Random plant event: Rhipsalis baccifera

I did not know that Rhipsalis baccifera berries were purple, until a couple weeks ago when I saw these at the ex-job.

I was surprised, because the berries on my NOID Rhipsalis,¹ as well as the berries on Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa, are both white. (P. ramulosa is apparently less closely related to the genus Rhipsalis than it looks, but I didn't know that until very recently either.) That's not that much to go on, but it seemed reasonable to think that the other Rhipsalis species probably also had white berries. Live and learn. Apparently some of them have black berries, even.

These are the flowers:

Not dramatic and flashy, obviously, but apparently they get the job done.

Here's a wider view, to give you some perspective on the size:

So there's that.

In other news: I may have an announcement of sorts relatively soon, but 1) it's not what you're thinking so don't go getting all excited,² and 2) I didn't want to make any announcements on April Fool's Day, for what I would hope would be obvious reasons. So let's say sometime in the next week.

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¹ An Exotic Angel plant, so the ID is kind of inherently questionable. According to their website, it's Rhipsalis micrantha, but the pictures of R. micrantha that show up in search engines don't look much like my plant. The pictures do look like the photo on the EA website, but that could just mean that EA misidentified it, something they're extremely prone to do, when they bother to identify things at all.
Having said that: it's not like I can come up with any Rhipsalis species that look like what I've got at all. The only photos I could find that looked like my plant were either on the EA website itself, or plants that looked like they were probably EA plants before purchase. So I'm content to just call it a NOID.
² (or somber: it's not that announcement either)

Unfinished business: Pseudorhipsalis, Monstera

A combination of unusually bad time management, a Flash-based online game, an upcoming plant profile that sometimes seems like it needs to be a two-parter and sometimes doesn't, a broken windshield, and probable but unconfirmed acute polyurethane-fume poisoning have left me with no pre-written posts at the same time as I need to start another plant-watering cycle, so the posts may be kind of lame for a while.

Before you ask: the windshield was self-broken on Saturday, from the inside, because it turns out that a space that should have been 8 feet long was actually more like 7 feet and 11.75 inches. And of course it happened at the stroke of 5 PM, when nobody was available to fix it or rent us a replacement.

Meanwhile. The husband has also been applying polyurethane to the floors in the house in small sections for a few days, which means we've been living with a low level of fumes for as long. Like most smells, you get used to it pretty quickly and then don't smell it anymore, but then on Sunday night he did the whole kitchen all at once and my eyes sort of felt burny, I had trouble concentrating, and I felt sick to my stomach though I didn't actually throw up. We'd go somewhere to escape the smell for a few hours, except the last time we did that, we broke the windshield. So.

Anyway. I mentioned a few posts back, in one of the transmitted light posts, that the Pseudorhipsalis ramulosas at work had been looking really huge and incredible (comparatively speaking) since we'd gotten them in almost two years ago, and promised to provide a picture, so here you go.


It may or may not be your particular cup of tea, but you can't deny that it's at least very large and colorful. I noticed that some of the branches seem to be drying up again -- this is something they also did last year, and we never figured out why that was or what we were supposed to do about it.

Also, I'd promised better pictures of the "Philodendron 'Cheesecake'" that was actually Monstera deliciosa, and I have delivered on half of that: I got more pictures. Whether or not they're better is debatable; it still might not be sufficient to prove that they aren't Epipremnum aureum, as was suggested in comments, but I think if you open them in a new window and inspect the petioles, you can at least see that they are not grooved from top to bottom, as they would be for Epipremnum.








I'm still not especially inclined to buy one, though the price is not terrible and I admit I did think about it a little. Instead, on this trip, I bought a three-inch cactus that I hope is a Pachycereus marginatus and then, at a different place, a four-inch Zamia NOID. Pictures of which may wind up being tomorrow's post.

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

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to congratulate me on the Blotanical wins (1st place for Best Iowa Blog, and then three third place finishes: Best Educational Blog, Best Blog Name, and Best Container Gardening Blog) yesterday. I was kind of unhappy with the event overall because very few people I voted for won: with five options per category, if I'd just voted randomly, without paying any attention to the quality of the blogs at all, 20% of my votes would have been for the first place winners. Instead, I only managed 17%. I apologize to the people I voted for, and promise not to do it again next year.

But so anyway, back to regular blog business:

I'm working on two plant profiles simultaneously, which is keeping me busier than normal. No idea when either will be done. In the meantime, it's been a while since I did one of these, I guess, so -- let's look at some leaves.

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

Cissus rhombifolia 'Ellen Danica.' What to say about this one? It's a leaf. A green leaf. That's about it.

Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa. (Previously identified at PATSP as a NOID Disocactus, but that is incorrect.) Believe it or not, this is in focus. I'm getting to be really fond of this plant, after seeing what the ones where I used to work have been up to: lots of berries, and they've turned bright red, more or less the color of this picture, and are much larger now. (I'll put up a picture sometime.) Not that anybody's buying them, still, but they are visually quite stunning, and are much better-looking than when we first got them in. Nobody appreciates the weird plants. *sigh*

Dracaena thalioides (previously Pleomele thalioides). Another green leaf. It's a prettier shade of green than the Cissus, though. It's also unusual for a Dracaena to have a midrib the way that this one does.

Canna NOID. This one I like. Plain, but detailed enough to be cool, and the lines are graceful and pleasant. If this doesn't do it for you, I've got another Canna picture coming up in some other set of transmitted light pictures that is pretty stunning. (Even I was impressed.) But this isn't bad on its own.

Fagus sylvatica 'Purple Fountain.' I liked this one well enough to use it as the header photo until fairly recently. The leaves really are purple: you just have to see them by reflected light, instead of transmitted light.

Plectranthus oertendahlii. I'm really liking this as a houseplant lately. I got a few cuttings from a Garden Webber in a trade a little over a year ago, and they've turned into what would be a really full 6" plant, if I hadn't cut a lot of it back to propagate. It's more or less what you'd get if you crossed Plectranthus verticillatus with Saxifraga stolonifera: a fuzzy green trailing vine with veins highlighted in gray.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Quarterback.' When I had this plant indoors, it grew nice big leaves that were sort of lime green, more or less the color of this picture. The ones I moved outdoors, earlier this summer, have small leaves which have turned sort of gold and are way less attractive. I've learned from working on a Solenostemon scutellarioides profile that it's not unusual for a cultivar to change color or habits depending on growing conditions, age, soil fertility, and various other things.

Perilla frutescens 'Magilla Purple.' For some reason, I remembered this being a really bad picture, but it's not so terrible. I remember I had to try more than once, though. Maybe the first attempts were really bad.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Kong Aline.' (Just to get this out of the way: I know the picture is kind of unimpressive. It needed to get the brightness tweaked a bit more than it did, I'm afraid.) 'Kong Aline' is the joke name I gave a sport of 'Kong Rose' I found at work in May, and subsequently bought. It's still here, and still alive, but I haven't been able to give it enough light, so it's not really clear whether this color pattern is stable. It's also been trying really, really hard lately to flower, which could signal the beginning of the end.

Zingiber malaysianum. The way light shines through the leaves was most of the reason why I bought this one. So far it's doing . . . okay. Not great. There's new growth, but some of the old growth has gotten dry margins. I didn't up-pot it as quickly as it would have liked, so it got overly dry a few times; I'm hoping that's all the dry-margins thing means. Obviously this would be my favorite picture from this batch.

Random plant event: Disocactus seedlings

UPDATE 4 Aug 2009: The plant in this post is in fact not a Disocactus. What it is, is a Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa. It was sold to us (where I used to work) as a Disocactus, so that's what I called it. I would rewrite the whole post to reflect this, but that would be an awful lot of work to go to for an old post that nobody is likely to read anyway, so instead I'm saying this. Sorry for any inconvenience and/or confusion.

First the Disocactus flowered. Then the flowers became fruits, from which I extracted seeds.

I didn't know quite what to do with the seeds once I had them, but I figured, well, what the hell, and decided to try to plant them. But how to separate them? (As shown in the fruits post, the seeds inside the fruits are suspended in a gooey, sticky, snotlike substance, making it very difficult to separate them from each other to plant.)

What I wound up doing was, I washed off a few seed globs into a drinking glass full of water and stirred them as hard as I could, until the seeds had mostly separated from one another. I then poured the water out onto some vermiculite and waited. That was about two months ago.

The first few seedlings appeared in late October; now we have at least twenty.





This is a lot more plants than we will ever sell, especially considering that we still have a good six hanging baskets and another 28 rooted cuttings of them. If they had cool flowers like Epiphyllum or something, then maybe we'd sell them eventually, but this -- this is overkill. So no idea what we'll wind up doing with them, but it's awfully sporting of them to play along anyway. I'll see if I can come up with a way to reward them for their effort, once they're a little more mature.

Random plant event: Disocactus fruits

UPDATE 4 Aug 2009: The plant in this post is in fact not a Disocactus. What it is, is a Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa. It was sold to us (where I used to work) as a Disocactus, so that's what I called it. I would rewrite the whole post to reflect this, but that would be an awful lot of work to go to for an old post that nobody is likely to read anyway, so instead I'm saying this. Sorry for any inconvenience and/or confusion.

This is a Disocactus. Maybe. Still shaky and hesitant on the ID: posters earlier suggested that the more accurate name might be either Rhipsalis or Pseudorhipsalis, and maybe that's true. I have yet to see any really good photos that make me think that it's definitely anything, so for the time being we're going to keep calling them Disocactus. (Among other reasons, that's what the tags for them that I printed up at work say they are, so I have a certain personal interest in seeing them remain Disocactus.) Anyway. I wrote about them previously, because they had all flowered and that seemed noteworthy.


This is the flower, along with, underneath it, a couple of fruits. I had originally assumed that the fruits would probably only contain one or two seeds, not for any good reason, really. I guess I just figured the fruits were pretty small already, so the seeds would probably take up most of the volume of the fruit. Like an olive or something.


This, then, is what happens when a ripe fruit is squeezed a little bit. Seeds start popping out of one end. The overall texture and feeling is kind of like squeezing jelly out of a plastic bottle.

This is cool, but we're not done yet, because the gunk in which the seeds are embedded has interesting properties of its own:


The gunk is almost exactly the texture of snot. Or slug mucus. Something that is simultaneously very viscous and sticky, but becomes slippery if dampened (making it fun to try to get off). The whole point in touching them in the first place was because I wanted to plant them, and that didn't work out well at first: anything I tried to plant them in would just stick to my finger.

Eventually, I resorted to washing them off in a glass of water. The seeds from any particular pod all stay stuck together in water, like a phlegm globber, so, after adding several more, I stirred hell out of the water and then pulled out the -- I guess you'd call them "rinds?" This did sort of separate the seeds from one another well enough to make them plantable: I basically then just poured the water out on vermiculite, and we'll see whether that's good enough.

The interesting part of that was that the seeds actually made the water noticeably thicker to stir. Not by a lot, but enough that you'd have no trouble telling the difference between a glass of ordinary water and a glass of water that had had Disocactus seeds stirred in it and then filtered out. This is impressively viscous glop. It really just cries out for an industrial application of some kind. I have no ideas about this personally, but there's got to be something.

It's all kind of beside the point, because they're very easy to propagate from cuttings anyway (like Epiphyllum, which it resembles). I in fact have one at home, which came from a cutting of one of the work plants. Seeds are hardly necessary.

But: they're fun.

Random Plant Event: Disocactus (?) NOID blooming

UPDATE 4 Aug 2009: The plant in this post is in fact not a Disocactus. What it is, is a Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa. It was sold to us (where I used to work) as a Disocactus, so that's what I called it. I would rewrite the whole post to reflect this, but that would be an awful lot of work to go to for an old post that nobody is likely to read anyway, so instead I'm saying this. Sorry for any inconvenience and/or confusion.

This is a Disocactus. I initially misunderstood it as Discocactus, but no, Discocactus, though it actually does exist, is a different thing. (It looks more or less like a regular barrel-type cactus, with spines and ribs and all. Another way to tell the difference: when grown in good conditions, sometimes a Discocactus has to boogie oogie oogie 'til it just can't boogie no more. Though this is rare.)


At least, I thought it was a Disocactus, because that's how it was sold to us. And also 'cause WCW said it was, and she's almost always right about these things.

They're nice enough in their own right as plants, of course. In full sun, they change colors from green to red, which is kind of pretty (though I think it takes a lot of sun), and if they'd been just a slight bit smaller and cheaper I probably would own one, but I don't.

We also had a customer in a while back who wanted to know what kind of Disocactus we have, because apparently they come in kinds. There are some that have red flowers, and some that have yellow, or white, and some of the flowers are big, or small, or etc. I had no idea. Neither did WCW.



Then recently, they started growing little bumps along the edges of the leaves, which was weird but not really noteworthy: for all I knew this was an alternate way they budded off new stems (or leaves, or whatever they are).

Then the bumps turned into flowers. So now we know: white. Also tiny. I'm a little disappointed that they're not more dramatic, but at the same time, well, it's something new.


It may yet be, WCW's considerable expertise aside, that these aren't technically in the Disocactus genus: I wasn't able to find anything that looked like these in an admittedly hasty and non-thorough search. I found better likenesses among the Rhipsalis and Epiphyllums. I'm not betting against WCW: I expect this just means I should do a more comprehensive search.