Unfinished business: NOID ferns

The original plant was a hitchhiker in the pot of a now-gone Rhipsalis NOID, which I carefully plucked out and potted up on its own, and it went from this

to this

in a year and a half. (And just so we're clear about how much growth that was, the pot in those pictures went from 4" / 10 cm to 8" / 20 cm.)

Not quite a year after that, I saw a couple scale insects on it, so I cut all the foliage off and sprayed some rubbing alcohol around or something. Two or three weeks later:

18 March 2014.
And a mere two months after getting cut back:

26 April 2014.
Just monstrous. I've recently learned that there's one exception to the remarkable speed, though.

I'm not sure when it started producing spores; my guess is the summer of 2013. I didn't necessarily want more of these plants (where would I even put another one of these plants, after all?), but you know me: I can't help myself. So I sprinkled some spores around in one of the Anthurium germination containers, and also in a separate sealed plastic container containing some potting soil, as an experiment. I think this was in September 2013.

And nothing happened. I'd done the same thing with Cyrtomium falcatum, earlier, and nothing happened then either, so I concluded that I was destined for greater things than propagating ferns, and forgot about it all.

So when something started coming up in the germination containers with the Anthurium seeds, it took me a little while to figure out. They didn't look much like the fern I'd started with: the fronds were so thin they were practically transparent, and the wrong color besides -- sort of a pale apple-green instead of the blue-green of the fully-grown plant. Wasn't 100 percent sure what I had, but when in doubt, pot it up and see what happens.¹ So I potted up a banker's dozen² in individual three-inch pots on 20 September 2015. I don't have any photos of them until 24 November; I'm guessing I didn't want to put the time into taking pictures if I didn't know for sure what they were or whether they were going to live. By November, though, it was clear they were ferns:

24 November 2015.
And it quickly became clear that these were the quick-growing monster-type ferns. Ten weeks later:

3 February 2016.
And by now, late April, they've grown so much that it's hard to get a picture of them all at once:

25 April 2016.
They've grown so much that they're already bending their pots out of shape

and their rhizomes are jumping over the pots' sides.

So I should maybe be thinking about moving them up to 4-inch pots already.

You may have noticed that I've avoided saying what they are. I've had some trouble settling on an ID. Obviously the original plant, as a hitchhiker, didn't have an ID on it. I thought for a while maybe it was Phlebodium aureum,
though I wasn't sure, because the only P. aureum I had to compare it to was my (since-deceased) P. aureum 'Mandianum,' which has a similar color but much rufflier fronds. There were other reasons to doubt the ID too; I no longer remember what they were, though.

And then I had an anonymous commenter do a drive-by to tell me that it was obviously a Laua'e fern (Hawaiian Wart fern), Phymatosorus grossus. Image searches seemed to argue against Phymatosorus, which has glossier, greener fronds, and also Phymatosorus is supposed to have a pleasant scent, which my plants do not. The arrangement of the sporangia seems subtly different, too, though it's harder to say exactly what's different about them.

In any case. After comparing pictures of the venation on Phlebodium aureum 'Blue Hare' (here) with the venation on my fern, I'm about 75% confident that I have P. aureum. If any fern experts are reading this and feel like weighing in, feel free. I'd look into it harder myself, but I'm kind of busy trying to figure out what to do with all these.³

-

¹ The ones in the separate sealed plastic container with soil also started coming up at about the same time, which either means that they just take two years to develop from spores, or some freaky coincidence was happening. 'Cause they weren't in very similar conditions, aside from the high humidity: different temperatures, different light sources, different light durations.
² (Most internet sources will tell you a banker's dozen is eleven, but in this case I mean ten. The joke works for any number under twelve.)
³ (I don't even know what to call them. I mean, they're not seedlings if there were no seeds, right? As far as I could find from, admittedly, a kind of half-assed search, there's no botanical, technical, or horticultural word for ferns analogous to "seedling." Any fern experts in the audience are invited to answer that question too; in the meantime I guess I'm going with "sporeling.")

Random plant event: NOID NOID

The scale infestation continues. It is in fact looking like what people say is true: once you have scale, you always have scale. It's never very many insects, they're never on very many plants, I can occasionally even remove an infestation from an area entirely by repeated spraying with rubbing alcohol.¹ But it always seems to move somewhere else, and always seems to return to the plants I removed it from. Between the scale and the sunburn and rot caused by putting plants outside before they were ready, I'm on the verge of throwing out all my Agaves, Furcraeas, Manfredas, and Mangaves and being rid of those genera forever, the same way I abandoned Hedera and Codiaeum to the spider mites years ago. I mean, look what happened to my Agave lophantha 'Quadricolor' after two days outside:

September 2013:

April 2014:

I did salvage an unrotted offset from it, and I had a previous offset (taken over a year ago, when I'd thought the scale might lead me to throw the plant out), but that's small consolation for losing a specimen as large and pretty as it was. Especially since the offsets will likely die or get thrown out before reaching that size themselves.

But we're not here to mourn the Agave; we're here to marvel at the recuperative powers of my NOID fern.²

I discovered scale on several of the fronds around the beginning of March, maybe the end of February. I started cutting off any fronds that had obvious scale, and any fronds that were close enough to have had honeydew dripped on them. As I progressed, I realized that 1) this would result in me cutting off most of the fronds, and 2) any fronds that I left would probably have enough undetectable scale on them to launch a new round of infestation, so I'd have hacked my fern to bits but accomplished nothing. So, I cut all the fronds off down to the rhizomes. Maybe the plant would come back, maybe it wouldn't, but at least the scale would be gone.³

I'm not certain about the date, but my best guess is that I cut the fronds off on 28 February. By 18 March, new ones were coming up all over:

And by yesterday morning (26 April), it was back to what it had looked like before, pretty much:

That's an incredibly fast comeback.

I don't know yet whether this had the intended effect of getting rid of all the scale. I haven't seen any yet, but then I've also been too busy and too scared to look for it. I'm impressed with the plant's recovery either way, though.

-

¹ If you want to recommend that I try pesticides, especially imidacloprid: been there. Done that. More than once. It costs too much for something that works as slowly and incompletely as it does.
² It was a hitch-hiker in a Rhipsalis I bought years ago. Took it out, nursed it along, and it is now much, much larger than the Rhipsalis ever dreamed of getting. Because the fern wasn't supposed to be in the pot, though, there was no ID for it. My best guess is that it's a Phlebodium of some kind, possibly P. aureum. When I expressed this opinion in a previous post, someone popped up to tell me that it was cleeeeearly a Hawaiian wart fern (Microsorum scolopendria or Phymatosorus grossus) and not a Phlebodium at all. Based on the lack of scent (M. scolopendria fronds are supposed to smell like vanilla.) and the less-orderly arrangement of its spores, I'm pretty certain it's not that particular Microsorum (or Phymatosorus). Though I don't rule out that it could be a Microsorum (or Phymatosorus).
³ In theory. I was assuming that the scale wouldn't be able to survive on the hairy rhizomes long enough for the plant to grow new fronds. This may or may not be a good assumption.