Unfinished business: Lenophyllum texanum

The reader may or may not recall that back in August 2014, I put up this post, in which I said that it had been twenty months since I was officially been growing Lenophyllum texanum in the house, that I'd thrown out the potted plants I had and marked it as officially deceased on the spreadsheets and everything, but I still technically had some.

L. texanum is terrible about dropping leaves any time it gets moved or bumped, and each leaf is capable of growing a whole new plant, which was the reason why I got rid of it in the first place -- I was sick of having to constantly pick leaves and plants out of pots. But, when I threw away the original pots, of course some of the leaves fell off, and some of those leaves landed in the tray the plants had been sitting in, and they were too big to get washed down the drainage holes, so twenty months later, I had whole L. texanum plants growing in the bottoms of the flats. Here's the picture from August 2014:

So the months went by, and plants came and went above them, but the Lenophyllum texanum plants formed a little mat and collected a little water every time I watered the official plants in their flat, and after a certain point I was like, okay, so let's see how long you can survive this way. This post is because I have concluded that Lenophyllum texanum can, in fact, survive indefinitely with no soil or pot and very little light, water or fertilizer. This is the same bunch of plants in June 2016, three and a half years after I was officially no longer growing this species:

A close up of the group on the left side of the previous photo.
Not looking quite as healthy, sure (I think that I'd pulled them up at some point to look at the roots, which is at least part of why they're floppy: I couldn't put the mat of plants back in exactly the same spot.), but obviously still alive and everything. So I was like, okay, guys, I'll let you have a pot and some soil, good job, you win. I didn't even try to plant them. I just got a pot, filled it with some moist potting mix, and set the little mats on top of the soil. And the change was almost instantaneous. The above photos were taken on the day that I put them into pots, 16 June 2016. Here are the exact same plants on 18 August 2016, a mere 63 days later:

I assume the color change was due to stress (a lot of succulents turn redder when stressed, though the usual reasons -- cold, excessive sun/UV -- wouldn't apply here), as they were always gray-green when they had soil before, and turned back to gray-green as soon as they had soil again.

So, I mean, I still don't especially like L. texanum as a houseplant: it's messy, and invasive, and not even particularly pretty at its most beautiful. But I feel obligated, after what I've put them through. All that, and they're fine.

Obviously they will never not be fine.

Stupid plant tricks: Lenophyllum texanum

Officially, I have not been growing any Lenophyllum texanum since New Year's Day, 2013, when I threw out the one pot that I had growing, marked it down on the spreadsheet as deceased, and went on.

The plant had other plans. In the process of disposal, some leaves fell off, which I noticed but figured weren't worth the trouble of digging out of the flat and throwing away. Sure, it's a desert plant, but how's it going to survive with no soil, brief periods of water, and little light, was the thinking.

A year and a half later, the leaves have grown into whole plants. The roots have intertwined to form a little mat, against which all the stems can brace themselves, keeping them upright even without any soil. And apparently the mat is good enough at retaining water that they can make do, and even thrive, with just the water they get from being sprayed for about 15 seconds, every couple weeks.

This is impressive, and would even be endearing if it gave the impression of having to exert itself a little. I'm happy to root for underdogs every now and again. But it's not acting like a plucky little underdog, struggling to survive against all odds; it's closer to an unstoppable Terminator type. For the moment, I'm going to keep it -- it's growing in an unused space in the flat, and it's not asking anything of me -- but at least 50% of that decision is because I'm no longer sure whether it's possible to get rid of it.

Random plant event: Lenophyllum texanum flowering

If I were going to write a plant profile on Lenophyllum texanum, I think I'd go with "Stalker" for the person, because it's a weird creepy plant that's always winding up in other plants' pots but has few redeeming qualities of its own. It's like, if plants could talk, this plant would always be saying JUST GO OUT WITH ME THIS ONE TIME AND I'LL LEAVE YOU ALONE FOREVER I PROMISE.

I talked about it in the Bryophyllum daigremontianum profile without knowing that I was talking about a different plant: both B. daigremontianum and L. texanum reproduce by dropping bits of themselves off of a parent plant: for Bryophyllum, the bits are plantlets, and for Lenophyllum, they're leaves. In either case, at work, they tended to land in the same pots as cacti, where they grew more or less unperturbed, because nobody wanted to risk getting stuck by the cacti in the process of removing the weeds.

Much like this, actually.
But I'm not going to write a profile about Lenophyllum texanum, because I haven't actually tried to grow it on purpose. Maybe it actually is a nice guy, deep down, and we'd be very happy together, but I'm not willing to risk finding it popping up in all the other plants' pots around the house for the next seven or eight years. That position has already been filled, by Sedum morganianum¹ and S. x rubrotinctum.²

However.

It turns out that L. texanum really does have at least one redeeming quality, if you leave it to its own devices for long enough, which is: there are flowers.


They're not huge or gorgeous or pleasantly-scented or anything, and I don't know how often they bloom (these pictures were taken at the ex-job in mid-November), or for how long, but now I'm feeling a little bit bad that I didn't let a Lenophyllum go wild just once at the ex-job, to see what it would do. And who knows what other really cool things I never got to see because I was all busy with the "working" and the "talking to customers" and "earning a paycheck" and everything.


But, you know. I was young and stupid then.

I still don't want to grow L. texanum myself -- you'll notice that even when it's getting enough light to flower, it's still kind of gangly and awkward, and the leaf-droppage problem would be an issue regardless -- but hey! It has redeeming qualities! Party on, Lenophyllum texanum!



-

¹ Which I encourage, because S. morganianum is frequently cooler than the plants whose pots it is hijacking.
² Which is less welcome, but better now that I know it has to be under extreme -- like, MOUNTAIN-DEW! extreme -- artificial light if I want it to look good and do well. We may yet be able to reach an agreement.