Unfinished Business: Aglaonema seedling

It's been a long time since I mentioned it, but I did get an Aglaonema to grow from a self-produced seed once. I got berries (almost certainly self-pollinated) from a plant in late 2011, and the first had germinated by March 2012. By October 2012, I'd gotten three seedlings, though one never did very well and eventually died, and a second one developed what looked like a ring spot virus so I threw it out. The third one, though, is now four years old and multi-stemmed:

It isn't an amazing-looking plant. I don't especially like this particular variety of Aglaonema (which I've seen identified as 'Marianne' and 'Maria,' probably a few other names too -- it's an old cultivar). Didn't really need more of them. On the other hand, being grown from seed gives it some novelty value.

Had the option been open to me, I would be an Aglaonema breeder instead of an Anthurium / Schlumbergera breeder, because I like the genus generally, and I have a lot of them,¹ but this particular variety doesn't do much for me. Sadly, although my ags bloom just fine, usually in spooky unison no matter where they live in the house,² and the spadices develop bumpy bits that look for all the world like tiny developing berries, nothing ever comes of it: the developing berries dry up and die, and then that's it until the next mass blooming.

I saw something on-line a long time ago that said the plants need really high humidity while berries develop, so that could be the problem, though 1) it's not like we have low humidity in the house, and 2) I don't have a way to increase it, so if that's the hitch then I guess this is the only Aglaonema I'm going to grow from seed. Once, I tried enclosing a bloom in a plastic bag along with a damp paper towel; it didn't help.

If only they could decide to bloom in the summer, I could put them all outside and they'd have all the humidity they could ever want. But no. So ag-breeding is something I only get to do in my dreams. Maybe someday.

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¹ Mostly NOIDs, but my best guesses for names are: 'Maria,' 'Stripes,' 'Sparkling Sarah,' 'Peacock,' 'Diamond Bay,' 'Gold Dust,' 'Brilliant,' 'Cory,' 'Jewel of India,' 'Jubilee,' 'Silverado,' 'Red Gold,' 'Silver Queen,' and 'Emerald Bay.' When I say I like the genus generally, I'm not fucking around: I really like the genus. The white-stemmed cvv. ('Peacock,' 'Brilliant,' 'Cory,' 'Sparkling Sarah') are particularly great.
² And not even at the same times of year necessarily: historically it's been mostly January and/or October, depending on the year, but for some reason this year they've all decided to go in April as well.

Question for the Hive Mind: a new bug

I did not ask for a new bug. And if I had, I would have been asking for a new bug to replace the scale, not a new bug to add to the scale, much like Huey Lewis wanted a new drug to replace the problematic drugs he had previously tried, not because he wanted more variety in his drug use.¹ And yet.

The problem is that I don't actually know what new bug I have, nor how to make it go away. So I'm asking y'all for thoughts.

Relevant details:

It seems exclusively interested in Aglaonemas, and only two or three varieties of Aglaonema to boot.²

It looks basically like household dust. In fact, it looks so much like household dust that I've been assuming for quite a while that that's what it was.

The overall orange/red tint to the photo is because of the light source I was using, and is not the actual leaf color.
The dust hypothesis didn't actually make that much sense, because it was only ever on certain specific leaves, and was sometimes accompanied by weird brown-orange discoloration at the leaf margins.

When I tried to find an unaffected leaf for comparison purposes, I noticed that all the leaves seem to be doing this to some degree or another, but I think the picture above gives the general idea. They all eventually wind up looking like the leaf on the left, but are supposed to look more like the leaf on the right.
I don't know why the margins would be discolored, though, as the bugs seem pretty evenly distributed across the whole upper surface of the leaves.

There were also frequently sticky droplets of something or another. The droplets didn't alarm me terribly, because a lot of my Aglaonema varieties produce sticky droplets on the outside of the spathes when they produce flowers, and I first noticed the "dust" as the first affected plant was flowering. I'm still not 100% convinced that the droplets are related to the bugs, actually.

It doesn't seem to be particularly harming the plants, aside from the marginal discoloration, and the margin thing has really only been going on with 'Emerald Bay.'

So why do I think there's even a problem? Because I checked the leaves out with the microscope. As usual, getting decent photos with the microscope is nearly impossible, so forgive the quality, but you can see a couple mite-like things in the center of this photo, a relatively in-focus third one just above and barely to the right of those, and pieces of blurrier ones here and there around the periphery of the photo.

Which, it looks like an arthropod, not an insect: blurry though the picture is, it's pretty clear that they're holding four legs in front of the body, and either one or two pairs behind it. Plus there's that overall tick-/ mite-shape going on.

Obviously there are many, many species of mite, but the only ones I know of that make a habit of attacking houseplants are the two-spotted spider mite and the cyclamen mite, and I don't think these are either of those two species. Under the microscope, spider mites are 1) much larger, 2) yellowish and opaque, instead of translucent white, 3) inclined to stay mostly on the underside of leaves (these mites are almost 100% on the upper leaf surface), 4) detectable by the visible webbing they create, and 5) will move while you're looking at them under the microscope. I've never directly observed cyclamen mites under the microscope, but the pictures that come up in Google are of rounder, smoother creatures with stubbier legs. Cyclamen mites mostly look like white jellybeans, as far as I can tell, which these do not.

It's conceivable that I'm actually seeing the dead skins left after the mites molted.³ That's happened before, with the deep-sea crab/skeleton/spider/ghost things (probably actually aphids) I talk about at the end of this post, and would explain the translucent whiteness and lack of movement. I am also willing to entertain the possibility that my Aglaonemas are being haunted by the ghosts of deceased spider mites, because that likewise explains the translucent whiteness and makes about as much sense as anything else.

Of course I've Googled. There's plenty out there about spider mites and Aglaonemas, but nothing about any other kinds of mite.

So far, I've tried imidacloprid (when I was putting imidacloprid in all the plants), which definitely did not get rid of the infestation, and wiping the leaves with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel, which I did too recently to know about its effectiveness. (My guess: yeah, it'll probably work, but I'm going to have to do it several more times.)

So what about it? Anybody seen anything like this before? Have any suggestions for what I could do to find out what I've got, or how to make them go away? Suggestions for dealing with spider mite ghosts are especially welcome, since Google is as silent on the topic as you'd expect.

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¹ Side note: it's a little peculiar that he's asking for "one that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with you." 'Cause, you know, if you've got that in drug form, then you don't actually need the girl anymore, right? I mean, wouldn't it make more sense to just spend a lot of time with her, since she already exists and makes him feel exactly like he feels when he's with her, rather than asking the world's chemists to go to the trouble of inventing a whole new drug with these super-specific effects? I think about these things. Maybe Huey Lewis should too.
² Almost all of it has been on 'Emerald Bay,' which is in my office. Also affected: 'Golden Bay,' 'Diamond Bay,' and 'Brilliant,' all of which are in the living room. 'Gold Dust,' which sits right next to 'Emerald Bay,' and has been for quite a while, doesn't seem to have the problem at all, though.
³ If you're into video of spider mites running around and molting -- and who among us isn't? -- check this out:

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part L

Still have a lot of these photos stockpiled from . . . I don't even know how many years ago. Long time. I should probably try harder to burn through those, 'cause I'm still taking new pictures, and at this rate I'll never actually end up posting them.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Tetrastigma voinieriana. Alas, my Tetrastigma was lost in the big scale purge in February. It didn't have scale: I just got tired of it. It was top-heavy, and I couldn't actually let it climb anything like it wanted to, because I wouldn't have been able to take it to the tub to water it, and it had never grown very well, so out it went. I can't say I miss it much, though it's not particularly a bad plant, just not well-suited to my growing situation here.

Platanus occidentalis, autumn. I think sycamores are my favorite outdoor trees. Though tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) is competitive. This particular photo does a terrible job of showing why it's my favorite tree, but that's not really what I was trying to do in the first place so whatever.

Strelitzia nicolai.

Fothergilla x 'Mount Airy.' This was obviously taken at the ex-job; we don't have a Fothergilla here.

Ligularia stenocephala 'The Rocket.' Same here, though I have run into Ligularias occasionally in houseplant books, and have always wondered how well they'd really grow indoors.

The only time I've ever seen anyone come close to trying is when we kept one in the greenhouse at work for a while; it produced some flower buds, which was exciting, but then the actual flowers turned out to have thrips, so they were all twisted and stunted and gross. The whole affair was pretty disappointing.

Plectranthus amboinicus, variegated. I'd like P. amboinicus better as a houseplant if it didn't try to get so big so fast.

Dieffenbachia 'Starbright.' One of the four or five Dieffenbachias I still own. Most of them get thrown out once they get too tall and leggy for me to deal with: either I decide I don't like them and just throw them directly out, or I'm emotionally conflicted about throwing them out, so I try to cut them back and root the cutting, but they don't resprout and the cutting doesn't root and so then I throw them out.

I've always loved the way Dieffenbachias look, and obviously they make for great transmitted light pictures, and it doesn't hurt that they're kind of dangerous -- I like the dangerous plants -- but overall? I don't find them worth growing. The exceptions are the really huge cultivars like 'Tropic Snow' and 'Tropic Rain,' which do well enough for me, and resprout consistently when cut back, that I don't mind having them around.

Pilea 'Moon Valley.' I don't know how many times I had to attempt a photo of 'Moon Valley' before I got this one, but it was a lot. So this is probably my favorite from this batch, whether or not it deserves to be.

Aglaonema 'Sparkling Sarah.' My original plant, which had three individual plants in it and looked decently full, is not as attractive as it used to be, though that's my fault, not the plant's -- I accidentally broke one of the canes off. It's still one of the better red/pink Aglaonemas in my experience.

Caladium 'Fire Chief.' Not a houseplant (though don't think I haven't tried, more than once), but the photos are almost always great.

Ten(-ish) Things I Have Mistaken for Scale

So we're in the fifth week of checking all the plants in the basement weekly (on the east and south sides) or every second week (on the west). I'm not finding many actual pests anymore, for two reasons:

The first reason is that there's just not that much to find anymore, since any plants with obvious, easy to see infestations were already thrown in the trash.¹ The second is that I'm not looking as hard, because it's extremely time-consuming and tedious to do, and I'm tired of it.

As a result, almost every scale insect I've seen lately has been a false positive of one kind or another. And there are many kinds. So here is a list of ten things I have managed to mistake for scale in the last five weeks:

1. Scars -- on everything. Oh my god. You've never imagined how many little tan corky spots there are on the leaves, petioles, and stems of your plants until you've had to check each one individually to see whether it rubs off. And of course there's no way to actually remove them, because they're part of the plant, so I wind up checking the same scars over and over, week after week. This is far and away the largest and most irritating category of false positives.

Multiple scars on Epipremnum aureum 'Neon.'
Leaf scar on Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips.'
Not actually sure what this thing on a NOID Cryptanthus is, but I think it's either edema, a scar, or edema that became a scar.
Multiple irregular scars on the back of a Begonia x 'Erythrophylla' leaf.
Scars from thrips (?) on one of the Anthurium seedlings.

2. Dots of dried sap -- they're generally the wrong color to be scale, but the size and shape are close, so they have to get checked out anyway. Arguably a subcategory of scars, though distinct because dried sap rubs off. (Usually.)

Dried sap on Euphorbia trigona.
And on Hoya something. (Sold as H. kentiana, probably actually H. wayetii.)

3. Marginal burn, tip burn -- It doesn't happen a lot, but sometimes when a leaf is burnt in just the right way, the dead spot looks like a scale insect hanging right on the edge or tip of the leaf. Since the actual insects tend to congregate around the spot where the petiole attaches to the leaf, on and along the midrib and other major veins, this isn't terribly confusing, but it happens.

The margin spots on this variegated Yucca guatemalensis didn't make it through the recoloring / cropping process in very good shape, but they're there, along with a more obvious scar in the center of the leaf.

4. Aerial roots -- the shape is often not quite right, but when they're first developing, some aerial roots are small, oval, and tan. Best distinguished from scale by the facts that they don't wipe off and that they're pointy.

Aerial roots on a somewhat unhappy Selenicereus anthonyanus.²
Roots forming on a Stapelia gigantea stem.

5. Dirt -- dirt gets splashed all over when I water, so some of it ends up on the leaves and stems. Because there's no wind in the basement to blow it off, it stays attached. The irregular shape usually gives it away, but some pieces of bark are rounded enough to be momentarily alarming, and vermiculite is about the right color, so this is occasionally a problem.

A tiny fleck of potting mix on an Aglaonema 'Peacock' leaf.
A couple bits of dirt on an Anthurium seedling.

6. The natural coloration of the plant -- some plants just naturally have lots of little bumps or brown spots or whatever. In most of these cases, I've either given up on checking altogether because it's impossible, or the plant got scale a long time ago and has been thrown out. Aerial roots is technically a subdivision of natural coloration, now that I think about it, but it's so common and specific it probably deserves a separate entry anyway.

Close-up of a Ficus microcarpus stem, showing peeling bark, aerial roots, and a bunch of other random stuff.
Some of this Schefflera actinophylla's brown spots, if not all of them, are capable of becoming aerial roots if the air is sufficiently humid, but usually they just expand to form bark.

7. Edema -- again, bumps due to edema are usually irregularly shaped, so I don't have to resort to the squish test, but this has still happened plenty of times.

Surprisingly bad edema on a Billbergia nutans leaf, probably because I moved it into a bigger pot and then set it in front of a cold window.

8. Spiders -- only once, but still.


9. Mineral deposits -- parts of the plants that are in contact with the soil will sometimes get a tan, crusty mineral buildup which can resemble a big infestation of closely-spaced scale. Hatiora salicornioides seems to be especially prone to this, but I also see it on Anthurium quite a lot.

Mineral crust on Hatiora salicornioides.

10. Hallucinations -- and occasionally I just straight-up see things that aren't there. Which is usually a sign that I should take a break.

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¹ The last few scale insects I've found also appeared to be dead already. Or at least they were really, really tired, being flat and dried out and crunchy. One hopes that this has something to do with the imidacloprid.
Although thrips aren't really the focus of the post, for readers who are curious: the thrips are still around, here and there, and when I see them they're generally alive. I'm only finding them in a particular fairly narrow section of the basement shelves, though, and I didn't find any last week, so this is maybe progress. I also got my first thrips photos -- none are very good, but they're an improvement over no photos at all:
The thrips in question was photographed on notebook paper (hence the blue line in the top image), through a tiny magnifying glass lens, if this gives you any sense of the size.
² I have two Selenicereus anthonyanus plants, one in the basement and one in the plant room, and neither one has ever seemed very happy to be here. Mostly they just don't grow very fast, and the new growth is thin. Likely a light issue, but I don't have any better spots available.
It's weird, because Selenicereus chrysocardium is fine in very similar spots. I don't know what's wrong.

In Which I Nearly Achieve Houseplant Pest Bingo

There are too many plants in the basement, and too many plants needing water elsewhere in the house, for me to have been able to check everything in the basement this week. But here's where things are since my last post about the Great Purge of 2013:

I've discarded 125 more plants, 70 of which were Anthurium seedlings.

This is both worse than I had feared, and not nearly as bad as I had feared. I'd assumed that I would find a handful of locations that were just swarming with scale, but most of the collection would be clear. The reasoning was that there would be a lot of insects near the spots where they were first introduced, but since they don't crawl very far or very fast, they wouldn't have had time to spread very far away from those initial sites. And that actually is more or less what I found among most of the collection -- a few hot spots, but mostly clean. However, among the Anthuriums, it was basically the opposite: lots of plants that only had one visible insect, occasionally two, but no plant that was heavily infested, and the affected plants were sort of randomly scattered around the flats of seedlings. I don't know what that means, exactly, but it must mean something.

I also discovered, in the process of giving everything close inspections, that I have thrips. For sure. I'd thought this was possible, because I've seen damage on a few plants (especially the Anthurium seedlings) consistent with thrips, and on two occasions, I've seen fast-moving skinny insects that might plausibly have been thrips, but 1) they're so fast that by the time I realized that I had seen something, the something was no longer there to see, and 2) it's only happened a couple times over a long period of time, so by the time I saw the second one, I'd mostly forgotten about having seen the first.

As far as it goes, I only saw two thrips on this round, but I got a better look, and one thrips¹ actually held still long enough to be identified (though not photographed). So it's been confirmed.

Which means that, among other things, I have finally reached the point where I have had all seven of the major houseplant pests,² which feels like an accomplishment of sorts. I have not yet gotten Houseplant Pest Bingo, see below, but am now in a position where I'll almost certainly have Bingo with the next pest I see, regardless of what it is.

Slugs, earwigs, caterpillars, snails, root mealybugs, or borers/weevils would all get me a Bingo. And then I win! (Something!) C'mon, caterpillars!³
Most of the scale sightings were of the same species over and over again, which is what I'd expected. The species in question is nearly circular, brown, and very flat, and what makes me think that it's the same species consistently is that unlike most pictures of scale I've seen, on this one the legs are almost always visible through the shell. (In fact, seeing legs is as good as the squishability test, as far as determining if a random spot is scale or just a scar.)

The species of scale I've been seeing on everything. Left: younger one, on Eucharis grandiflora. Right: a couple more mature individuals on Alworthia 'Black Gem.'
However, I think there may be more than one species in the basement, because I found one plant that had these instead:

Many unanswered questions about this. Where did they come from? How did they get to be so huge without managing to spread to the plants around them? (I was being awfully thorough: if other plants had these, I would surely have seen them.)

But so the point is that in the course of trying to get one problem under control, I've discovered two more problems. Which is less depressing than you might think, because the stuff I was already planning to do should also get rid of the thrips and the new scale. The imidacloprid may yet do something, and I've decided to go ahead and keep spraying the Anthurium seedlings with neem oil, on the theory that it can't hurt, and may help. Plus I'm about to begin another sweep through the basement to check for scale (or whatever), and anything that has scale, or a major problem with something else, will be thrown out. There may be no magic bullet, but perhaps there's a magic shotgun shell.

As far as losing plants that cannot easily be replaced, there have been a few, but not as many as I was expecting. Most of the hard-to-replace plants were thrown out because they'd never done well for me, not because I saw scale on them. The only plant that really qualified as a sad event was a NOID Nematanthus with pink/orange blooms, where I lost all five plants I had. I also lost both the Murraya paniculata I'd propagated from a cutting, and the one I'd propagated from seed.

And then there were the three that I should have thrown out, but cheated and kept parts anyway:

1) I threw out the parent, but propagated an Epipremnum aureum 'Marble Queen' that had belonged to the husband long ago. It didn't seem like it was that badly infested, and although 'Marble Queens' are easily replaced, this specific 'Marble Queen' wasn't. I washed the cuttings off (including power-washing with the sprayer attachment set to "annihilate"⁴) and am water-rooting. I'll check them over a few times before potting them up, but considering the plant's history, I didn't want to get rid of it completely.

2) I also propagated Agave lophantha from offsets, after power-washing, though I did it kind of backwards. The main plant didn't have visible scale on it, but the offsets did. The weird part was where. My A. lophanthas have been producing lots of offsets (at least ten per plant) on long, skinny stalks, with thin, stunted leaves shielding the stalks all the way up. After the stalk is a certain length away from the soil, the offset starts growing thicker, heavier leaves, and settles down into a rosette form like the mature plants have.

I didn't think to take any pictures of the runners that had actual offsets growing at the end. This is a picture of one of the long, skinny stalks with the thin, stunted leaves, though.
On my plants, the parents were clean, and the thicker leaves of the offsets were clean, but there were scale hiding under the thinner leaves up the stalk.

This makes it sort of silly of me to spare the offsets, and there's a good chance that the scale kept appearing on the offsets because they were crawling over from the main plant, maybe beneath the soil. But, the parent plants had grown large enough to be dangerous and unwieldy, and I didn't want to throw out the entire plant, because I don't see them for sale very often. So power-washing the offsets and then potting them up was sort of the best compromise I could manage. I get to keep the species while shrinking it to something more manageable, and hopefully any scale present was either discarded along with the stalks and parent plant or washed down the drain during the power-washing. If scale show up on the offsets later, I suppose I'll throw them out, but I'm hoping the scale will let me get away with cheating, at least on this one species.

3) The non-variegated Agave americana was also spared. Again, the parent plant seemed to be clean, or at least cleaner, but the offsets had scale. So I pulled the offsets out, threw them away, and kept the parent. This is probably kinda stupid, but the plant has only just started to get big enough and healthy enough to resemble a full-grown plant: I didn't want to have to start all over again if there was any way to avoid it. And I have a soft spot for Agaves anyway.⁵

Pot diameter: 5.5 in / 14 cm.
So, overall, it was worse for the Anthuriums than expected, but better for everything else. There were several borderline cases, where I saw honeydew spots but couldn't actually find insects, so I don't know if those plants were infested or just near plants that were. So there will probably be more plants on the way out this week, when I recheck. Also, this round of inspections only covered the south and east sides of the basement; I have another 57 plants on the west side that need to be checked for the first time. But so far, things aren't terrible.

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¹ "Thrips" is one of those words that is both plural and singular. One thrips, two thrips. There is no such thing as a "thrip." It's especially confusing in this case because the words that do this don't generally end in "-s," so it seems like there ought to be a "thrip." But there is not.
² (spider mites, aphids, scale, mealybugs, whitefly, thrips, fungus gnats)
³ Also: I'm not 100% certain about the viruses, since I've never had that checked out by a lab or anything. But I've seen enough things that I thought could be viruses that I figure one of them probably was. The most recent has appeared on one of my seed-grown Aglaonemas:

As with the other occasions, I can't be positive that there's a virus here, but a Google search for "ring spot plant virus" turns up a number of photos that look like this. I haven't thrown the plant out yet, but I realize I probably ought to. Maybe in this next round.
⁴ It's one of those garden-hose attachments with multiple settings. The settings are something like: mist, gentle shower, cone, jet, pulse, julienne, stun, liquefy, annihilate. For watering, I pretty much only ever use mist (for seedlings) and gentle shower (everything else), but when I feel the need to really blast the hell out of something, I use one of the others.
⁵ Indeed, from the perspective of the Agaves, I am nothing but soft, stab-able spots.

Music video: Adenium Anniversary

A reader e-mailed me a link to this, and . . . whoa. I don't understand a lot of what's going on, of course, not speaking Thai Korean. I don't think the music is related to the Adeniums, though I'm charmed by the idea that it might be. (The world needs more plant-themed dance pop.) But this is part of how Siam Adenium (WARNING: website has freaked out one reader's antivirus software, and contains autoplaying video and audio) has chosen to market themselves on-line.



I'm not entirely clear what anniversary this is supposed to commemorate; the website hints that it's the 8th anniversary of something, presumably the founding of the business? I suppose it's not important.

You know what, though: this makes me sort of want to try Adeniums again. Some of the stuff in the video is pretty awesome. The website is even worse: they've got Adeniums that appear to be about 10 feet (3 m) tall, they have "standard" forms with a crown of foliage sitting on a long, bare trunk, they have crested Adeniums, variegated Adeniums, Adenium seeds, fragrant Adeniums, doubled Adeniums, bonsai Adeniums, just everything. I didn't think there was anything that could get me to try Adeniums again, but the website might actually have done it.

And it gets worse. There's an Aglaonema page, which has me biting my knuckles in envy. Green ones, white ones, black, red, pink, contrasting midrib, contrasting veins, contrasting margin, spotted -- it's a little overwhelming. I kind of just want all of them. Though I already wanted to own all the Aglaonemas; this is just a reminder.

I don't know what the company is actually like to deal with, and there appears to be a minimum order on at least some products, so buyer beware, but they certainly do have plants I would want, if I had money and weren't trying to cut down on the number of plants I have to take care of and had space to keep more plants and had a dedicated staff of plant-waterers and so forth. Perhaps someday.

List: Houseplants That Can be Propagated Within the Home From Seed or Spores

I couldn't think of a better way to phrase the title. This list is for plants that are either 1) self-pollinating, or 2) easy for an amateur to cross-pollinate. In the first case, you only need a single specimen; in the second, you need two (which will probably have to be of different varieties).

For the main list, I'm restricting myself to plants I have personally gotten actual seeds from, instead of anything that's potentially self-fertile. (At the end, there will be supplemental lists for plants I've not personally been successful with and plants I've not attempted.)

The amount of trouble it takes to get seedlings varies. With some of these, seedlings will just start growing in the pot (or sometimes in a neighboring pot) without any effort on your part. With others, you may have to get lucky on the timing, or perform precise actions at precise times in order to get fruit. When possible, I've linked to other PATSP posts that describe the process in more detail.

Abutilon cvv. (flowering maple)
(shown: 'Bella Pink')
I don't know if Abutilon cvv. will pollinate themselves or not; I never tried to find out. That said, crossing two different varieties within the 'Bella Mix' group worked pretty reliably for me, back when I still had them,¹ and there's no reason to think other combinations wouldn't work too.²

A single seed pod has maybe 20-30 seeds in it, if I remember right.

Seedlings are old enough to bloom in about a year, indoors; outdoors they might progress faster.

• Collecting seeds
• Germination speed and percentage
• First flower buds
• First open flower
• Multiple flowers


Aglaonema cvv. (Chinese evergreen)
(shown: 'Maria')
I've definitely gotten fruit from an Aglaonema cross once, and the seedlings have been doing fine in the basement for a while now.³ I don't know the parentage; it might have been 'Maria' x self, but I had other Aglaonemas flowering at around the same time, so it could have been 'Maria' x something else.

It wasn't easy to do; you have to have flowers that are shedding pollen and flowers that are receptive to pollen happening at the same time, and most of the crosses I've attempted have failed.

Often, the flowers emerge, but the spathe remains so tightly wrapped around the spadix that it's not possible to remove or introduce pollen without destroying the flower. This has especially been a problem with 'Brilliant,' which sucks because I would very much like to propagate it. ('Maria' is different in that its spathes tend to open wider and stand away from the spadix.) It's possible that this would be less of a problem if I had higher humidity in the house.

Each fruit contains a single large seed. I have no idea how long it takes to grow a seedling to blooming size, but I'd guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-7 years.

• Developing fruit
• Ripe fruit
• Removal of seed from fruit
• Germination


Anthurium, flowering hybrids (flamingo flower, peter on a platter, oilcloth flower, tail flower)
(shown: 'Sensa')
I don't think these are self-fertile, though I haven't actually tested that. I have about ten different varieties here, so whenever an inflorescence is shedding pollen, I run around dusting all the other inflorescences just in case, which means I never know who the male parent was for any of the crosses.

Some varieties are easier to cross than others.⁴ The main obstacle with Anthurium is that the flowers are very long-lived, but have very short periods of pollen shedding, and somewhat brief windows for accepting pollen, so it's hard to get the timing right. (This is why when there's pollen to work with, I just try to cross everything: if I waited until the timing worked out to make a particular cross, I'd never have any seedlings at all.)

I've never bothered to try to count how many seeds you can get from a single inflorescence, but working solely from memory, I think the fewest I've gotten is like 3, and the most might be around 25-30.

Starting seeds once they've formed isn't difficult, but it is more complicated than just opening up the fruit and dumping seeds on some soil.

Plants reach blooming size in three to five years.

• Cross-pollinating
• How to start seeds from the berries (also how to start Schlumbergera)


Ardisia elliptica (shoebutton tree)
Ardisia elliptica is self-fertile, and requires no special meddling on the growers' part to produce berries. My plant was a few years old before it produced flowers, and then only about five (three of which produced seeds); however, the species is capable of blooming earlier than that, or more flowers than that, in good conditions. The progression from flower to seeds was pretty slow for me (several months), but germination is very fast (a few days). Each flower only produces one seed.

• Flowers (not from my personal plant)
• Unripe berries (not from my personal plant)
• Ripe berries (not from my personal plant)
• Removing seeds from berries and how to start them
• Just-germinated seedlings
• Very young seedlings


Chlorophytum 'Fire Flash' (fire flash, green orange, mandarin plant, Sierra Leone lily, fire glory)
My 'Fire Flashes' bloomed two Januarys in a row when I first got them, and haven't bloomed since. This suggests that blooming is related to day length; during the first two years, they were getting only natural light, and since then have been getting natural light supplemented with artificial. Individual flowers only last a day or two, but they don't all open at once, so a flower spike maybe lasts 7-10 days. (It's been a while; I don't remember exactly.)

'Fire Flash' is self-fertile; you only need one plant. Each flower will become a triangular pod containing three rows of seeds, with an average somewhere around 300 seeds per flower spike.

Seed germination requires patience, but not really any special skills. I've gotten the most seedlings by giving up on the seeds and dumping them into potting soil that I used to pot up other plants: seedlings kept coming up for months after that, and they're pretty easy to pull out and pot up separately.

• Flowers
• Flower and developing seed pods
• Seedlings coming up after I gave up on them

Columnea orientandina (no common name?)
I have not yet figured out how to make it happen, but Columnea orientandina will self-pollinate and form purple fruits occasionally. The fruits contain several tan or brown seeds, which can be removed from the flesh of the fruit, dried overnight on a paper towel, and then sown in vermiculite. Germination is high (about 55 seeds per fruit, the one time I've tried this so far), though I've had trouble keeping seedlings going after transplant. Only about 25% of the seeds I started are still growing; the main cause of death has been getting washed out of the pot, or washed under the soil, during watering. I'm not sure if this is going to be a viable propagation method for me.

• Flowers, berries, seedlings, overall process


Hypoestes phyllostachya cvv. (polka dot plant, freckle face)
If allowed to grow unchecked, Hypoestes will eventually produce leggy stems with smaller and smaller leaves. These stems aren't particularly attractive, which is why people generally keep the plant pruned back, but if you let them grow, they will produce tiny, self-fertile lavender flowers. I've yet to actually see the seeds, but I know they're there, because seedlings occasionally pop up in neighboring plants' pots.

I do not know: 1) how to collect the seeds before they wind up in a neighboring plant's pot, 2) how many seeds each flower produces (I'd guess one.), or 3) whether plant color comes true from seed. I have seen a white-spotted plant come from white-spotted parents once, and if memory serves, we used to get pink-spotted strays at work, where most of the plants were pink.

• The Hypoestes phyllostachya profile contains pictures of the flowers and seedlings.


Justicia scheidweileri (also Porphyrocoma pohliana, purple shrimp plant, rose pine, South African acanthus)
Flowers are self-fertile, and expel seeds hard enough that they can wind up far from the plant. (I've found seedlings in pots that were 6-7 feet / 1.8-2.1 m away from the parent before.) Seedlings generally transplant successfully, though they often go through a scary wilted period before recovering. I've collected plenty of seeds from the plant's shelf, with a dustpan: they're heart-shaped, rough in texture, and brown. Each actual flower only produces one seed, but a single flower spike can produce about 40 flowers.

Plants from seedlings can be large enough to bloom within a year.

• Spontaneous seedlings, seeds
• Seed propulsion (also Hypoestes phyllostachya)


Murraya paniculata (orange jasmine, orange jessamine, mock orange⁵)
Murraya paniculata is self-fertile, though only a tiny percentage of flowers end up producing fruits, and not all fruits have viable seeds. I've experimented with using a paintbrush to transfer pollen from flower to flower, but it doesn't seem to affect how often pollination succeeds, so I'm kind of stumped.

Each fruit contains a single seed, though two is not unheard of, and zero happens occasionally too, for some reason.

Seeds usually germinate in a month or two for me, if they're going to; I have no idea how typical that is. I start them in soil and water as if there were a plant in the pot: vermiculite hasn't worked.

Cuttings rooted from Murraya paniculata will bloom pretty much right away (in fact, if they were blooming when you take the cutting, they'll try to bloom while they root, too); I'm not sure if I've seen blooming on plants grown from seed or not.

• Fruits, seedling
• Newly-germinated seedling (item 5 in the post)

Rhipsalis NOID (maybe R. rhombea? No common names.)
The tiny white flowers self-pollinate and become small white oval fruits; fruits are ripe when they become partly translucent. Separate the seeds and let them dry overnight, then sow on vermiculite. They'll all germinate. Each fruit produces maybe 20 seeds, I'd estimate.

I haven't transplanted any yet, so I don't know how that goes.

• Flowers
• Seedlings


Schlumbergera cvv. (Christmas cactus, holiday cactus, Thanksgiving cactus)
You'll need more than one variety of Schlumbergera in order to get crosses, for reasons which are addressed in the profile. Once cross-pollination has been achieved, though, the rest is pretty easy, if slow. Fruits usually take 6-12 months to develop, though if you really want to, you can leave them on the plant a lot longer than that. Fruits usually turn pinkish-purple when ripe, though varieties with pale flowers may only turn light pink. Extracting the seeds is the same as for the Columnea and Rhipsalis -- cut or squeeze the fruit, remove the seeds, let them sit out overnight, then start them in vermiculite. I was pleasantly surprised at how well my seedlings handled their transplanting.

The number of seeds per fruit varies, but the last batch of seeds I started, I actually took a picture of them all on a plate and then painstakingly counted from the picture. I got about 550 seeds from 4 fruits, which averages to 138 seeds each.

It takes about three or four years for a seedling to get old enough to bloom.

• Developing fruit with spent flower
• Ripe fruit
• How to start them (also Anthurium)
• Newly-germinated seedling


As for the recommend / anti-recommend, that sort of depends on your goals, I suppose. If you want to make something new, stick to the plants that require cross-pollination, like Abutilon, Anthurium, and Schlumbergera. If you just want as many baby plants as possible and don't really care if they're exactly the same as what you've already seen, I'd recommend Abutilon, Chlorophytum, Justicia, Rhipsalis, or Schlumbergera.

My personal three favorites from this group: Anthurium cvv., Schlumbergera cvv., Murraya paniculata. Least favorite: Hypoestes phyllostachya.


Supplemental list #1:

I have reason to believe that these would belong on the above list, if only one of the following conditions were true: 1) I still owned one, 2) existing fruits would hurry up and develop, 3) my plant(s) would flower, 4) something hadn't happened to the developing seedlings.

Alternanthera cvv. (joy weed, calico plant, calico weed, Joseph's coat) -- we got some A. dentata 'Purple Knight' self-seeding at the ex-job, in the greenhouse, though I never saw flowers or seeds when I had Alternantheras in the house.
Ardisia crenata (coral berry, coralberry tree) -- my plant is too young to flower still, but presumably would self-pollinate like A. elliptica.
Chlorophytum 'Charlotte' (no common name) -- I've gotten seeds and seedlings before. The seedlings looked like they were going to be solid green, instead of variegated like the parent, but they all died because I let the soil dry out. Only one time, too. So I never found out whether they were going to be variegated or not.
Clivia miniata cvv. (clivia) -- the 'Aztec Gold' I wrote about a while back now appears to be developing seeds, though my understanding is that this is a slow process, and it's not clear how successful it will be.
Coffea arabica (coffee plant, coffee tree) -- I have fruit currently developing on my plant (flower buds, flowers), but I have no idea how long it will take to develop, how many will develop, or whether I'll get usable seeds out of any of them. We'll have to see.
Cyrtomium falcatum (holly fern) -- I've managed to get tiny protoplants from spores my plant produced, but they fell prey to a fungus (and/or springtails) before I could pot them up on their own, and I haven't seen any new spores since. So this is theoretically possible, but I haven't actually achieved it yet.
Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa (no common name?) -- these self-pollinated at the ex-job, just like the Rhipsalis above, and we got seeds from the fruits in the same way. (flowers, fruits, seed preparation, seedlings, fruits) My plant at home has never managed to bloom.
Spathiphyllum cvv. (peace lily) -- drunk on my Anthurium successes, I tried crossing two Spathiphyllums this summer, when I had one shedding pollen and another that looked like it might be receptive. The jury is still out on whether or not this will be successful. One spadix does have some spots that appear to be growing larger, and it's not dried up like the inflorescences normally would have by now (though the spathe is⁶), so there are indications that something may have actually happened; there's just a long ways to go before I can say I've successfully crossed any. Even if I have, I can't think of any good reason why I would want to have more peace lilies, so the whole thing feels pretty pointless.


Supplemental list #2:

Other people claim to have crossed these at home, but this hasn't happened for me, because 1) I don't have multiple varieties to cross, 2) my plants have never bloomed, 3) germination of seed is difficult to do, 4) I'm not crossing them correctly, 5) I don't own any, or 6) some combination of the above.

Adenium obesum & spp. (desert rose) -- I'm not sure I've seen anybody who wasn't a professional grower / breeder claim to have crossed Adeniums successfully, but I have seen amateurs raise Adeniums from seed. So it might be possible, I guess.
Begonia cvv. (angel wing begonia, rhizomatous begonia, rex begonia) -- surely someone must do this, or else we wouldn't have so many. No idea how easy this might be; I haven't actually seen any amateur growers talking about it.
Citrus spp./cvv. and Fortunella spp. (orange, lemon, lime, kumquat, citron, grapefruit, etc.) -- at least in theory, if you can get fruits, then you should be able to get seeds as well. And citrus seeds aren't supposed to be that hard to germinate. I know people do get fruit produced on their plants indoors occasionally, so it would logically follow that they could also start new plants from the seeds. I just don't think I've run into anybody who claims to have done that.
Episcia cvv. (flame violet) -- I've seen a number of people claiming to have crossed Episcia in their home. I've tried to do it myself, but absolutely nothing has come of it. It's possible I might try again at some point, if I can determine how I've been screwing it up, but it's not a high priority for me.
Hibiscus rosa-sinensis cvv. (tropical hibiscus) -- I've seen a number of people claiming responsibility for new hybrids on-line, but I couldn't tell whether the claims were coming from amateurs or professionals. I attempted it myself a couple years ago, when I had two varieties blooming at once, but nothing happened. I no longer have the plants to experiment with.
Hippeastrum cvv. (amaryllis⁷) -- amateurs do experiment with these pretty regularly, and in fact the one Hippeastrum I have is the result of someone else's experiment, but I've never done it myself. I've never even had one flower, actually.
Orchids -- amateurs cross orchids all the time;⁸ the problem is that once seeds have formed, most people don't have the ability to germinate them.⁹ Some amateurs send their seed pods to flasking services, who place them in sterile flasks and grow them for however long it takes to get viable baby plants, then they mail the flask back. You can read some about this at Plantgasm, if you're interested.
Passiflora caerulea and maybe other Passiflora spp. (passion flower) -- I have a houseplant book that mentions new plants can be produced from seed, though they're not specific about where the seed is supposed to come from. I don't know whether it's plausible for an amateur to produce their own seeds or not, nor do I know whether different Passiflora species will hybridize with one another.
Pelargonium cvv. (geranium¹⁰) -- I assume someone must be doing it, because there are so many varieties, and I recall seeing some seed pods on the Pelargoniums we overwintered at the ex-job, so I know it's possible to get seeds. I have no idea whether anybody is actually deliberately collecting and starting the seeds, or what the success rate would be, but in theory this might happen.
Punica granatum (pomegranate, dwarf pomegranate) -- again with the houseplant book making claims. I suppose it's plausible, but I don't know whether a given Punica could be self-fertile or how readily they'll set fruit.
Saintpaulia cvv. (African violet) -- as for Episcia, except that I no longer have any plants here to try with and probably never will.¹¹

If the reader knows of any plants I've left off the list (and I'm sure there must be lots of plants I've left off the list), I welcome suggestions for others in the comments. If you do leave a comment to suggest another plant for the list, please indicate how confirmed it is. (I.e., let me know if you've actually done it yourself, if you're in the process of doing it but don't actually have new plants yet, if you know someone else who does it but haven't tried it yourself, if you heard about somebody doing it once somewhere but don't remember where, etc.)

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¹ I no longer have them. They need a lot of water and light, and it eventually reached the point where I could no longer provide them those things here.
² I considered trying to cross the 'Bella's with the common Iowa weed Abutilon theophrasti ("velvetleaf"), just to see if anything interesting would result, but it's probably just as well that that never happened.
³ The most recent picture of them, from 11 September 2012:

The one in the front there is not looking so great, but the plants in the other two pots appear to be doing well.
⁴ 'Gemini' and 'White Gemini' are much better at accepting pollen than they are at shedding it. ('Gemini' is easily the most productive of the varieties I've got: 54% of my seedling Anthuriums have 'Gemini' as the mother, and another 27% are from 'White Gemini.')
'Pandola' and 'Pacora' are fairly good at shedding pollen.
A NOID reddish-purple variety consistently accepts pollen and begins to form fruit, but then aborts the whole inflorescence before the fruit is ripe. This might be a watering issue, instead of a hybridization issue. Similar things seem to happen a lot with a pink NOID.
'Red Hot' and a NOID purple variety will only rarely form flowers in the first place, much less permit them to be pollinated, which is annoying.
I might have a lot of berries developing right now from 'Florida,' which has large, heart-shaped, orange spathes. I would be very excited if those turned out to be viable.
Etc.
⁵ If you're mostly an outdoor gardener, you probably think of one of the Philadelphus spp. when you hear the name "mock orange." They're totally different.
⁶ The stalk seems to have gotten bent at some point, possibly when I let the plant get too dry. I don't know whether the spadix will survive without the spathe, or whether one dying means they're both doomed. Here's what the inflorescence looked like as of last Saturday:

⁷ There is a genus with the botanical name Amaryllis as well, but usually when people talk about an amaryllis in an indoor-growing context, they mean Hippeastrum, in the same way that "pothos" never means Pothos and "nephthytis" never means Nephthytis.
⁸ Indeed, there seems to be a certain amount of sniffiness among the established, serious orchid breeders about how amateurs don't know what they're doing, and screw things up for everybody by flooding the world with their inferior crosses or whatever. One shudders to think of what might happen were an amateur orchid breeder to enjoy him- or herself without first getting the permission of his/r betters.
⁹ There are two main problems. The first is that orchid seeds and seedlings are very susceptible to fungus, so they require a sterile medium for germination, which most of us can't achieve in our homes very easily. The second is that the seeds are extremely small, and consequently difficult to work with. Flasking provides a sterile growing medium for the seedlings, and they can use syringes and other equipment to make sure that the seeds are distributed evenly on the surface. It's not that you couldn't do this at home if you really wanted to, but it'd be a lot of extra work. Lincoln Orchid Society has a page of instructions for home orchid flasking, if you want a sense of how much extra work.
¹⁰ As with Hippeastrum / "amaryllis," when people talk about "geraniums" indoors, they usually mean Pelargonium.
¹¹ I'm a little bitter about the African violets, in fact. This is completely unjustified: I don't water enough, and I seem not to have sufficient light either, even though they're not supposed to be that picky about that, so of course they don't do well for me. But I still feel entitled to them, since the rest of the world seems to be able to grow them just fine, therefore bitterness and resentment.