Random plant events: Huernia schneideriana (?), Huernia zebrina, and Stapelia variegata

Originally, this post was just supposed to be about the Huernia schneideriana, because I saw that it had produced some buds on 18 July.

And they opened on 23 July, the first time I'd seen the flowers in-person, which was neat.

(This photo is actually from 27 July, but it's the same flower that opened on the 23rd. Should also note that the flower is actually very small: maybe 3/4 inch, or 2 cm, in diameter.)
But then two days after that, on the 25th, I happened to see that the Stapelia variegata had produced a flower without me even noticing the bud.

This flower is about 2 inches / 5 cm in diameter.
And two days after that, on 27 July, I saw that the Huernia zebrina had also produced a bunch of buds, one of which had fully opened by that afternoon.

Maybe 1 in / 2.5 cm in diameter.
So instead of a post about a single stapeliad flower, you get a post about three of them. And they cover a range of color patterns: solid, dots, stripes. So it's clearly a good thing that I couldn't write this post when I first thought of it.

As a side note: the flowering of the H. schneideriana means that all four of my stapeliads have now bloomed, so I can compare their smells. S. variegata is definitely, absolutely, no question about it, the worst-smelling. I haven't been able to smell anything, good or bad, from either of the Huernias, even checking multiple times over the course of a day. S. gigantea definitely has an unpleasant smell, but it's not so intense as to be particularly bothersome, if it's only one flower at a time. Putting the S. variegata next to the door we use all the time was a mistake, though.

Random plant event: Agave americana

This doesn't, I think, mean much of anything, but I hadn't seen it before. One of my variegated Agave americanas grew a couple leaves that got fused together halfway down.

The new leaves on the Big Damn Screw Pine occasionally fail to separate from the leaves that precede or follow them, I think because the midrib spines get caught on the other leaves. If it were growing outdoors, where the wind and rain would move the plant around as it grew, this wouldn't be a problem, but indoors I occasionally have to unstick them from one another. So, I thought maybe the Agave situation was something like that, and tried to pull the leaves apart.

But I shouldn't have. Oh, well. The plant hasn't rotted or turned yellow or started to glow or anything, so it appears that I didn't actually hurt it.

Pretty pictures: Caulaelia Snowflake Northland

The pictures could have turned out better (it does help somewhat to view them at full size), but I approve of the flowers.

This was tagged as "Dilaelia (Cll) Snowflake Northlan," but Dilaelia is Caulaelia now, so.

Caulaelia Snowflake Northland = Caularthron bicornutum x Laelia albida

Random plant event: Aechmea fasciata

I bought an Aechmea fasciata in November 2006, after it had bloomed, and it produced two offsets, which I separated and potted up. It's a good species. I've never had any pest problems with it, it grows new leaves regularly, and it accepts a spot that a lot of my other plants won't grow in (near the floor in the living room -- there's light, but it's also near a window and a heat/AC vent, which means that the temperature there fluctuates wildly from hour to hour and month to month).

It's never bloomed for me, which is mildly disappointing. They do need a few years to get old enough to bloom, but not seven. I think the problem here is the care it's gotten: it'd probably like better light and more tropical conditions.

In any case, having had it drummed into me for years that bromeliads flower, then offset as the parent rosette dies back, I had kind of been expecting that the A. fasciatas weren't going to produce any offsets until they'd flowered, and they were never going to flower until I gave them a better spot. But on 7 July, I found this in one of the pots:

And by yesterday, it had grown to this:

So clearly it's not screwing around. I don't know whether to be happy or not: does this mean that it's given up on ever blooming and proceeded directly to rosette replacement? Or is it a good sign, that even though it hasn't bloomed yet, it's feeling happy enough about things to go ahead and offset? Please, someone, tell me how I'm supposed to feel.

Saturday morning buffalo picture

I know, I know, you were expecting Sheba. This is sort of (barely) Sheba-relevant, though.

I really enjoy riding around on side roads and gravel roads. I like the lack of traffic, and having the option to jump out of the car and take a bunch of pictures of a weed on the side of the road when the spirit moves me, but also it's just more interesting. There are more things to look at, you're a lot closer to them than you are on the highway, and you have more time to check them out because you're not going by them as quickly.

We haven't done much of this lately, because when we bought the house, we lost our main excuse for doing it. Also there are only so many roads in the area, and we'd already been on most of them, so there weren't many left over, and part of the fun is getting to see new things.

But a few weeks ago,¹ the husband and I got another chance to do some back-road wandering. We'd both cleared our schedules for the day, because we had a thing to do about an hour south of home and didn't know how long it was going to take. Also the weather was nice,² so after we were done, we took the opportunity to try to locate some new roads on the trip back.

And we did! Found about 30 miles of brand-new (to us) gravel, which was pretty exciting on its own, but then at one point, we wound up on . . . well, not quite a ridge, but it was a lot higher than any of the surrounding area. Maybe an unusually large hill? In any case, it was neat, and I was taking some photos of the view . . .

This photo benefits a great deal from being viewed full-size.
Also: remember this the next time someone describes Iowa as flat and boring. Admittedly some of it is, but it's a lot more varied than people know.
. . . when the husband rolled the car forward a little and suddenly there was a BUFFALO.

Several buffalo, actually, but only one of them was in a good position for photos.

This wasn't the first buffalo we've seen in Iowa or anything; we'd also run into some somewhere north of Cedar Rapids, about five years ago. But they're uncommon. At one point during the 80s, I remember being told that buffalo were the meat of the future, that they were so much lower in cholesterol than beef, and tasted great, and so on and so forth. Twenty-five years later, it's pretty clear that reality isn't going to catch up with the hype (ditto for ostriches, which were promoted the same way, at around the same time, and which we've only encountered once in our travels, also north of Cedar Rapids), but apparently some people are still raising them anyway.

So this was neat. Plus we could just sit there and watch it for a while.

Sheba took a while to notice the buffalo (she is sometimes a little slow to pick up), but once she did, she freaked the hell out. Growling and barking and whatnot, which initially seemed silly, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that no, that's reasonable: they're huge, we have no reason to think that Sheba's ever seen one before, and they do have some menace to them. I mean, it wasn't being aggressive or anything, but just the horns, the face and, well, the size.

The buffalo did not appear to feel threatened in any way by Sheba, but it did, as you see above, look up from what it was doing so see what all the commotion was. The husband and I felt bad about disturbing it, so we left shortly after Sheba started going bonkers. Still pretty cool, though. I realized while writing this post that I kind of . . . forget, sometimes, that buffalo didn't actually go extinct.

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¹ (Same trip as this and this.)
² I am pleased with this summer's weather so far; I don't know if we've been consistently cooler than the historical average this year, but we've been consistently cooler than the last few years, at least.
Last summer at about this time, you'll remember, I was pretty miserable. This year . . . well, the official high temperatures for Iowa City on 23 and 24 July were 79F/26C and 77F/25C, and the forecast as I write this is for a solid week of temperatures at or below 82F/28C. Our forecast high for today, Saturday, is 70F/21C. In Iowa. In late July and early August. Even taking into account that the NWS always predicts a few degrees cooler than reality winds up being, to even be thinking about temperatures below 95F/35C at this time of year is incredible.
EDITED TO ADD: The NWS is now predicting a low temperature of **49F/9C** for us tonight. 49. In July. What.

Random nonplant event: stinkhorn

Fungi aren't plants, and aren't even particularly related to plants,¹ but people tend to think of them as plants, and this fits the scope of the blog insofar as it's something that grew in the yard, so I'm making an exception.

A few weeks ago (3 Jul), I encountered this in the yard.

I recognized it as a stinkhorn, a type of fungus, and eliminated a few species from the possibilities, but I couldn't narrow it down much better than that. My best guess is Phallus rubicundus, on the grounds that Mutinus species lack a clearly defined "head," and this definitely has a clearly defined head. P. rubicundus also seems to be relatively common in this part of the country, even though it's not native to the area -- the short version of the story is that it was probably introduced here via mulch; interested readers can find the long version here. I'm pretty sure that there was some mulch spread on this part of the lawn at some point since we moved in, though I can't remember why. So the odds would seem to favor P. rubicundus.

It's not clear where P. rubicundus is actually native; apparently it's been found on every continent but Antarctica. The first specimens discovered in North America were in South Carolina and Texas; it generally favors tropical and semitropical areas, but apparently frost isn't a dealbreaker: it's been introduced and established in the U.S. as far north as Wisconsin.

The brownish slime on the head contains the spores. It's supposed to smell bad and attract flies, though I didn't notice a smell when I took the picture. (Also it's supposed to be green, not brown; it's possible that this one wasn't fully mature.) New fungi are started when the flies carry spores away on their feet.

As to where the spores come from, well, fungi have a very different understanding of sex and gender than we do; I don't even want to try to explain. Try this: A Fungus Walks Into a Singles Bar.

Both 1) things that smell bad to attract pollinating flies and 2) fungus are going to appear on the blog again a few times in the next couple weeks; I know this because I have so many things to blog about all of a sudden that I've managed to schedule the blog for near-daily posts through 19 August.² Haven't done that in a while. (It's possible I still won't. But that's the plan.)

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¹ (Fungi actually have more genes in common with animals than with plants.)
² (Two days off in the next 24 days.)

New plant: Mangave 'Macho Mocha'

I've been wanting a Mangave for a looooong time. Basically since I found out they existed, in fact. (If memory serves, that was via Digging, though it's been so long ago that I can't be certain.) And now, thanks to a reader, I finally have one. Or, rather, two: one big one, one small one.

The bigger plant. The pot diameter is ~5" / 13 cm.
Both traveled fine, and I potted them both up with minimal leaf drop. The small plant didn't drop any leaves, but it's not growing new ones yet; the large plant lost a leaf or two, but is producing new ones already. Neither one had spots when shipped, because they'd been growing in shade and then spent a few days wrapped in newspaper in a dark cardboard box, but they both colored up once I put them outside in the sun.

The smaller one, when first potted up: they were both this color when they arrived. Pot diameter: 3" / 8 cm.
That said, I don't think this is the ultimate full-sun coloration either. Depending on their particular spot, the plants north of the garage either get morning and afternoon sun, or afternoon-only sun. The Mangaves are in the first group, but there are still a few hours in the middle of the day when the garage is shading them and preventing them from reaching their full color potential, or something like that.

Close-up of the big plant, to show the spots off better.
Regardless of the color (and honestly, whatever color they wind up is going to be fine with me), it looks like a pretty robust plant. I'm a little concerned about the potential size (davesgarden.com says they get to be 36-48 inches / 92-123 cm across), but if I let potential size worry me, my entire collection would constitute, like, three plants.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis NOID

The tag was inaccessible (all I could see was the word "Sweet'), so we don't have an ID for this one.

It's nice? I guess? I have a tough time finding any strong feelings about any Phalaenopsisesises, because they're so ubiquitous, though I plan to make an exception whenever my personal phal finally blooms. Everything's going okay so far.

Very Large Numbers

If Google's count can be trusted -- and why wouldn't it be; it's Google -- this is PATSP's 2000th post. It is not at all clear to me how I should be feeling about this, but I think we can all agree that it's a pretty big number, blogularly speaking. Consequently, there should be some Gazania photos ('New Day' mix, if you're keeping track), as Gazania is the Official Celebratory Flower of PATSP.

We also passed the one million word mark last November. Is there really that much to be said about plants? Probably not really, but, you know, I repeat myself sometimes.

Of course, we also got the three-millionth page view at the end of last March, too, so I guess people don't mind a little redundancy.

What's in the future for PATSP? I don't exactly know. For a lot of different reasons, I'm less interested in plants than I used to be. This has more or less killed the plans for the book. I feel bad about that -- I wanted to read it just as much as some of you did -- but I just can't force myself to work on that now. I did try. This may (MAAAAAAY) mean that the plant profiles are coming back in the next six to twelve months.

Having said that, the blog itself will probably endure. I am uncomfortable with having this much information about myself in Google's hands, and have been for some time, but that particular toothpaste has been out of the tube for years; nothing much to be done about it now. I do still have plenty of ideas for posts, including a solid half-dozen ideas right this minute, so my personal expectation is that Google will give up on hosting PATSP for free before I give up on writing it.

I'll still be surprised if we reach post #4000, but my surprise is not a reliable predictor of things. So we'll see what happens. 2000 posts is still an accomplishment, so let's have one more Gazania:

Saturday morning Sheba picture

Random plant event: Leuchtenbergia principis

The seedlings are still around, mostly -- I started 56, of which approximately 42 (75%) germinated, and 39 of which (70%) are still around, though some of those aren't looking real promising. I should probably try to figure out a way to move them outside for a couple months; I'm just not sure where I could put them.

But that's not what this post is about (ha! Tricked you!); what the post is about is the first specimen of L. principis I bought, which is producing flower buds!

Leuchtenbergia principis is actually supposed to be a relatively easy cactus to bring into bloom, so this may not excite some of you all that much, but it's a big deal to me. This plant had a flower on it when I bought it in 2009, but hadn't bloomed for me since. They need quite a bit of light to bloom, and I'd been keeping it indoors year-round, therefore no flowers.

The buds don't appear to be developing very rapidly, so I don't know how long it's going to take before I see the actual blooms, but it's something to watch for and something to look forward to. The longer the plant collection lasts, the rarer it is for the plants to do anything I haven't seen them do before (and often when they do bother to do a new thing, it's dying), so stuff like this is even more exciting to me than it would have been a few years back.

Questions for the Hive Mind: outdoor IDs

Neither of these is an emergency sort of ID situation or anything, but I'm curious.

The first plant was growing in the dark underneath our front deck. The husband has torn the deck apart (for complicated reasons I probably don't fully understand), so suddenly the plant is completely exposed, enabling photography. I'm thinking a juniper of some kind? I don't really know the various needley plants very well.

Another question relevant to this one might be, is this worth trying to relocate? I mean, we don't have any particular attachment to it or anything, and I obviously can't know how it will handle transplanting if I don't know what it is, but if it could be a nice plant at some point, and it was free and could be moved, then we're not above trying to give it a more deliberate location.

UPDATE: More or less identified in the comments by multiple people as a Juniperus sp., probably J. virginiana, with an outside chance at J. communis or J. chinensis.

Plant #2 was growing in a bit of land that had been cultivated within the last couple years, but was allowed to do whatever it wanted this year, so this could either be a deliberately-planted ornamental or a common weed, and I'm not sure which is more likely. The whole plant:

And a close-up of a flower:

The flowers sort of make me think of chicory, but the rest of the plant doesn't. This was blooming in late June, by the way.

It's also appealing to thrips, I gather.

Not really looking for any advice on the second one, since it wasn't on our property, plus: ew, thrips. But I hadn't seen it before, and it was interesting, so I figure one of y'all must know what it is.

UPDATE: Identified by nycguy in comments as meadow campion, Silene latifolia ssp. alba.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum lowii

Yep, some of the people at the Illowa orchid show still don't want photographers to be able to see their plants. This background is the worst, though it helps slightly if one can photograph so the background is at an angle, as on the right side of this photo. I don't know why the presenter thinks this is a good idea.

The flowers are pretty cool, though. You would no doubt agree, if you could see them.

Apology to a Potter Wasp

11 July 2013

Eumenes fraternus
Family Vespidae
Northeast corner of the garage

(The letter's recipient.)
Dear Ms. Eumenes,

I wish to apologize to you for my actions on 10 July 2013, when I thoughtlessly destroyed the two nests you had constructed on my Pachypodium lamerei and then smeared the caterpillars that were inside across the concrete. I should not have done either of those things.

The brood cells; the one on the left is still being filled; the one on the right is full and has been capped.
I did not intend to inconvenience you; I was merely unfamiliar with your brood cells, and on first glance, feared that they were a gall or other pathogenic growth on my plant. And also I was a bit creeped out by the caterpillars, since to me they're a threat, not baby food.

The caterpillars from the cell that had already been filled. She crammed them in there pretty tightly. Proportionally, that's something like you or I filling a Ford Focus, unassisted, through the driver's side window, with paralyzed German shepherds.
I know that the nests represented a significant investment of effort on your part, in the construction of the chambers themselves, the hunting, stinging, transporting, and shoving of the caterpillars, and the egg laid in the closed nest. Further, I acknowledge that no apology can make up for this loss. Nevertheless, I wished to express my sincere regret, and promise that if you should favor my plants for construction in the future, I am now capable of recognizing your brood cells and will do my best not to harm them until your offspring have matured and emerged.

The caterpillars from the cell that was still being filled. Still alive, technically, but they weren't moving at all when this photo was taken.
I have also instructed my husband and dog not to interfere with your subsequent constructions, if any.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if I may be of assistance (mud, location recommendations, caterpillar scouting) to you in the future.

Sincerely,
Mr. Subjunctive

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

It is with a little sadness that I announce the passing of Nina, everybody's favorite brown anole.

Nina. 2009? - 2013. (Photo from 8 Dec 2010.)
I say "a little" sadness, as opposed to great sadness, or unbearable sadness, because it's not like I have a ton of happy memories of running through flower-filled meadows with her or anything. (Though we did have that one moment in the bathtub.) You only get so much affection from an anole, and I don't think she ever got comfortable with seeing me, so our emotional connection was always a little fraught.

Also it wasn't like I didn't see this coming, a long time ago. In the wild, allegedly, Anolis sagrei has a lifespan of about 1.5 years, and Nina was at least 4.3 years old when she died. I mean, her death is still a change and everything, but it's hard to see it as being particularly tragic if she was like 200 years old in anole years. Hopefully the time she spent here was better (if, perhaps, a bit less free) than she would have gotten had she stayed in Florida with Felipe. It was certainly better than it would have been had she stayed in the ex-job's greenhouse and been poisoned to death by pesticides, or if she'd escaped the greenhouse and then froze to death seven months later.

Probably not going to get a replacement. (See above re: you only get so much affection.) I mean, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with keeping another anole, but it wasn't like I had a burning desire to have one when I got Nina; she just kind of happened. So if the ex-job calls me up and asks me if I want another one, sure, but that's not something that's likely to happen.

Random plant event: Schlumbergera seedling #49

I have just over 100 Schlumbergera seedlings growing right now, and for the most part, they look just like their parents, except smaller. Also, most of those are seedlings from 'Caribbean Dancer,' which isn't really surprising, since 'Caribbean Dancer' is the most prolific bloomer.

There is also a set of 16 seedlings from a NOID with salmon/peach blooms. A few of those are also normal-looking, but the majority are very slow-growing, and appear stunted somehow. A couple seedlings have a normal number of segments, but the segments are all tiny (1/4 the size of normal ones), or they're ridiculously overbranched (like, one segment with fifteen segments growing off of it), or there are only three segments and they're all long and thin. Stuff like that.

#49,¹ though, is the oddest of the odd.

It seems to be growing, if very slowly, but the segments are long and narrow and sort of . . . I want to say "crimped," (?) along the edges. It seems weak, and I doubt that it's going to survive to blooming size, but I'm very curious about whether this is something it's going to grow out of at some point, or whether the flowers are going to be similarly malformed, or what.

As a side note, if any U.S. readers are interested in starting their own small army of Schlumbergeras or Columnea orientandinas from seed, I have several ripe fruits of both² that I need to do something with relatively soon, so send me an e-mail and I can probably mail you your very own seeds to germinate and be overwhelmed by.

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¹ (I'm not naming the Schlumbergeras like I have been with the Anthuriums; I probably ought to be, I suppose, but I'm not as emotionally invested in the Schlumbergeras.
² (The Schlumbergeras would be fruit from 'Caribbean Dancer,' since I have plenty of those seedlings already.)

Pretty pictures: Tolumnia Passionata Red

If this looks like an Oncidium, that's because it used to be: the genus Tolumnia was apparently separated from Oncidium about 25 years ago. They're native to the Caribbean.

Tolumnia hybrids are a relatively new thing (last 50 years or so), according to the American Orchid Society, which also has lots of advice about how to grow them.


Tolumnia Passionata Red is Tolumnia Florence Little x Tolumnia Breezy.

Materials and Techniques: Propagating Cyperus alternifolius

I mentioned a while ago that I'd been seeing Cyperus for sale here and there, and had been tempted to get one. A number of commenters encouraged me to do so, and then a reader offered me cuttings of hers. I hadn't even known that growing them from cuttings was possible.

Also, fortunately, it turned out that the reader who offered the cuttings had already written a blog post about how to proceed, so I didn't even have to search the net to get instructions.

I goofed here: I should have taken a picture of the cuttings outside of the water, cut the stems, then taken a second picture of the cuttings in the water. Forgive me; I was excited. The cuttings are upside down, relative to the direction they were originally growing.

The above picture was taken on 3 June. The jar then sat to the side of the kitchen window, where the cuttings got mostly bright indirect light with a little weak late afternoon sun.

By 19 June, two of the three cuttings had produced new sprouts and roots from between the leaves. I then pulled them out of the water, cut off most of the leaves (I left about 3/8 inch / 1 cm on; it was impossible to cut very precisely without catching the new shoots and roots as well, and I figured it probably wouldn't matter if part of the leaves was still attached.), and planted them in potting mix. Molly planted hers right side up, the direction they were growing to begin with, and I left mine upside down: it turns out not to make a difference.

Growth has felt slower than I'd expected, especially considering how quickly the cuttings started to produce roots and growing tips. The whole process has actually moved pretty quickly, considering that I went from cuttings to plants in a month: I'm just impatient.

This is what they looked like yesterday. Surprisingly easy so far; I've kept them in a saucer of water by the kitchen sink, so I remember to check to see if they need water. I expect that will become more challenging once their root systems expand a bit, but everything's worked fine with these two for the first month.

The third cutting has still not produced new shoots or roots or anything; the only notable difference between it and the other two is that it had been flowering when cut off. That may or may not be the reason why it hasn't done anything. In some ways, I don't really care whether or not it roots, since I already have two plants and I didn't, technically, have room for them, but I've kept it anyway just to satisfy my curiosity about whether it ever will. (Thank you again, Molly.)

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

This picture is from last Sunday (30 June). We were coming back from a trip to Fairfield, and stopped just north of Brighton, in a public area for people to launch their boats into the Skunk River. There's a former bar (now apparently a house) along the road to the launch site, and a dog who lives there saw Sheba go by in the car and followed so she could introduce herself.

Pretty picture: Jackfowlieara Lindiwe

Jackfowlieara Lindiwe is Cattleya Sierra Doll x Jackfowlieara Appleblossom.

Pretty picture: Echinacea NOID

Things have been really busy for the last few days, Sunday in particular, so there isn't much to blog about, and what there is isn't anywhere close to being ready to post.

I'm not thrilled about the situation, but things are what they are. Meanwhile, the Echinaceas are blooming. Not our Echinaceas: we don't have any. But everybody else's. You know what I mean.