Random plant events: Leuchtenbergia principis, Zamia furfuracea

Everything was going fine, and then it was time to dig up the Cannas and bring them in for the winter. And you've seen the Cannas.¹

As of 18 October, direct-weighing on a bathroom scale has given us the approximate figure of 787 lb. (357 kg) of Canna rhizomes brought inside for the winter, and we haven't even dug them all up yet.² My best guess is that another 200-300 lb. (91-136 kg) remain to be dug up.

Meanwhile, one of the Leuchtenbergia seedlings has decided to bloom, in the basement, under artificial lights. I'm surprised that this is even possible.

The seedling in question was sown on 8 May 2013, so it's about five and a half years old. In some ways that feels like a really long time to wait for a bloom, and in other ways it feels incredibly fast. (It's not as if Leuchtenbergia is known for its speed.)

Also, I purchased four kinds of seeds from seedman.com at the beginning of September. Three of them are sort of disappointing. There's nothing at all going on with Chamaedorea cataractum, and one of the six seeds in that package was rotten when it arrived, so I kind of suspect that was wasted money. A few seeds of Ficus religiosa and Ficus benghalensis have germinated, but they're developing slowly and I'm not optimistic about getting actual plants of either one.³

But the fourth one, Zamia furfuracea, is doing more or less what it's supposed to.

I have germination on eight of the ten seeds so far, and it's only been four or five weeks (the first seed to germinate, photographed below, took 26 days; the package instructions said to allow "several weeks to a few months"), so I'm hopeful about the other two.

Not that the Zamias are much to look at so far. But still. It's something.

I have no idea when I might get back to regular posting again.

-

¹ (Well, some of the Cannas. There were a lot of Cannas.)
² Also, this omits a box with about 35-40 lb. of Cannas that we just gave to a total stranger because he stopped at the house and asked. (He knew we had them because we piled all the cut stalks on the curb, in hopes that the city will eventually take them away for us, and the pile was kind of . . . unmissable, I guess is the word.)
³ Though you never know. I tried F. religiosa once many years ago, and got at least one plant that survived long enough to develop some leaves. It didn't transition to a pot well, probably because I was asking it to go too long between waterings. There's probably a reason people don't normally grow these species indoors anyway; I just thought it might be fun to try. (It hasn't been.)

Schlumbergera seedlings: assorted

Two reasons for the recent long gap in posts: one, I got hung up on a name for seedling 226A (didn't like any of the four names that I'd come up with, couldn't find any names I liked better), and two, Japanese beetle season is upon us once again and it's way, way worse than previous years. Like, if someone told me that a count had confirmed that there were a hundred thousand individual beetles in our yard alone, I'd be like, only? Judging from my estimates of how many I'm catching in a jar of soapy water, the population is about ten times more than it was in 2015, and 2015 made me want to cry.

So I've been distracted and frustrated, is the point. Meanwhile, the Schlumbergeras continue to bloom (two first-time bloomers in July alone, and July isn't over yet), so the longer I stall on one seedling, the more work it's going to be to catch back up. (I am aware that I don't actually have to name the seedlings, but usually I like doing it.) So for the sake of making progress at all, I'm going to announce the names of a few seedlings I can assign names to, and we'll just have to come back around to the difficult ones later.

To begin, let me present Schlumbergera 382A Permanganate:

It's named for the chemical potassium permanganate,¹ a strong oxidizer that also happens to produce intensely-colored solutions in water. Concentrated solutions are a very dark purple, but more dilute solutions are sort of pink-magenta similar to the flowers, so it works for me.

Rejected names:
Calmth (a state of calmness, by analogy with heighth or breadth; from the dialect dictionary)
It Is To Laugh (382A is another non-yellow offspring from the NOID yellow parent. The failure of the NOID yellow to produce yellow offspring is not exactly funny, but it's not not funny either, see 369A Punch Line.)
Jellybread (also from the dialect dictionary; bread with jelly on it. Really only works if you're imagining grape jelly, and even then the color's not quite right.)


And 379A Can't Find The World:

This is a reference to a moment when I was playing around with Half-Life 2 developer console, so I could use the noclip cheat and look around at spots which are normally not visible within the game. I don't remember what I did, but at some point the game gave me the error message "can't find the world." I didn't know what that meant, but the idea pleased me somehow, and I wrote it down as a possible seedling name. Then this seedling started to bloom but never quite finished, and the seedling seemed to match the name. I still haven't found out what "can't find the world" means exactly.

379A is also another non-yellow seedling from the NOID yellow parent. It turns out that mostly the NOID yellow produces more oranges, though for some reason we also got a couple magenta/white flowers out of it, plus a couple new combinations.

Rejected names:
Dysphoria (not really a reference to anything in particular; the flower just kinda looks dysphoric)
Flea-Bit Dog (mostly a reference to thrips damage, plus the "dog" designation for seedlings that don't turn out very well)
Fools Rush In (not actually sure what this one's supposed to mean -- maybe I was thinking that the plant was trying to bloom before it was actually mature enough to do so?)


Here's 424A Speedrun:

Speedruns are where someone attempts to play through a video game, or a level of a video game, as quickly as possible, often using unintended bits of the game code to bypass certain time-consuming scenes, or to travel faster than the game normally allows one to go. It works for this seedling because, while it's not technically a record-fastest bloom, 424A was nevertheless very quick to go from seed to flower.

Rejected names:
Alexis Carrington (character / main antagonist from Dynasty. The husband and I can now say that we've seen every single episode of the original Dynasty, by the way. I tried watching one episode of the rebooted CW Dynasty and it is awful, please do not watch it. Somehow it manages to be just as nonsensical and over-the-top as the original series without ever being even a little bit entertaining.)
Flamboyant Tendency (basically just a description of the flower in general; not really any deeper meaning intended)
Prismatic (a reference to the number of colors in the petals, though obviously they're not arranged in rainbow order like a real prism would produce, and other seedlings have done better at keeping the colors prominent and distinct from one another. Don't mind the name, but this wasn't the best seedling to give it to.)


188A Freyja's Turkey:

This is another chemistry-related name, though in a more roundabout way. I remembered that the element vanadium was named for the goddess Vanadis, which was a reference to the wide range of colors produced by vanadium compounds (Vanadis being the goddess of, among other things, fertility and beauty), but I didn't remember that Vanadis was just another name for the goddess Freyja.

The "turkey" portion of the name comes from the way some of the photos had the petals fanning out like a turkey's tail.

Both 424A Speedrun and 188A Freyja's Turkey are offspring of the NOID magenta.

Rejected names:
Hetty Reckless (a runaway slave and abolitionist, who was part of Underground Railroad, fought against prostitution, worked toward improving education and skills in AA community, and just generally did impressive and good things. She's totally going to get a seedling someday, it's just not going to be this one.)
Rainbow Flag (another reference to the range of colors, though if we're speaking literally then it should be noted that like half the colors in the actual rainbow flag aren't found in the flower)
Vocal Fry (I think this was a reference to the slightly ragged edges of some of the petals? Or the way the thrips had chewed them up a bit? Mostly I just like having a term for the phenomenon, which I would probably otherwise never have even noticed.)


237A Neptunium:

Yet another chemistry name, though since I've talked about neptunium before (in the post for seedling 239A Plow The Seashore, specifically footnote 3), I probably don't need to explain it again. The short version is, this is seedling 237, and isotope 237 is the most stable isotope of neptunium.

237A is also another of the seedlings from 025A Clownfish, along with 239A Plow The Seashore, 240A Schwa, 244A That's My Purse, 250A Glede, and a handful of others that haven't been named yet.²

Clay Court (because it's approximately the color of clay tennis courts, and why not?)
Horseback Opinion (implying that the bloom wasn't well thought-out or well-planned; I found the idiom in the dialect dictionary, but it's apparently still known today, because The Free Dictionary has it. The implication is of an opinion offered so quickly and with so little thought that one hasn't even taken the time to get off one's horse first -- something unconsidered or off the cuff)
Snakeypoo (this one came from the random word combination "serpentine nickname." I asked myself what a good nickname for a snake would be, and "snakeypoo" is what came out. It amused me, so it went on the list. I don't think it signifies anything about this particular seedling: it's probably just that I was still finding it funny when I was generating the list of name candidates.)

The next post will happen when it happens.

-

¹ Technically just the permanganate half; a positive ion has to be there to balance the charges, but it doesn't have to be potassium. Potassium is just a common counter-ion, for reasons I didn't bother to investigate. All my personal exposure to permanganate salts has been with potassium permanganate (KMnO₄) as far as I'm aware.
² (236A, 241A, 248A, and 252A)

Anthurium no. 0728 "Sister Dimension"

It's not particularly on-topic, but I'd like to say that I hate Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica). So much. Two days in a row now, I've been out picking them off the Cannas¹ and gotten about 200-250 individual beetles both days. I'm pretty sure that's the worst it's ever been, and I don't know if the reason is because it's an especially bad Japanese beetle year or if we're just growing that many more plants, but surely it's one or both of those.²

Does milky spore live up to the hype? 'Cause I'm interested.

As for our actual subject today, I'm pretty happy with seedling 0728.

There have been other seedlings with similar coloration, most notably 0097 Colin Ambulance, 0694 Brad Romance, 0791 Joslyn Fox, 0805 Triana Hill, and 1181 Tajma Stetson. Sister Dimension doesn't do everything better than all of them, but she blooms more frequently than Triana, has bigger spathes than Tajma, seems less prone to thrips damage than Colin, holds her color better than Brad, and doesn't flip her spathe back like Joslyn, so she's at least playing in the same league as the others, if not decisively superior to them all.

Left column, top to bottom: 0097 Colin Ambulance, 0728 Sister Dimension, 0805 Triana Hill.
Right: 0694 Brad Romance, 0791 Joslyn Fox, 1181 Tajma Stetson.
The plant as a whole could be better:

the leaves are nicely-shaped and glossy, but there's more thrips damage than I would like.

Nevertheless, Sister Dimension is a keeper.

It's easy to find websites that mention the drag queen Sister Dimension, but very difficult to find anything that explains who she is, what sort of thing she did, or whether she's still performing. Which is irritating. Best I could come up with on short notice is that she was a queen in the East Village drag scene in the 1990s, in the same circles as RuPaul and Lady Bunny. Not sure which one she is, but she's apparently in the (in-?)famous "Pickle Surprise" video (as are Ru and Lady Bunny):


Which is itself probably sufficient to give an idea of the sorts of things going on in the East Village in the 1990s.

You're welcome.

-

¹ They don't, so far, seem interested in the houseplants I've got outside for the summer (mostly Euphorbia tirucalli, Ficus benjamina, and Coffea arabica. I pretty much never have to worry about the Euphorbias, which is why I love E. tirucalli so much even though it occasionally tries to blind me.).
² We also got the plants out later than usual this year, and the squirrels have gone after them worse than usual too. Dunno if either of those makes a difference?

The garden: Cannas

I have apparently managed to grow large numbers of Cannas outside, for a few years, and managed to take large numbers of photos of them, without ever showing you those pictures in a post here at PATSP. How did this happen? It is a mystery. (Weirder still: I appear to have deleted most of the photos I've taken, so I don't have that much to show you even now.) But since the subject's come up:

The fence bed, 2014.
As best as I can remember, I got the first Canna rhizomes in 2010, from a friend in town, and we planted them in the spring of 2011. Since then, every year we dig them all up in October, store them in the basement for the winter (probably too warm, but the best we have, and they don't seem to mind too much), and then plant them outside again in May. I then spend a couple months trying and failing to keep them weeded, until they get big enough to block light from competing plants and become essentially self-weeding. In July, they start to bloom. In August, I see a hummingbird. Also in August, I start collecting seeds from them. And then it's October, and the Circle of Cannas begins all over again.

The fence bed, 2014.
Before 2015, we've always planted all the Cannas we had in a bed along the north edge of our property (the "fence bed"), as in the first photo, above; in 2015, we found we had so many of them that they wouldn't all fit there, so two new beds were created. We put one of the new beds along the far west edge of the property (the "west bed"), where they sort of blocked the view of the cornfield. (Ordinarily, this would have made me mildly unhappy, because I like the cornfield, but 2015 was a soybean year, and soybeans can blow me.) The other new bed was a square maybe 10-15 feet on a side a nearly square rectangle, 93 inches by 113 inches (2.4 x 2.9 m), the "square bed," located along the south side of the property, where the previous owners had a garden, and where we have experimented with outdoor gardening in the past, with mostly-dismal results. (Cannas work just fine there, though.)

The square bed, 2015. The cinder blocks did go all the way around it, before the husband took them away for some project or another.
The west bed has never really seemed to reach its full potential in terms of growing the biggest, baddest Cannas possible, but it was interesting anyway, in that it more or less turned into a living graph:

The west bed, 2015.

The left side of that row is right under the neighbors' maple tree, so the plants there get more shade than the ones on the right end. There's also probably something of a rain-shadow effect going, since the maple hangs way over the fence. I suspect that the rain is the more relevant problem, since the square bed is also in shade for most of the day and got a lot taller: it was close enough to the house that we occasionally watered it ourselves, and it didn't have a tree overhanging it and stealing its water.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for Cannas in Iowa, from what I can tell. Nobody seems to have very many, and there are two main ways I see them used around here: 1) in a row, to hide a fence or cover the side of a building, and 2) as The Tall Thing in a group container. Maybe if they were winter-hardy here and one didn't have to dig them up every fall and re-plant them every spring, people would use them in regular gardens more often. Or maybe it's that (digging/replanting aside) they're too easy to grow, so Iowa gardeners just don't respect them. (Maybe just gardeners in general: DCTropics recently wrote a Canna-celebratory post that nevertheless characterized them as being for lazy gardeners.¹)

We have sometimes had bug problems: 2015 was terrible for Japanese beetles. I dumped hundreds of them into jars of soapy water, for weeks, and never felt like I was even making a dent in the overall population.

And there was one year (I think 2010) with incredible whitefly swarms: some years I don't see any, most years I see a few, but that one year was like a never-ending snowstorm.

Candy-striped leafhoppers (Graphocephala coccinea) hang out on them from time to time, but don't seem to be causing the plants any serious problems, and they're never in huge swarms. We've had quite a few grasshoppers in 2015 after the Japanese beetles left, but they didn't seem interested in eating the Cannas; they just liked to hang out on them after they finished eating other plants (mostly Iris).

ARACHNOPHOBE WARNING: BEGIN SCROLLING DOWN REALLY QUICKLY

In 2015, for the first time, the Cannas also attracted remarkable numbers of spiders, of a species I wasn't previously familiar with and couldn't identify even after a good hour of online searches.

My best guess is Neoscona crucifera, which is at least hairy, known to live in Iowa, and a builder of vertical, orb-shaped webs. Still uncertain because N. crucifera is supposed to be nocturnal, and these didn't appear to be (I saw them both hiding and out in the middle of their webs during the day; they didn't seem to have a strong time-of-day preference), and because the ones on my Cannas had a consistent, distinctive, and vaguely octopus-/Cthulhu-looking way of folding their legs up over their heads, whereas the photos of N. crucifera on-line frequently show them with all legs stretched out wide.

Whatever they were, there were a lot of them.

--ARACHNOPHOBES MAY STOP SCROLLING--

My personal dream for the back yard, which the husband is aware of but not particularly enthusiastic about,² is that we replace the lawn in much of the back of the yard with a meandering path, with Cannas on either side. (If we had more yard, I'd want a Canna maze, but the property is too long and narrow for that. Also this year's experience with the west bed suggests that we couldn't count on the Cannas reaching a uniform height, which would ruin the maze effect.) I intend to try to sell the meandering-path idea hard this winter as a "but think how much less lawn-mowing you'd have to do,"³ and we'll see if that works. If not, I suppose I can encourage the incremental expansion of the existing beds until we reach full lawn-replacement.⁴

-

¹ When it comes to outdoor gardening: guilty as charged.
² (because he's the one who would actually have to plant it and dig it up)
³ (The husband does the lawn-mowing too. I'm not actually opposed to lawn-mowing or Canna-digging, but I overheat too quickly to be much good at either. I mostly handle the weeding and the strawberry-picking, though, so it sort of balances out.)
⁴

Anthurium no. 0361 "Willam Belli"

Initially pretty happy about Willam. The bloom photographed beautifully after it first opened:

and the leaves are very nice.

The plant as a whole has a tendency to fall over, but that could probably be fixed with some potting soil in the right places.

So you'd think I'd be happy with Willam, but: after the initial really nice bloom, the spathe flipped backward so hard that it all but folded itself in half. Not really what I was looking for.

This doesn't illustrate the folded-in-half problem very well, but it was the only photo I got that was even slightly in focus.
I think it's worth waiting for a couple more blooms, to see whether this is inherent or accidental. (And even when it's inherent, the plant can still be worthwhile: hell, 0234 "Ross Koz" does this a lot as well, and it's one of my favorite seedlings. Though it seems to fold its spathes more at some times of year than others.) Officially undecided, pending another bloom.

In other news:

There's been another purge: I decided to go ahead and get rid of five seedlings for being generally crappy,¹ plus the scale situations on 0205 "Venus D-Lite" and 0267 "Natalie Attired" became hopeless, so those two were sacrificed for the good of the other seedlings.² And I got sick of the long internodes on 0232 "Rhoda Badcek" and 0235 "Rowan DeBoate" getting tangled in one another, and everything else, so they're gone too. Way too much hassle for mediocre pink/pinks, even if they were early-blooming mediocre pink/pinks.

I have realized just how big of a project trying to tape all the leaves on all the Anthuriums really is, and am overwhelmed. The basic idea still seems good, but I'd initially thought I would be able to tape all of them, like, once a week or so, until the bugs were all gone, and then I actually tried it and it took me about an hour to do a dozen 6-inch plants. Which extrapolates to something like 24 full hours of work, every week. Obviously that's not happening. So: still planning to tape them all, but for the moment, I'm focusing on 1) trying to get all the plants completely taped at least once (progress so far: somewhere between 5 and 10 percent complete; I've been really busy with other stuff), and 2) taping the blooms more often than that, since the thrips like the blooms better than the leaves.

Finally, the annual Canna harvest has happened. Here are a couple pictures:

Last year, I'd guessed as a ballpark figure that we'd dug up about 400 pounds (~180 kg) of rhizomes, but I measured more precisely this year and came up with 438 lb. (~200 kg), so clearly last year's number was a bad estimate. I think they're more than doubling in weight each year, on average, but I don't have great information for how many we started with (I apparently didn't take any photos), so that's a guess. It does look, though, like if we really wanted to and it weren't a completely insane thing to attempt, we could have a literal ton (2000 lb. / 900 kg) of Canna rhizomes to dig up in the fall of 2017. As the planting and digging up mainly falls to the husband to do, I'm guessing we're not actually going to reach that point, no matter how appreciative the hummingbirds would be. But it's sort of fun to think about.

-

¹ 0058 "Betty Larsony," 0288 "Cookie Buffet," 0373 "Shangela Laquifa Wadley," 0558 "Amber Waves," and 0564 "Shannel"
² Sorry, Ginny. But Natalie was really bad, and at this point mailing her anywhere would require me to keep her going all winter here first. There will be other pink/pinks.

Random plant event: not a Schlumbergera or Anthurium (!)

You may have gotten the impression that I no longer have any plants that are not Schlumbergeras or Anthuriums. If so, you are wrong, but I forgive you, because it's . . . basically true.¹ There are, nevertheless, other kinds of plants here, and sometimes they still do things. No Eucharis has bloomed for me since June 2013, and this particular Eucharis hasn't bloomed since December 2010. I wasn't trying to make this happen, so it was a pleasant surprise:

And they still smell wonderful, of course.

-

¹ 754 Anthurium seedlings, 25 specimens of named varieties used to generate seedlings (though some of the named varieties' names are not actually known -- I'm assuming they have names -- and some of the named varieties have not yet actually produced any seedlings); 193 Schlumbergera seedlings, 26 cuttings of seedlings, and 10 named varieties. As of February 20, this means that 65% of the individual plants in my collection are either Schlumbergeras or Anthuriums. Expand that to include the other plants I'm producing from my own self-generated seeds (32 Spathiphyllums, 34 Coffea arabicas, and 4 Euphorbia leuconeura) and about 70% of my plant collection is self-produced now.
And that's me being slightly restrained -- I have a whole fruit's worth of Leuchtenbergia principis seeds I could start but haven't, plus a bunch of Salvia elegans seeds I collected in late fall that I'm not sure how or when to start, and I have enough Canna seeds that I could just about fling them throughout the house and then skate from room to room:

Pretty picture: Canna NOID

It doesn't feel like it could possibly be Canna-blooming season again, and yet here we are.

Which means we must also be getting close to the Annual Sighting Of The Hummingbird as well. We planted Salvia elegans at the far edge of the property this year for the hummingbirds too, but we were expecting the field behind the house to be planted in soybeans this year (last year was corn; they've alternated in the past) and instead got corn again, which means that the pineapple sage is getting shaded out. Or at least I assume that's the reason why it's been staying so short. Goodness knows we've gotten enough rain. (Officially no longer in a drought as of a few weeks ago!)

This picture's from July 9, but they look about the same now, except that one of them has shattered and died. (It looked like something heavy fell squarely on the center of the plant.) I am choosing to believe that this was a case of Sheba running over it while chasing a tennis ball, instead of a mowing accident, which I can do because I didn't see it happen and can consequently explain it to myself in whatever way causes me the least upset. Though the mowing thing is more likely.

I have decided as of this year that it doesn't really make sense for me to try to overwinter the Salvia elegans indoors anymore, and I'm going to stop trying. It's not that it's hard exactly; the problem is more that the cuttings outgrow their containers so quickly that I wind up having to take three or four rounds of cuttings in the course of a winter. Which is nice, in that I start with one plant and wind up with twenty-five, but they also always get spider mites in early/mid spring, regardless of where I have them in the house, which means a few weeks of worry about that, plus all the time it takes to keep them watered, pruned, and propagating. I could just spend $4 at the garden center in February, propagate off that for a few weeks, and wind up in more or less the same situation by May, just without all the work. So that's what I'm going to try next year.

Oh. Reading back over this, I realize I just kind of jumped topics without explanation. I went from hummingbirds to pineapple sage because the hummingbirds also like pineapple sage. Though my pineapple sage plants are going to have to grow quite a lot before September if they expect to be hummingbird-worthy. The hummingbirds have standards.

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

The plants are coming in for the winter, and I've got a gigantic backlog of photos to deal with, so it's time for transmitted light pictures again.

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

Cissus rhombifolia.
Rotate it 90 degrees clockwise and there's a (subtle) peace sign!


Euonymous alatus, autumn.
Well. It's certainly very red, isn't it?


Ficus elastica 'Burgundy,' dying leaf.
This photo is very old (actually all of these photos are very old; I'm still working on a backlog of transmitted light photos from like 2009), but seems particularly appropriate right now. I had two Ficus elasticas. I just threw the small one out because it had scale, and I was like, whatever, I don't like trying to get rid of scale and it's a duplicate anyway, so I'll pitch it and grow the other one. But then the other one came in from outside, and it's been growing mostly horizontally the whole time it was outside because it's apparently one of those trailing rubber trees,¹ so I don't have any spot large enough to put it. And it's not like I'm hugely fond of F. elastica even when they're grown well. So I'm seriously considering throwing it out, or restarting from cuttings, or trying to sell it on Craigslist, or something like that. It's actually looking like a lot of the plants are going to have to be thrown out, sold, or restarted, in order to make space for the ones I actually want to keep. October's gonna be rough.


Pilea peperomioides, newish leaf.
Pilea peperomioides is probably not the most difficult "easy" plant I've ever tried to grow, but it's definitely on the list somewhere. And I have no idea what I was doing wrong.


Episcia NOID.

Ananas comosus 'Ivory Coast.'
This is perhaps not as flashy as some of the photos that follow it, but I think it's my favorite picture from this set. It's possible that I'm just a sucker for parallel venation.


Caladium 'Cardinal.'
Look out green! The red is right behind you! Run! Run! Aiiiieee!


Canna 'Tropicanna.'
As much as I love the red-blooming, green-leaved Cannas (and I do, very much), it seems weird that I haven't yet made it a priority to get one of the other varieties. Not necessarily 'Tropicanna,' (does it even come true from seed? Probably not, right?) but something. It's not as if there aren't a lot of options to choose from. Maybe 2014 will be the year.


Fittonia albivenis NOID.


Graptophyllum pictum.
I've seen Graptophyllum for sale exactly one time since I've been blogging, and I didn't buy it, because it was kind of underwhelming in person. (The books make it look a lot cooler.) Also you have to figure that if it were a satisfying houseplant, people would already be growing it everywhere. So I'm thinking I didn't miss much, but the picture still wound up pretty cool.

-

¹ A joke: there is no such thing as a trailing rubber tree. Though there is a rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora), which is neither related to Ficus nor to Hevea brasiliensis, the "real" rubber tree. Common names are dangerously misleading! Shun them!