Walkaway: Streptocarpus NOID

I realized, the other day, that I was about to run out of 3" pots for the Anthurium seedlings. (64 of them presently; there are at least that many more coming up after them, and probably twice that number.) So, when a trip to the Post Office turned into an unplanned trip to Iowa City on Monday, we stopped at the ex-job so I could buy 128 3-inch pots for Anthurium seedlings. Which is neither here nor there, but I mention it as a way of explaining why I was in town and saw this:

I know some of you have seen similar plants before, but this was my first Streptocarpus with a yellow throat, and I was impressed. Sadly, the best angle for getting pictures of the flowers was not the best angle for photographing the plant as a whole.

I didn't buy it because, whatever its positive qualities, it was still a Streptocarpus, and I don't think we'd get along any better now than we have before. But there are positive qualities, certainly.

Mouse and Trowel winners announced

Celebratory Gazanias.
So the winners of the Mouse and Trowel awards were announced yesterday, and PATSP won for two categories: Best Indoor Gardening Blog, and Post of the Year (for the Zombie Apocalypse post). I didn't acknowledge it yesterday because:

1) We're still dealing with some dog diarrhea issues here (she has yet to go in the house, which is very, very good, and believe me we're appreciative of our good luck on that particular count, but she's also gotten us up in the middle of the night for two nights running), and the sleep-deprivation that goes with that;
2) I did get the box of plants from the post office I mentioned in yesterday's post, and there was repotting and picture-taking to be done;
3) I didn't exactly know what to say.

The traditional Streptocarpus of Public Recognition.
But so I guess what one does in this situation is, one thanks the people involved. So.

• A big thanks to Colleen Vanderlinden and the M&T sponsors, for setting the whole thing up in the first place. I know a lot of work goes into these things.
• Thank-you to everyone who stopped by PATSP to see whether it was worth voting for during the last couple weeks, and a second thank-you to everybody who decided it was worth your vote.
  
• I know it sounds kind of weird, but I want to acknowledge the other blogs in the Indoor Gardening category: Get in the Garden, Indoor Garden-er, Nature Assassin, and Plant Zone. If you aren't already visiting them, you really ought to be. When people said (as people did, often) that Indoor Gardening was an especially tough category in which to vote, they weren't kidding. Please, go visit them and leave them messages about how they were totally robbed. 'Cause they were.
• Should probably also thank the husband, who makes it possible for me to spend almost all my time blogging or watering, and without whom PATSP would be literally impossible, or at least updated a lot less frequently.
• Finally, I have to thank the zombies, whose tireless dedication and perseverance inspires us all. More brains indeed!

Pretty picture: Streptocarpus saxorum

I first learned this as Streptocarpella, but davesgarden.com now tells me that the correct name is Streptocarpus saxorum. I didn't verify this anywhere, but it seems likely enough.

I've only ever seen S. saxorum for sale in one place ("Store A"), and for some reason they have a lot of it, so I infer that it must not sell very well. Also it's clearly a pain to groom.

List: Houseplants With Fuzzy or Hairy Leaves

This is the first of the list posts, as described last week. I'm not sure how useful or interesting this will be to anybody, but I do get hits from time to time from people who are wanting plants with specific characteristics (plants from Southeast Asia, plants with pink leaves, plants that stay tall and narrow), so I thought I could do some posts on those kinds of topics every once in a while. The reason I didn't start doing this immediately upon having the idea was that I figured at the bare minimum I should have pictures of the plants in question. So I've spent a long time taking pictures. Not finished with that, but finished enough to be able to do this set, so there you go.

I don't intend to make any of these lists exhaustive: all I promise is ten per category. However, I'll add to the text at the end if anybody wants to suggest additional plants in the comments. Also if anybody has any suggestions for ways to make these more useful or interesting that don't involve a lot of additional work, that would be welcome too.

Abutilon x 'Bella Pink.' (flowering maple)


Echeveria pulvinata 'Frosty.'


Gynura aurantiaca. (purple passion plant)


Kalanchoe tomentosa. (panda plant)


Plectranthus oertendahlii.


Saintpaulia ionantha cvv. (African violet)


Saxifraga stolonifera. (strawberry begonia)


Streptocarpus 'Tanager.' (cape primrose)


Tradescantia sillamontana. (kitten ears)


Tolmiea menziesii. (piggyback plant)

My favorite of these plants is easily Saxifraga stolonifera, with Plectranthus oertendahlii and Gynura aurantiaca coming in second and third. All three are pretty easy to grow and propagate (though watering can be a little tricky with Gynura).

Not pictured:
Begonia rex-cultorum (some cvv.)
Cyanotis kewensis (teddy bear plant)
Cyanotis somaliensis (=Tradescantia somaliensis) (also "kitten ears")
Datura metel (angel's trumpet, devil's trumpet, downy thorn apple)
Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender'
Plectranthus amboinicus (Cuban oregano)
Sinningia cvv. (florist's gloxinia)
Tetrastigma voinierianum (chestnut vine)
Tradescantia pallida (purple heart, purple queen)

Air Traffic Controller (Streptocarpus cvv.), Part II

Okay. So, when we left Part I, I was promising jokes, light refreshments, and nectar guides. Help yourself to some soda/cookies/nuts/whatever, and then we'll get started.

Streptocarpus 'Purple Martin,' with really obvious nectar guides.
Nectar guides are, like they sound, markings on the flower which guide pollinators toward the nectar. In some plants (e.g. black-eyed susan, Rudbekia hirta, or Gazania), the flower guide is simply a dark spot¹ around the center of the flower. Other plants make the whole flower dark but make the pollen stand out very brightly (Zantedeschia does this in UV, as does Glechoma hederacea), and still others draw lines or spots which point toward the nectar (Digitalis, Streptocarpus, Geranium, Viola).

Viola NOID, also with really obvious nectar guides.
I admit to being kind of puzzled about this, initially. To my thinking, the flower itself should be advertisement enough. I mean, bees aren't usually that much smaller than a lot of the flowers they pollinate, so if they wandered around on the flower for a second or two they would find the nectar anyway, whether there were "EAT AT JOE'S" signs or not. And it's not like their eyesight is particularly bad, considering that they can clearly manage to see small distant objects pretty accurately in order to find the flowers at all.² So what does the plant get out of this? What, for that matter, do the bees get out of it?

My best guess is that it's worth the effort for the flowers because there are a limited number of bees, and each bee can only visit a limited number of flowers in a day (or season, or whatever). If you want all the flowers in a field to have the best possible chances of being pollinated, it's helpful to make it as obvious as possible where the nectar is, to minimize time spent fumbling around trying to find the nectar. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but if you're competing with other plants for pollinators, any advantage you can get over your competition, everything else being equal, is going to be helpful. If you can get eighty pollinations in an hour when everybody else is only getting seventy-eight, you will inherit the earth. So it can be worth it to become an air traffic controller.

And if you're a bee? Well, obviously you can collect more nectar in a given amount of time if you don't have to fumble around looking for it, which enables you to bring back more nectar, which means you can raise more baby bees. That much is pretty straightforward, actually.

Streptocarpus 'Falling Stars:' slight nectar guides are present, but they're not very pronounced.
This waste-of-time theory has been observed in the wild, on a Delphinium species which produces both normally-colored flowers with nectar guides and albino flowers with no markings: both hummingbirds and butterflies took longer to pollinate the albino flowers. The researchers went the extra step to verify that this was because of the lack of guides, and not just that the hummingbirds and butterflies were less enthusiastic about white flowers, by painting nectar guides on the petals, and painting other petals on the same flower blue, and then timing the pollinators again. They even made sure that the change wasn't just because the pollinators were attracted to the paint, by painting blue flowers that were already blue and comparing the response.³ (ref.: .pdf file)

Having said all this, nectar guides are not a universal thing. Nectar, in fact, is not a universal thing either. Flowers that are pollinated at night don't really need guides, for obvious reasons.⁴ Cultivars don't necessarily have the same nectar guides as their ancestral species, and may not have nectar guides at all. Streptocarpus 'Falling Stars,' above, has much less pronounced nectar guides than 'Purple Martin' or 'Tanager.' We also had a fourth variety at work, 'Snow Bunting,' that was pure white. (Not only could I never get a decent picture of it myself, but I can't find one on-line, either.) I'm fairly sure it didn't have any markings at all.⁵ So nectar guides are not mandatory, just helpful.

As with human air traffic control, certain conventions have arisen to make everything run smoothly.⁶ Nectar guides are often in specific colors, either yellow or "negative ultraviolet."⁷ In some plants, the nectar guide, but not the rest of the flower, changes color when the flower has been successfully pollinated, signalling pollinators to move along to the next flower and not waste their time with this one.

Streptocarpus 'Tanager,' with relatively strong but somewhat shortened nectar guides, relative to 'Purple Martin.'
Streptocarpus nectar guides are relatively obvious and straightforward, at least in most cultivated varieties, though as with most things, if you get to digging around in the literature, you find some cool details. Most cultivated Streptocarpus are hybrids, with the bulk of their genes coming from the lavender-colored S. rexii, which displays very prominent nectar guides and is pollinated by bees. However, not all Streptocarpus species are bee-pollinated: some, like S. dunnii, are pollinated by birds instead, and lack nectar guides altogether. (ref.) Such species also show other signs of being specifically adapted against pollination by bees.^{8, 9}

When I first had the idea of going with "Air Traffic Controller" for Streptocarpus, I wasn't really thinking about that choice much beyond the fact that it uses nectar guides, and I wasn't sure that was really enough to hang the choice of "person" on. Seems kind of minor, you know? But it turns out that this was even more apt than I imagined, because not only do Streptocarpus spp. use nectar guides to point pollinators to nectar, but they also use different colors when talking to different pollinators, and send them different signals about when and where to land. It really was the right choice. I love it when these profiles work out that way. (You can tell I'm excited when the footnotes have footnotes.)

-

Photo credits: all me.

¹ Rudbekia "flowers," as well as those of Gerbera daisies, sunflowers, and many other familiar plants of the Asteraceae, are actually clusters of a large number of tiny, individual flowers. Only the outer ring of true flowers grow petals, which serve to attract the attention of pollinators (though cultivated varieties of these plants may produce inflorescences in which every flower produces petals, as for example in some of the more hideous cultivars of Echinacea^a). Although to us the petals of Rudbekia look uniformly yellow, to a bee the petal changes color about halfway out: the inner part of the petal absorbs ultraviolet and the outer part reflects it.
This is the same kind of thing people see when we look at, say, a Hibiscus that's yellow with a red center, it's just that in the case of the Hibiscus, the difference between the two parts of the flower is in the green part of the spectrum, which we're able to see. The outer part of the flower reflects both red and green (a combination our brains call "yellow"), and the center reflects only red. The same thing is happening in Rudbekia: the outer portion of the petals is reflecting red, green, and ultraviolet, and the inner portion is reflecting only red and green. There are pictures at this site which can show you what you're missing in UV wavelengths. The Rudbekia plan, with UV absorbed in the center and reflected on the outer edge, is typical of a lot of flowers, though that's not the type Streptocarpus uses.
^a I know you like them, jodi, but they don't look right. . . .
² Though their eyesight is not especially good, either: human eyes are much better at seeing detail, whether from far away or close-up, than bee eyes are. So this might be bad logic on my part.
³ This sort of double- and triple-checking, silly though it might sound to the non-scientist, is actually very important, and is called scientific control. Without it, experimental data is difficult or impossible to interpret accurately. For example, suppose I let Nina loose in the house ten different times, and each time I find her hiding in the Aglaonemas. I conclude, oh, anoles are crazy about Aglaonemas, and I post this on the blog and talk it up and publish papers and books about it and eventually it becomes my whole career, the anole-Aglaonema-attraction theory. Then somebody points out that when I did these experiments, all my Aglaonemas were in the same room, and how do I know that Nina didn't just prefer that room for some reason? And somebody else asks if I've tested this on any other anoles, and how can I be sure that Nina doesn't just have some "personal"^a fascination with Aglaonemas? And somebody else wants to know whether I did this all at the same time of day: maybe she was just looking for the brightest/darkest/warmest/quietest/etc. spot she could find. And so on, and the questions keep coming and suddenly nobody wants to buy books about the special bond between anoles and Aglaonemas anymore, and my career is ruined, and the husband, Nina and I all lose the house and Nina's turning tricks in alleys in order to buy crickets, and it's all because I wasn't controlling for these variables in my original experiments.
There are some critics of science that don't understand this concept, many of them failed scientists themselves, and they will complain about how Western science is all about "controlling nature" and "making nature jump through hoops" and what have you, because they're not able to understand that there might be reasons for their experimental results that have nothing to do with their particular pet theory. I'm hoping to bring this up again in a different set of posts, eventually, so I figured I'd get the idea out there for everybody to chew on ahead of time.
^a (In quotes because she's not exactly a "person," so "personal" is probably not the right word to use. Though "anoleal" doesn't sound right, either.)
⁴ Although I will predict that if nobody's found them yet, somebody is going to someday discover a night-blooming flower that uses texture, instead of color, as a nectar guide. There are already day-bloomers that use hairs pointing in a particular direction instead of pigments, for their nectar guides (e.g. Iris). It doesn't seem like that big of a stretch to think that a bat-pollinated flower might reflect sonar differently from different parts, in a way the bat could read. Color, after all, is just differences in the reflection of light, so why not differences in the reflection of sound? If I were an actual botanist, instead of just playing one on the internet, this would be something I'd be interested in going looking for.
⁵ (It was also really boring: I didn't care for it.)
⁶ E.g. saying "niner" instead of "nine," which seems like a quirky affectation until you imagine trying to tell the difference between the spoken words "nine" and "five" while trying to control a large, loud, potentially dangerous piece of machinery, and then all of a sudden it seems totally obvious and kind of brilliant. Similar logic underlies the use of the NATO alphabet (Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo etc.) for letters.
⁷ "Negative ultraviolet" means "absorbs ultraviolet." Since people can't actually see ultraviolet light, we've never had to come up with a name for this color. I mean, to (non-color-blind) people, red is red, and red+green is yellow, and red+green+blue is white, but red+ultraviolet is also just red, to us, and red+green+ultraviolet is also just yellow, because the presence or absence of UV doesn't register on our eyes or brains one way or the other. Bees, on the other hand, do see ultraviolet, and so to a bee, red+green is yellow and red+green+ultraviolet is a different color, which they may not regard as being terribly similar to yellow at all. Weirdly, though, to bees, red+green+ultraviolet is the same color as green+ultraviolet, because they don't see red.^a
This, incidentally, is why none of the great honeybee artists have ever been appreciated for their genius in the human world (Particularly BZbzbZZ and BzbzzbzZZbz, whose work human critics have called "derivative," "uninspired," and "cliched" despite their wide acclaim in the honeybee community. This has led to some frustrated and enraged honeybee artists stinging humans as an act of tragic revenge/suicide, made all the more tragic because they can't tell people apart from one another very well and therefore almost never sting their critics. The life of the honeybee artist is a tortured one.): we're literally not seeing the same pictures.
All of which is to explain what "negative ultraviolet" means: it's a color word we've had to make up for colors that we can't see, and would make little sense to the bees. Though very little makes sense to bees anyway, as you know if you've ever tried to talk to one.
^a Which hopefully answers the question you've never thought about: how come red flowers are so attractive to hummingbirds? What's so special about red? The answer is, it's not that the hummingbirds are necessarily so attracted to red as that, if you're a red-flowering plant, you're basically invisible to the bees, so if you want to get pollinated, you have to either change colors or focus your attention on the non-bee pollinators. If the red-flowering plants are being pushed to adopt ever more hummingbird-friendly designs, then evolution is going to reward hummingbirds that focus ever more tightly on red flowers.
⁸ S. dunnii is also adapted in other ways to pollination by birds: besides having red flowers, the flowers are more tubular in shape, and narrower (suitable for a bird's beak, but not large enough for a bee to crawl in), and all face the plant's one large leaf, which is used by birds as a perch while they collect the nectar from the flowers. The flowers of bee-pollinated species like S. rexii face every direction. (From this paper, which contains a lot of interesting stuff relating to nectar guides and pollination.) There are a few "unifoliate" (= "one-leaf") species of Streptocarpus (S. dunnii, S. grandis, S. pusillis, S. polyanthus), which grow only one leaf, and which are a little too weird-looking to be commonly grown, though they're cultivated by people who are, you know, really into Streptocarpus and are useful in hybridization.
⁹ Species like S. dunnii, if not S. dunnii itself, are probably the original source for the genes which result in red-flowering Streptocarpus hybrids like 'Tanager.' You'll notice that 'Tanager's nectar guides are not as intense as 'Purple Martin's.

Air Traffic Controller (Streptocarpus cvv.), Part I

I don't actually swear off plants all that often. True, there have been a few that pushed me too far, but generally I'm optimistic enough that I stop short of ruling a plant out forever and ever. Originally, when I started writing this, Streptocarpus was going on the list too.


Compared to others on the list, it's not that bad, really. It's not especially buggy, like Hedera helix or Codiaeum variegatum, and it's not perpetually miserable like Philodendron 'Xanadu,' or a dramatic and heartbreaking failure like Calathea ornata. I've just never had a good experience with one, either at home or at work. Or, well, I had one good experience, with one individual plant. It lasted about two months. Then it turned into another bad experience.

My first experience with Streptocarpus was in the fall of 2007, right after starting the greenhouse job. Apparently people here treat streps like annuals and keep them outside, and then pitch them in the fall. Or that was the theory: I've been watching, but have yet to see anybody with one on their front porch or planted in a flower bed. Who knows what they're doing with them really. Nevertheless: if they come in, they come in in the spring.¹ And in August 2007 when I started, there were still a lot of those left over from the spring, on the east side of the building, getting cooked in the morning August sun. Which was kind of dumb, because they don't like direct August sun. (I never claimed we were smart.²)

So we brought them into the greenhouse (looking back at it now, this was probably a bad call: however hot the east side of the building got, the greenhouse got hotter), and then I noticed that some of them had mealybugs. So we pulled them out of the greenhouse into the back room, and squished the visible bugs, and sprayed all kinds of crap on the leaves to kill the invisible bugs. Which left big ugly black spots on the leaves. Not helpful. And the mealybugs persisted anyway, so we were scarring the leaves for nothing. So they got dumped. I don't know how many we threw out. It seemed like a lot at the time.

And then I didn't see any Streptocarpus again until the spring of 2008. We got a bunch of plugs in, and potted them up, and although a few rotted right away, that was fine: we had plenty. And when they started blooming, I thought they were pretty. So I picked out a nice one, all loaded up with buds, of a red-pink variety called 'Tanager,' and took it home. Whereupon it immediately dropped all of its buds and then sat there, sulking, for about six months, doing absolutely nothing.


The plants that stayed behind at work weren't doing any better: the greenhouse got hot, so we moved them outside, and then it rained, and rained, and rained, and flooded, so all of them rotted and died as a result.³

Meanwhile, around September, my 'Tanager' at home suddenly started growing leaves again. Which was great. I mean, leaves aren't as good as flowers, but whatever. I was just thrilled it was doing something. And then come November, we had flowers too. It was great.

It was also temporary: that plant was dead by January 2009. It just kind of went limp one day and wouldn't come back.

So I tried again, in March, this time with the cultivar 'Purple Martin.'⁴ It didn't come to a complete stop once I got it home, like 'Tanager' had: it continued to grow leaves, and it even flowered once or twice.

And then it all went limp at once and wouldn't revive when watered and it was dead by June. I lost a lot of plants between May and June, because we moved to a new house and everything was chaotic, including waterings, but still.⁵


So I've seen Streptocarpus die in all kinds of interesting and unexpected ways, and I'm not a fan, and I don't recommend giving them to anybody unless you're trying to break down their self-esteem or something.⁶ I'm not willing to rule them out entirely, because in the process of writing this profile I've seen some pictures of some really ohmygod beautiful ones, and for the right plant, I might be willing to try again. But we'd have to be talkin' about one charming motherfucking pig Streptocarpus.

But enough about me. You're probably here because you want to know how to care for them, right? Crap. Um. . . .

The other websites make them sound easy enough. Basically like African violets, but easier, is the impression I get from reading around. Here's the general consensus from the net, with particular attention given to places like streptocarpus-info.com and robsviolets.com,⁷ which are trying very hard to give the impression that they know what they're doing, and maybe actually do:

LIGHT: Bright light, with some sun, appears to be ideal, as for example an east or west window. Too much sun will burn the leaves, and they won't flower if they're not getting enough light. One way around both problems is to grow them under fluorescent lights: like African violets, Streptocarpus do well in artificial light.


WATERING: Supposedly, Streptocarpus do best if allowed to dry out between thorough waterings, even to the point of going a little limp (like for Spathiphyllum), though they should never be allowed to stand in water or dry out completely. This is more or less the way I water all of my plants, with a few exceptions, so you'd think I would have been able to manage this, but no. It's also not as simple as that, because as with most other gesneriad species, if you get cold water on the leaves, the leaves will develop spots. (You can bottom-water to get around that, or just use room-temperature water.)

The bigger issue, though, seems to be with soil quality: Streptocarpus must have an extremely light and porous soil or they will develop root rot. (This is my best guess for what went wrong with my plants.) The exact composition varies depending on who is doing the recommending, but both streptocarpus-info.com and robsviolets.com advise a minimum of 50% perlite.


Plants are best in wide, shallow pots than in tall, skinny ones. Azalea pots (which are 3/4 as tall as they are wide) are usually what is recommended, though this is more of a gentle recommendation than a hard and fast rule. The boss's mother at the greenhouse had her plants in pots that were deeper than they were wide, and they were the most amazing Streptocarpus I'd ever seen.

A number of sites repeat the same advice over and over, to water the plant when the top 1/2 inch of soil is dry. My advice would be, don't rely too much on that as a guideline, because the moisture level in that top half inch will indicate very different things in dense, wet soil than it will in light, airy soil. Waiting to see the leaves go slightly limp seems more reliable to me.⁸

HUMIDITY: Humidity levels have a large influence on certain other aspects of care, more so than with a lot of other genera of houseplant. If the plant is in high humidity, it can take more direct sun, and for a longer period, than a plant which is in low-humidity air. They are also more tolerant of underwatering and high temperatures if the air is moist. As a general rule, more humidity is better, the one exception being that tightly crowded plants in high humidity are prone to rot and fungus. So don't increase humidity at the expense of air circulation.

TEMPERATURE: Everybody is in agreement that Streptocarpus do best in a cool room. Definitely keep the temperature below 80F (27C) as much as possible, and aim for somewhere in the range between 55-75F (13-24C). I can more or less vouch for this personally: in the greenhouse, our plants did well if they were near the doors (where they occasionally got cool air) and began to droop and look miserable at about the same temperatures I did.⁹


PESTS: Mealybugs are the only ones I've seen personally, and appear to be the most common problem, though thrips and mites, I'm told, can also affect Streptocarpus. None of the sites I ran into seemed to really emphasize pests as an issue, though, so I expect that cultural issues are the main cause of death. (I should be so lucky, to keep a strep alive long enough for it to get bugs.)

PROPAGATION: I've never managed to make this work out, either, but supposedly these can be propagated much like Saintpaulia or Begonia. The usual recommendation is to take a long, healthy, middle-aged leaf, and make two parallel lengthwise cuts, one just above the midrib and one just below, and then plant the leaves in moist potting soil or vermiculite, with the cut edges in the soil and the original leaf margins sticking up. In theory, this is supposed to result in new plantlets forming at every vein along the cut leaf.

One is also supposed to be able to cut leaves into chevron-shaped sections and plant those in potting soil or vermiculite, and get new plants that way. I've tried both of these methods and neither of them resulted in new plants, though in fairness propagation wasn't really a priority and I wasn't paying terribly careful attention to the conditions. Wedge cuttings are supposed to be more reliable, but the cut-out-the-midrib method is (theoretically) capable of producing more plants, total.


Sticking leaf sections into shallow water, provided that one has a way of keeping them upright, might also be effective, according to this thread at Garden Web. Cutting out the midribs, wrapping the resulting half-leaves in damp paper towels, and enclosing the paper towels in a Ziploc bag, instead of planting them in vermiculite, is also said to work. I've not tried either of these methods at all.

Plants may also be grown from seeds. The seed pods are long, thin, and twisted brown things which are occasionally seen on plants in retail situations. (I saw them at work a time or two; I don't know why I didn't get a picture but I'm sure I must have had a very, very good reason.) I have never seen the seeds directly, but they are supposed to be extremely small, and should sprout under more or less the same conditions as fern spores: fill one side of a clear clamshell-type container with damp vermiculite, sprinkle seeds over the top, don't cover the seeds, close the container and leave it in a bright spot until seeds begin to germinate. I don't know of any vendors who sell Streptocarpus seeds, but I'm sure there must be some out there somewhere.


One may also divide mature plants with multiple crowns; this has the advantage of providing you, in theory, with new plants that already have root systems, but the disadvantage is that it will make you feel like a big, lumbering brute who destroys anything s/he touches, as the stems, leaves, and roots are all very fragile. The plants don't necessarily care about this, though, and divisions will happily re-root in a bright, humid environment even if you didn't manage to retain any roots while dividing.

GROOMING: Grooming is actually kind of a bigger pain than I'd originally thought. Particularly in low humidity, leaves will develop brown edges and tips, which don't really hurt anything but which people generally cut off anyway. Also dead flowers need to be cleared out regularly, if you're lucky enough to get flowers, because otherwise they can begin to rot, which may lead to healthy leaves. These are not especially big issues. But:

Plants also fill their pots with roots very rapidly, in the improbable event that they're happy with you, which means that repotting and/or dividing is necessary for proper maintenance. Exactly how often this needs to happen will vary, but most of the sites I looked at that mentioned this said either every six to twelve months. That's a lot of repotting. The typical recommendation seems to be to move plants up to larger pots until they hit a 5-6" pot, and then divide plants and keep putting them back in 5-6" pots thereafter. I don't know what happens if you keep moving up to larger and larger pots. Probably they die. Dying seems to be a skill. At work, we did plant up some hanging baskets with four plugs to a ten-inch hanging basket -- some of these did fine, though what usually happened was that one or two of the plants would die, leaving the basket lopsided. A ten-inch hanging basket in which all four plants survived, particularly when all four are blooming, is definitely pretty, though, so I sort of understand going to the trouble anyway, even if it rarely worked out well enough to justify the work.


Flushing soil out with water from time to time is also sort of a big deal, apparently, though I'm a little surprised by this because it seems like you wouldn't have the plant in the same soil long enough for fertilizer salts to build up to the point of being a problem. Apparently not, though.

FEEDING: The people who are serious about growing streps recommend a high-phosphorous fertilizer from spring until fall, and then either no or very little fertilizer from fall to spring. The precise formulation doesn't seem to be particularly important: I saw recommendations for 7-9-5 and 10-30-10.¹⁰

The "person" to go along with Streptocarpus, air traffic controller, wasn't chosen because air traffic controllers sit around all day doing nothing at all, then suddenly fly into a panic and collapse, like the plant does. (At least, your better air traffic controllers don't.)

On the contrary, real air traffic controllers have to be unusually calm, and able to keep a clear head in stressful situations, and it's a difficult job to get in part because there are tests in place to weed out the people who are likely to fly into a panic and collapse. So the temperament could hardly be more wrong for this plant. However: Streptocarpus are actually one of the better houseplant examples of the phenomenon of "nectar guides," which does work as an air traffic controller reference (or at the very least it's close enough for PATSP). We'll pick up on Thursday with a discussion of what nectar guides are and why they matter. Jokes and light refreshments will be provided. Those of you who already know about nectar guides, please try not to spoil it for everybody else.

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Photo credits: all my own except for the Streptocarpus fruit picture, which came from LucaLuca via Wikipedia. I would have liked to include pictures of other varieties, but I've only ever directly encountered four ('Tanager,' 'Purple Martin,' 'Falling Stars,' 'Snow Bunting'), one of which ('Snow Bunting') photographs badly, and I couldn't find public domain / Creative Commons pictures I liked. There will be a picture of 'Falling Stars' in Part II.

¹ For the spring of 2009, we'd ordered them again, but they didn't arrive when they were supposed to, nor did anyone at our supplier seem to know where they were, and our supplier was actually buying them from someone else, and they (our supplier) couldn't contact anybody at the other place. In the end, we had to just assume that the other place had been a victim of the crappy economy and had gone out of business. We didn't have to pay for the Streptocarpus plugs we didn't receive, but there was also no backup plan from the supplier, either. So we just didn't get plugs, period, see footnote 4.
² (Or, if I did, I totally take it back.)
³ "All" might be an exaggeration: I don't remember whether there were any survivors. We lost the overwhelming majority of them, in any case, and none survived to the following spring, so one way or another, bad things happened to them.
⁴ Although the supplier didn't deliver any to us, we were able to get some from the boss's mother, who had some amazing, huge ones from the 2008 batch, or maybe earlier than that, which we divided. I hated dividing them: however careful I was trying to be, they were incredibly brittle, and they didn't break in particularly good spots, and I was sure when it was all over that I'd just butchered the hell out of her plants and killed them for no good reason, that nothing was going to be salvageable. I was overreacting, though, because the same percentage loss was about the same as we would have gotten from plugs. The 'Purple Martin' I bought was one of these divisions.
⁵ Worse, I think the streps were setting a bad example for the Saintpaulias, because around this time all of the Saintpaulias, which had previously been looking a little unhappy but were still basically functional, started falling to pieces as well.
⁶ If so, be advised: there are cheaper and more effective ways to do this than showering the person with difficult houseplants. Many people, I'm told, don't even care that much whether they can keep a plant alive or not.
⁷ Though robsviolets.com is immediately suspicious on account of saying things like "They are a great flowering houseplant for people without 'green thumbs.'" In my experience, there are no good flowering houseplants for people without "green thumbs," and if there were, Streptocarpus would definitely not be one of them. I should also note while I'm here that "like Saintpaulia, but easier" is backwards in my experience, which is reflected in the higher difficulty level for Streptocarpus. Your mileage may vary.
⁸ However: leaves will wilt when the plant is too wet or too dry. Spathiphyllums are like this too. So, don't just take the leaves' word for it that they're dry: check the top of the soil too, and the weight of the plant, before reaching for the watering can.
⁹ Although I hadn't really been particularly prone to heat exhaustion before the greenhouse job, I definitely was once I'd been there for a while. Although my psychiatrist told me it wasn't really known to cause heat sensitivity, I suspect now that the reason behind this is the wellbutrin I'm on for depression. It's possible that switching to a different medication might also handle my depression fine without the heat thing, but odds are I'd just have a different set of side effects to deal with, and those side effects might be worse, plus switching to a different medication might well not control the depression at all, which would definitely be worse. The heat thing was a good percentage of the reason I left the job, though there were lots of other reasons.
¹⁰ I also saw a recommendation for 10-10-10, which would probably work if you wanted it to, but it looks like you'd be throwing away a lot of the nitrogen and potassium that way.

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

I will admit that this particular batch is not my best. I've pretty well run out of new plants to get pictures of. The next batch, 19, is better than this, and there's always at least one pretty spectacular picture in each set, but there's sort of an overall let's call it a lull, from 18 to 23 or so.

What happened around Part 23 was, I realized that none of you guys are going back and looking at all the previous pictures anyway, so I can go back to plants I've gotten pictures of already and nobody will know, so Parts 24 and 25 ought to knock your socks off. Seriously. You will no longer be able to wear socks. But right now, we're at 18 and I know we've all seen better and I'm deeply sorry or something.

So let's hurry up and get this over with.

(The previous transmitted light posts, many of which are considerably better than this, can be found here.)

Hoya carnosa 'Chelsea.' The venation for thick leaves like this often wind up reminding me of clouds.

Syngonium podophyllum 'Neon.' There's an odd asymmetry to the symmetry here. I like it. It's different.

Homalomena cv. 'Perma Press.' Not terribly impressed with Homalomena cvv. as houseplants, but I will say for them that they have very graceful veins.

Fragaria cv. 'Fort Laramie.' I remember this as being a much better picture when I first took it. Either my memory is wrong, or something went badly awry during the cropping and editing process.

Streptocarpus 'Purple Martin.' I really am going to write that Streptocarpus profile someday, I promise. I've had some difficulty with it, in that I find it difficult to be interested.

Phlebodium aureum 'Blue Hare.' Maybe I should get one of these sometime. No idea how they'd do inside, and the growth habit is sort of wild and random, but the venation is so cool.

Ipomoea batatas 'Blackie.' Either this one or the Polypodium is my favorite from this group, I think: there's a lot of interesting detail in the full-size view, and it's a new color for these transmitted light pictures, kinda.

Anthurium andraeanum 'Pacora,' spathe. This didn't work out at all like I wanted. It might look a little better in full size.

Alternanthera cv. 'Partytime.' Interesting colors, though no individual leaf is all that impressive on its own: you sort of have to see the whole plant at once.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Splish Splash.' I've become somewhat disillusioned with coleus lately: I kept one indoors for over a year, and it didn't seem so terrible, though it was kind of leggy. Then I went kind of nuts buying them, discovered I didn't have anywhere to plant them, and they've had to suffer outdoors in tiny pots or inside without enough light. I'm not sure whether I'm going to try to keep them going through the winter or not: I know it's possible, but it's questionable whether this would be worth the trouble, when coleus is so easy to get in the spring. If I do keep some, 'Splish Splash' is likely to be one of the ones I keep.

Memorial Day

Well, the move has been a done deal for a month now, and I think we've got a handle on how many plants survived. The current census lists the plant population here at 568. It looks like we lost seven from the move, and only one of those hurts, as the others were either duplicated many times over, or not doing terribly well before the move and already kind of mentally written off. I thought it would be only appropriate to take a moment to honor the memories of the fallen, before we go on. Readers with delicate constitutions may wish to look away:

Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana.' January 2008 to June 2009. Cause of death unclear.

Streptocarpus 'Purple Martin.' March 2009 to June 2009. Cause of death believed to be repeated drought.

Saintpaulia ionantha cv. "the Dieffenbachia-leafed one." June 2008 to June 2009. Cause of death: drought. Survived by three clones.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Quarterback.' April 2008 to June 2009. Cause of death: extended drought.

Sansevieria trifasciata 'Bantel's Sensation.' February 2007 to June 2009. Cause of death: fall repotting combined with winter overwatering, rot, root loss. Survived by four leaf-section cuttings, none of which look likely to last more than a month themselves.

Saintpaulia ionantha NOID. November 2007 to June 2009. Cause of death: drought. Survived by three clones.

Not pictured: Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Electric Lime.' May 2009 to June 2009. Cause of death unknown.

Random plant event: six-petaled Streptocarpus 'Purple Martin'

Normally, Streptocarpus have flowers with five petals (as well as other gesneriads, like Saintpaulia), which are partly fused into a tube (not true of most Saintpaulias, though semi-tubular Saintpaulias do exist). This particular specimen lost count at some point and wound up with six. It wasn't the only flower on this plant that did this, but there weren't very many sixes before it reverted to fives. (I know it was the same plant because, naturally, I wound up buying it and bringing it home.)

I don't know that this really means anything much, but I'm curious about what would have made this happen, and especially what could have made it happen that would be easily reversible, as this obviously was. [shrug]

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

Yet another round of transmitted light photos. (The previous batches can be found here.) These were all taken of work plants, back in October. (Yeah, that's right. Sometimes I plan posts three months ahead. You got a problem with that?)

Strelitzia nicolai. Almost seems shameful that the plant would evolve to have these leaves get ripped apart by the wind. I mean, I get why. But still. They're so pretty.

Asplenium nidus. I love the picture; I'm not so good at growing the plant. Alert readers will notice that this bears a striking resemblance to the header photo.

Streptocarpus 'Purple Martin.' Difficult picture to get, and now that I see it, I'm not convinced that it was worth the effort, but I've posted worse.

Philodendron 'Autumn,' new leaf. This one looks especially good if viewed full size in a new window.

Alternanthera dentata 'Purple Knight.' An older leaf might have made for a more interesting picture, but for some reason when I tried to take a picture of an older leaf, I couldn't get the camera to focus properly.

Synadenium grantii. I'd never really given the matter much thought before, but you can see in this picture that there are actually two separate layers of red splotches: one's in focus here, and the other one is way out of focus on the other side of the leaf.

Cordyline fruticosa 'Bolero.' The file name identifies this as 'Bicolor' because I was briefly confused about what I was taking a picture of. Looking at the photo, though, it has to be 'Bolero.'

Calathea fasciata. (ID tentative) The problem with transmitted light photography, obviously, is that leaves like Calatheas, which are green on top and purple on bottom, end up a muddy mess. But the vein structure is still there, and is pretty impressive. It's at least not something anybody would ordinarily notice.

Musa 'Rowe Red.' No visible spider mite damage, either. It's a miracle!

Microsorum musifolium. And I think I have a new favorite picture.