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.

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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.)

Anthurium no. 1589 "Anita Waistline"

Hello again.

So I've gotten to the point where the camera and I are sort of getting along (except for the speck of something that's gotten into the lens, which I haven't done anything about yet because I don't want to send the camera away while there are Schlumbergera seedlings blooming for the first time, lest I miss the chance to document the flowers entirely). The adjustment process has been about 25% finding default settings to use and about 75% adjusting my expectations for what the photos "ought" to look like.

After sitting with the last post for a while, and encountering other reading material and etc., I've decided to change the name of seedling 1592 "Maliena B Itchcock," but the next several names on the list of possibilities are also problematic in various ways, and I'm beginning to think that maybe the whole drag-queen-name thing was ill-advised from the beginning. So I don't know what the new name is yet, or when I'll have time to make the changes.

Anita Waistline isn't a brilliant or unproblematic name either, but it's okay, much like the seedling it designates:

The spathe is small. I think the plant has only produced one bloom so far, too, which isn't exactly a recommendation. The foliage is probably the best thing about it.

The seed parent was 0330 Faye Quinette; I was expecting much more interesting colors than this. But that's Anthurium-breeding for you.

Anita is a sibling of both 1592 (whatever her name's going to be) and the also-uncomfortably-named 1594 Roxy-Cotten Candy.

Let's see. What else?

The Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings (mentioned about a month ago) did in fact germinate, or at least a lot of them did:

When these photos were taken, the seedlings were a mere 15 days old.

Presently at 15 new first-time Schlumbergera seedling blooms, including a very disappointing one from one of the NOID yellow's offspring, which I won't spoil for you. You can find it yourself in the Schlumbergera seedling gallery, if you so choose: it's seedling 369A.

Have become more or less convinced that Schlumbergera 057A Pyrotechnic and Schlumbergera 057B Oxomoco are in fact the same seedling, and have begun calling them both "Pyrotechnic."

Also have some news about the weird yellowing-veins thing that "the Erlenes" do with their leaves, which doesn't answer the question of why they're doing it. but does provide more evidence.

I'll try to get that into the next post, whenever that is. Life is actually pretty acutely stressful right now and I'm having a rough time of things, so I'm not going to make any promises. But I haven't forgotten about the blog.

Unfinished business: Leuchtenbergia principis

An update on the Leuchtenbergia seedlings today. I haven't had a lot to say about them because there hasn't been all that much going on. None of them have died since the last update, I think, though I've sold a few. Of the original fifteen, I'm down to seven, and I just moved those up to 3-inch pots on 2 June. (The first one of those I did may have been damaged in the process: the roots had stuck hard to the side of the pot, and I couldn't figure out how to get them out, so I tried jamming a thin metal rod in through the drainage hole, which broke the tip of the root because the root was right on top of the hole. I figured out how to get them out with less trauma after that, but until I did that first one, I had no idea what sort of roots I might find.

Seedling no. 2. Pot is 2-inch (5 cm) in diameter.
The seedlings don't look much like the young plants I've seen occasionally in stores, like these:

Specifically, my seedlings have more of a trunk on them already, and the leaves are curved instead of straight. Both things are probably due to me not having quite enough light for them, though I'm not sure. In their natural habitat, they're often shaded as seedlings, so they really ought to be more flexible about this than a lot of other cactus seedlings might. I don't know.

Seedling no. 6. Pot is 2-inch (5 cm) in diameter.
In any case: still here, doing fine. They've possibly sustained some thrips damage on the upper surface of the leaves; a while back I noticed that there were little scars appearing. I haven't actually seen thrips on any of them, and you'd think the seedlings' skin would be too tough for thrips, but that's the only explanation I can come up with. I've heard tales of woe regarding Leuchtenbergia and scale, but so far, I haven't seen scale on them. The species of scale I've been dealing with here seems to be particular about which plants it likes to eat (Agave, Yucca, Anthurium, Aloe) and which plants it doesn't (Dracaena, Coffea, Spathiphyllum, Schlumbergera), so maybe scale in general are a problem for Leuchtenbergia, just not my personal pet scale.

Seedling no. 12, after the repotting. Pot is 3-inch (8 cm) in diameter.
I started these seeds in May 2013, getting the seeds from an on-line supplier, so seedlings are just over three years old now. I've also cross-pollinated two adult plants in 2013. Both plants produced fruit, though I think I only collected seeds from one: I can't remember. In any case, I still have lots of self-produced seeds, in addition to the leftover online seeds, and I've thought about trying to start the self-produced ones outside this summer, but I'm not sure what I'd do with them all if they germinated. The species is an acquired taste, and not in particularly high demand, so although the seeds cry out to me to be sown (as all seeds do), I can't come up with a perspective that makes me feel like it would actually be a good idea to start them. So we wait.

Unfinished business: Leuchtenbergia principis

I spent a lot of yesterday working on a different, longer post, but it became clear that I wasn't going to finish soon enough to publish it today, so instead you get this. We'll call it a follow-up to the Leuchtenbergia principis profile.

I noted in that post that different sources gave wildly conflicting information about the color of Leuchtenbergia fruits, and guessed that they were perhaps just that inconsistent about fruit color. Since that post was written, my two mature plants' fruits have ripened, and in fact the two plants do not agree on the proper color for ripe fruit. The small plant's was pinkish-purple,

and the large plant's was yellow.

This is sort of backwards -- the small plant's flower was solidly bright yellow, but the fruit was pinkish; the large plant's flower was a pinkish, but produced a solid yellow fruit. So I guess the lesson here is that they turn whatever colors they feel like turning, at all stages of the process. Leuchtenbergias are the honey badgers of the plant world.

Both of the above photos date from last November; at the beginning of February, the small plant's fruit had browned and shriveled up, so I pulled it off, and I learned the truth behind another thing that had confused me while researching. A couple sources mentioned something about the seeds coming out of a small hole at the base of the fruit, which didn't make sense to me until the small plant's fruit came off -- the hole the seeds come out of is where the fruit was originally attached to the tubercule. (The way it was phrased, I'd thought that maybe the fruit stayed attached to the plant and, like, grew a hole on its side or something. Which didn't seem like a sensible way for a plant to go about distributing its seeds, but I thought maybe Leuchtenbergias were just kinda crazy. See above re: honey badger.) The dried fruit works more or less like a salt shaker -- seeds kept falling out of the hole as I moved it around. And it was basically packed full to begin with.

So I guess they don't actually need animals to find and eat the fruit, because the fruits will dry up and disperse the fruits all on their own. Which may explain the inconsistent fruit coloration: if you don't have to attract animals in order to get the next generation going, you can color your fruits however you want. So everything makes sense now, and I'm happy.

So, now, I have 15 seedlings in tiny clay pots in the basement, there's another six in the plastic container where I germinated them last May, I have maybe 70 seeds left over from the ones I bought, and I have an unknown number in the two fruits. So for the love of all that is good and pure in the world, please, if you are at all interested in having seeds or seedlings of Leuchtenbergia, send me an e-mail and ask. Something can be worked out, I promise.

Unfinished business: Billbergia, Haemanthus, Leuchtenbergia, Strelitzia

Some odds and ends today.

Billbergia nutans
This is probably more of a random plant event than unfinished business, but: the Billbergia nutans¹ is blooming again. Much smaller show than last year: then, I had seven flower spikes happen more or less at once, and so far this year it's only two. (This could be because I didn't repot this year, though it didn't actually need repotting, so if it's withholding flowers just because I didn't repot then it's being awfully petty.) That doesn't make as much difference as you'd think, photographically, because the flowers aren't terribly interesting unless you're close.

It would also probably help if I had better light for photo-taking, but you know how it is: every spot in the house that gets decent natural light also has plants piled in front of it, and consequently, it's an afternoon of work to set up a spot and take enough pictures to justify all the effort. By which point the sun has often changed positions anyway. This picture didn't turn out so bad, but you should see some of the pictures I tried to get on Saturday.


Haemanthus albiflos

I got my Haemanthus almost exactly one year ago, and in that year, the only thing it has ever done is drop leaves. I think this was mostly due to unusually long and cold shipping, and not because they're naturally big leaf-droppers, but even so, it was sort of disappointing. That only lasted for a couple months after it arrived, though; then it stabilized at three leaves. I then spent nine or ten months looking down into the center of the plant every so often to see if there was any new growth, and being disappointed. Then, a couple days ago, I looked in and there was something new. So I realize this is not the most amazing plant photo you've ever seen, but it's easily the most exciting plant photo in this post as far as I'm concerned.


Leuchtenbergia principis
For the time being, I'm still watering the Leuchtenbergias even though the information I found when writing the Leuchtenbergia profile clearly indicates that I shouldn't. I like to live on the edge like that. Both of the adult plants still have fruits on them, though the fruits don't appear to be doing much of anything. The interesting part, to me, is that they're distinctly different colors. The big plant's fruit is very slightly red-purple:

and the small plant's fruit is very slightly yellow-green:

Does this mean anything? Probably not. But it's new. Kinda.

The Leuchtenbergia seedlings I started are sort of doing okay. Probably they would be doing better if I were keeping up better with the watering. Of the 15 seedlings I potted up in individual tiny clay pots, 12 are fine, and 3 have had to be replaced. The usual cause of death, as far as I can determine, is either that I didn't water them when they needed water (small roots means a limited ability to take up water, and seedlings don't have much in the way of water reserves, so when they're out of water, they're out of water), or that I dislodged them from the soil when watering and then they got completely buried under the soil. In some cases, I suspect both things happened. I still had some seedlings that hadn't been potted up, though, so I just replaced those three seedlings and went on. There hasn't been a lot of change in the other 12 seedlings; they might be a tad bigger than they were when I potted them up, but the change is awfully subtle.

Seedling number 13 (with 10 and 7 in the background) as of 24 November 2013. The pots are 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) in diameter.

Strelitzia juncea
Speaking of seedlings.² A second Strelitzia juncea seed has germinated, and unlike the Leuchtenbergias, Strelitzias don't waste any time getting going:

Seedling no. 2.

Seedling no. 3.
Strelitzia juncea is primarily of interest because it doesn't have the big, broad leaves of the more common species like S. nicolai and S. reginae,³ so you may be wondering what's going on here. It's pretty simple: S. juncea is one of those plants with different kinds of foliage at different ages. Young plants grow leaves and resemble S. reginae, but as they get older the leaves shrink down to the point where they're basically just petioles and midribs and nothing else. Which is why I was interested. But I'm going to be seeing regular-looking leaves for quite a while first, I expect.

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¹ (Or Bizzlebergia nutans, to some.)
² (All due respect, Mr. S., but when are you ever not speaking of seedlings?)
³ Full-grown plants look like this:

Photo credit: BotBln, at Wikimedia Commons.

Weirdo Loner-Type (Leuchtenbergia principis)

Leuchtenbergia principis is a lonely guy. For one thing, it's the only species in the genus Leuchtenbergia, what botanists call a monotypic species.¹ For another, in its native habitat (pretty much everything in the northern half of Mexico, except the coasts), it's typically found as single individuals, often growing next to a clump of Agaves and tall grass. (I guess they're not comfortable in crowds?)

Leuchtenbergia doesn't look the way you'd expect a cactus to look, which is a lot of the charm. The body of the plant bears multiple green or blue projections (called tubercles) which are triangular in cross-section, and stick out about 4-5 inches / 10-13 cm from the center. In strong light, the tubercles can even develop red or purple edges, which echo the differently-colored margins on a lot of Agave leaves. The shape of the tubercles and overall Agave-like appearance lead to the common names: agave cactus, prism cactus,² and (more inexplicably) cob cactus. The tubercles end with several long, soft, papery spines of varying thickness and length, which point in all directions. The overall impression, then, is of an Agave with a bunch of dead grass caught in its leaves.³ Which is just the thing you'd want to look like, if you were trying to hide next to a small clump of Agaves and dead grass.

Though that may be giving the plant too much credit. Given that they're often found as single individuals, near Agaves, I suppose there might be an element of peer pressure involved in them looking the way they do. Or maybe bullying. (Agaves can be terrible bullies, as you know if you've ever had to work with a lot of them.)

The IUCN⁴ lists Leuchtenbergia principis as a "least concern" species, on account of its wide range and large number of wild individuals (estimated at about 500,000). Regardless of what the IUCN says about it, Mexico is free to protect whatever species they want, and has placed L. principis on its national list of protected species.⁵ The main risks are from illegal collectors and livestock grazing.

The root is thick and long, to about 8 inches long and 3 inches in diameter. (Metric equivalents: 20 cm and 8 cm.) Absolutely everyone describes it as "parsnip-like," so I will too, even though I'm not all that familiar with parsnips. As plants age, they'll shed tubercles (usually when dry and/or during the winter) and grow a trunk, though that's a slow process: neither of my plants have, as far as I can recall, ever dropped a tubercle spontaneously. The white or tan wooly hairs around the base of the tubercles drop with age as well: the trunks are naturally bare and corky-looking. Even plants that have been pampered and coddled for their entire existence still end up looking like they've had this terrible, brutal life,⁶ though they do generally look better than the ones that actually have lived in the wild.

Mine, unfortunately, aren't old enough to have much of a trunk yet: this is about as good as the pictures get.
It's hard to come by any exact measurements for the maximum height of a Leuchtenbergia -- 24 inches (61 cm) is popular, and one source said 30 inches (77 cm). They grow so slowly that I doubt it matters much to anybody growing one as a houseplant: it's not one of those plants that's constantly going to be outgrowing its location.

Mature specimens may also develop branches, though they have to be pretty old first, and even when old, this doesn't seem to happen very often.

As a houseplant, Leuchtenbergia principis is very easygoing, with only a few non-negotiable aspects of care.

LIGHT: Because they're adapted to grow in the shade of other plants, Leuchtenbergia is perfectly able to survive without a lot of direct sun. The tubercles can move around a bit, depending on the light and humidity: they'll lie flat if there's too little light, and pull closer together and more upright if the air is exceptionally dry. So if you notice that your plant's lying flatter than it was when you bought it, well, that's one possible reason why.

Both my specimens lived inside year-round for their first three or four years, and although they didn't grow much, and the tubercles did splay quite a bit, they survived. It's better, though, if you can provide a lot of direct sun: they'll grow faster, the color will be better, and you stand a better chance of getting them to bloom. The best solution for people who live in an area with cold winters (like me) is to let the plants spend summers outdoors and winters in a bright spot inside.⁷

If you do let your plants summer outside, remember to start them off in a shady, protected location and gradually move them into a brighter spot: they can sunburn if you try to take it too quickly. There's a popular opinion that the plant actually looks better if grown in bright shade or part sun, as opposed to full sun; I don't have enough experience growing Leuchtenbergia outdoors to have an opinion on that yet.

WATER: Lots of conflicting information on this one. Until this summer, I watered my two Leuchtenbergias every two weeks unless the soil still felt moist (which happens occasionally in the winter), winter spring summer fall. This won't work for everybody, and temperature is a factor there, but I've never had a tubercle drop spontaneously,⁸ so I think I must be doing something right.

The long root will require a deeper pot. Clay is preferable to plastic, both because it will dry out faster (less chance of rot) and because it'll keep the center of gravity a little lower than plastic, so the plant won't tip over as easily. I'm ignoring both of those suggestions with one of my plants, though: it's in a plastic azalea pot.⁹ The most likely reason for this is that I probably didn't have any appropriately-sized clay pots around the last time I thought about repotting it.

Soil should be fast-draining, with a lot of coarse sand, gravel, or similar material. Avoid potting soils that retain a lot of water (peat moss is not your friend). Some people add eggshells, limestone, or other sources of calcium to the soil when they pot plants up: as best as I can tell, this is more natural, but doesn't affect the health of the plant much. What matters is that the potting mix dries out quickly. The root should not be above the soil line after you repot, and you shouldn't have to repot very often in the first place.

Some of my sources say that the tubercles will turn yellow if the plant is too dry; I don't know if this is true. The first sign of too much water is rotting and death, so if you're not sure whether to water, don't.

TEMPERATURE: Leuchtenbergias, if kept dry, can supposedly tolerate freezes with no problem, and can even go down to 15F / -9C for short periods. I have no intention of ever verifying any of that, and I don't recommend that you test this either, but it's nice to know that the possibility theoretically exists.

One caution about cold: some people overwinter their plants in very cold rooms (or garages, or what have you). If you do this, keep in mind that the colder the temperature, the more likely you are to kill the plant by watering it. Either go cold and dry, or warm and not-very-wet, during the winter. Most sources recommend a temperature between 40 and 60F (9 to 16C) during the winter, with no water at all. (In nature, they get moderate rainfall in the summer and virtually none in winter, which is presumably where this idea comes from.) Other people water just enough to keep the tubercles from dropping, but I don't know how they know when that is.

Being from the hot Mexican desert, L. principis obviously doesn't have much in the way of a maximum temperature, at least not one that you're likely to reach in cultivation.

My personal plants stayed at about 65-75F / 18-24C year-round, for the first few years I had them. Since they've been out for the summer, I think they've had a night or two in the upper 40s F (about 9C), but I'm probably going to bring them in for good once we start seeing low 40s (about 5C).

HUMIDITY: Pretty much irrelevant, though very high humidity might encourage rot, especially if the soil is cold and wet. The plant is naturally adapted to dry air.

PESTS: Leuchtenbergias are primarily affected by scale and mealybugs. Both scale and mealybugs can be hard to see: scale looks like scarring or part of the woody trunk, and mealybugs could blend in with the wool around the base of the tubercles. Watch for shiny, sticky spots on the leaves: I've found that I usually see the drops of honeydew before I spot any insects. When I've seen honeydew and ignored it, I almost always regret it later, even if I couldn't actually find any insects.

Fungal and bacterial infections are also possible, especially if the plant is poked with something sharp or damaged during transplanting or something like that, but I didn't get the impression that it's a common problem, and I've never encountered it personally.

PROPAGATION: If you want a bunch of small Leuchtenbergias, the way to go is to get seeds. They're easy enough to find on-line.

Seedling at about 3 1/2 months old. It'd been indoors under artificial lights for all that time, so it's maybe a little stunted and/or etiolated, compared to a natural seedling.
When I started about 60 seeds at once, in May, I got about 60-65 percent germination; I would probably have done better if I'd tried to start them outdoors, but I'm not very well set-up for starting seeds outside.¹⁰ Of the 38 or so that germinated, about 30 were still alive and healthy three months later. I transplanted a batch of 15 on 25 August, of which 12 out of 15 were still alive as of 19 September.

Photo from 27 August.
Other propagation methods are rumored to exist, but I can't vouch for them.

• One can supposedly take cuttings of plants that have branched: I'd assume that one should let the cut piece dry and callus over before planting it, as for other desert cacti.
• I also hear that it's possible to take cuttings of individual tubercles and root them, but I was unable to find anybody on-line who claimed that they had actually done this successfully. (If you have, let me know.)
• One variety of L. principis essentially grows plantlets at the end of each tubercle, which could be rooted and grown if they were normal plantlets. But they're not. More on this later.
• There are also claims out there that normal plants will, rarely, produce offsets at their base, which could be separated and potted up on their own. There's also a variety which offsets really heavily. Later on that one too.
• People also sometimes start seedlings and then graft them to other cacti, which allegedly gets them to grow bigger faster. This may be true, but I'll never try it myself, because it looks wicked stupid to me.¹¹

GROOMING: There's no grooming in the usual sense -- they don't need to be pruned or dug up or anything -- so I'll talk about flowering instead.

The flowers are yellow, and about 3-4 inches (8-10 cm) across. Very occasionally, one will find an individual that blooms yellow with pink edges, or pink, but those plants are rare. The flowers allegedly have a scent, but nobody describes it and I couldn't smell it on my own plants, so it must be pretty faint or nondescript.

My own plants bloomed simultaneously once this summer, and I got a not-great picture to compare the color:

The smaller plant, in the clay pot, consistently produced very vividly yellow flowers that got slightly lighter over time; the larger plant in plastic made pinkish buds that opened to pale yellow flowers, which stayed pale yellow.

The stamen colors were also different: the small plant's stamens were the same yellow as the petals, while the large plant's were sort of pink-orange. Which was sort of cool, I guess.

The weird part is that I'd seen the smaller plant bloom before, when I first saw it for sale, and it was producing pale yellow flowers then, so apparently the flower color is at least partly determined by growing conditions. I'm not sure which conditions are the important ones, since for all intents and purposes these two plants got the same treatment -- watered and fertilized at the same times, same light, temperature, and humidity.

The 2009 bloom. Granted, the color's off, but you can at least tell that it's not the intense Crayola-type yellow of the 2013 bloom.
The flower buds appear at the tips of the tubercles, on the current year's growth. I think it would be fair to characterize the speed of development as "excruciatingly slow," though my perceptions are probably not to be trusted. (I got really excited when I first saw the buds on my plants, and then checked them semi-obsessively every time I went outside.)

Just one of the many, many pictures I took this summer of slowly-developing Leuchtenbergia flower buds.
Plants need to be about four or five years old in order to flower,¹² and can produce two rounds of blooms in a single year if conditions are right, between late spring and early fall.¹³ Strong light seems to be necessary: it's probably possible for a plant to bloom indoors, but I'd think the conditions would have to be pretty exceptional. Once a plant is old enough to produce flowers, it can bloom every year thereafter.

Supposedly a single heavy drench will spur bud development about three weeks later: I couldn't tell you if that's true or not, since my plants pretty much get heavy drenches every time they're watered. According to one source, plants that are kept indoors for the winter then moved out in the late spring are likely to produce their first buds in June, and then bloom continuously until September. I didn't notice buds on my own plants until 12 July, so that's at least approximately correct. Individual flowers don't last long. My longest-lived flower lasted three days; the shortest for about a day and a half. Buds may drop if a plant is moved while they're developing.

None of my reference sources would say whether the flowers were self-fertile. (Nobody even seemed to feel like it was an interesting question, which was frustrating.) My guess is that they are not, though that's based on the first flowers from the small plant not producing fruit on their own. I didn't think I needed to do anything, since the black bees seemed pretty thrilled with them --

OH HAI IM IN YR LUKTEN- (*hic*) LUKTIN- (*hic*) LUKTENBIRERGERA DRINKN YR NECTAR
-- but the bee's presence didn't lead to self-fertilization, whether it's possible or not, and I didn't attempt to pollinate the flower myself, because I naively trusted the bees to take care of it. (I'll have to try self-pollination when one of the remaining buds opens.) I did take a paintbrush outside when both plants had flowers simultaneously, and that seems to have worked.

The fruits are said to be green or greenish-blue, about 1 inch (3 cm) long and 3/4 inch (2 cm) in diameter. Most of which is right on the money so far. They may or may not turn red when ripe. One of the photos available through Google image search shows a purple fruit, even.¹⁴ Each ripe fruit will contain "several hundred" seeds. Seed collection apparently goes better if the fruit is slightly overripe.

Cleaned and dried seeds can be stored. Nobody was specific as to how long, exactly, one can store seeds, but once you have a hundred or so seedlings, are you really going to care that much about how long the remaining seeds will remain viable?

This seedling is roughly a week or two old.
FEEDING: Doesn't appear to be a huge thing. Feed during the growing season with a regular balanced houseplant fertilizer. It's not a particularly needy plant as far as fertilizer goes.

Although Leuchtenbergia is a monotypic genus, it's sufficiently related to Ferocactus and Astrophytum to be able to hybridize with them occasionally. Hybrids with Ferocactus are called Ferobergias, and look more or less like Leuchtenbergia except with smaller tubercles and stiffer spines: the overall color is still green to green-blue, the flowers are still yellow or pink, etc. Oddly, Ferobergias are also often variegated, though the variegation is not necessarily attractive. (To me.)

Leuchtenbergia / Astrophytum hybrids aren't common enough to have an official name; one source suggested Astrobergia, which . . . sure, I guess we'll go with that. They look more or less like Ferobergia (short tubercles, green or green-blue, yellow or pink flowers, etc.), but with the little white dots (trichomes) all over the surface like Astrophytum. They're not unattractive on their own, if you like Astrophytum (for example), but they're also almost always grown as grafts.

Astrophytum appears to be less compatible genetically with Leuchtenbergia; a lot of what I found about them was just people complaining that their attempts to make viable crosses weren't paying off. (The only specific suggestion I saw was that transferring pollen in the early morning might help; I have no idea if it does.)

There are at least two cultivated varieties of Leuchtenbergia principis: L. p. var. trachythele, which has the same overall shape but with rougher, sandpapery skin, and one or two monstrose varieties. Trachythele is either very rare or very unloved; I only found one reference to it, and all the photos that come up in Google either look exactly the same as the species, or dramatically uglier than the species. And it's not like it's the world's most gorgeous plant in the first place, you know. Plus, when you're trying to make something more appealing to consumers, one's first impulse is usually not "let's give it more of a sandpapery texture!" So if you see a trachythele for sale somewhere, snap it up if you're interested, 'cause you probably won't get many other chances to buy one.

There appears to be more than one monstrose variety, but they're all called the same thing. One of the monstrose ones just offsets a lot, which isn't necessarily unpleasant if you don't mind the regular species. Not sure that should qualify as "monstrose," but whatever.

The other monstrose form is more deserving of the name. It produces scaly buds from the tip of every tubercle, which develop not into flowers but instead into entire new plants, each of which also immediately sets about budding at each tubercle. It's so insistent about doing this that it has to be grafted, I gather -- I don't know if the roots fail to develop properly, if they just can't keep up with the above-surface growth, or what, but they won't survive on their own roots. I'm not a huge fan of monstrose cacti in the first place, and I've already told you how I feel about grafts, so I find this one pretty revolting and would just as soon not think about it anymore if that's okay with you.

Leuchtenbergia principis holds a special place in my heart, and both purchases are sort of pleasant memories for me: the first one I bought was a rare case of non-buyer's remorse. Only one lonesome plant at the ex-job one day when I went in for something. I noticed it, of course, and thought it was interesting, but I didn't necessarily want to buy it or anything. Took some pictures, got home, uploaded the pictures to the computer, looked up the plant on Google, and then realized I NEED THIS PLANT. So I called the ex-job and asked them to hold it for me, then went back and bought it a couple days later. Usually, these things work the other way: I buy on impulse, then look at the pictures and at Google and wish that I hadn't. So that was a nice change of pace.

The second, slightly larger plant I bought just because I couldn't believe it was so cheap. Frontier, in Cedar Rapids, had had this single specimen for a while and nobody wanted to buy, so they'd marked it down to $5. And still nobody had been interested, apparently. I'd had my first specimen for a little over a year at this point, and I was pretty happy with it, but $5 for one this big and this old was such a great deal that I might well have bought it even if it had been a species I hated. Some deals are just too good to pass up.

Plus: the first specimen needed a friend.

References (in something resembling, but not quite, alphabetical order):

Cactiguide.com
Cactus art
Cactus and Succulent Society of America¹⁵
The Central Ohio Cactus and Succulent Society (article by Bruce Brethauer)
CoronaCactus Nursery LLC
Dave's Garden (monstrose)
Dave's Garden (species)
Dave's Garden (var. trachythele)
Desert-Tropicals
The Garden Forums¹⁶
Gardening With a Not-So-Angry Redhead
GardenWeb forum (1)
GardenWeb forum (2)
IUCN page
Kara Nursery
Lophophora
The Lovely Plants
Plant of the Week
Tucson-Gardener.com
Wikipedia

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Photo credits: all photos are my own.

¹ Because most of the fun in being a botanist is having a specialized term for every little thing. Or at least that's how it looks from here.
² Probably a reference to the shape of the tubercles -- glass prisms are often triangular -- but it might also have something to do with the range of colors the plant is capable of producing, depending on its conditions: green in lower light, blue in higher light, red, red-violet, or violet in very strong light.
³ When I got my first one, I spent a while fighting the impulse to clean it up by trimming the spines down to something more sensible-looking. In the end, my plants kept their natural look, but only because I was too lazy to trim them. If you're wondering, no, it probably wouldn't have hurt the plant if I had trimmed them: as far as I can tell, their only real function is to hide the plant, something which isn't really relevant in cultivation, so if it really bothers you, grab the scissors and go nuts. Though people might, you know, judge you for it.
⁴ (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources)
⁵ Crazy people are always wandering into Mexico to steal plants. And non-crazy people sometimes steal plants to resell, especially plants like Leuchtenbergia that take a long time to get big. Why sow seeds and wait thirty years for specimen-sized plants when you could just drive to Mexico with a shovel, right? So I think Mexico's doing the right thing here.
⁶ I also considered "Gangsta Rapper" for the Leuchtenbergia principis "person" because of this -- I don't know if it's still going on, but there was a time when all the rappers seemed to be inventing much rougher childhoods for themselves than they could have had in reality.
⁷ At least one of my sources, don't remember which, said that Leuchtenbergia would never thrive or look good if it was ever kept indoors at all, and that if you can't give it full outdoor sun all the time, you may as well not even try to grow it.
This is obviously one of those people for whom plants are only worth growing if you can grow them to their full genetic potential, a sentiment I addressed in this post (scroll down until you hit item #4).
People are of course free to set their own standards for what counts as "successful" cultivation of a plant, and there's nothing wrong with the "full genetic potential" standard if that's the sort of thing you're into, but . . . people should be free to set their own standards for what counts as successful cultivation of a plant, and not expected to adopt the standards of someone else. I mean, if you're not entering it in a show or something, the only thing that ought to count is whether or not you're enjoying the process. Don't let other people make you feel bad about enjoying your own hobbies, that you're spending your time and your money on. For fuck's sakes.
⁸ The one tubercle that's come off either of my plants did so because it was broken off, when the plant got knocked over.
⁹ Standard pots have the same height and width; azalea pots are 3/4 as tall as they are wide.
¹⁰ Watering is the main problem: the sprayer we had with a "mist" setting broke, and anything stronger than mist is likely to knock plants around, bury them under soil, etc. What I did was, I filled a plug tray with soil, wet the soil, put a seed in each cell, and then covered the tray with a plastic dome. This is probably more moist than they would have liked, but I was worried that without the dome, the seedlings would dry out and die before I noticed that they needed water.
¹¹ Though I'm not a fan of grafted cacti (or Euphorbias) in general. If you like that sort of thing, you might think a grafted Leuchtenbergia looks cool. You'd be wrong, but you might think that. (Readers upset by this should read footnote #7 again.)
¹² Plants grown indoors are likely to take longer than this. In Arizona, or Southern California, you could maybe go from seed to bloom in four years, but in Iowa, where it has to endure lower light from October to April, I'd expect closer to six or seven.
¹³ In my particular case, the small plant produced I think five flowers between 21 and 31 August, just boom-boom-boom-boom-boom, and the large one started on the 31st and still has three buds left.
¹⁴ (This isn't a case of my sources disagreeing with one another. Leuchtenbergias are apparently just really inconsistent about fruit color. It's weird, since you'd think that any plant that depends on animals to distribute its seeds would want the fruit to be as visible as possible, but maybe the impulse to hide is just that strong.)
¹⁵ The CSSA link no longer works for me; I make no promises that it will work for you. I don't think it required registration when I read it previously, but it does now. I would be delighted to register, but the site didn't provide anywhere to do that, the last time I checked.
I'm including it on the list anyway, because 1) some of you might still be able to read it, and 2) it was part of the research I did, and I figure it's better to give credit nobody can verify than it would be to pretend like I didn't read it and have someone come after me for not giving appropriate credit. Though I don't think it contained any unique information anyway, so probably I should have just pretended that I hadn't read it.
¹⁶ This one may or may not work either; they seem to have changed the way their URLs are constructed since I visited last. Either that or I bookmarked the wrong thing previously. If all else fails, you can go to their search page and search for "leuchtenbergia attemps" [sic] and that should bring you to the correct conversation. This one is more critical than the CSSA link, because the discussion in question is about creating Ferobergias and Astrobergias, and was the only place I found much of anything about this subject at all.

Random plant event: Leuchtenbergia principis

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

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

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

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

Random plant event: Leuchtenbergia principis

I started a batch of Leuchtenbergia principis seeds on 8 May. I wasn't sure what percentage would germinate, so I started a lot (56, which isn't even half the number I got¹). I noticed the first seedlings on 15 May, and new ones keep popping up. So I will soon have way, way too many baby Leuchtenbergias, with enough seeds to make way, way more.

So far, they don't look like much,

and Leuchtenbergias are slow-growing plants besides, so they'll probably continue to not look like much for quite a while, but that's just a guess. In any case, things seem to be working as intended so far, so that's something.

Readers who have always wanted to grow a Leuchtenbergia principis but have never been able to find one for sale (which I assume is probably most of you), let me know: I can probably hook you up with some seeds. I don't know how delicate the seedlings are yet, but mature plants are very easy to grow as long as you can supply them with adequate light.² Hopefully the seedlings won't be significantly harder to deal with.

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¹ I'd ordered 100 from cactusstore.com, and at first they sent 25. So then I sent a hey-wait-a-minute-that's-not-what-I-ordered message, and they sent another 100, like, immediately. Plus both packages contained more than the stated number of seeds, so I wound up with I think 131 seeds overall, from an order of 100.
² Leuchtenbergia rates a 2.0 on the most current incarnation of the PATSP scale, virtually all of which is due to their need for stronger light than most people can easily provide indoors.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Old picture (from last June), but I figure it will probably serve your Nina-photo needs. (If not, submit a refund request by e-mail. Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. Refund is not transferable. Restrictions may apply.)

I'm less than thrilled with the color and overall photo quality, which is probably why I didn't post it last June, but it's my understanding that all I have to do is tell you that I used an Instagram filter on it, and then you have to like it regardless.

Not really any Sheba news. There's been a lot of traveling in the last couple weeks, which is rough on her (she sometimes gets carsick), but she didn't actually get sick, so that was nice.

I've gotten a couple new plants in the process, neither of which is particularly interesting (Sansevieria trifasciata 'Jade Dwarf' and Ficus benjamina 'Starlite' are my guesses, though neither one was tagged with a cultivar name), but at least they were cheap ($5 and $3-something, respectively).

Sansevieria trifasciata NOID, possibly 'Jade Dwarf.'
A lot more money went toward large (12-14" / 30-36 cm) clay pots: many up-pottings have been on hold for several months because I needed a couple really big pots, so I could free up a few sorta big pots, which would free up some medium-sized pots, and so on.

Ficus benjamina NOID, probably 'Starlite.'
Also questionable judgment but at least not terribly expensive: I've been working on a couple new plant profiles at once, for the "book" or whatever it's going to turn out to be, and I had forgotten about the problem where when I'm writing a profile, I tend to convince myself to get more of whatever it is I'm writing about. Worse, the search results for certain plants will bring up seed-selling sites, and you know how I am about seeds. So on Thursday, I discovered that I'd ordered 100 mail-order Leuchtenbergia principis seeds in some kind of seed-purchasing blackout.

(I already have two Leuchtenbergia principis plants. I mean, I like them very much, but that was unnecessary. Fortunately, it should only set me back by $8.50, so I imagine I'll survive.)

I am now soliciting suggestions for what a person could do with 80 or 90 seedling Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings. (The prize for the best answer: an undetermined number of Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings.)

Five More Plants I'm Not Currently Mad At (H through Pn)

As explained in the first of these posts, I'm currently trying to convince myself that despite a pretty catastrophic spring and summer, some of the plants are still doing reasonably well.

Also I'm trying to justify all the new pictures I've taken recently, since sorting through them all and getting them presentable has taken a lot of my time in the last three or four weeks.


1. Haworthia limifolia var. limifolia

Haworthia spp. and I are not always pleased with one another. Watering is often an issue: their need varies depending on the time of year, and although I know this, I have a hard time remembering when it's time to switch from more water to less water. Most of my plants get the same watering year-round, so there's a tendency to try watering the Haworthias that way too. Then I overwater, and they die, and I remember oh yeah, it's [whatever season it is].

Date: September 2012.
Pot size: 3" / 8 cm (along diagonal).
H. limifolia var. limifolia hasn't had as much of a problem with this as some of the others (it's especially been a problem for H. cymbiformis and Haworthia limifolia var. ubomboensis), though, and in fact has managed to make the most dramatic progress of any of them. Here's what it looked like five years ago:

Date: October 2007.
Pot size: 3" / 8 cm (along diagonal).
Part of the reason it does so much better than the average Haworthia in my care is that it gets better light (from shop lights in the basement) than most of them do. Most of the others have been in my office or in the plant room, and I suspect¹ I've misjudged how much light some of those locations actually receive.

Aside from the light and water issues, H. limifolia var. limifolia has been trouble-free: no insects (that I've seen; it was exposed to the ongoing scale infestation, though I've yet to see any scale on the plant), no complaints about temperature or humidity. I feed by splashing with a little bit of fertilizer at the end of a thorough watering. I haven't had a chance to propagate, though I would like to -- they produce plantlets on runners beneath the soil, which can be removed and potted up individually. Unfortunately, mine has yet to produce any plantlets.


2. Leuchtenbergia principis

I actually have two specimens of Leuchtenbergia principis. The first I bought because it was a cool plant, and I had been assured by PATSP readers that I would like it. The second one I bought because it was an 8-inch (20 cm) pot for $5 (the original was a 6-inch / 15 cm for $25), and I couldn't pass up that deal, duplicate plant or no.²

They're not, as you'll see, particularly rapid growers.

The original plant.
Date: September 2012.
Pot size: 6" / 15 cm.
I probably ought to at least look at the roots sometime soon, if not do a soil replacement or move it up to a bigger pot, but I've been holding off because I'm nervous about it. And fall is a bad time to be doing that anyway.

(original)
Date: somewhere between August and November 2009.
Pot size: 6" / 15 cm.
The other plant is in similar shape:

The later-arriving plant.
Date: September 2012.
Pot size: 8" / 20 cm.
In both cases, the plants have splayed outward a bit in the middle, to try to collect more light. They're in a south window, but there are a lot of things (houses, garages, other plants, walls) blocking the light before it reaches the Leuchtenbergias. Perhaps next year they'll get to spend the summer outside.

The later-arriving plant.
Date: December 2010.
Pot size: 8" / 20 cm.
Other than the splaying, they haven't complained about anything. I wind up watering the 6-inch one about every two weeks, though I slow that down some during the winter. The 8-inch plant gets watered about every four weeks, though it's closer to every two weeks in the summer. Fertilization is as described for the Haworthia. Neither Leuchtenbergia has ever given me any other problems.


3. Pachypodium lamerei

Pachypodium lamerei got to spend the summer outside this year, and responded by growing much more and much faster than I thought it was capable of. The down side to this is that it got top-heavy, and as a result, it got knocked over a lot. On occasion, other plants got knocked onto it, too, hence the lopsided appearance of the plant here:

Date: September 2012.
Pot size: 8" / 20 cm? I'm not sure, and I'm too lazy to get up and measure the pot.
And here it is five years and two repottings ago:

Date: October 2007.
Pot size: 4" / 10 cm.
I've definitely had some problems with P. lamerei in the past: mild cases of spider mites, occasional droplets of a dark brown liquid of unknown origin or significance,³ a tendency to defoliate partially in the winter,⁴ the way they're impossible to handle because of all the stabby spines, etc. But on the other hand, it's still alive and growing after five years, it's looking pretty good, and none of the problems have ever gotten out of control or anything.

Indoors, I water it every two weeks, year-round (unless the soil feels wet -- I do still always check the soil first), with light fertilizer splashed on after the watering, as described for the Haworthia. I try to keep the temperature at or above 60F / 16C. I'd love to propagate this, but it's probably just as well that I can't.⁵ Light is my main problem: last year, it sat in a west window with a bit of supplementary artificial light, and seemed to be okay with that. This year, however, it's gotten too tall to fit in that spot, so I have to give it a less-satisfactory location. It might be a good year to try inducing dormancy, but I probably won't: see footnote 4.


4. Philodendron pinnatifidum 'Spicy Dog'

First up, I have to say: Philodendron pinnatifidum 'Spicy Dog' isn't quite what I'd hoped it would be when I bought it. Nothing wrong with how it's turned out, but it's a lot closer to P. bipinnatifidum now than it was when purchased, and we already had a P. bipinnatifidum. The leaves are a lot more deeply lobed, and the stem's lengthened inconveniently. (I have to prop it up against a wall now, which is only going to become more difficult as the plant grows.)

Date: September 2012.
Pot size: 10" / 25 cm.
It's not really visible in the above picture, but if you were looking at the plant from the side, you'd see that the stem has a fairly pronounced "S" shape to it.

Inconvenient though it is, I'm not mad at it right now because it's always grown well and been problem-free. I mean, if it's too big and has a different appearance than what I wanted, it's hard to argue that those things are the fault of the plant.

Date: April 2010.
Pot size: 6" / 15 cm.
The younger leaves were cooler, though.

It's been getting watered about once a month lately (it might be overpotted a bit). For light, it has four separate windows (east, south, south, west), but they're all at least 6 feet (1.8 m) away, and three of the four are heavily obstructed by plants. How it manages to get by on that is something of a mystery to me, but maybe it's highly motivated: perhaps it knows that it's too big to go anywhere else in the house.

It appears not to mind the temperature and humidity here; I can't recall any pests. Propagation is out of the question, for the same reasons as Pachypodium, but there'd be no space for more of them even if I could propagate.


5. Plectranthus verticillatus

Perhaps an odd choice, but I've been appreciating P. verticillatus a lot lately even though it's one of the few plants that's actually decreased in size since I've had it.

Date: September 2012.
Pot size: 4.5" / 11.5 cm.
The original plant made it up to an 8-inch hanging basket --

Date: July 2010.
Pot size: 8" / 20 cm?
-- and then I took cuttings to make a second 8-inch hanging basket. Plus a whole bunch of 4-inch pots I'd propagated from cuttings. The 4-inch pots all grew a little too well, to the point where I couldn't untangle them from one another, and they were always dry, and I realized nobody was going to buy them, so I threw them all out. And then the two hanging baskets both just kind of fell to pieces. I suspect that was a temperature problem, because I'd put them in one of the worst spots imaginable for a tropical plant: near the floor of the room with the least insulation in the house, and directly in the path of a heat vent. So when the heat was on, they got blasted with hot, dry air, and when it wasn't, they were in a cold draft.

Stupid of me, I realize, but it seemed like something they'd be able to handle (they're ordinarily very tough plants), and I didn't have anywhere better to put them. I took cuttings from those before they had completely died, and those salvaged cuttings have turned into two plants, one of which is pictured above.

As to what it's doing on this list, well, they've been living in the basement for a few months now, and the other day I picked them up to water them and I was like, hey, that's actually really pretty, all dark-green and shiny like that. And they're almost too easy to grow, if you're at all trying: mine get water and fertilizer every two weeks, normal household temperatures and humidity (except when they don't), I've never had a pest on any of them, and they're easy to propagate. They're so fast-growing, it can be difficult to keep them under control, so they require some maintenance, but the fast growth is one of the things I liked about the species originally, so I can't really complain about that too much.


Honorable mentions to:

Haworthia NOID (possibly related to H. truncata)
Hoya bella
Hoya lacunosa
Hoya obovata
Huernia schneideriana
Huernia zebrina
Isolatocereus dumortieri
Myrtillocactus geometrizans
Neofinetia falcata Amami Furan
Pandanus veitchii
Peperomia clusiifolia
Peperomia pereskiifolia
Phalaenopsis NOID
Philodendron gloriosum
Philodendron hederaceum 'Aureum'
Pilosocereus pachycladus

As before, this is not an exhaustive list, whatever it might look like: these are just the plants that I happened to take photos of in September and that are still doing well for me.

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¹ (really more like know)
² I've recently been tempted again, because the ex-job got in two or three three-inch (8 cm) pots, and they're so cute that I just about can't stand it --

-- but so far I've been able to resist.
³ Which has happened both indoors and outdoors, and at different times of the year. It also seems to happen mostly near the growing tip, though I've seen it as low as halfway up the stem. It's relatively infrequent: I think I've only seen it four times? There haven't been any signs of bugs, and the last time, this summer, it happened after a particularly bad falling-over, which makes me think it might be related to physical injury, but on other occasions nothing had happened to it before the appearance of the spots, so I'm stumped. I'll try to get a photo the next time it happens.
⁴ The defoliation isn't necessarily a bad thing: they can go dormant if you withhold water, and then come back to life again in the spring. I don't do that because there's no compelling reason for me to do so. That, and I have trust issues about letting plants go dormant, because I always worry that they won't come back again.
⁵ Supposedly they can be propagated from stem cuttings (though I have no idea how in the hell you'd cut one of these stems) or seeds, and there are on-line sources for seeds, but I doubt I could provide enough light to keep seedlings from etiolating, and I don't especially want to cut my plant down, so we'll let it keep doing what it's doing.