (jellybean plant)
Tradescantia pallida (purple heart, purple queen)
Yucca guatemalensis (spineless yucca; still called by its old name, Y. elephantipes, quite a bit) (also Central America)

Unfinished business: Cycas revoluta thingies

A few days ago, I posted a Question for the Hive Mind about weird growths at the base of my Cycas revoluta, and was advised to get a better picture. Which I've done, though it's too late (and opinions may differ on whether or not it's better), since I found out what they were already. But here it is anyway:

Yes, this blows up bigger if opened in a separate window.
So let's start with the basics. Cycads are, botanically speaking, plants in the order Cycadales: as far as houseplants go, the important cycads are the genera Cycas (sago palms) and Zamia (cardboard palms). If other cycads are kept as houseplants, I haven't heard about it.

As Diane said in the comments on the post last Saturday, cycads (all of them, apparently) have a symbiotic relationship with some cyanobacteria, which means that the plants and bacteria both benefit from their association with one another. The cyanobacteria live within the cycad's roots, and convert atmospheric nitrogen (which the plant can't do anything with) into ammonium ion (which the plant can use to build proteins and stuff). I'm less clear about what the cyanobacteria get out of the deal: I had my whole aha! moment at about 10 PM last night and am kind of scrambling to get a post together at the last minute, so I'm doing a lot of skimming. Presumably the cyanobacteria are getting something. Let's just leave it at that.

My understanding is that all cycads grow roots like I was asking about, which are called apogeotropic precoralloids, whether or not there are any cyanobacteria around. Most of the roots don't do this; only a small percentage of them do.

So then eventually a cycad and a cyanobacterium meet, and if they decide that they love one another very much, the cyanobacterium moves into the precoralloids, and then the plant turns the precoralloids into coralloids. I'm unclear about what that means, but it's obviously the most important day in any young cyanobacterium's life. Probably there is cake.

If you want to poke around in semi-impenetrable scientific language and not-great webpage design, here's where I found this all out. I will no doubt wind up revisiting it all myself, whenever I get around to writing a Cycas or Zamia profile, but for right now I'm just happy to have found out that, A), these freaky things are supposed to be on my plant, and B) serve some kind of purpose which I can try to comprehend later.

The apogeotropic precoralloids are probably not supposed to be above the surface of the soil. I should cover them. This isn't a particularly good time, though. Right now, I've had a long day and really just want to get to sleep. So I will.

Pretty picture: Colmanara Wildcat 'Bobcat'

This is a really old picture, dating back to the bygone days of 2007. (How innocent we all were!) I've had it sitting around so long that I'm no longer quite sure why I didn't use it then, but I suspect the issue is that I either didn't think the quality was quite up to par (the image has faint vertical lines in it, which is something my camera used to do before I figured out how to take pictures with it not doing that) or that the flowers themselves were too similar to some other flowers I'd taken pictures of recently. I really don't remember for sure. Doesn't matter.


This is the only Colmanara I've ever seen. Other pictures I ran into on-line for this particular cross mostly appear to be a little less ruffly and a little less yellow than is shown in my picture. I couldn't tell you if this plant was different because it was mistagged (always a possibility) or cultivated differently or what. Maybe they're just variable.

Multigeneric orchids like Colmanara are usually given three names: the first (Colmanara) tells you which genera of orchid were involved in the cross (here, Oncidium, Odontoglossum, and Miltonia). The second name (Wildcat) describes a particular cross between two parents, which in this case refers to Odontonia Rustic Bridge (Odontonia = Odontoglossum x Miltonia) and Odontocidium Crowborough (Odontocidium = Odontoglossum x Oncidium). Any given cross may produce thousands of seeds, and each of the seeds, because it has inherited a slightly different batch of genes, may be subtly different from all of the others. The third name ('Bobcat') refers to a plant grown from a particular one of those seeds; all the 'Bobcat' specimens out there are clones from that one original plant.

Orchid genealogy is not a particularly interesting subject to me, but obviously both of 'Bobcat's parents were crosses as well, so the hybridization could easily go back several generations before one hits any actual species. Orchid fanciers do like to fiddle with things.

The reason why orchid names are often so weird (See the post about Goodaleara Pacific Truffle 'Surrogate Star' for complaining about weird orchid variety names. Also it's a nice flower in its own right, and is worth the trip.) is because, clearly, at some point one just runs out of descriptive words and has to resort to paging through the dictionary. I fully expect to see a Beallara Truckasaurus Matisse 'Ninja Breath' at some point very soon.