Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia

Okay, well, the third part of the Anthurium update just doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. So we may as well look at the other plants for a bit. A few of them are even doing things.

A very, very long time ago, in the halcyon days of August 2011, I managed to obtain some leaflets of Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Zamicro' or 'Mini' or something like that. (The cultivar wasn't identified.) And I tried to start some new plants from the leaflets, as you do. Which went well, for once, and a year later I had actual plants, in tiny four-pack cells.

(June 27)
Three years after getting the leaflets, they're all still in four-packs, because I am terrified of repotting them. Repotting Zamioculcas, for me, has always gone badly, and although I think I know why these are doing well when previous Zamioculcas haven't,¹ I am still scared to mess with them in any way. They're growing, I'm happy, they're happy: why fix what ain't broke?

And that's how things have been for quite a while. Then a couple weeks ago, I learned that if anything, I have underestimated how happy they are, because behold:

(From June 13, plus or minus a day.)

That's the first one. I think there are two more on the way. Excitingly, they appear to be at more or less the same stage of development, which means that I might wind up with two flowers blooming at the same time, and you know what happens when I have two aroids blooming at the same time.

(June 27)
Though as long as it takes Zamioculcas to grow from a cutting, I can't imagine what slow kind of torture it is to grow them from seed. You know I'm going to try regardless, but I'm going to be crossing my fingers at the same time in hopes that the pollination fails.

The spathe never really get any prettier than it is in those first couple photos:

(This photo and the next: June 27)
But the way the spadix dries up is sort of interesting.

So that's something that happened. I'll let you know if I get any pollination. As much as I hope I don't wind up with seedlings, I am kind of interested in seeing what the berries and seeds actually look like.

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¹ A gritty, fast-draining soil mix, and shallow soil for the size of the plants. Previously, I'd been using pots with standard dimensions (as wide as tall), and regular potting mix. Short-term, this was usually fine, but given enough time, eventually something would happen and they'd rot.

Unfinished business: various

As I predicted, the Cryptbergia seeds (or at least "seeds" -- I'm not sure we ever definitively proved seediness) have all failed, due to some combination of fungus and incompetence. Womp-womp.

Not much else is going on here, really, which I guess makes it a good time to look through the back posts and see if I have any updates about them. All these are from September 2012; turns out there were no posts in October or November that require follow-ups.


Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture, with bonus Question for the Hive Mind (1 Sep 2012)

Nothing ever came of the Canna seed. Not really surprised by this, though. More surprising: the Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' has more or less completely taken over the terrarium. I think this is mostly because it's more drought-tolerant than the Episcia 'Coco' was. (I have a tough time knowing when to water the terrarium, because it's less convenient to actually touch the soil, and every time I open the lid I'm convinced that Nina is going to take that opportunity to jump out and run into the living room, where Sheba will eat her. So I don't open the top very much.) The Peperomia puteolata is still present, as is the Murraya paniculata seedling, but overall, it's kind of a mess. And I sort of wish that the crickets didn't eat the plants so enthusiastically. I mean, I understand: they're crickets. It's what they do. But it's just depressing, with all the dead leaves, holes, ragged edges, and what have you. Perhaps I am not emotionally stable enough to keep anoles in a planted terrarium.



Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica (4 Sep 2012)

It's taken a while, but the third leaf is now slightly bigger than the second.

Sansevieria cylindrica.
Come back in late 2016 and I may have a fourth leaf to show you. CAN YOU HANDLE THE EXCITEMENT.¹


Random plant event: Rhipsalis NOID (12 September 2012)

The Rhipsalis seedlings are still alive, and are slightly larger than they used to be. This is neither unusual nor unexpected, but it's a thing that happened. I wound up potting all the surviving seedlings into two pots together, because it seemed like they were likely to give me a really sparse, uninteresting plant if I didn't put several of them together, and also because it wasn't clear how many of them were going to survive. (As far as I can recall, though, all the seedlings that made it out of the vermiculite have survived in soil, and possibly I should have just started them in soil to begin with.)



Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Zamicro' (19 Sep 2012)

I wasn't expecting this, but so far, 'Zamicro' actually has turned out to be easier for me to grow than the species. I suspect that this is not actually about the cultivar so much, and has more to do with these getting better watering and light (the species plants I've started from leaflets also did well in similar conditions, until they were transplanted), but who can really say.


For now, they seem to be happy in their little 4-pack cells, and I'm inclined to leave them there for as long as that seems to be working out. Whenever I do have to transplant, I'm going to take the advice of Steve Lucas at Exotic Rainforest and make an especially sandy and fast-draining soil for them. I am more or less convinced that this Zamioculcas-growing secret I've been missing.

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¹ NO YOU CANNOT HANDLE THE EXCITEMENT.

Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Zamicro'

So this story starts on 30 Aug 2011, in Cedar Rapids. We were at Frontier, my favorite Cedar Rapids garden center, and I noticed that they had a bunch of new Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Zamicro' plants in. Or possibly the cultivar was 'Mini:' I'm unclear whether those are the same plant under two different names or not. (There's a picture of 'Zamicro'/'Mini' from an earlier visit to Cedar Rapids here, if you're interested.)

Anyway. So the table in there was littered with a bunch of dropped leaflets from these plants, and I picked some up and asked the guy if he minded if I took some home, since they'd already fallen off and everything. And he said, essentially, knock yourself out. So then I felt obligated to buy something, and wound up getting a Sansevieria trifasciata 'Black Gold,'¹ and took the leaflets home with me, and then realized: I don't even really like Zamioculcas. And 'Zamicro'/'Mini' is less attractive to me than the species, so I had no compelling reason to bring the leaflets home in the first place and what the hell had I been thinking.

But, you know how it is. When there is propagatable plant material, I will try to propagate it. It's my nature.

So it is with mixed emotions that I announce that those leaflets, after a year of cultivation, have begun to produce new growth:

(Side view.)

(Top-down view.)
Given that there's a year invested in these already, I see no reason not to keep going. Best-case scenario would be that they turn out to be much easier to grow than the species,² in which case I will have to like them on principle, even if I don't like the look as well.

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¹ Which was doing unusually well for a S. trifasciata in my care until a couple months ago: the husband redid some shelves in the living room, so the plant wound up in a new location. Which it is most unhappy about. Really I should just learn the lesson already and stop trying to grow them, but that's a whole other story.
² In my experience, Z. zamiifolia is easy to keep alive, but it's next to impossible to take a plant that looks bad and turn it into one that looks good. While it's true that they are very slow to drop leaves, they're also very slow to replace them. My longest-lived plant has about the same number of leaves now that it had six years ago when I got it. They may be a completely different set of leaves, but the plant didn't look good then, and it still doesn't look good now.

How to Take Transmitted Light Photographs

This one is for Derek Powazek, who left a comment in the most recent transmitted-light post asking for a "'behind the scenes' type post on how you shoot these photos."

Initially I resisted the idea, because I didn't think it was really complicated enough to write a post about. I mean, really, you just get a light source, a camera, and a leaf, and you put the leaf between the light source and camera and take pictures. Nothing that complicated about it. But as I thought have I learned anything else about the process that would be useful to share?, I managed to make it complicated anyway. Yay me.

So the first thing is, you need a camera, light source, and leaf.

I have no advice about the camera part. I don't know about cameras; I've only ever had relatively cheap point-and-shoot ones. I do know you're going to need something with a very short focal length, so make sure there's a macro mode.

I have some advice about leaves. Characteristics that tend to make leaves suitable for transmitted light photos:

1. Thin (non-succulent).
2. Broad.
3. Variegated.
4. Flat(-tish).

Thick, succulent leaves can sometimes produce serviceable photos, but to see the venation, you need a leaf that's thin enough for light to shine through. Broad leaves are useful mostly because the leaf has to be big enough to block the light source from shining on the lens. If it's not, you get lens flare.

Lens flare, ruining an otherwise mediocre picture of Begonia x erythrophylla.
Variegated leaves tend to be more interesting, or at least more colorful and dramatic, though that's a matter of personal taste. Finally, extremely curly, quilted, or twisted leaves tend to make poor subjects because only part of them can be in focus. Sometimes that works out well anyway, but I prefer flatter leaves.

The "leaves" don't always have to be leaves, either -- I've taken serviceable pictures of spathes (Spathiphyllum, Anthurium), phyllocladodes (Schlumbergera), petals/sepals (Abutilon, Tulipa, Hemerocallis), and cataphylls (Zamioculcas) before. Dead leaves also have their charms, sometimes, in the right situations.

Zamioculcas zamiifolia cataphyll. I'm not saying it's gorgeous or anything, but it's in-focus, and there's light.
Almost any leaf can be made to work, but I particularly recommend Dieffenbachia, Caladium, Alpinia/Zingiber, Calathea, Alocasia, Zantedeschia, Strelitzia (especially S. reginae), Solenostemon, Musa, Anthurium, Codiaeum, Begonia, and Phlebodium.

The light source that works best for me is sunlight. That said, it's totally possible to get a decent image out of an artificial light; the main problem is that the color balance can come out really strange, and sometimes it can be hard to fix after the fact, like in this picture:

Aglaonema 'Golden Bay,' using an overly-reddish fluorescent light as a light source. The result is too yellow and too saturated: I should have fiddled with the image longer, probably.
This happens less often with sun.

One wants to minimize reflected light as much as possible when doing this. The appeal of transmitted light photos is that the colors are highly saturated and at high contrast; if there's light coming from behind the camera, this will reflect back into the lens and wash out the color. This can also be a problem if you're taking pictures outside in a bright area, or even if you're taking pictures while wearing light-colored clothing. Wear dark clothes, and as much as possible, shoot from a dark location towards a light one.

Strobilanthes dyerianus showing reflected light (especially visible on the left side of the image and down the midvein). Reflected light tends to be blue, so sometimes you can just reduce the level of blue a little bit and come up with something workable anyway.
Very light-colored leaves (e.g. some of the Dieffenbachias with white centers, Spathiphyllum spathes, pretty much any of the chartreuse cultivars of anything) tend to be difficult to get. This might be specific to my camera. It's often possible to manipulate the image afterward to increase the contrast and get something interesting out of it anyway, but not always.

Dieffenbachia 'Triumph' or something similar. This would have been improved by making the image lighter and increasing the contrast, though sometimes that also changes the color.

Like here (Spathiphyllum 'Golden Glow' or whatever, spathe), for example. The actual spathe is basically pure white, but in the process of cranking up the contrast so there was something to look at, all this yellowish stuff showed up. This was fixable too (reduce the saturation); I don't know why I didn't.
I usually get the best results when the light source is hitting the leaf exactly perpendicular to the leaf surface. If the light comes in at an angle to the leaf, you'll wind up with shadows everywhere. If the leaf is basically flat, this can sometimes be a good effect; if it's at all cupped, quilted, or otherwise uneven, though, I don't like it as well. With some extremely-textured leaves (like Pilea mollis 'Moon Valley,'), you're going to get shadows no matter what you do.

Pilea mollis 'Moon Valley.' There's a really obvious shadow in the top left, but there are also shadows on the left side of each of the bumps on the leaf.
If the camera is pointed at an angle to a flat leaf, you'll have one area that's in focus, and then out-of-focus everywhere else. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Usually, the closer you can get to aiming the camera perpendicular to the leaf surface, the better.

Codiaeum variegatum NOID. This image was very obviously taken from an angle -- the left and right sides are very blurry.
I'm usually trying to get these pictures while holding the leaf in one hand and the camera in the other. This means that for most shots, both my hands are moving, and the image comes out blurred. The solutions I've come up with for this:

1. Keep your hands touching one another, so that if one moves, the other has to move with it. This doesn't eliminate motion blur, but it keeps both hands moving in the same direction, so you get rid of some of it.
2. Tape the leaf to something. I've had decent luck taping leaves to the shade of the fluorescent light on Nina's terrarium; I've also been able to tape leaves to windows at certain times of day. If you use a tiny piece of tape, and only on the very edges of the leaf (which won't show in the picture anyway), this can be very helpful. This doesn't work when there's a screen on the window, though:

Dieffenbachia 'Camouflage,' photographed against a screened window. It's an interesting effect, but not really the kind of thing I'm usually going for.
3. Find a tripod. I often stack up soup cans and rest the camera on the cans when taking pictures. This doesn't reduce camera motion entirely, but it helps, and it's easy to set up, take down, and adjust. Plus then you can have soup when you're finished taking pictures.
4. Take lots of pictures. Sometimes you just have to take 25 pictures and hope that one of them turns out.

Manipulating the images afterward is also part of the gig; I use Irfanview. I rotate the image so that the base and petiole of the leaf are on the left and the tip of the leaf is on the right, straighten it as much as possible so the midrib (if present) is strictly horizontal, crop the image, and then adjust the color until it looks right. All these steps are pretty easy to do in Irfanview, though cropping is sometimes kind of a pain, because of a quirk that happens when the image size is reduced down to about 20-25% of normal. A typical process goes something like this (using a bract from an unidentified Euphorbia pulcherrima variety as my example):

This is the raw image, as uploaded from my camera. (Part of the reason this is so dark is because it was late in the day and I didn't have much direct light to work with; this was taken in the ex-job's greenhouse, about an hour before sunset.)

After rotating it slightly to get the midvein horizontal.

Cropped to remove the shadow of another bract on the left.

Lightened with the "gamma correction" function. (I don't know what gamma is or why it needs correcting, but this gives better results than adjusting the brightness.)

I increased the contrast until it looked more or less right.

I used the auto-adjust color, which increased the contrast a little more and darkened the image slightly.
There are often other steps involved in the photo processing: if everything's too yellow, I can turn up the blue a little; if it's washed-out, I can increase contrast; if it's a little fuzzy, I can sharpen the image. That sort of thing. Often, something that looks just fine on my computer will look like crap once I upload it to the blog, but them's the breaks.

So I think that's all I've got. Go. Go try it for yourself.

Rumble Among the Jungle, Matches 2.25-2.28

Rules and Stuff
1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.
2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants, you are encouraged to do so.
3) You are also encouraged to leave comments on Rumble posts, if so moved.
4) All photos will enlarge if opened in a separate window/tab.
5) You can choose which plant is "best" according to whatever criteria you decide for yourself. My personal process is a bit convoluted.¹
6) All polls will be open for three days.

Results for matches 2.9 to 2.12:

Not just one close match in this set, but three close matches.

In 2.9, Phalaenopsis/Doritaenopsis cvv. jockeyed for the lead against Monstera deliciosa. I lost track of how many times they switched places, but each was in the lead at least three times. By the beginning of the third day of voting, Monstera had managed a lead of about four votes, which would ordinarily mean that it was very likely to win (the votes usually slow down a lot after the first 24 hours of voting), but then reader/commenter Paul posted this at OrchidBoard.com,² and soon Phalaenopsis were up by three votes. I was personally kind of rooting for Monstera, but this sort of advocacy is explicitly permitted and encouraged by the rules I set up (see #2 at the top of the page), so oh well. Phalaenopsis wins, 67 to 62.
Match 2.10 wasn't as dramatic, just surprisingly close: Araucaria heterophylla and Sansevieria cylindrica were stem and stem until the very end, when Araucaria gained and held a narrow lead, winning 60 to 53.

So, Phalaenopsis/Doritaenopsis will be competing with Araucaria heterophylla in match 3.5, voting for which begins on 17 October.

Match 2.11 was another extremely tight race: in the end, Cereus peruvianus barely won, 59 to 54, defeating Dracaena marginata cvv.
The only battle where the victor was pretty obvious early on was in match 2.12: Hoya carnosa cvv. defeated Maranta leuconeura cvv. by 73 to 46. This would please me regardless, because I've had better experiences with Hoya, but I take particular satisfaction in this case because Maranta was the plant that knocked Anthurium out of the contest.

Cereus peruvianus and Hoya carnosa cvv. next appear in match 3.6, which also begins on 17 October.

And now, today's voting:

Match 2.25
Adenium obesum (desert rose) vs. Zamioculcas zamiifolia (zz plant)

(Various unidentified Adenium obesum cvv.)

L-R: Zamioculcas zamiifolia, Z. zamiifolia NOID (possibly 'Zamicro'), Z. zamiifolia.





Match 2.26
Ficus benjamina (weeping fig) vs. Haworthia spp.

Clockwise from top left: Ficus benjamina NOID variegated cv., 'Margarita,' 'Black Diamond,' 'Midnight.'

Top row, L-R: Haworthia tessellata (?), H. NOID.
Middle row, L-R: Haworthia limifolia var. ubomboensis, H. cymbiformis (?), assortment.
Bottom row, L-R: Haworthia attenuata, H. limifolia var. limifolia.





Match 2.27
Cycas revoluta (sago palm) vs. Tradescantia zebrina (wandering jew)

(Top: older Cycas revoluta. Bottom: young C. revoluta.)

(All are unidentified cvv. of Tradescantia zebrina.)





Match 2.28
Tillandsia cyanea (pink quill) vs. Self-heading Philodendrons ('Autumn,' 'Prince of Orange,' 'Moonlight')

(Tillandsia cyanea.)

Clockwise from top left: Philodendron 'Prince of Orange,' 'Moonlight,' 'Autumn,' 'Prince of Orange,' 'Moonlight.'





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¹ I'm deciding according to a hypothetical situation in which all of my houseplants are gone, as are all the other houseplants of the world, except for one producer/supplier/retailer. Said person is offering to restock me with one or the other of the plants in question but refuses to give me both. Which one would I choose?
² If you are not already a member of OrchidBoard, you may be taken to a page telling you this, but you can still see the message as a guest if you go to the main forum page (link should be near the top of the "you're-not-a-member" message), then to "Off Topic - Totally" (the very last subcategory in the forums, then to the "Orchids are in need of votes folks!" message.

Rumble Among the Jungle, Matches 1.49-1.52

Rules and Stuff
1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.
2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants, you are encouraged to do so.
3) You are also encouraged to leave comments on Rumble posts, if so moved.
4) All photos will enlarge if opened in a separate window/tab.
5) You can choose which plant is "best" according to whatever criteria you decide for yourself. My personal process is a bit convoluted.¹
6) All polls will be open for three days.

Results, matches 1.33 to 1.36:

I was surprised by how close match 1.33 (Dionaea muscipula vs. Pilea mollis 'Moon Valley') turned out to be. I figured carnivorous plants would inspire strong feelings either for or against, and that whichever it was, pro- or anti-, almost everyone would feel the same way about venus flytraps. Instead, Dionaea just barely squeezed past Pilea, 54 to 49.
In match 1.34, by contrast, Aeschynanthus spp. whaled on Ardisia crenata so hard that its grand-seedlings are going to feel it, winning by 22 to 68.

Dionaea muscipula and Aeschynanthus spp. will face one another in match 2.17, on 11 October.

In match 1.35, Aechmea fasciata whipped Rhapis excelsa by 58 to 35.
Spathiphyllum cvv. KO'd Coffea arabica 62 to 36 in match 1.36. Neither of these surprised me much, but I'm a lot happier about one than I am about the other.

Aechmea fasciata and Spathiphyllum cvv. will cross swords on 11 October as well, in match 2.18.

On to today's bouts --

Match 1.49
Adenium obesum (desert rose) vs. Episcia cvv. (flame violet)

(Various unidentified Adenium obesum cvv.)

Top row, L-R: Episcia 'Coco,' E. NOID.
Middle row, L-R: Episcia NOID, E. 'Pink Acajou,' E. NOID.
Bottom row, L-R: Episcia 'Silver Skies,' E. NOID.





Match 1.50
Zamioculcas zamiifolia (zz plant) vs. Alocasia amazonica 'Polly' (african mask plant)

L-R: Zamioculcas zamiifolia, Z. zamiifolia NOID (possibly 'Zamicro'), Z. zamiifolia.

(Alocasia amazonica 'Polly')





Match 1.51
Ficus benjamina (weeping fig) vs. Begonia rex-cultorum cvv. (rex begonia)

Clockwise from top left: Ficus benjamina NOID variegated cv., 'Margarita,' 'Black Diamond,' 'Midnight.'

Clockwise from top: Assorted Begonia rex-cultorum, B. 'Escargot,' B. 'Harmony's Red Robin.'





Match 1.52
Asplenium nidus / antiquum (bird's-nest fern) vs. Haworthia spp.

(L-R: Asplenium nidus, A. antiquum.)

Top row, L-R: Haworthia tessellata (?), H. NOID.
Middle row, L-R: Haworthia limifolia var. ubomboensis, H. cymbiformis (?), assortment.
Bottom row, L-R: Haworthia attenuata, H. limifolia var. limifolia.





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¹ I'm deciding according to a hypothetical situation in which all of my houseplants are gone, as are all the other houseplants of the world, except for one producer/supplier/retailer. Said person is offering to restock me with one or the other of the plants in question but refuses to give me both. Which one would I choose?

Milestone: 1 Kiloplant

As I mentioned yesterday, I did a lot of propagation on Thursday and Friday of last week. I also had to move a lot of plants around to make room for the new ones, so the spreadsheets are a huge mess and I'm behind on watering.

But. As the title said, I've hit a milestone in the number of official plants I have in the house: as of Saturday, we've reached a kiloplant. It's a fuzzy milestone, because depending on how you look at it, the plant count has both been well over 1000 for a long time now (cuttings and seedlings that I think might not make it don't get counted as plants on the spreadsheets, but they still have to be cared for like plants and take as much work as the official plants) and remains under 1000 plants still (though I'm reasonably confident that most of the new plants I started will survive, inevitably I'll realize that some of them were put on the spreadsheet prematurely, and they'll die), but according to the spreadsheet, for the moment, we've arrived.

Here's the graph:



I would say that 1001 is obviously too many plants, but I've been saying that I have "too many" plants since, like, 600 plants ago, and somehow I keep managing to find places for them and take care of them, so maybe it isn't actually too many. I'm not sure.

I considered trying to go around and get pictures of all of them to post, give each plant a chance to represent, as the kids say ("East Side Basement in the hizzouse!"), but even just trying to get a picture of one shelf at a time, that would take hours and hours to do, and there'd still probably be plants you couldn't see because of the camera angle or whatever, and they wouldn't even be particularly good pictures, probably. (What I would really like to do sometimes is take all the plants outside and put them in the yard so I could take a photo of all of them at once. However, not only would this require perfect weather, it would also literally take me all day to do. I've done the math. Even if the husband helped, I think, moving the plants outside, taking the picture, and then moving them all back inside would at least take most of the day.) So instead, I'll show you pictures of the new plants that put me over the top.

Years ago, I started a tray of Zamioculcas zamiifolia leaflet cuttings. (And when I say "years," I mean years: I'm not sure when it happened exactly, but I remember where the tray was located when we lived in the apartment, and the spreadsheet suggests November 2008.)

Many of the leaflets dried up and died, but I didn't dump the soil, because that doesn't always mean that there's no chance of getting a plant out of it. The leaflets form tubers at their base, which can stick around and grow (somehow) even after the leaflet's gone.

Still, though, I've continued to hang on to the tray, waiting. Every so often a batch of them would sprout, and I'd take them out and repot them, but I left the others. Then last fall, another batch sprouted leaves.


So yesterday I decided to once and for all see what was going on in there, pot up what tubers I could find, and free up that space for something else. It turned out that almost every single cell had a tuber in it, whether it was sprouting leaves or not:


The roots are supposed to be delicate and easily damaged, so I tried to be as careful as I could, but I expect I still probably ruined a few tubers during the transplant. Still, I put three or four in each pot, so I should wind up with moderately full-looking plants even if some of them do fail. They don't look like much right now, but I added some fertilizer when I watered, so hopefully the tubers that haven't produced leaves yet will get the signal and take off.


It's not a very practical way to get new Zamioculcas plants, obviously, waiting two years or more for almost nothing. But it's a way.

Walkaways Part 12

Well okay. Back in the saddle again, or something like that. Went to Cedar Rapids on Friday, saw some plants, bought some, didn't buy others. And some of this was somewhat interesting. I guess. If you're me. I'll leave the plants I actually bought for another post. (There were three: all three were gesneriads; two were unusual; one of the unusual ones was very cool.)

The theme for the walkaways on this trip: slightly-unusual varieties of perfectly ordinary plants. First up is a variegated Euphorbia milii, from Peck's Garden Center. I'd heard of these, but hadn't seen one myself until Friday. As with most of the walkaways on this trip, I didn't buy it because I had slightly less money than it cost. (In this case, I was also trying to conserve money for later purchases -- Peck's was the first garden center we hit.)

NOID variegated Euphorbia milii.

Same plant as above, seen from top.
Peck's also had a NOID Dieffenbachia I've seen before in Cedar Rapids. One day, I'm going to own this, but I had way less money than needed for this plant.
NOID Dieffenbachia cv. (maybe 'Neptune?')
I liked this NOID cactus, too. The photograph makes it look less impressive than I found it at the time. I assume it's probably a Mammillaria. I could have afforded this, but was saving my money for the super-cool stuff I was sure I'd find elsewhere.

Possibly a Mammillaria of some kind? UPDATE: Believed to be M. spinosissima 'Un Pico.'
Finally, I passed up what I think must be a cultivar of a bird's-nest fern (maybe Asplenium nidus or A. antiquum), because anything that might be an Asplenium is automatically removed from consideration. They hate me, I hate them, we have an agreement and we stick to it. Still, though, I don't think I've ever seen one quite like this before. (I have a nagging suspicion that I may have seen one semi-recently on someone else's blog, though -- has anybody posted about this plant lately?)

Asplenium something?
We stopped at Lowe's, but they didn't have anything I was interested in (I came close to picking up a partly-dead hanging basket of Hoya lacunosa, because it's one of my favorite plants, it only cost $2.50, and it was only partly dead.), so then we went on to Frontier.

Frontier looked like they were getting ready to receive a new shipment of stuff, because a lot of the tables were cleared off, so they had fewer options than usual. I lingered over a Polyscias I've never seen before --

Probably a Polyscias balfouriana variety.
-- which I thought at the time was a new variety of P. fruticosa, but having gotten home and looked at my fruticosa and balfouriana, I think it's actually a mutant balfouriana. Balfouriana leaves are often divided into three leaflets like the above plant and the leaflets are usually rounded. Fruticosa leaves are much more subdivided, and there's nothing rounded about them: they're all angles and points. This makes me feel better about not buying it: balfouriana and I are still not entirely sure we like one another.

Frontier also had a monstrose Cereus peruvianus (or maybe C. hildmannius) that was interesting. I've seen a lot of small monstrose cacti (mostly C. validus or C. repandus?) for sale, and we had them at the ex-job quite a bit, but the bigger ones are rarely available. So I was tempted, but yet again, it was slightly out of budget.

Monstrose Cereus peruvianus.
The main one I went back and forth on (to the point of considering asking the husband if he could buy it for me) was a Zamioculcas zamiifolia. Now, I already have a Zamioculcas. In fact, officially, I have seven. But this is a slightly different variety. I've written about it before (reader consensus was: "yuck."), but had never seen it in person until Friday.

Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Mini' or 'Zamicro?'
The variety names I've heard for it are 'Mini' or 'Zamicro.' I'm kind of puzzled about why: it's not noticeably smaller than the species, as far as I've seen. Mostly the difference is in the plant shape, but it's a really subtle difference -- the leaflets are a little pointier than the species, and are held more horizontally. You can sort of see the leaflet shape better in the photo from the top of the plant:

Same plant as above, seen from top.
Otherwise, they appear to be the same thing, which was why I kept going back and forth on it. I already had it, but I didn't, but I kind of did, and yet I sort of didn't. In the end, I decided that the species and I don't get along well enough to justify collecting every variety I ever see. (We're doing better lately, but it's been difficult for me to figure out how to water mine: contrary to what you'd expect, I think I was under-watering for a long time before I figured it out.)

So that's what I didn't get in Cedar Rapids. Which non-purchase was the biggest mistake?

The pictures of plants I did buy will be posted relatively soon.