Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

LAST-MINUTE EDIT: We had a minor flood in our basement last night -- about 3/4 of the basement floor was covered by about 1/2 inch to an inch of water (1.3-2.5 cm). We didn't notice until 10 PM, it had started to recede again by about 10:45 PM, and it was never very deep, but still.

As I write this, I don't really know how bad any of it is going to be, except to know that our situation is not as bad as that of many of our neighbors, who have 1.5-8 inches (3.8-20 cm) of water in their basements. There's also the possibility that we may have worse flooding in the future: during the really big flood of 1993, I'm told the basement of this house was about five inches deep (or possibly more -- the story was sort of vague as to the actual depth). 1993 isn't the kind of flood that's supposed to happen often, but it sure seems like they do anyway, see 2008.

So.

I don't know whether this will affect the blog or not, because we really don't know much about the situation yet, but there is the possibility that posts may have to become less regular for a while. I have one pre-written for Sunday (and I'm now suddenly worried that it could be the last impression I leave people with for a while, which you maybe will understand once you see it), but after that I have no idea what's going to happen. Updates, obviously, as they are relevant, but I figured y'all should know, in case I can't update for a while because I have cholera or something.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled post, the mood of which is so drastically different that some of you may suffer whiplash. (Sorry.)

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When I first posted about Fervor, way back when, Diane left a comment on that post saying, in part, that "having a dog around makes life so much better." I needed confirmation of this at the time, which CelticRose ("And yes, having owned both dogs and cats and lived without either, I think I can say with some authority that pets in general improve your life.") and Diane ("Oh, absolutely they make things better!") provided.

ALERT! Sheba.
Then we took Fervor back because I was allergic (in case anyone is interested -- Fervor hasn't been back on the Iowa City shelter's website, so apparently this adoption is going to take, whoever and wherever it may be) and wound up with Sheba instead.

The dogless period in between Fervor and Sheba was definitely worse, but I was still unsure about having a dog making life better, especially considering that most of my recent prior exposure to dog ownership had been through Cesar Millan's show, which is all about incredibly problematic dogs. Problematic dogs being rehabilitated, granted, but still. The show did probably make us more reluctant to adopt a dog than we would have been otherwise.

And, after four months of having her here, I can say that yes, it's true, life is better. It's actually hard to imagine what it was like before we had Sheba, so I can't pin down exactly why or how it's better. It's nice to have a big, soft, furry thing around to touch occasionally, especially since the husband and I are both of an age where a stuffed animal collection would be creepy or off-putting. She's often entertainingly goofy. It's somehow incredibly delightful to see the look on her face when she's waiting for me to throw a ball for her to fetch. She's someone to talk to when I'm watering plants and the husband is outside doing stuff. I don't know. Life is just somehow less depressing, with a dog. It's weird, and it bugs me that I can't describe it better (the husband concurs but can't describe it either), but there it is. So.

Relaxed Sheba.
In case you'd wondered.

And if that wasn't enough reading for you,

PATSP participated in the blog carnival "Berry-Go-Round" #30, which is hosted by Brain Ripples and can be found here. PATSP's contribution, Part I of the Phalaenopsis profile, will already be familiar to regular readers, but there are other people there, with new, primarily science-themed, posts. Some of these are people you (ought to) know, like Rock Paper Lizard, The Phytophactor, and Watching the World Wake Up; others are new to me but will probably be showing up on the blogroll whenever I get around to updating the blogroll again.

Particularly recommended to PATSP readers: "19 Basic Botanical Terms," at Learn Plants Now. I really need to do a post like that, so I figure out some of these terms myself.

More Sites of Interest

It's been too long since I've done this, and I'm sorry. I'm even more sorry that I'm not going to be as thorough about it as I would like. My time is limited, like usual, so I will wind up not including some blogs which are perfectly worthy. I have a whole list of people I intend to check up on, who I hope to add to my blogroll at some point, so just so that we're all clear: I might still be aware of your blog (especially if you've commented here before, but even if you've just linked to PATSP), even if you're not on the blogroll.

Which actually is another reason why I haven't done one of these in a while: I feel like I have to apologize to all the people I leave off.

Anyway. So for this round:

Hort Log has been around for a long time (since 2007), and is written by Zog Zog and Hort Log, who may be the same person. I can't determine a location for sure, but it appears to be based somewhere in Southeast Asia (Singapore?). Particular interests are rare / weird tropicals, particularly orchids, carnivores, begonias, and gesneriads: it's a really good place to look at plants you've never seen before (and probably will never see in person, alas). I knew of Hort Log for a long time before I thought to add it to my feed reader, so I no longer have any idea how I became aware of it. Probably either Blotanical or Houseplants.

My Northern Garden is written by Mary Schier, who lives in Minnesota and writes about outdoor and edible gardening in Minnesota, as one would expect, with occasional forays into container and indoor gardening. I first became aware of MNG during the Robin Ripley stuff a few months ago.

I am somewhat embarrassed that I haven't gotten around to mentioning Steve Asbell's The Rainforest Garden before now. It's not that I wasn't aware of it -- it seems like I heard about it a long time ago, possibly through Blotanical? -- but for some reason, you know. Possibly I was jealous of the blog design. (It's very nice.) I don't know. In any case, I'm rectifying this now. Steve and I grow a lot of the same plants, but all mine are indoors, and his are mostly outdoors. Special interests appear to be edibles, bromeliads and other epiphytes, large-leaved plants like Colocasias, gingers, cannas, and bananas, and then houseplants and container gardening.

Danger garden writes Danger Garden from Portland, Oregon. The focus is very much on the sharp pointy things: Agaves, Yuccas, Euphorbias (though mostly the outdoor, hardy types, not the pointy ones, which seems like an oversight, but I will forgive a blogger of a lot of things if they have 57 posts tagged "Agave"), that sort of thing, hence the blog name. And there is a dog. I think I ran across Danger Garden via Plant Zone, but I'm not sure.

F that S (yeah, it stands for what you think it stands for) is sort of about everything and nothing. There are tendencies toward the horticulture industry, graphic design (and then landscape design, the overlap of the two), travel, and much photography of nature-type stuff. I'm probably leaving things out. It's written by Corinne Weiner from New York City, and I'm pretty sure I found it when Statcounter told me someone came from there to visit PATSP.

That's it for this round. If I haven't mentioned you yet, please know that I probably feel really bad about it.

Pretty picture: Stenosarcos Vanguard 'Fireball'

You will probably want to open this full-size, in a separate window.
This is an odd one, very unlike what most of us picture when we think of orchids. Stenosarcos Vanguard is a cross of Sarcoglottis speciosus with a Stenorrhynchos species (different sites give different identities: either S. speciosum or S. albidomaculatum). I didn't get a picture of the foliage, and don't even remember seeing it (the displays had a lot of plants all crammed in together, so it's possible I couldn't have seen or photographed it even if I'd tried), but it's sort of pleasantly variegated, as orchids go. The foliage is probably from the Sarcoglottis side of the family; the color and flair of the flowers, such as it is, looks like it comes from Stenorrhynchos. At least that's what I infer from Google Image Searching for about ten minutes.

I couldn't find much hard information on the cross or its two parents: Stenosarcos blooms in winter, with the first flowers appearing in January and lasting until maybe Valentine's Day -- though this particular photo is from late March, so this must not be written in stone. It's said to be a terrestrial orchid, but most of the photos I saw showed it planted in sphagnum moss, so I'm not sure what to think about that. A lot of the websites said it was an easy orchid to grow, but so many sites say that about so many orchids -- particularly if they sell the orchids they're talking about -- that I don't trust that to be the case. So maybe it's an easy to grow terrestrial that blooms in January, and maybe it's a difficult to grow epiphyte that blooms in March.

*sigh* Relying on the internet for information has its drawbacks.

Stenosarcos isn't an exceptionally beautiful flower, as compared to a Potinara or Beallara or something, but it's a type of orchid I haven't seen before. Which is cool enough, I think.

Some prettier (or artier) pictures: (1) (2)

Fictional botany: Aerophthora repens

Aerophthora repens (air-oaf-THOR-uh REE-penz), also called flor de diablo, flor de silencio, hushvine, orphans' vine, or the obsolete A. bullatus, is the only species in the genus Aerophthora, in the family Aerophthoraceae.

Its natural range is primarily Nicaragua and Costa Rica, with isolated colonies in Panama, Venezuela and Columbia. It is especially common in low-lying areas with rich, organic-heavy, acidic soil, but tolerates a wide range of soils.

The botanical and common names refer to its unique defense mechanism: all parts of the plant, but particularly the leaves, contain hollow, easily broken chambers or tubes in which the poisonous gas carbon monoxide (CO) is stored. (Aerophthora means "corruptor of air;" repens refers to the trailing habit.) No other plant is known to use carbon monoxide defensively in this way. The only analysis performed to date found the concentration of CO within the leaf to be about 90%, with most of the remaining 10% being water vapor and nitrogen.

Because carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless, and the plant typically forms large, thick mats of trailing vines, it is theoretically possible for an invividual to release a lethal concentration of carbon monoxide simply by walking through a field of Aerophthora, given a tailwind and other appropriate weather conditions. No documented cases of such a single fatality are known, however. Aerophthora has, on the other hand, been conclusively shown to kill large groups traveling together, on several occasions. Historians believe, for example, that the plant was a significant obstacle in the Spanish conquest of Nicaragua, in the early sixteenth century. Archaeologists have found large numbers of Spanish weapons and armor, dating to the correct time period, in areas favorable to Aerophthora's growth, and the Spanish log books make reference to multiple unexpected losses of large scouting parties. The culture of the indigenous peoples also include prohibitions on traveling in large groups: though the restrictions do not mention the plant as such (the justification is instead religious, having to do with the number of gods in the local pantheon), it seems reasonable to assume that the danger posed by Aerophthora was the original motivation.

Hushvine is a small, creeping vine with paired round leaves about 1-1.5 inches (2.5-3.8 cm) in diameter, puffed-up or blistered in texture, and typically half as thick as they are wide. New leaves are often slightly reddish, especially in full sun, and hollow; the outer surface encloses a carbon-monoxide-filled chamber which is typically 1/8 inch (3 mm) thick. Leaf color ranges from gray-green to blue-green, usually with a slight iridescent or metallic sheen; this coloration is due to a layer of microscopic bubbles within the leaf tissue itself. These smaller pockets are filled with air, not carbon monoxide, and their purpose is still debated.

Aerophthora produces large, showy flowers in June and July. The five petals are broad and pointed, and lie flat or slightly reflexed. The flowers' overall color is deep blue, with a narrow purple margin on each petal, and in the center, a ring of yellow anthers surround a single white stigma. Flowers range in size from 5 to 8 inches (13-20 cm) in diameter, and last for about 5-10 days. All flowers in a given population bloom synchronously, which is said to be extremely dramatic. Pollination has not been observed, but the pollinator is believed to be a bee. Seed pods are cigar-shaped, nondescript green structures about two inches (5 cm) long which resemble the leaves; they mature in late August or September and split open to release thousands of tiny, windborne seeds. Seeds are viable for three to six months and germinate readily, though they will not develop without full sun and abundant moisture.

The IUCN presently lists Aerophthora as an Endangered species, as it has been the target of aggressive eradication campaigns throughout its range. Though defensively formidable en masse, the plant is easily kept under control through herbicides, the planting of trees (as it cannot survive in dense shade), and hand-pulling of isolated plants. Burning is ineffective, as plants can resprout from the roots. It is presently believed extinct in South America, and present only in extremely remote areas, with low population, in Costa Rica, Panama, and particularly Nicaragua. Though the flowers are very attractive, the plant is not known in cultivation because of the danger it presents.

Though now mostly eradicated, Aerophthora's effects are still sometimes seen in remote areas in the weeks following tropical storms or hurricanes, when weakened trees fall into beds and damage large numbers of leaves simultaneously. The resulting carbon monoxide plume can, depending on the temperature and wind conditions, travel through the forest, killing large numbers of birds, mammals, and other animals before dissipating. This is the origin of the common names "flor de silencio" (silence flower) and "hushflower:" an eerie silence near a field of Aerophthora is a common motif in the legends of the indigenous people.

Random plant event: Ardisia elliptica seedlings

I didn't know whether this would work; I'd gotten berries¹ on the plant a long time ago (last summer or fall, maybe?), and they turned black/purple like they do. Which is how they remained for a very long time, because I wasn't sure at what point they're officially ripe and plantable. Eventually one started to shrivel a little and then I thought I'd probably waited too long, so I opened them all up and took the seeds out.

I am aware that the photos suck. I needed more light, apparently, though it didn't seem that way at the time.
The seeds are surprisingly small, compared to the size of the fruits, and each drupe only produces one seed. The flesh of the drupe² was also surprising. I expected something more like a blueberry or tomato, where there are multiple seeds just kind of floating around in a semi-liquid mass, but it was actually surprisingly dry, yet soft. More like a banana than a tomato. Seeds are located at the point of attachment to the plant, and take up very little of the drupe.


The seeds are slightly less than 1/4 inch (5 mm) in diameter, and slightly ridged. I wasn't sure how to plant them or how to simulate going through a bird's digestive system, so I just washed them off briefly, stuck them in some damp vermiculite in a plastic clamshell container (like I use for propagating Begonias), and set the whole thing in the warmest, brightest spot I could come up with.


The first activity I noticed was a couple weeks later.³ I was pretty happy to see one sprout -- I wasn't sure whether the seeds were any good, considering how long they'd been on the plant.


Since this picture was taken, the other two seeds have also sprouted, though so far none of the three have shown any leaves: all three plants are still wearing their seed coats, and I'm a little scared to remove them, lest I damage something important. But fairly soon, they're going to hit the top of the container anyway, and then I'll have to transplant, so I hope to see leaves very soon.

Would that I had more than just three seedlings to pot up, though it appears that plants may sucker: the plant that produced the drupes is now a small clump of 24 stems. I can't find anybody confirming this on-line: all the invasive-species sites emphasize the seeds being spread by birds, and don't mention whether or not there might be suckering, but it seems unlikely that the original 3-inch plant I bought could have contained 24 individual seedlings. Measurement and geometry tell me that it's technically possible, though.⁴ Maybe this new crop of seedlings will sucker a little as they grow, and I'll end up with a second, full-looking plant in a couple years, or maybe they won't, but I'll have new seedlings to add to them later on. Either way, I'm pretty tickled that this worked.

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¹ Technically, they're drupes; the distinction between the two is not that important for our purposes, and brief googling didn't give me any easy ways to tell the difference between the two, so I decided I didn't care. But I'll still use "drupe" henceforth, for the sake of botanical correctness. Pedants in the audience -- and I know you're out there -- will be pleased to know that in most horticultural or lay contexts, people call the fruit of Ardisia elliptica "berries," so now you have a whole new world of people to correct. You're welcome.
² $50 vocabulary word for the flesh of the drupe: mesocarp. (You now owe me $50, by the way.)
³ According to the dates when the photos were uploaded, I started the seeds on June 27, and noticed the first seed sprouting on July 14. This is pretty fast, though for some reason it felt slow.
⁴ The circumference of the clump at soil level is 9.25 inches, and it's a more or less circular clump, which means its diameter is just under 3 inches. (9.25 / pi = 2.94 inches). Add in that the trunk diameters have increased, and that the plants in the clump would tend to lean away from one another, for better light, and we come up with 24 plants in a 3" pot as being plausible.

Pretty picture: Hibiscus NOID

I don't know what the most likely species ID would be here; it's a hardy Hibiscus of some kind syriaca (thanks, Don & Greensparrow), from someone's front yard here in town. I remember seeing it last year and pondering whether it would be worth my time to ask for a seedling or cutting, but then I didn't, because so much other stuff was going on last year. I'm less certain now that I actually want one -- whatever the voices in my head tell me, I don't have to have all the plants -- but I can still appreciate them when others grow them.


To me, accustomed to Hibiscus rosa-sinensis as I am, the pinky-lavender color of the flowers seems impossibly strange and exotic, though I'm aware it's not that unusual of a color for hardy hibiscus.

Random plant event: Caladium 'Fire Chief' flower

Not that it's a gorgeous flower or anything, but I'm fairly impressed with this. I mean, for a flower, it's nearly pretty, and for a Caladium flower, it's downright spectacular.


Makes me wonder what would happen if people started trying to breed Caladiums for the flowers, how far that could go. I don't know what sort of natural variation they'd be working with, color-wise, and I imagine pleasant fragrance would be too much to ask for. But still. Maybe someday?

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

(During Nina's brief exile from the terrarium, while I cleaned it)
Sort of a futuristic look for Nina today, just because I can. It's not clear whether she's accepted the new arrangement of plants just yet, but I've already gotten an unexpected bonus from the change, in that I can now see her most of the time when I look in. For a while there, I really couldn't tell whether she was moving around or not, because whenever I looked in, it was always the same: Stromanthe covering everything, and no visible Nina unless I scanned everything carefully for twenty minutes.

We're also about to change things up again, relatively soon. I found and bought one of the small-leaved white Fittonias like I've been looking for for the terrarium, at the ex-job last Sunday:¹ thinking back, I guess I was aware that they had them, but they were just cuttings on one of the back tables, it seemed like they'd been there a long time, and didn't look like they were doing all that well, so I wasn't expecting them to ever be for sale.

But last Sunday the Fittonias were out for sale, finally, and I bought one. But! Then when I brought it home, I first sprayed it with neem oil. I've been doing this with all the new acquisitions lately, just in case.²

. . . And then I realized that I'd just sprayed an insect-killing substance on a plant that I was planning to enclose with a bunch of crickets. Who are insects, whatever you may have heard, and do sometimes chew on the plants.

So I'm waiting. Google tells me that the half-life³ of the active component, azadirachtin, is roughly 2.5 to 4 days, depending on the conditions, so I'm figuring that at least 95% of it should be gone by August 1, two weeks after the first application.⁴ Or I'll just wait until the plant no longer smells like neem. Probably both. And then she'll have her Fittonia and maybe will no longer be emotionally scarred.

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¹ Ginny Burton had offered to send me one in the comments to last week's Sheba/Nina picture post, but this wound up not working out. Which is fine, because clearly Nina is destined to get one anyway.
² I can't prove that it's helping, but I figure if I got a plant home and then saw bugs of some kind on it, spraying with neem is what I'd do. So it should work just as well to spray the plants if I don't see bugs on them, right? And odds are that some of the plants I've gotten recently have bugs, just by the First Law of Retail Greenhouses, so surely this must have helped me at some point or another.
³ The half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of a given substance to turn into some other substance. The half-life of the radioactive carbon isotope carbon-14, for example, is 5730 years. What this means is that if you have 100 grams of carbon-14, set it aside in a box for 5730 years, and then come back and check it again, you'll find you now have 50 grams of carbon-14 and 50 grams of nitrogen-14. Check again after another 5730 years and you'll have 25 grams of C-14 and 75 grams of N-14. And so on. With radioactivity, this is absolute: C-14 always turns to N-14 that fast, whether it's hot, cold, exposed to sunlight, or whatever. You can't make it faster; you can't make it slower. This reliability is the basis for carbon-dating.
With chemical compounds things are not always as mathematically tidy, but the basic idea still applies: if you're given 100 milligrams of a drug that has a 2-hour half-life in the body, then we'd expect only 50 milligrams to be left two hours after taking the drug, then 25 mg after four hours, 12.5 mg after six hours, and so forth.
⁴ The math is approximate, and it's entirely possible that the stuff breaks down a lot faster than this. It probably doesn't have to be 95% gone anyway; I'm just trying to be careful. Yes, I want the crickets to die, but only if they do so in a way that benefits Nina.

Graffiti: Rock and Roll

Just west of Riverside, IA:


What I like best about this one, I think, is the thoughtfulness of using (electrician's?) tape on the sign instead of the harder-to-remove markers or paint.

Iowa: home to gay marriage and considerate vandals. (Massachusetts, eat your heart out.)

Pretty picture: Asclepias tuberosa

I really like this plant, and at some point during the late winter or early spring, I bought seeds of it, with the idea that I could plant them somewhere in the back yard and then enjoy them forever. That didn't happen, due to dithering about where and how a back yard garden would be constructed, which regular readers already know because they got to read some of the dithering.

View full-size by opening in another window and see the fly (?) peeking out of the mass of flowers. It's really quite adorable, if you're the sort of person who can find flies adorable.
I'm assuming that it's probably too late, now, to do anything with the seeds, and even if it weren't, the back yard plans change frequently: I wouldn't know where to put them. Also "plans" is a charitable way of putting it: it's more like I have vague, mutually exclusive intentions about where to put certain plants. So oh well. It's not like the world is going to run out of seeds, and failing that, lots of places around here sell the grown plants. Whatever. Consider this post my announcement of intent to have one or more Asclepias tuberosas planted somewhere on property I own at some point in the future.

Random plant event: Glycine max flowers

I'm finding it very difficult to organize the information I've collected for the Schlumbergera profile, so that's going to take a little longer than what I'd originally said. And frankly, the original deadline (yesterday) was pretty optimistic to begin with.

So is the new deadline (next Wednesday).

(UPDATE: It's finished.)

Meanwhile, did you know that soybean plants have flowers? They do! The flowers, like Ryan Seacrest, are small, pinkish, and not very interesting, but one can at least see why soybeans are classified in the pea family (Fabaceae), and get some sense of how the plant works.


The most surprising thing about this particular event is that I'd never seen it before. Living in Iowa, you'd think it would have come up before, but somehow (possibly due to my finding corn waaaaaaay more interesting than soybeans) I missed it.


I wouldn't have seen it this year, except that the field that begins where our back yard ends is planted in soybeans this year, instead of corn like last year. (I liked the corn better: more picturesque. Though the soy is looking a little better now that they've filled in a bit.)


This last photo is really big, should you want to open it in a separate window and see all the gory details.

Pretty pictures: Alcea NOID

I had an entirely different post planned for today, but technical difficulties prevent me from sharing it. Specifically, Firefox has been intermittently freaking out because my version of Adobe Flash Player is out of date and (paraphrasing:) going to make my computer catch fire and explode, so it sends me to a site to download the new version of Adobe Flash Player. Which I then dutifully download, giving my approval and permission where necessary.

And then AFP eats up all the memory in my computer for half an hour, does nothing, and eventually tells me that the file fails an integrity test or something, and then continues to hold all the computer's memory hostage for a few more minutes just to piss me off. After an hour in which I've been unable to do anything at all with the computer but also unable to go anywhere else, to do anything else, because who knows when AFP might let go and let me have the computer again, AFP finally relinquishes control and I can use my computer more or less normally again, except that I'm now an hour behind where I wanted to be, and in my hurry to catch back up, I do stupid things like accidentally double-clicking on something, opening 27 windows of Irfanview, and then slow myself down even more.

Since all of the prior AFP download attempts have failed (there have been about five or six, at random intervals over the last few weeks, and they all go like this), what this means is that at some point a few days or weeks from now, Firefox is going to be all like ZOMG YOUR GOING TO DIE UNLESS U DOWNLOAD THE LATEST VERSION OF ADOBE FLASH PLAYER!!!!1!11!11!!, and then we'll go through this whole thing again, and nothing will happen.

There should be more hollyhock pictures than just these two, but there was some problem I no longer remember with the other ones. (These are a few weeks old, from before it got too hot to walk with Sheba.) So: you'll look at the hollyhock pictures, and you'll like them.

The One About Plant Theft

Sheba and I stopped to admire and photograph this Zantedeschia outside an insurance office in town when the agent inside saw us and came out to say hi. We'd met her before, on a walk, so this was cool. I explained my presence as being because of the Zantedeschia, and she said something to the effect of, yeah, we used to have two pots this size, both with callas in them, but somebody stole one of them so now there's just this one.

The Zantedeschia in question.
Oh. Well it's a very nice wait a minute did you say somebody stole one?

Yup. The theory was that it may have been someone in town for a funeral (there's a funeral home right across the street from the insurance office), because it didn't seem plausible to her that someone who lived in town would do this. I mean, it's a small place: someone would know.

Well, maybe. But it wouldn't surprise me if it were someone in town.

This is not the first such story I've heard from around here. One of the people I worked with at the garden center sold daylilies and hostas (among, possibly, other things) from her home as a side business, and on multiple occasions in 2008, she came home to find plants missing. It was a specific weird number, too, every time, like she came home and found she had 31 fewer plants than before. Presumably whoever was taking them could only fit 31 in their car/pickup/whatever. It was really upsetting her. It kind of upset me to hear about it.

Hemerocallis fulva, I think. Hers were probably much nicer than this.
For readers who are commencing a knee-jerk reaction about how this happened because of whatever your particular theory about What's Wrong With the Kids of Today is (people today don't respect their elders; they think everything's a video game; it's all been downhill since the Supreme Court took prayer out of schools; schools don't teach the subjunctive mood anymore, etc.), catch that knee. This has been going on for generations. People suck now, because people used to suck in the olden days:

A Chicago Daily Tribune article from June 1876 bemoaned a crime wave at a city park: "Rare plants and flowers were ruthlessly dug up from the hot-beds and other places, and the old gardener grew greatly annoyed, and scarcely knew how to catch the thieves," the paper reported. Even after a police stakeout, 10 "splendid geraniums" went missing.

In 1901, Hyde Park was up in arms over bandits who snipped blooms from bushes, and in 1909 six newly planted trees were illegally "wrenched from the soil" near Armour School. "People of the neighborhood are incensed over the latest depredation," the Daily Tribune reported.

(Source: Chicago Tribune)

Sadly, the more serious thefts are apparently usually the work of people who resell them to unscrupulous (I don't want to say "shady") landscapers, or at least that's the explanation I've seen on-line. Which makes sense: I can't imagine any real gardener taking plants from another gardener's yard without permission. And it would really only pay to steal large numbers of plants if you could "launder" them somehow. I mean, if someone plants 500 'Stella D'Oro' daylilies in their yard, three days after all the Stellas within a 30-mile radius disappeared, you know, people would figure it out.

But even if the problem is mostly organized theft for resale, that's not what happened here with the Zantedeschia. I mean, there was a matching plant right there next to it, and they didn't take that one. Sometimes people are just greedy, or lazy, or impulsive.

I suspect this is going to happen more often, as the economy gets more dire. I can't think of any particularly good ways of preventing it, either.

Pilea nummulariifolia. Keep reading to find out why this picture is here.
There's also the issue of sneaky theft: the people who leave the whole plant, in more or less the same condition, but take leaves, seeds, offsets, or whatever without asking anybody first. That's a whole different thing, and if you want to see a bunch of people all get really self-righteous and angry with one another about where to draw those lines, this thread at Garden Web will make your day. Though remember to un-roll your eyes regularly. Whatever side you're on, you're going to want to do some eye-rolling.

Personally? I'm not pure as the driven snow on this one. I do believe it's wrong to take leaves / seeds / offsets without asking, whether it's a big box store, a mom-and-pop nursery, someone's personal garden, whatever. But I've still done it. Possibly this makes me a hypocrite; I prefer to think of it as just error-prone.

I've also realized while writing this that I've conveniently forgotten some instances: when I started, I could only remember the three-inch Pilea nummulariifolia (CLARIFICATION: Normally "three-inch Pilea" would mean a whole plant in a three-inch pot; what I actually took was a single cutting about three inches long. Doesn't make it more moral, but just to clarify your mental image.) I took from a big box store. (Plant is wildly successful; I feel seriously guilty.) Then I remembered the Zamioculcas leaflets from the floor of a mom-and-pop. (Plants are moderately successful; I feel no guilt at all but still should have asked.) Then I remembered the Kalanchoe plantlet from a different mom-and-pop. (Plant was a total failure; I feel moderately guilty.) It's possible there are others.

I would have been mad, if I'd seen someone take these same things from the garden center when I worked there. I wouldn't walk into a bakery and take a bite out of a donut and then walk out without paying; I'm not sure why the situation seems different when it's a plant involved. Some of the people in the Garden Web trainwreck tried to defend it by saying stuff like well, you know, the plant was almost completely dead already, I was just saving some offsets that would have been thrown in the trash. To me, that sounds a lot like "but I took it at 5:30 PM, and the donut was going to be thrown out at 6 PM; therefore it's not stealing because shut up that's why."

So I dunno. I'm not looking for a confessional here, and I'm really not interested in everybody doing a lot of posturing about their personal moral code. We're all good people here (Well, except you there, in the back: you're kind of horrific.); we don't have to prove goodness to one another or convince everybody else that we're the most moralest, bestest person ever.

What interests me is that last question. Why would plants feel like an exception to the general don't-take-it-if-it's-not-yours rule, enough so that people would be at Garden Web defending something that is, at least technically, stealing? (Even, in some cases, arguing that they're practically doing the place a favor by taking stuff -- stuff which clearly has value to someone, because it has value to the person doing the arguing -- without paying for it?) I'm curious. What is it about plants? Or is it specific to plants?

Random plant event: trade plants rooting, growing

Still waiting to see anything new above ground from the Selenicereus cuttings I started last spring, but the Epiphyllum cutting I received by trade in mid-May is suddenly sprouting all over. (Perhaps the Selenicereus would prefer to have an actual potting mix of some kind, instead of just the vermiculite? I'm pretty sure there are roots in there. Maybe I should do that. . . .)


Epiphyllums are not the tidiest, most manageable plants out there, so I'm a little concerned about how big and how fast it will grow, but it's always gratifying to see plants doing stuff they're supposed to be doing. Particularly since they so often, you know, don't.

Meanwhile, I received some Ficus elastica cuttings by a different trade, at around the same time. It was originally a single long cutting, which I cut in half and stuck both parts in perlite. I've been watering approximately once a week (not very consistent about it), and they're in the basement, which is cool, but humid and bright, thanks to the artificial lights.

The original, baseline photo of the cuttings, immediately after they were put in the perlite.
These, too, have been zipping right along: a couple weeks ago I noticed I had roots growing out the bottom of the pot already.


I had always sort of had the impression that it was hard to get Ficus cuttings to root, mainly because when I tried rooting them in regular potting mix at work, the majority keeled over and died within a week or two. I also tried vermiculite once, with a work-pruning of Ficus microcarpa 'Green Island' that I brought home, and that failed in a big hurry. I don't know whether that was the fault of the vermiculite, the species, the variety, the no-drainage plastic cup I put it in, the amount of time it had to sit out before I brought it home, or what. Whatever the case, perlite seems to be very effective when it comes to Ficus, and makes the whole process very easy. Go Team Perlite!

Walkaways Part 10

Okay, well. As promised when I posted about my newer plants last Wednesday, these are the plants I didn't buy. As a group, they're probably more interesting than the ones I actually bought, but I have my reasons for not buying them.

The first three, two succulents and a cactus which happened to get my attention, were at Lowe's.

Euphorbia polygona cv. 'Snowflake.'
I would have bought this in a heartbeat, but for the fact that all of the Euphorbias with this kind of "corn-cobby"¹ habit I've ever bought (specifically: E. anoplia, E. enopla, E. horrida var. noorsveldensis) have gotten etiolated² really easily, and seem to be considerably worse about it than the larger-growing columnar species (e.g. E. pseudocactus, E. ammak, E. grandicornis). Though I love the look of the plant and would like to have one, I don't really want to buy one just to watch it slowly turn grotesque and unhealthy.

Kalanchoe eriophylla.
According to the tag, K. eriophylla is similar to K. tomentosa (panda plant) except for being more of a low, trailing plant. Which I don't mind trailing plants, but the genus Kalanchoe and I have a long history together which has not been satisfactory to either party, and K. tomentosa and I in particular aren't good together. And it's not like it's ever really going to be beautiful, right? Only fuzzy.

I mean, not that beautiful is a requirement, but it's nice to be able to think it's a possibility.

Melocactus azureus.
I just liked this one. I'm not sure why I didn't buy it; it may be that I thought I had too many bluish cacti at home already (Pilosocereus pachycladus, Cereus peruvianus, the one that may or may not be Browningia hertlingiana, Leuchtenbergia principis). Kind of regretting the choice, now that I re-examine the picture.

Next up, plants I didn't buy at the ex-job:

Begonia 'Soli-Mutata.'
I maybe should have asked for some leaf cuttings, to take home and propagate. I couldn't have afforded the whole plant, but I'm reasonably confident in my ability to start new plants from leaves, which is way cheaper.

Begonias and I don't get along amazingly well, but it might have been worth a try. The texture on those leaves is pretty cool.

Selaginella flabellata.
No spikemosses or clubmosses ever, at least not in an extra-terrarial sense. This one isn't even especially pretty, though it kind of looks like a piece of arborvitae (Thuja spp.) or something, which is interesting. The common name, according to the tag, was "cypress fern," which pleases me, because it's another instance of a common name where all parts of the name are technically wrong. It's not a fern, it's not a cypress.

Zygonisia Cynosure 'Blue Birds.'
I don't normally include orchids in the walkaway posts, both because orchids usually get their own posts and because they usually don't count as walkaways: most of the time, they're far enough out of my price range that I can't ever even be especially tempted.

I wasn't especially tempted by this one either, although: I'm told that this was the only plant from the most recent shipment of stuff that WCW purchased, I haven't seen it before, or even anything terribly similar (Zygonisia is a cross between Aganisia and Zygopetalum, and I've seen Zygoneria, which is a cross between Neogardneria and Zygopetalum. So I can say I've seen a relative, maybe.), and the pot was small (4" / 10 cm), which briefly gave me hope that it might be more affordable. (Sadly, no: $35.)

That said, I took more pictures than just the above, so as long as we're here anyway, we may as well stop and look at them:




Okay. Now on to Wallace's, in Bettendorf, IA.

Pilea microphylla 'Pink.'
When I first saw this, I thought it was kind of neat. It's at least something I'd never seen before, and hadn't even imagined, so points there. And it was cheap ($5), and belongs to a genus I generally find congenial.

But then there's the part where it's, you know, kind of ugly. While I was looking around, at one point a mother and son (who looked about 10-13) came by, and the mother was talking to someone on the phone. She told the son to hurry up and pick something out for his grandmother so they could go, and then she went back to talking on her cell phone. He started reaching for this plant, which she noticed. She stopped her conversation long enough to tell him, in a what's-wrong-with-you tone, Not that one! What are you thinking? That looks half dead.

I couldn't help it. I laughed. She was right! It looks way better close up than it does from a distance, and despite the name, it's more sort of an ivory than a pink. Maybe for a small terrarium, though.

Aglaonema 'Cutlass.'
This was a serious temptation. Not that I don't already have a lot of Aglaonemas, but I like the look of this. They had a couple other Aglaonema varieties that I hadn't seen before ('Juliette' and 'Mystic Marble'), which were both sort of like what you'd get if you averaged 'Maria' and 'Jubilee:' just your basic Aglaonema with medium sized, elliptical leaves patterned in dark green and silver. Technically I hadn't seen them before, but I'd still seen them before, you know? 'Cutlass' I like, though: I've seen a few Ags with long, narrow leaves, but nothing this extreme. Perhaps we'll run into one another again someday.

Adiantum sp.
Not a serious temptation -- what am I, crazy? -- but I thought the Adiantum was worth noting. As far as I can remember, this is the first one I've seen for sale anywhere in, literally, years. I miss things, and forget things, so maybe I've missed or forgotten a maidenhair fern here or there too, but still. You don't see Adiantum around. This is maybe because as soon as someone ships them here, they wither, brown, and turn to dust. Just guessing.

Anyway. What about yourself? Anything cool you've passed up lately? Or anything dull, even: we don't judge, here at PATSP.³

-

¹ (Not a particularly good word, but the best I could come up with.)
² Etiolated: describes plants with thin, stretched-looking, and pale new growth, caused by insufficient light. Though they may produce normal-sized new growth if moved to a better location, the old growth won't bulk up to match.
³ Not technically true, but tell me anyway. I'll be nice.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Nina had a pretty eventful week this week, in that I have finally cleaned up her terarrium. I removed the Stromanthe burle-marxii, which had grown from a single 4-inch (10 cm) tall baby to a monster with eight clumps of leaves that was taking over two-thirds of the tank, divided it, and potted it up into four pots:


And then I replanted that part of the terrarium with a Peperomia caperata and some rooted cuttings of Pellionia pulchra. None of those were doing that well outside of the terrarium, but I'm hoping the terrarium environment will give them whatever they were missing and they'll be happy.

I left the Vriesea because that's where Nina sleeps sometimes, and it seemed to be doing fine in the tank anyway, without needing any changes.

I didn't take any Before pictures of the terrarium, because, frankly, I was embarrassed by it and didn't want you to see. I do have an After, though the After is also embarrassing in that it looks pretty sparsely planted. I'm hoping the Peperomia will grow tall enough to look appropriate for the space (if it doesn't rot first), and then the Pellionia can do the trailing, ground-cover thing it does. If the Peperomia fails, I have Pilea 'Moon Valley' as a backup, and if the Pellionia fails, I can try Saxifraga stolonifera.


Whether Nina will like this any better or not, I don't know. She wasn't exactly complaining before, and may well have liked the previous version better because it was easier to hide. This is the total feedback I've gotten so far:


Sheba's week was more typical. We're going on way fewer walks than we were, because I overheat too quickly when we do. Instead we've been playing fetch in the back yard in the mornings, for however long she wants to (usually only 10-20 minutes), which is easier on me because I can stand in the shade. I figure she gets her exercise either way.

That's also the reason why I'm not posting as many pictures of plants from gardens around town: we're not seeing them anymore. This'll probably change again in September or so. Summer is a stupid season.

Anyway. So here's Sheba, taking a break from the fetching in the shade of our maple tree:

Pretty picture: Laeliocattleya Rojo x Cattleya aurantiaca

The pictures that come up for Laeliocattleya Rojo look an awful lot like this (example), and that same page also lists the parentage of Laeliocattleya Rojo as Cattleya aurantiaca x Laelia milleri. So this is supposedly (Cattleya aurantiaca x Laelia milleri) x Cattleya aurantiaca. I get why one might want to recross with one of the parent species, in general, but I'm confused about why one would want to recross in this specific case, since Lc. Rojo is already such a nice-looking plant. And the cross doesn't even appear to have changed much of anything, at least not to my (admittedly inexpert) eyes.

Pretty, though, in any case. I didn't wind up coveting many of the orchids at the show, but this is one I wouldn't mind having, assuming that I could grow it and have it flower and stuff. I think we're still a ways away from that point. But maybe someday.

Random plant event: The Plucky Little Cereus Peruvianus

This poor little Cereus peruvianus. I don't know what its story was originally; all I know is that it had been cut back at some point before I started working in the garden center (August 2007). I've never seen the plant fully intact; I don't know how it came to be cut back, or how long ago.

Still, though, I'd seen advice to cut the tops off of plants as a way to propagate them, or when they get too tall, or as a way to salvage a plant with fungal or disease problems, usually with the assurance that the plant would sprout new growing tips and recover. So I figured it was only a matter of time, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The whole time I worked there, the plant did nothing at all. August 2008 came and went, then I left in May 2009, and the plant was still there, looking exactly the same. The first indication that something might be going on was in September 2009, when it looked like the plant finally intended to sprout some new growing tips, but they turned out to be flower buds:


And, of course, once there were flower buds, someone was interested in buying the plant, so they took it into the back room to hold for the customer, and the customer never came to get it. Or maybe the customer had a change of mind. I'm not sure. In any case, the plant went to all that trouble to produce flower buds, and then it got moved to a dark spot, dropped the buds, and of course the customer didn't take it, after that.

Being a cactus is, I suspect, often kind of frustrating. Hence the acting out.

But so anyway. Back out to the sales floor it went, and it sat there for almost a year after the flower-bud thing before it elected to do something else.


So now it's got a growing tip again, finally, some three or more years after losing the original, and it looks like it's working pretty hard to make up for lost time. Will this make someone want to buy it again?

Weeellll . . . . I don't know about that. But it's trying. It's like the song says,

I get knocked down
But I get up again
Eventually, when I feel like it
I get knocked down
But I get up again
After three or more years of inactivity. . . .

(real lyrics)

New Plants

I guess it's been a while since I did one of these posts. I haven't been doing that much plant-buying lately, I thought, but I seem to have a lot of "new" plants anyway. (Some of these have been around for a month and a half, so they're not exactly "new," but they're still new, in that I have not previously mentioned them on the blog.)

Gasteria bicolor var. lilliputiana.
The florist in town also sells some outdoor stuff, mainly (entirely?) annuals, during the early summer, and I got the first three plants of the post from her. Unlike some people, I like Gasterias, though I have a lot less experience with them than their close relatives Haworthia and Aloe.

Pilosocereus pachycladus.
She also had some cacti in 6-inch pots for $15, back in May (there are still a couple left, last I looked), and I'd sort of been looking for a Pilosocereus pachycladus for a while (since seeing one in Cedar Rapids, at Pierson's, several months ago). It was a good price, there were two plants in the pot, and they were reasonably good-sized. I don't know if Pilosocereus is easy or difficult, for a cactus, but so far, so good.

Agave lophantha.
This plant, too, was a $15 6-inch plant from the flower store in town, and I'd also been looking for an Agave lophantha since the same trip to Cedar Rapids when I saw the Pilosocereus. These have since been divided into separate four-inch pots, and appear to be doing well in the basement under lights.

Crassula falcata.
Crassula falcata is a plant I'd asked about in a walkaways post, and then went back to get after being told what it was. Crassulas and I have a very mixed history together, so I don't know that I expect this to work out particularly well in the long run. But it's an interesting plant: I figured I had to at least try.

Aloe haworthioides. (Aloe descoingii x Aloe haworthioides?)
This came from the hardware store that was selling the 'Jenny Craig' Dracaena. Andrew purchased one of these (or something very similar) recently, too, and came up with the ID of Aloe descoingii x Aloe haworthioides for his. Possibly this is a cross, and not a straight A. haworthioides, but that was the first ID I ran across that looked rightish to me, so that's the ID I'm going with until I get a clearer sense of the difference between the two, and/or see some good pictures of the two side-by-side.

Peperomia orba.
Not a lot to say here. This was another plant I previously posted about as a walkaway; it was cheap, I have mixed but mostly positive results with Peperomia (though my P. argyreia is extremely unhappy with me for the last . . . ever), and I'm interested in what this will look like six months from now. So we're trying it.

Didymochlaena truncatula.
Didymochlaena truncatula is also called the "mahogany fern," I'm assuming because of the brownish-red color of the newest fronds. We had a few when I was working in the garden center that got pretty big, and they were pretty nice-looking. Ferns are sort of a gamble, in that a lot of them also need conditions which are cooler or damper than I'm able to provide year-round. So I'm not sure how this will turn out. Googling about the plant turned up a 50-50 mix of sites saying that they're difficult (mainly talking about outdoor care) and sites saying they're easy (primarily talking about indoor care). Which is interesting.

The botanical name drives me crazy, by the way. I first learned the species name as trunculata, and I've also seen it as just plain truncata, but it's actually truncatula, which I try to keep straight with the mnemonic, "the cat you love is in my Didymochlaena." Mixed results so far, with the mnemonic: I still have to check every time I type it.

The genus name is problematic as well, but in a different way: I've never had any trouble remembering how to spell it, because I learned that correctly the first time, but my brain played with the pronunciation. Davesgarden.com says the correct pronunciation is "did-ee-moh-KLAY-ee-nuh," but my brain first pronounced it "DID-ee-MO-ka-LAY-nuh," which, I have discovered, easily corrupts into part of the Los del Río song (and cultural sensation) "Macarena." (DAle a tu CUERPo aleGRIa, MAcarENa / Heeeeeeey, Macarena --> DAle a tu CUERPo ale DID-ee-MO-ka-LAY-nuh / Heeeeeeey, MO-ka-LAY-nuh) Which is, obviously, super-annoying.

Even if I used the davesgarden.com pronunciation, I'm pretty sure "Macarena" would sneak in somehow ("DAle a tu CUERPo ale DID-ee-MO-klay-EE-nuh?"). It's probably hopeless. Perhaps in this one case, I should go against all my principles and call the plant by its common name, not the botanical one.

Polypodium grandiceps.
The Polypodium, like the Peperomia and Didym mahogany fern, came from my ex-job. They have a lot of ferns right now, because the tropical plant situation in Florida is still suffering the effects of last winter's freeze. (Florida: you get freezes every few years. How can this always surprise you? You have to prepare for these things.) Which meant not much of an availability list, and every box of "assorted" anything had ferns filling in for whatever frozen tropicals were missing.

So they now have basically all the ferns: elkhorn (which is our boy P. grandiceps, above), rabbit's-foot (Davallia), bird's-nest (Asplenium), mahogany (Didymochlaena¹), crocodile (Microsorum musifolium 'Crocodyllus'), Boston (Nephrolepis), 'Austral Gem' (an Asplenium cross), button (Pellaea), tiger (variegated Nephrolepis), upside-down (Arachniodes), holly (Cyrtomium), staghorn (Platycerium), bear's-paw (Polypodium), table (Pteris), possum-tail (Scyphularia), tree (Blechnum and Cyathea, among others, though they're not actually ferns) -- basically everything except maidenhair (Adiantum).

Which perhaps makes the fact that I bought a second fern, one I had never particularly cared about or wanted, somewhat more understandable. The odds said I was going to buy some ferns, 'cause that's what they had.

Agave bovicornuta 'Reggae Time.'
The last two plants came from Wallace's, in Bettendorf, IA, last Sunday. We hadn't been there since the orchid show in March, and the weather was such that I could survive outside the house without air conditioning (barely), so it seemed like a golden opportunity to go somewhere. And we did. Oddly, all the purchases from Wallace's had Jamaica-themed cultivar names.

I think I'd seen 'Reggae Time' at Wallace's before, maybe last October, but I asked someone and she thought they'd gotten them in new for this year.² Either way, it's a big plant for the price ($7.99) -- nearly a foot (0.3 m) in diameter now, and the tag says to space them at least three feet (.9 m) apart. (It actually says 36-60 inches, or 0.9-1.5 m.) So it could, theoretically, get very large, though indoors it probably won't. Still, it's a big, scary, angry-looking plant, and I like those.

Dracaena reflexa 'Song of Jamaica.'
Finally, Dracaena reflexa 'Song of Jamaica,' because they had fairly cheap 3-inch plants I could buy and then pot together. It's not a plant I was searching for especially, but my little 'Song of India' has done well enough inside that I've concluded that Dracaena reflexa is not as much trouble as the rumors say, and I wanted a multiple-plant pot because D. reflexas tend not to be that interesting individually. So I made one, when we got home.

There will probably be a post about the walkaways from these trips within the next week or two.

-

¹ (Heeeeeeeey Mo-ka-lay-nuh!)
² The ones I remember were definitely not this big, though plants do grow. So these may or may not be the Agaves I remember.