List: Missing From Retail, Part 2 of 5

The explanation and background for this post can be found here, at part 1. (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5)

What other never-available plants do houseplant books try to get me excited about?

Camellia 'Sekidotaroan.' Photo by KENPEI, from Wikimedia Commons.
I know Camellia cvv. (camellia) are still out there, because I see them pretty regularly on the blogs of outdoor gardeners from the southern U.S. Less clear is whether they're growable indoors. The books say yes, but I've never seen them sold as such, and they're popular enough outdoor plants that I'd think there'd be an indoor market for them if it was at all possible.

Why would the books tease us like this? As commenters suggested in Part 1, it probably has to do with changes in new home construction: less drafty, no unheated sunporches, that sort of thing. There could be other, Camellia-specific things going on as well, but I'd bet that warmer, more energy-efficient homes explain a lot.


Caryota mitis. (My picture.)
There are several things about Caryota mitis (fishtail palm) that don't work so great indoors. They can get to be enormous,¹ they tend to be buggy (my first attempt ended abruptly due to scale; they're also appealing to spider mites), they're expensive when you do see one for sale,² and they need a lot of water.

However, I don't think any of those things are the reason why I don't see them for sale that often: I think the reason is that people don't like the ragged tips on the leaflets. I mean, that is how Caryotas are naturally supposed to be, but I bet people assume something is wrong with the plant and move on.

Cissus antarctica. Photo by Dinkum, released to public domain. Found via Wikimedia Commons.
I've never seen Cissus antarctica (kangaroo vine) in person, either for sale or in someone's home. Wikipedia provides a clue as to why: "It doesn't do well above 15°C, especially when exposed to central heating, which can cause the leaves to drop." It's not too hard to draw a line from warmer homes, to people having a tougher time growing them, to people buying fewer of them, to growers producing fewer of them, as with Camellia.

It's also probably relevant that C. antarctica isn't a particularly flashy plant. No variegation, no brightly-colored flowers, no fruit, not even a particularly interesting leaf shape (though I like it personally) or manageable growth habit.

Cobaea scandens. Photo by Michael Wolf, obtained via Wikimedia Commons.
Cobaea scandens (cup and saucer vine, cathedral bells) actually does have flashy flowers, and it's even weedy in New Zealand (according to Wikipedia), both things that ought to make it suitable for indoor cultivation. Also it is deliberately cultivated as an outdoor plant, so seeds are available. I mean, it's not like it's some super-rare thing that's only found in a seed bank in a single botanical garden somewhere. And yet, I'd never heard of until I bought the Kramer book a few weeks ago. Some of this, I'm sure, is just my natural adorable obliviousness asserting itself, but even so, it seems like a plant this unusual should be inescapable if it can be grown indoors at all.

A few of the comments at Davesgarden.com refer specifically to growing Cobaea as a houseplant. Some of the other comments mention it getting 20 feet (6.1 m) long outdoors, and being inclined to pull down large objects, so maybe that's the explanation? Another complaint is that there's a lot of foliage for not very many flowers, and that the flowers don't actually smell that great. All of which I will accept as an explanation until I find a better one.


Costus barbatus. My own photo (though not my own plant!).

I've never seen a Costus spp. (spiral ginger) for sale, though I always thought they looked interesting in pictures. Having seen some in person (at the Quad Cities Botanical Center), I'm less interested: I'd never realized how big they could get.³

I assume the size is the main problem, though finding out that they're related to gingers doesn't make me want a Costus much either.⁴ If they get burnt leaf tips even inside the humid, warm dome of the QCBC, there must be something touchy about them.


Cyperus alternifolius. Photo is mine; it was also taken at the QCBC.
I have no actual memories of seeing Cyperus alternifolius (umbrella plant, umbrella palm, umbrella papyrus, umbrella grass, umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh) for sale anywhere, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure I've personally seen someone growing one indoors (about 15 years ago, granted), so they must be available somewhere. My impression is that they need a ton of water and are really prone to spider mites; if anyone can confirm or refute that, I encourage you to do so.


Eriobotrya japonica. Picture is my own.
Eriobotrya japonica (loquat) leaves have a pleasant fuzzy texture, the plants grow slowly enough that they're not going to outgrow your windowsill immediately, and they're about average difficuly indoors. (I've had one for a couple years, due to the generosity of a PATSP reader, and aside from a brief and easily-corrected spell of spider mites, it's been fine.) So why are they not in stores? Couldn't tell you.

In theory, it's possible to get your own for free or mostly free, by buying a loquat and planting the seeds, so maybe there's no demand. (I don't actually see loquats for sale that often, but I don't spend a lot of time searching for them either. I'm sure I could find one if it were really important that I do so.) Or maybe they have some horrible characteristic that I haven't run into yet with my own plant.

Eucomis comosa. Photo: H. Zell, via Wikimedia Commons.
Eucomis cvv. (pineapple lily) is certainly visually striking, and I know they're sold in containers somewhere, for indoor cultivation, because I've seen people asking about them on the UBC indoor plant forum. I suspect they probably need more light than I could provide, but that wouldn't apply to everybody around here, so there must be some other reason.


Fatsia japonica. My own photo.
Fatsia japonica (Japanese aralia) isn't entirely unknown in Iowa -- the ex-job had them once before I started working there, and I've seen them at least a couple different times at Wallace's, in the Quad Cities. (The photo above was taken in Wallace's.) And I could be forgetting some occasions. But they're a lot rarer than the books would make you think. My own experience with them has been uniformly pretty negative: the one I had in 2009 lasted about six weeks before I found mealybugs on it and threw it away, and when I've looked at them since, I've generally found spider mites. Like with Camellia, Cissus antarctica, etc., I'm wondering if forced-air heating isn't in the process of driving them out of the houseplant trade.

Geogenanthus poeppigii. Photo by Cliff, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Magnus Manske.
I am completely unable to explain why I've never seen Geogenanthus poeppigii (seersucker plant, formerly G. undatus). Not even in a botanical garden. They were once widespread enough that all the books mentioned them, and they look neat enough that they would surely sell if offered. Hell, Geogenanthus is even in the Commelinaceae,⁵ so there's reason to think they could be produced in commercial quantities without a lot of effort. Also the sunporch theory wouldn't seem to apply; it's my understanding that Geogenanthus likes it warm.

Most sources that talk about G. poeppigii mention that it needs high humidity, so it's possible that it just doesn't do well enough for long enough in a store to be worth bringing in. But stores regularly carry any number of other plants that need high humidity and go downhill quickly without it: Calatheas, Selaginella, rex begonias, etc. Why is Geogenanthus special?


Again, this topic doesn't really lend itself to recommendations, though I can say Eriobotrya is fine indoors. The one I'd most like to try is Geogenanthus, even though I doubt it would do well for me.

Not pictured:

• Bougainvillea cvv. (bougainvillea): uncommon, but I see them occasionally in the independent garden centers.
• Bromelia spp./cvv. (bromeliad; no common name): never seen.
• Callistemon citrinus (syn. C. lanceolatus; crimson bottlebrush): I may have seen them occasionally as faux-bonsai; I'm not sure.⁶ Never a full-size plant.
• Campanula isophylla (Italian bellflower, star of Bethlehem): have never seen.
• Carissa macrocarpa (natal plum): have never seen.
• Catharanthus roseus (Madagascar periwinkle): routinely sold as an outdoor annual here, but I don't know anybody who's tried to keep one going indoors, nor would I ever attempt to do so myself, after seeing how much spider mites like them.
• Catopsis spp./cvv. (bromeliad; no common name): never seen.
• Chamaerops humilis / Livistonia spp. (European fan palm, Mediterranean fan palm; Chinese fan palm): rarely seen.
• Chirita / Primulina (chirita, primulina): have never seen. My personal plant died of unknown causes.
• Clerodendrum ugandense (blue butterfly bush, blue glory bower): once or twice at the ex-job.
• Crinodonna corsii (crinodonna, hybrid naked lady): have never seen?
• Crinum spp./cvv. (crinum lily): never seen, though I do know more than one person who's tried growing them indoors.
• Daphne odora (winter daphne): never seen.
• Dyckia spp./cvv. (dyckia): never seen in retail in Iowa. My first died more or less immediately; a second one is luckier so far.
• Eranthemum nervosum (blue sage): never seen, though I'm not sure I'd recognize it if I did.
• Euonymous spp./cvv. (spindle, spindle tree, euonymous): probably as an outdoor plant, but I don't shop for outdoor plants so I wouldn't know. I've never seen one sold as a houseplant, despite the books' collective insistence that this happens all the time.
• Faucaria spp. (tiger jaws): seen very occasionally.
• Ficus deltoidea (mistletoe fig, syn. F. diversifolia): rarely, if ever.⁷
• Freesia cvv. (freesia): very rarely, and so far only at the ex-job.
• Fuchsia cvv. (fuchsia): seasonally as an outdoor annual; I've never seen them sold as houseplants.
• Gelsemium sempervirens (Carolina jessamine, evening trumpetflower, woodbine): also never seen, but I don't know that I could recognize an unlabeled plant.

As ever, if you have other suggestions for the list, if you think I must have seen some particular plant somewhere, if you have an explanation for why they're not sold, etc., please leave a comment. Especially that explanation one. Or, again, plants that I talk about a lot that are never for sale where you live.

-

¹ There are some pictures of a full-sized Caryota at this post, if you're interested.
² (which has only happened to me a couple times in Eastern Iowa, both of them quite a while ago)
³ Sure, I know they probably don't all get as big as the one in the photo. But even the smallish plants in some of the Wikimedia Commons pictures are big enough that they're never going to be desktop or windowsill plants.
⁴ Costus is in the family Costaceae, while Alpinia, Kaempferia, and Zingiber are in the Zingiberaceae. Both the Costaceae and Zingiberaceae are in the same order, the Zingiberales.
I've tried growing Alpinia zerumbet and Zingiber malaysianum, and they did okay, but they clearly weren't that happy. One of the Alpinias got scale, which isn't its fault; the other Alpinia rotted out, which arguably is its fault; the Zingiber is still with us, though it died back dramatically one or two winters ago and has literally never been the same since. So the Zingiberaceae isn't a family I'm looking to explore right now.
⁵ Same family as Tradescantia pallida, Tradescantia spathacea, Tradescantia zebrina, Callisia fragrans, and Cyanotis kewensis. Of the group, only Cyanotis kewensis is at all difficult to grow or propagate, and it's not really that hard.
⁶ All the different species of faux-bonsai look pretty much the same to me, because they're all usually about 3/4 dead.
⁷ (There are a couple Ficuses I never completely identified from the ex-job, so it's possible this was one of them. I'm fairly certain I've not seen any for sale locally in the last three years.)

The Quad City Botanical Center, Part 2 of However Many

This is the second post about our visit to the Quad City Botanical Center (henceforth QCBC) a few weeks ago. (Part 1)

The QCBC building. Photo by Ctjf83 at Wikipedia.
The tropical plants area of the QCBC is divided up in a way that makes it feel relatively small, but the pamphlet the husband picked up says it's 6444 square feet (599 square meters), and 70 feet (21.3 m) tall at its tallest point. So there's room, and somehow they've managed to get some very big plants in there, even though their website says they've only been around since 1998. (Presumably some of the plants were of pretty good size before they were planted.)

My favorite, naturally, was the Pandanus utilis.

Pandanus utilis.
I tried to take a picture that would show the spiral arrangement of leaves, to explain the common name "screw pine," but the sun was behind the plant, and there was only so much I could do. This was the best one I got:


Seeing this one at the QCBC made me even more determined to get a Pandanus utilis of my own someday, though. Not that I needed the push.

Odds are that more visitors are impressed by the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, than the Pandanus. It was certainly much taller, if nothing else:

Cocos nucifera.
And it did, I admit, educate me a little as to how the coconuts are attached to the plant: I always thought they were held closer to the foliage than that. (You may have to open the picture in a separate window to see the coconuts.)

Not all the big, impressive plants were unfamiliar: the QCBC also has the largest Murraya paniculata I've ever seen. I can't imagine how overpowering the smell, when it's in full bloom. The people who clean the room must hate this plant. (My own makes a mess of the husband's office on a regular basis, and it's a tiny fraction of the size of this one.)

Murraya paniculata.
They also had a big, healthy Philodendron erubescens that was trying very hard to pull down the building:

Philodendron erubescens (?).
I suspect there is a law that all botanical-garden-type places have to have at least one gigantic Alocasia or Colocasia somewhere.

Alocasia sp.? Colocasia sp.? I'm not really getting any better at telling the two apart. . . .
I was surprised to find a Duranta at all (it's not a plant I think about a lot, or expect to see anywhere), but finding a really big, chartreuse one was a pleasant surprise:

Duranta erecta 'Golden Edge.'
No flowers on the Duranta, which is too bad. I want to smell one again sometime and see whether I still think it smells like cookies.

There were pothos plants climbing, literally, the walls (you can see some of them in the background of the pictures from Part 1), but this particular one got to the ceiling by climbing a support column.

Epipremnum aureum.
I also saw a Syngonium podophyllum with mature leaves at the QCBC. I'd seen this before, but it'd been a long time:

Syngonium podophyllum.

The plant that most impressed me, though, of all the plants there, was their Caryota mitis (fishtail palm), which was not only enormous --

Caryota mitis.
-- it was also flowering. Rather a lot.


The flowers aren't pretty, but apparently they don't have to be in order to work.


And this very new flower below looked like an octopus to me, which makes me like the species way, way more. I've never had good luck with C. mitis indoors (in my experience, it's hard to find one that's not buggy), but if they can grow octopi/-puses/-pods, then I think I need to rethink my position.


They also had a few other very large plants that I'm leaving out of the post because they didn't photograph well, including a Chorisa speciosa (silk floss tree) that nearly touched the ceiling and was dropping pink flowers on everything underneath it. I'd heard the name before, but it wasn't a plant I was familiar with at all. In person, it was maybe a little too huge and a little too far away for me to relate to, but still. Always nice to meet new folks.

There were also quite a few gigantic banana plants (Musa sp.), and a very large but badly lit Breynia disticha (snowbush, also sometimes Breynia nivosa). Maybe I'll get pictures of those the next time we go.

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

The last few days have been kinda bad for me personally, and part of the badness was not having enough time to sort out material for the blog, so I have to dip into the transmitted light photo reserves. On the up side, the houseplant-toxicity book came in through interlibrary loan, so the long-awaited plant-toxicity post should be coming along fairly soon.

The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.

Epipremnum aureum 'Neon.' A variegated cultivar would probably have made for a more interesting picture, I know.

Caryota mitis. After considerable experimentation, I have concluded that we're just not set up to have Caryota mitis at work. They don't like it there, and I don't know why. I haven't had a good time with them personally, either, though it's been a long time since I've given it a serious try.

Begonia NOID (some kind of dragon-wing, I believe). There's a definite texture there, but it didn't turn out to be the best picture anyway.

Philodendron hederaceum 'Brasil.' This one kinda pleases me.

Bougainvillea NOID (bract). You can see the shadow of the true flowers on the left side.

Hypoestes phyllostachya. Contrary to expectations, these are not pink and green when viewed from below. It's more yellow and green; i.e., the colors in this picture are more or less accurate. I find this slightly disturbing.

Asplundia 'Jungle Drum.' Either this one or the Anthurium pic (below) is my favorite from this set. It's not that the venation is especially impressive, but I like the way the shadows fell in that checkerboard pattern on the right, and the fainter checkerboard in the center.

Paphiopedilum Supersuk 'Eureka' x Paph. Raisin Pie 'Hsinying' x Sib. I am probably capable of a better photo than this, but it's a tough get: the leaves are thick, and tend to shadow one another, and they're not very big, so they tend to let light flares into the shot.

Anthurium 'Pacora,' new leaf. I think the awesomeness here is self-evident.