Unfinished business: Eucharis grandiflora

In the sell/trade post, I mentioned having gotten Eucharis grandiflora bulbs but not being sure if they were any good or ready to resell. (I got them originally from easytogrowbulbs.com, and have been happy with the service from them so far, if you're interested. Currently they're selling sets of 5 bulbs for $8.95, and then shipping is almost as much again; it worked out to about $3/bulb for me. They'll only ship between March and June, so if you want bulbs from them, order soonish. If you'd rather get a plant that's already potted and sprouted and everything, I will be selling some of them later in the summer; I'm not sure when, but I'm thinking around August. I'll let you know.)

These were the bulbs when they first arrived:


I potted them up on April 22, and here is what they looked like on May 20:


Not particularly lush or impressive, but you can still see that all but two of them (the second and third from top, in the left column) had leaves to some degree or another. One of those two now has a very small green shoot starting to emerge, so I think it's going to be fine. The other was quick out of the gate with a partly-formed green leaf above the soil, then something happened to change its mind, and the leaf turned brown. The bulb still feels firm (or at least what I can feel of it at the top, without digging it all up), so I think it's still alive, but I'm not sure whether it's going to shape up and grow again, or what the problem was in the first place. Still, though, 14/15 is not a bad success rate.

And they're growing fast now that they're fully awake: as I write this on May 30, the leaves are considerably bigger than they were in the picture above. (I apologize for the lack of photo: I originally thought I was doing a different post today.) So we've got some momentum going. I'm excited to see how big they'll get in the next couple months.

Pretty pictures: Pinkish Red

Pressed for time again -- we were elsewhere for a good chunk of yesterday.

Most of these were taken at the ex-job; the rose was at Lowe's.

Dianthus NOID. I should know what the variety is: it's the same thing we sold during the two springs I worked there. I just forgot, and there's no time to try to look for the ID.

Lamprocapnos x 'King of Hearts.' I regret not getting a clearer photo of the foliage on this one; it seemed different. Not that I'm hugely familiar with bleeding-heart foliage.

NOID Cattleya alliance orchid.

Paeonia 'Hoki.' ('Tis the season.)

Cyclamen persicum NOID. If anybody still remembers my Cyclamen experiment from last fall: it looked worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and then I moved it to the (cool, humid) basement under shop lights, and it's doing massively better. Among other things, it's growing HUGE leaves. Which I guess is good. I was getting sick of it and considering throwing it out, so it's shaping up just in time, pretty much.

Rosa 'Radtko' (doubled knock-out rose). I'm sure there are roses out there that I could find interesting and exciting, but I haven't run into them at Lowe's. Not that I expected to. I'm just saying.

Dianthus NOID. Dianthus were one of my favorites to sell, at the ex-job; they smelled nice, and I enjoyed deadheading them. I'm not currently growing any, and probably won't in the near future, because we're still working on establishing a raised bed in the backyard, and even if we had a bed already I maybe still wouldn't grow any because I don't know if I'd want to, but they were nice, occupationally speaking.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

First off, the Brady sisters have apparently fledged already: when Sheba and I went out yesterday morning, the nest was empty. The husband said he thinks he saw Marcia a couple hours after that, in the yard -- it was at least a small robin with juvenile foliage plumage, and then he was screeched at by an adult for a while -- so we're not especially worried about them, but nevertheless. They grow up so fast.

We also have a pair of barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) building a nest above our front door.


This is okay with us, as we never use the front door, though if they have to build a nest there, we do kinda wish they'd clean up after themselves a little better than this. Still, though, the intent is to leave the nest where it is, at least this year. Wikipedia says they'll reuse the same nest year after year, so next year we may have a problem.

There were still no eggs as of Wednesday --


-- but the position of the nest is such that I'm not sure I'll be able to sneak the camera in there to check, when there are eggs; they've added height to the nest walls since I took this picture, and I was barely able to squeeze the camera through to get this picture.

Not that pictures of barn swallow eggs are that exciting anyway, I realize. But I'm interested.


Meanwhile, Sheba's life is the same as usual; no new developments I can think of. She got a bath (more of a shower, I guess, technically) yesterday, from the husband, which she never likes, but that's about it. Today's photo is from a pause in some seriously intense tennis-ball chasing, earlier this week.

Pretty picture: Cattleya Confetti x C. aurantiaca

Again from the orchid show last March, and again with a Cattleya. They really are terribly photogenic, and y'all know I have a thing for orange flowers.

I'm feeling kinda down on orchids lately: the Oncidium I bought last December had been doing better than any other orchid I've ever owned, until about three weeks ago, and then it started throwing leaves everywhere and won't stop. The Potinaras and Sophrolaeliocattleya aren't throwing leaves, but they're not growing, either. This is how pretty much all my orchid purchases go, as far back as I've been trying to grow orchids. I'm getting sick of it. Either I'm going to have to find better spots for them to live -- which will be difficult, since space is extremely limited, and the best spots are already occupied by more appreciative plants -- or PATSP is about to have a Summer Orchid Giveaway.

Random plant event: Hypoestes phyllostachya and Justicia scheidweileri

I noticed while watering this flat of (mostly) Gasteraloe x beguinii (Aloe aristata x Gasteria batesiana) that one of these plants was not like the others:


It's trying to blend in with the Gasteraloes, but there's a small Hypoestes phyllostachya seedling in there about 1/3 of the way from the bottom and 1/3 of the way from the left side.

This is noteworthy mostly because I haven't planted any seeds. I actually haven't even seen a Hypoestes seed yet. (They're commercially available if you Google for them; I've just never wanted any.) Obviously there's been one at some point or another, though -- the parent plant lives next to this flat of Gasteraloes, and is apparently as much of a nosy neighbor as I said it was in the profile. I'm still a little puzzled, though: the Hypoestes doesn't hang over the Gasteraloes; it's a few inches away. So it would have had to throw seeds, somehow, which I think maybe I dimly remember hearing something about that, but I couldn't confirm my suspicions with Google just now, so I may be misremembering.

Similar things have been happening in the living room: I've seen a few unidentified seedlings in one specific section of the room (couldn't find any to take a picture of, but last time I saw them, they were all too small to have any true leaves yet), which happens to be the area around the Justicia schedweileri, which: has also been blooming more or less nonstop for the past couple months.

And: there are references to Porphyrocoma/Justicia about its ability to explosively propel seeds a large distance from the parent plant.

(The actual quote is "The seed stalk or funiculus of each seed is modified into a hook shaped jaculator or retinaculum that functions in flinging out the seeds during dehiscence." I have no idea why people would think botany is a dry subject, if this is the kind of stuff botanists get to read, but I'm pretty sure this translates into non-botanist as, "the seeds have a thingie that propels them away from the plant when they're ripe.")

It just so happens that I've been spending mornings in the living room a lot lately, and while there, especially on sunny days, I'll be sitting quietly, minding my own business, when I'll hear a sudden CRACK! from the general area of the Justicia. I've never been able to pin it down to anything particular (in fact, I'd assumed it was probably the acrylic sheet the Justicia and other plants are sitting on, expanding in the warm sun), but it could be the Justicia exploding and scattering seeds around, which would explain both the noise and the randomly appearing seedlings. Once some of the seedlings get old enough to have true leaves, I'll be able to confirm that.

(UPDATE: Yep, they're Justicia scheidweileri.)

Wednesday morning Marcia, Jan, and Cindy picture

This isn't necessarily going to be a regular Wednesday thing, but I skipped the Saturday Sheba/Nina pictures last weekend and then everybody was all omigod what have you done with the Sheba/Nina pictures you can't do this to me, so I figured I owed y'all some animal pictures.

So, introducing Marcia, Jan and Cindy:

(L-R) Marcia, Cindy, Jan. From 20 May.
A nice robin (Turdus migratorius) couple built a nest on top of our gutter's downspout, on the northwest corner of the house, which I've taken a few pictures of, but I'm probably not going to have a lot more opportunities: Wikipedia says that chicks leave the nest two weeks after hatching, and these look pretty big already. We'll see.

(L-R) Marcia, Jan, Cindy. 23 May.
The parents (Mike and Carol, presumably) don't really approve of me taking pictures, and get really agitated when I try, but there's not much they can do to stop me. So far no actual damage has been done, though they watch Sheba and me pretty closely when we're outside.

I don't actually know that the chicks are all female; it's just funnier to call them Marcia/Jan/Cindy. For that matter, I also can't tell them apart from one another, the captions in the photos above notwithstanding. I'm mainly going according to their facial expressions and/or posture.

Random plant event: Murraya paniculata

I have a lot of ideas about things to do with the plants that never wind up coming to fruition. Either the plants are uncooperative, or I lose interest, or I make an error at a critical moment in the process and everything falls apart. (In fact, I'm considering making a post about projects like this -- not quite a Where Are They Now? sort of post so much as a How Come You Never Wrote About This Again? post.)

One of the ongoing failures has been Murraya paniculata propagation. I knew someone must be capable of doing it, 'cause otherwise how would we get more Murraya paniculatas? But I've failed, repeatedly, with cuttings and seeds both, and had kind of reached the conclusion that propagating Murraya was just not in the cards for me.


And it still might not be, of course. Many things could still happen. But last fall (last summer?), I took a cutting and stuck it in damp vermiculite in a clear plastic cup, then put another clear plastic cup on top of that, and taped them together, and then MANY MANY MONTHS happened. During that time, the cups were untaped maybe three times and more water added, and the last time I did that, I put a little fertilizer in as well. (I also knocked it over repeatedly, because the cup has a narrow base and a high center of gravity.) It's been sitting in an east window, where it gets a lot of bright artificial light and intermittent filtered sunlight, when we have sunlight.

And I just noticed, last Saturday, that the fool thing is trying to bloom:


Which worried me, initially, because I leapt to the conclusion that it was wasting energy on blooms when it hadn't even built any roots yet, and I was getting ready to give it the I'm-so-disappointed-in-you speech, but then I found a root --


-- so now I'm thinking well, maybe I've solved this problem. Still too soon to have the Murraya Propagation Party, and it's an unpleasantly slow process even if it does work, but I'm feeling hopeful.

Pretty picture: Convallaria majalis flowers

When we bought the house, we also bought a couple square feet of lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis) next to the garage. In the time-honored fashion of Convallaria, they have since expanded to maybe three square feet, which may or may not matter in the long run because the husband has at various times proposed moving the garage, paving over the relevant section of the lawn, and digging up everything next to the garage so as to relocate the dirt (don't ask).

In any case, however temporarily or permanently they're going to be around, and however ratty the leaves look by September, I do enjoy having them here. The smell alone makes them worth keeping around. Even if they are thugs.

Random plant event: Hemigraphis exotica

This plant doesn't belong to me; it was at the ex-job a couple weeks ago. (My own plant is not particularly happy with me -- I think it's a problem of not being able to give it as much light as it would like.) It's not a particularly pretty or even interesting picture, but I hadn't seen a Hemigraphis flower before, so I figure some of you hadn't either, and now we all have, more or less. Hooray for the internet!

Pretty picture: Renanetia Sunshine

I guess it's supposed to look like this, but mostly I think, so what's the point of this, exactly?

Once again, the name on this plant was misspelled at the orchid show, so the file name on the photo is incorrect. Which will probably never matter to anyone, of course.

Renanetia, which I'd never heard of before, is an intergeneric cross between Neofinetia and Renanthera. Which I'd likewise never heard of before. Most of the pictures that show up when one googles Renanetia show flowers which are varying shades of red or orange. (Google resists at first, and tries to show you pictures for "Renania" instead, which appears to be the Italian name for the Rhineland, in Germany. No, dear Google, one has to say, believe it or not, I actually meant to search for the word I typed in, so please show me what I asked you to find, okay?) So it's possible that Sunshine is an unusual cross in having pinkish flowers instead. I don't know.

Newish plants

This last month or so is apparently the dawning of the Age of Gesneriads, as far as my personal collection goes. I've gotten a lot of them in trades recently, including my first Columneas, Nautilocalyxes, Codonanthes, Kohlerias, and Chirita. Mostly Episcias, though, because I feel safest with Episcias.

This isn't going to be an exhaustive list of everything I've gotten, because 1) there are too many of them to do that, and 2) some of them literally died before I could get a picture taken.¹ These are just the ones I find most interesting.

First up, since I teased you about the gesneriads, let's begin with the gesneriad I'm most excited about. This is Columnea orientandina:

Columnea orientandina.
Why am I so excited about it? I don't know. It just seems cool. All the leaves have that red spot on the tip of the underside, the flowers are smallish but a nice clear yellow --


-- and it just seems, you know, likeable. Possibly the main reason I'm interested in it is because I'd never heard of anything like it before.

Dyckia 'La Rioja.'
This is one of the ones that died, which was tragic and not-tragic simultaneously. The tragic part is that it was a weird color, plus a bromeliad genus that's new to me, and I think Dyckias have a really cool shape to them. It's not tragic in that the hooks on the leaf margins are wicked sharp, and it would have been all but impossible to handle this plant without hurting myself. A lot.

Hatiora NOID.
The Hatiora (better known as Easter cactus, or Rhipsalidopsis²) is one I actually bought. I've wanted an Easter cactus for some time now, but I've never seen one for sale around here until a few weeks ago. They only had two, and both were more or less bloomed-out, but this was such a nice color (the photo doesn't do it justice; it's sort of peach/orange/coral), and I get so few opportunities to buy them, that I went for it anyway. Paid $10 or $11 at Earl May, which is excessive for a plant this small, especially one that's already mostly bloomed-out, but at least now I have it. So far, contrary to the rumors about Easter cacti, it's held together and not disintegrated into a pile of unconnected segments.

Hatiora NOID.
This, on the other hand, is an Easter cactus I got via trade, so essentially for free, from a reader. You'll notice that it's way bigger and nicer. It will have magenta flowers, assuming that I can get it to flower next spring.

Kohleria 'Peridots Kitlope.' Or maybe 'Peridot's Kitlope.' Not sure about the apostrophe.
I forget what it was (possibly a post at Andrew's?), but at some point not that long ago, I decided that I needed to have a Kohleria, so I started trying to get one. I now have three, of which this is the largest. The person who sent it to me was not enthusiastic about the genus, for reasons which were either forgotten or unspecified, but I think I have pretty nearly ideal conditions for it in the basement, so we will see what I think of it after a decent interval of time has elapsed.

Close-up of Kohleria 'Peridot[']s Kitlope' flower.

Nautilocalyx forgetii.
I know next to nothing about Nautilocalyx. So far, one unrooted cutting of N. pemphidius died almost immediately, and this unrooted cutting of N. forgetii seems to be doing okay. Even if it does well for me, it's not likely to be fascinating -- the flowers are smallish and white -- but it's novel. And maybe it'll do well for me. That always makes me like plants better.

Chirita 'Deco.'
Since this picture was taken, the plant seems to be preparing a flower bud, which I'll have to get a picture of so I can show you, I guess.

Billbergia 'Foster's Striate.'
Easily one of the biggest plants I've ever received by trade (that's a 6-inch / 15 cm pot it's in), and if I can ever get flowers, that should be pretty awesome. It might be awesome even without flowers, actually. There are some concerns that I might not have a bright enough spot for it, but so far it seems to be hanging in there.

Episcia 'Pink Acajou.'
One of the more interesting Episcias.

Episcia 'Silver Skies.'
And another.

Episcia 'Faded Jade.'
There were seriously a ton of Episcias.

Episcia 'Kempenfest.'
The USPS basically backed a truck up to the house and I went in the back of the truck with a shovel and just shoveled Episcias out for an hour or two.

Finally, for the pièce de résistance --

Pereskia godseffiana.
I knew of Pereskias before this, from pictures, but had never been that interested. So it's a cactus with leaves,³ big deal. The reality in person is much stranger. First of all, I was not prepared for the color. Pereskias are usually green, but this is hot pink and brownish yellow. It looked more like a badly-wilted pink poinsettia than a cactus. Second, even though there are leaves, there are also thorns/spines/whatever, which are seriously sharp, and hide at the base of the leaves, which wouldn't be that big of a problem except that I had to try to bend the leaves upward in order to keep from planting them along with the stem, and they don't really want to bend, so I was stabbing myself repeatedly while trying to pot the cutting up.

I'm a little worried about it: they're supposed to be incredibly easy to root, but nothing seems to have happened so far, and the leaves are a little floppier now than they were, which is possibly a bad sign. Granted, it's only been here a week, and I should give it time.

If it does work out like it's supposed to, then I will have a fast-growing, hot pink and brownish yellow plant on my hands that longs to be a thirty-foot vine that bristles with thorns.

-

¹ Not really my fault or the sender's fault. First of all, they weren't a trade so much as a gift, and there were time constraints on it such that they had to be shipped during a cold spell in late April. They're still in the process of sorting themselves out, as far as who's going to live and who's going to die, but at the moment about 2/3 of that group are still technically alive. How many of them will stay that way, on the other hand, I have no idea.
² But Plant List will back me up on Rhipsalidopsis being a botanically obsolete name.
³ If memory serves, Pereskias are thought to be the living group of cacti most similar to the ancestral cactus from which all the others descended. Hence, they still have actual leaves, and need a fair amount of water, and so on.

Question for the Hive Mind: unidentified plant

This has been bothering me for at least a year; I don't know why I haven't gotten around to asking until now.

What we have is a plant. I've seen it outside, both in spots that looked deliberately cultivated (as with this plant) and spots that did not. Or at least I think I'm seeing the same plant in both places.


The specific specimen I've taken pictures of appeared to be deliberately cultivated, because there were three or four of them, in a row.


The above is less for ID purposes than because it's sort of borderline pretty, but if seeing the flowers help with the ID then great.

Random plant event: Kalanchoe prolifera

It's not a huge deal, but my Kalanchoe prolifera has now matured to the point where it's producing pinnate leaves.


For comparison, this is what it looked like eight months ago:


Most of the stem actually died and had to be cut off; the stuff you can see in the picture is mostly growth from buried or almost-buried nodes that came up after most of the stump was dead, when it was becoming questionable whether anything was going to happen at all.

So far, K. prolifera looks like one of those plants that's never pretty, but is really vigorous and easy to grow, like Euphorbia tirucalli or Pandanus veitchii. Which is okay by me. I mean, most of my favorite plants fit that general description.

Pretty pictures: Purple and Blue

I've been taking tons of pictures lately, and then not doing much with them, blogularly speaking. Part of this is because I've been taking so many that the thought of trying to sort them all out makes me exhausted before I even start. Today, I'm going to at least try to get a few of them out of the way.

Hyacinthus orientalis NOID. In somebody's yard, here in town.

Glechoma hederacea. Ditto. I like this picture not because it's a great photo in and of itself, but because it's closeish to an accurate depiction of the weird luminous quality G. hederacea flowers have in certain lighting situations. Like all blue/purple things, they rarely photograph in anything close to accurate color, but I'll settle for them glowing slightly. The leaves are reddish, incidentally, because this photo was taken when it was still pretty cold at night, and Glechoma turns reddish in the cold. Like a lot of plants do.

Bacopa 'Colossal Blue.' Or possibly Sutera 'Colossal Blue.' I've lost track of which one is supposed to be current. This was at the ex-job, and whether or not I find it interesting depends mostly on what I'm comparing it to. So like, comparing it to the overall options available in the outdoor annual category, I think it kinda sucks. But comparing it to the other Bacopa/Sutera varieties I'm familiar with, all of which were white, it's interesting. A quick googling suggests that I should actually be even less impressed than I am, because this is far from the only lavender Bacopa in the world.

Lobelia erinus 'Laguna Sky Blue.' This was more impressive in person than in the photograph. I'm not sure what went wrong with the picture. I don't think I'm likely to try to grow Lobelias again, having had uniformly negative experiences with them, but there's no arguing that they're pretty.

Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost.' Also at the ex-job, and unfortunately a little bit past prime bloom, but nevertheless blue, so it fits, so here it is.

Delphinium 'Summer Skies Pacific Giant.' Delphinium cultivar names appear to be getting as ridiculous as those of orchids.

Viola sp. From our lawn. The plant's nothing special, but I thought this picture turned out remarkably well. Hence my remarking on it.

Viola sp. I don't actually remember where this one was taken. They're everywhere right now, you know.

Scilla siberica? An older photo, from someone's lawn. Really like this picture too.

Anchusa arvensis. Taken at a garden center that's not the ex-job. I hadn't actually heard of this before this year, and now that I've heard of it and seen it, I'm not sure how I feel about it.