A Cautionary Tale

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. I've tried, of course, to be conscientious about hand-washing and so forth, but as many Euphorbias as I have, and as long as I've had them, I was going to get Euphorbia sap in the eye eventually. So here's my report about that.

What happened: On Wednesday night, our weather forecast predicted a low of 58F/14C, which was probably warm enough that I didn't need to do anything -- the plants are all either right next to the house or right next to the garage, they're packed fairly close together, and most are sitting on or near a good-sized slab of concrete. So they're in a relatively warm microclimate to begin with, warm enough that 58F/14C shouldn't be that big of a deal.

But I decided to move the ones that were easiest to move anyway, because an extra layer of protection couldn't hurt. So I intended to wheel the sets of plants that are on carts into the garage. (A couple big plants also had to be moved before I could move the ones on carts, but that's not really relevant to the story.)

One of the carts had a Euphorbia lactea next to a Euphorbia tirucalli 'Firesticks.' I'd been keeping them outside because I've been stupidly hoping that being outside would do something to clear up their fungus problem -- which is still going on, and has been going on for at least a year now.

Back row, L-R: Euphorbia milii, Pachypodium lamerei, Pilosocereus pachycladus. Front row: Euphorbia tirucalli 'Firesticks,' Euphorbia lactea, Euphorbia milii.
I'm not sure what's going on with the E. lactea: it's gotten wobbly in the pot. Kept falling over into the E. tirucalli, as I rolled the cart over the rough surface of the concrete. So I kept picking it up again. I noticed that the lactea thorns were stabbing the tirucalli stems here and there, but this isn't the first time that's happened, and I didn't think it was terribly significant. I tried to keep my hands out of the little pinpricks of sap, and pressed forward, because it was already 8:30 PM and I had other stuff I was hoping to get to before bed.

Got everything in the garage, rolled the door down, turned out the light, went in the house, and sat down at the computer to do stuff. Got about half an hour into that when I absent-mindedly rubbed my left eye.

What it was like: Initially, it just felt like there was something in my eye; it was irritating, but not unusually so. So I rubbed harder, to get whatever it was out of my eye. As you do. And that didn't make things any better, so I got up and went to the bathroom to rinse it out in the sink. And that's roughly the point when I realized that this was no ordinary foreign-object-in-the-eye situation.

For one thing, it felt hot. And it was much more irritated, much faster, than if I'd just gotten a piece of dirt in my eye. I could still see through the eye fine. I found the husband and asked him to look at the eye in question and tell me if he could see anything in there; he couldn't. And that's about the point when I thought of the Euphorbia tirucalli I'd just moved, and put things together.

(So how was the pain? Once when I was about 19, I angrily opened a heavy wooden door, while barefoot, so it swung directly into my big toe, not only stubbing it but also ripping off the toenail. It hurt about that much: bad enough that it took some concentration to think about anything else, but not so bad that I completely lost control of my faculties. This, remember, is from what was probably a single pinprick of dried sap, though. Having experienced that much, I can totally believe that getting a squirt of sap directly to the eye would be completely incapacitating, and probably would involve a good bit of writhing on the floor and/or incoherent screaming.)

So. What you're supposed to do for Euphorbia tirucalli sap is, you're supposed to run cold, clean water on the affected eye(s) for 15 minutes, seek medical attention, and then (optionally) run water on the affected eye(s) for another 15 minutes. I didn't do that.

Why didn't you do that? I didn't do that because, although it felt considerably better with the water on it, and almost immediately so, even, I was having a difficult time keeping my eye open while running water on it, because . . . I don't know. I may have an overactive blink reflex, or something. It should also be noted that what my right eye was doing while this was going on was, it was getting to look at the inside of the kitchen sink. Which is not that interesting, so it's not like the time was passing quickly or anything either.

So what wound up happening was, I'd run the water for like 30-60 seconds, feel better, get bored, and start getting annoyed at trying to keep my eye open when every instinct was telling me to close it. So then I'd get up, try to locate the husband, discuss the situation with him, and then eventually run off to rinse the eye again.

After hearing that keeping the eye open with the water on it was a problem, the husband proposed that maybe it would work better for me to lie down somewhere, and have him holding the water, that maybe it would be easier to relax that way. So at one point, he'd constructed this whole thing where a couple of chairs were supporting a piece of plywood that stretched into our upstairs shower, tilted slightly downward so the water wouldn't run all over into the bathroom. When tried, that turned out to be considerably worse (cold water all over my back and scalp, a gazillion little jets of water spraying all over my face -- generally much, much closer to waterboarding than I felt comfortable with), so we abandoned that and I went back to the kitchen sink again.

Why didn't you just seek medical attention? Well, we did consider it. Since it was 9 PM or later through this whole ordeal, though, that would have meant going to the emergency room in Iowa City, which is a significant amount of time to spend in the car without any water to run over the eye, plus time spent parking, waiting in the waiting room to see a doctor, explaining the situation, and etc. At this point, I was having to go back to the sink every 3-5 minutes, so that didn't seem workable, plus the last time I went to the emergency room, it was also for something eye-related, and I didn't want the U of I Hospital people to be thinking that I was some kind of eye hypochondriac.

More seriously, though -- there was really no indication that the hospital would have been able to do anything much for me that I couldn't do for myself at home. I wasn't in unbearable pain, I was still more or less able to think, and there's not actually a cure for E. tirucalli sap in the eye anyway, as far as I could find on-line: basically you just flush it with water in the hopes that the sap will wash out (and because keeping the eye cool dulls the pain), and wait to see how bad it's going to be. And we had running water here already. So.

Resolution: At about 9:30 or 10 PM, I took an ibuprofen, because why not, and some benadryl (diphenhydramine), because somebody on-line had said that antihistamines were sometimes helpful. By about 10:30 PM, things had improved to the point where I was able to lie on the couch and watch TV ("It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") for a while without pain. Don't know if the drugs and the feeling better were related or not, but I suppose it doesn't matter.

Wound up going to bed at about 1 AM, and slept in until 11 AM. I don't know if the sleeping in is related or not either, but that's almost unheard of for me: I rarely sleep in later than 9:30 AM.

It's possible that my left eye is a little more prone to watering since this, but it's also possible that I'm just paying more attention to it. No lingering effects that are at all life-disrupting, anyway -- no pain, no problems seeing, no scarring.

What next? Damned if I know. I've had at least one E. tirucalli at all times since 2001, and this is the first time anything like this has happened. If I don't have to worry about it happening again until 2025, that's not so terrible.

On the other hand, the whole Euphorbia genus has made itself awfully annoying over the last year or so, with the ineradicable fungus problem, and there have been several occasions when I've been very tempted to just throw out all the affected plants¹ and start over. Or maybe not start over, even, since I don't know how to rid the house of the fungus. Also, this was likely just a tiny pinprick of sap. Next time it might not be.

A new thing they've come up with to annoy me: this branch just up and turned brown and died after it spent some time outside. Dunno why. But Euphorbia pseudocactus is on my list too.
Maybe I'm just done with Euphorbias. I'm certainly going to be thinking about it pretty seriously.

-

¹ Euphorbia tirucalli, E. tirucalli 'Firesticks,' E. drupifera (deceased), E. milii, E. milii 'Candyland' (deceased), E. milii large hybrid, Pedilanthus tithymaloides, P. 'Jurassic Park 2,' P. 'Silver Star,' Synadenium grantii, S. grantii var. rubrum, E. bougheyi variegata, E. lactea, E. trigona, E. trigona 'Red,' and E. pseudocactus.
All of these are officially Euphorbias at the moment, even if I've written their names as Pedilanthus or Synadenium.

Tina! Bring me the ax.

Scalepocalypse 2012 2013 update:

So two things happened Saturday night. The first thing was very unpleasant. (A Pilosocereus pachycladus fell backward onto me as I was transporting it to be watered, leaving spines stuck in a small patch on my right shoulder and a somewhat larger patch on my right forearm.) The second was a hundred times worse.¹

I went to pick up the Philodendron squamiferum, to take it into the plant room to water it, and there were scale insects all over the new growth. The same scale that it had on it when it arrived here.

Not so terrible in and of itself, granted. But it's what this means.

I'd noticed the scale on the Philodendron squamiferum immediately, when it arrived last May. I'd wiped off the leaves, individually, on multiple occasions, with soapy water, and sprayed every surface of the plant with neem, every time I watered, and I kept it as isolated from the other plants as possible under the circumstances. At some point, I don't remember when (September? October?), I threw some imidacloprid granules in the pot as well.

Imidacloprid is an insecticide, which is supposed to be particularly good against scale and mealybugs, because they have a waxy, water-repelling coat that shrugs off most water-based insecticides. Imidacloprid gets around this by being taken up by the plant's roots. It then circulates throughout the plant's tissues, so that no matter where the insect might bite, it's going to be sucking up a mouthful of poison as well. And then it dies.

Or at least that's the theory. But obviously: if the scale population has increased from invisibility to the point of overrunning the new growth in the span of a month, that means that the imidacloprid didn't work. And neither did the neem, or the hand-washing.

Also, I'd declared the plant officially clean, at some point last fall or early winter, and placed it with a few other important plants (Ficus maclellandii, the BDSP), on a table. Which means that there's a good chance that the other plants on that table also have scale now, scale which is resistant to the one pesticide that's supposed to be halfway decent at dealing with scale.

Which means that the week I spent dumping imidacloprid granules into all 585 plants in the basement was almost certainly wasted effort.² It's a different infestation of scale in the basement (brought in by Aloe polyphylla instead of Philodendron squamiferum), granted, so hypothetically the imidacloprid resistance might be totally different in the basement, but what are the odds I could be that lucky? Or maybe I've misapplied it. Maybe I wash too much out of the pots when I water. In any case, it doesn't seem like the imidacloprid is likely to be helpful, which makes me REALLY GLAD I spent all that time and money on it.

Now. I had been depressed for much of the month of January anyway, because I spotted some scale on New Year's Day. New Year's was depressing because it meant that the six or seven weeks before that, when I hadn't spotted any scale, was false hope, and they hadn't gone away. So the Philodendron on Saturday night was pretty much the worst thing that could have happened: even my backup hope, the imidacloprid, is probably also false hope.

And if fairly conscientious and repeated use of neem / hand-washing / imidacloprid hasn't worked so far, then the way I see it, I have basically three options.

1) I continue to fight with the inadequate tools I have, and maybe pick up new ones.

This is a non-starter. I've already exhausted and depressed myself dumping imidacloprid into the plants in the basement. There is no way in hell I could hand-wash every leaf of every plant in the house, and it apparently doesn't even help. I might as well sing Tom Petty to the scale.³ I reached the point of not even liking plants anymore at some point last summer, and things have only gotten worse since New Year's. So I am not going to fight. I'm not going to try your home remedy for scale, I'm not going to wait until spring and then move everything outside, I'm not going to buy more and bigger pesticides, I'm not going to buy predatory mites or lacewings or ladybugs or whatever, I'm not going to try to swab a thousand plants with a 50-gallon drum of rubbing alcohol and a pallet full of Q-Tips. I refuse to hope for a cure. I also refuse to give up and just try to coexist with the scale the way I do with fungus gnats or (to a smaller degree) spider mites, 'cause scale is just too damaging, contagious, and icky. Next option?

2) I throw all one-thousand-and-whatever plants in the garbage.

Just pile them up on a snowdrift in the back yard and let them freeze, taking the scale with them. That's not really going to work for me either. It's true that I hate the plants;⁴ I want to punch them all in their smug green photosynthesizing non-faces until they beg me to stop. (And then keep punching them, because I ain't gonna take no orders from no plant.) But I'm not a monster;⁵ I'm not going to spite-kill plants that have shown no sign of scale infestation and live in a part of the house where the scale are not known to have spread. Even as bad as things are -- and it cannot be over-emphasized that things are very, very bad, the kind of bad that involves mental health care professionals⁶ -- there are still plenty of plants in the house that are probably fine, due to natural resistance, luck, or both. Besides which, if I were to get rid of all the gray-variegated Yucca guatemalensises and Anthuriums, I would be inconsolable, because I hate them the least.

Which only leaves . . .

3) The back-burn strategy. I take a zero-tolerance policy toward any scale sightings. I'm not even going to pretend that I can eliminate them from an infested plant. Instead, I'm going to throw away any plant that shows any sign of scale, however beloved or irreplaceable the plant in question might be. If I suspect infestation strongly enough, I'll even throw away plants that have merely been adjacent to scale-occupied plants. The hope is that if I throw plants out fast enough, maybe I can out-run the scale. Eventually, mathematically, I have to reach a point where no plants in the house are infested. Maybe I'll only have twenty plants at that point. Maybe only six. Maybe one. But eventually.

That's a pretty unpleasant-sounding idea all on its own, of course. But wasn't I the indoor-plant blogger who'd been saying that I had too many plants and I desperately needed to pare down to a more manageable number? And haven't I been saying this for pretty much the entire time I've been writing the blog? Well, what's a more manageable number than one?

So that's where we are at the moment: full metal "Tina! Bring me the ax."⁷



The plants Scalepocalypse 2012 2013 is responsible for killing so far (I'm keeping the list so I know what to write on the eventual memorial):

Alpinia zerumbet variegata • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Aloe NOID, variegated • Aloe polyphylla • Agave desmettiana (?), variegated • Aloe vera • Aloe vera • Aloe vera • Gasteraloe x beguinii • Gasteraloe x beguinii • Gasteraloe x beguinii • Aloe 'Silver Ridge' • Aloe 'Doran Black' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Sedum rubrotinctum 'Aurora' • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Hoya polyneura • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Gynura aurantiaca • Philodendron hederaceum micans • Peperomia obtusifolia variegata • Peperomia obtusifolia variegata • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana • Hippeastrum 'Red Lion' x unknown • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Hatiora salicornioides • Aloe striata • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Begonia NOID • Begonia NOID • Callisia fragrans • Cyrtomium falcatum • Asparagus macowanii • Anthurium seedling • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Begonia x 'Erythrophylla' • Begonia x 'Erythrophylla' • Aloe 'Firebird' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Alworthia 'Black Gem' • Ardisia elliptica • Ficus benjamina 'Midnight' • Ficus elastica 'Tineke' • Haworthia attenuata • Haworthia attenuata • Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips' • Podocarpus macrophyllus • Philodendron squamiferum⁸

And everything down to Aloe 'Firebird' was before the zero-tolerance policy. We're just getting started.

-

¹ A hundred times worse, in the sense that I would rather do the Pilosocereus thing a hundred times than have the other thing happen once. And yes, I thought about this choice for quite a while: the number is not arbitrary.
² Imidacloprid does sometimes take a month or two to build up in a plant's tissues before it reaches an effective concentration, but the Philodendron had definitely had a month or two to work already.
³ ("Don't Come Around Here No More," obviously.)
⁴ (Not an exaggeration. I've been getting negative enjoyment out of them for the last eight months, with the possible exception of August's Epiphyllum-and-Clivia bonanza, and I've only been willing to tolerate the misery for this long because I thought it might end at some point.)
⁵ (yet!)
⁶ An overreaction? Well, sure, I suppose for most people it would be an overreaction to go bonkers over finding some bugs on a few houseplants. You have to bear in mind, though, that I have lived and breathed indoor plants, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, for about six years. And it has made Jack a very dull boy, and I wasn't even that good at it compared to some people, but it was at least a direction, a vague plan, a sort of goal. You know: here is a thing I enjoy. Maybe I could make a self-supporting amount of money from this, somehow.
You try hating the thing around which you've let six years revolve and on which you've constructed all of your future plans, and then tell me what's an overreaction.
There is, no doubt, some sort of cautionary tale in all of this about the dangers of turning hobbies into careers. Or the dangers of being generally inept at having careers. I don't know what it is exactly, but I can smell a cautionary tale in here somewhere.
⁷ (Helga, I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the scale.)
⁸ No, I did not get to salvage any of the Alworthia 'Black Gems.' Had 27 at the beginning of all this, and none of them have managed to not have scale at some point or another, so I am 'Black-Gem-'less for the first time in almost six years. This despite heavy and repeated neeming, a summer outside, careful inspection upon re-entry, and imidacloprid.

Random plant event: Musa x 'Cheeka' offsetting

This is another one of those things that's not objectively a big thing, but it's big to me.


My Musa x 'Cheeka' had a couple offsets on it when I bought it, but they withered away fairly soon after it got here, and it didn't grow any to replace them. Since that time, 'Cheeka' has been growing progressively smaller leaves, which are all bunched up together at the top of the plant, and the petioles keep stacking up on top of one another, too, making the trunk V-shaped.

It's supposed to be a compact variety anyway, but you can see that when I bought it, the new leaves were bigger than the preceding ones, and there was a healthy distance between them:

(Pot: 6"/15 cm diameter)
Now, though, they're wadded up at the top:

(Pot: 8"/20 cm diameter)
There are signs that this may be turning around; the last couple leaves have been larger again, and there are suckers too. I'm sort of ashamed to say what I think made the difference: fertilizer.

Not that I haven't been feeding the plant all along, pretty abundantly in fact. But I've been using the N-P-K-only Osmocote, not anything with trace elements in it. With a substantial number of my plants, that hasn't seemed to make a difference -- the Yuccas, Dracaenas and Anthuriums have all been just fine. Hell, the Dracaenas usually don't get any Osmocote, even. But, I had a plastic container of plant food that the husband bought many years ago -- some Miracle Gro product with trace elements;¹ the original packaging was gone -- that was taking up space in the plant room, and I kept having to move it out of the way, or else make a special point of opening it up when I wanted to use it for some plant or another. At some point this winter, that got annoying, and I thought, well hell, let's use this up and get it out of the way.

So for the last three or four watering cycles, I've been using it on everything. At first, I only put it on a few plants. I just sprinkled a small amount of the fertilizer directly on the soil without mixing it in water first like you're supposed to (though I emphasize it was a small amount). After a while, I decided that I should use it on all of them, so I started mixing up multiple gallons at a time in milk jugs.

This is when I was only mixing five gallons at a time (the fifth was mixed directly in the watering can); I'm up to eight-gallon batches now.
Now, granted, the plants would be starting to do stuff now whether I was feeding them special food with trace elements or not: it's spring, the days are longer, that's what plants do in the spring. But things are happening that have never happened for me before:

• The Musa x 'Cheeka' is re-suckering and may be growing bigger leaves again;
• the Tradescantia spathacea is blooming (hasn't happened in three years);
• the Coffea arabica grew, I shit you not, like six inches in a month, after a long period of slow, weak growth;
• the Cereus peruvianus started to grow after staying the same size for at least two years;
• the Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa cutting has started to grow after being the same size for at least two years;
• the Schlumbergera 'Caribbean Dancer' is on a third round of blooming for the year;
• the Euphorbia tortilis is growing again, after remaining the same size for almost two years;
• the Cissus rotundifolia had stopped growing for a while, turned yellowish, and a couple growing tips died, but is now producing rampant new growth;
• the husband's old Dracaena sanderiana that was about 60% dead is now producing new growing tips from its base;
• all the Ficus microcarpas have started to put on serious height, after a pretty slow last year;
• the Heliconia psittacorum 'Bright Lights' still looks kind of pitiful, but it's gotten greener and is poking up new shoots;
• the Phalaenopsis is producing more roots than I've ever seen it grow before;
• the Phlebodium aureum 'Mandianum' has HUGE blue-green fronds, instead of smallish yellow ones.
• the Rhapis excelsa is also suckering abundantly;
  
• the Platycerium stopped dropping fronds and is now growing new ones; and
  

Not all of those are necessarily because of the fertilizer, but that's a lot of unprecedented stuff happening all at once.

So I guess I've learned a valuable lesson about the importance of trace elements, and now so have you. Except you probably knew already. Or you suspected, at least.

I've been meaning to write a post about fertilizer for a long, long time, but a lot of the information I've seen about it is either the same thing everybody parrots ("Feed with a standard houseplant fertilizer every three months, or diluted with every watering.") or advice for people growing mass quantities of plants outdoors in a Florida shade house to sell wholesale, talking about parts per million of this and parts per million of that and Ca:Mg ratios and all that stuff. So this may be as close as I get to writing a fertilizer post.

-

¹ I know it contains trace elements because it's that pretty green-blue color of copper compounds; I know it's Miracle Gro because the plastic bags of fertilizer had Miracle Gro written on them. The missing part is the original box or whatever that they came in, which would have the full list of components and concentrations. In general, though, if copper is in there, then everything else will be too. I mean, there are exceptions, but I'd be surprised if Miracle Gro made a product that had copper but not iron.

PATSP Learning Moment: Cycas

About a month ago, I took the Cycas revoluta off the shelf to water and it was doing this:


My guess is that it's a nutrient deficiency, probably of iron, magnesium, or nitrogen. I did spray it with an iron-containing trace-nutrient spray, and the parts that were still green appeared to have gotten greener. That doesn't necessarily mean that the iron fixed the problem (it's at least as likely that I misremembered how pale it had been before the iron), but that's my guess. I'm looking for 1) confirmation on the diagnosis, and 2) someone to tell me whether or not the yellowed parts will turn green again, ever (I'm assuming not).

This kind of nutrient deficiency is, of course, made more likely to happen by the way I water my plants. I flush with fairly large amounts of water at each watering, because that keeps salts from building up in the soil. A lot of my plants are sensitive to such salts, and this keeps them happy. Happier. Unfortunately, flushing out the soil to remove unwanted minerals winds up being the same thing as flushing out the soil to remove necessary trace nutrients too. This yellowing is a fairly rare phenomenon for me, because usually I repot things before mineral depletion becomes an issue, and also I add fertilizers to replace the minerals I leach out. But it's still happened a few times (Strelitzia nicolai and I have been through this more than once, for example). Usually I have more advance warning, though: the Cycas bleached out pretty much overnight.

The plant appears to be growing another set of leaves, though it's happening so slowly that I'm not positive, and it's maybe not getting enough light, too, in which case the leaves (should they actually come in) will be grotesque, big, pale things anyway. I didn't really mind until it changed colors on me, but if I'm honest with myself, this whole Cycas attempt really hasn't been going that well.

Meanwhile, I spent part of yesterday fixing up and publishing two posts, one about guest posts and product reviews (because I am occasionally asked), and the other a master list of every plant I've attempted to grow indoors in the last four or five years, and how that's been going, as of May 24, 2010. The latter is pretty dull, but it's there if anyone is curious. Links to both pages are located directly under the Caladium-themed header above. They will be joined by the Infrequently Asked Questions, as soon as I get around to doing that.

Also, I want to wish my Canadian readers a merry and festive Canada Day. May Celine Dion come down your chimney and bring you all the Nanaimo bars, Atom Egoyan DVDs (I really like The Sweet Hereafter, actually), and hockey sticks you asked for.

Carmen Miranda (Ananas comosus), Part I

(This is Part I of the Ananas comosus profile, which has all the good jokes and historical information but nothing about how to grow one indoors. If you're interested in care information, and want to skip over all the jokes and culture and jokes about culture, jump to Part II.)


I've had second thoughts about going with Carmen Miranda for this profile. I mean, I've done profiles involving other old-movie stars nobody knows anymore (Greta Garbo, Clara Bow), but it's getting to the point where I'm worried that maybe it's becoming a tic. Maybe I should be looking at more modern people, say maybe Carmen Electra instead of Carmen Miranda, I was thinking.

Also it seems a little disrespectful. Kinda. Miranda was, among other things, a serious person, who had serious thoughts (I assume) and did serious work. She was at one point the highest-earning woman in the United States, says Wikipedia. She sang, she danced, she was on Broadway, she was in movies. Carmen Miranda was an extremely big deal at one time. However, her cultural legacy appears to be, in most people's minds, that she was a silly lady who wore large piles of fruit on her head.


Maybe she was asking for this: wearing fruit on your head once is forgivable, but do it six or seven times and you're tempting history. There's an argument to make there. I don't know. What I do know is that she was considerably more complex than just Ol' Fruit-Head Lady. She had a drug problem (amphetamines and barbiturates), she was beaten by her husband, she started working at the age of 14 to help pay for her sister's tuberculosis-related hospital bills. I mean, you wouldn't necessarily call it a tragic life overall: highest-earning woman in the United States, remember. But there was more to her than just wearing fruit baskets.

On the other hand, when faced with a Brazilian plant that grows a large, strange, extremely tropical fruit on a stalk above the rest of the plant and has a few dark eccentricities, there's a certain rightness to choosing a person for the profile who was Brazilian,¹ famous mostly for wearing fruit on her head, and had a complicated and occasionally unpleasant life. So it's not like I could think of a better person to go with. And so here we are.

Pineapples and humans first met in South America, in Paraguay and Southern Brazil. The Native Americans at the time (the Tupi and Guaraní) domesticated it and introduced it throughout South America and the Caribbean. The botanical name, Ananas, comes from the Tupi anana, said to mean "excellent fruit."^{2, 3} There are a handful of other Ananas species,⁴ some of which are also cultivated,⁵ though as far as I can tell they're mainly useful as ornamentals, and the fruits are infrequently eaten.

Europeans first encountered the pineapple in November 1493, when Columbus ran into some on the island of Guadeloupe during his second voyage, and he brought them back to Spain because that's what you do when you're a Spanish explorer and you find new foods, especially if they're foods that help prevent scurvy.

English Royal Gardener John Rose, presenting the first pineapple grown in England to King Charles II. Original painting is by Hendrik Danckerts, 1675.
The English-speaking part of Europe, which didn't meet Ananas comosus until 1660, was apparently pretty confused about the whole thing, and named them "pineapples," a word they were already using for what we now call "pine cones." This seems kind of stupid in retrospect (obviously pine cones and pineapples are not the same thing, or useful in the same ways), but I suppose it's not that much sillier than calling a peace lily a lily so we'll let it slide. In any case, as time progressed, the fruit held on to the name, and the alternate name "pine cone" was invented for the strobilus⁶ of pines.

And presumably the pedants of the day were really upset about the name change, too, because life is just generally really upsetting, when you're a pedant.

Clump of plants growing together, presumably all offsets of the same original plant.
Botanically, Ananas is different, but not shockingly so. They're a terrestrial bromeliad, which is a little unusual -- virtually all the other bromeliads familiar to indoor gardeners are total or partial epiphytes (growing on tree branches).⁷ They're one of very few economically important plants using CAM photosynthesis, which PATSP readers may remember from the Cryptanthus cvv. profile. There are some triploid and tetraploid varieties of pineapple, which tend to have bigger fruits that develop later, compared to the usual diploid variety.⁸

Close-up of the actual flower of an Ananas comosus.
Some Ananas species are pollinated by bats, and have flowers which open at night, but A. comosus is hummingbird-pollinated, and flowers are open during the day. Plants do not have to be pollinated in order to form fruit, and in fact almost everyone would prefer that they not be pollinated, because pollinated flowers produce seeds, which ruin the plant's commercial value. The seeds are described by one Davesgarden.com commenter as being smallish, brown, and resembling apple or pear seeds. Pineapple fruits are technically 100-200 individual, small fruits which are fused together,⁹ so that means a fruit full of 100-200 of these little, hard, brown seeds. Pineapple plants are self-incompatible: a particular individual cannot pollinate itself, nor will it produce seeds if it receives pollen from a genetically identical plant. Because of all this, Hawaii (which has no native hummingbirds of its own) bans the importation of hummingbirds, so as to protect the pineapple crop from being cross-pollinated and thereby worthless. I don't know how pineapple producers in areas like Costa Rica or Florida get around the hummingbird thing.^{10, 11}

Pineapple fruit.
Anyway. An individual pineapple syncarp (fruit) is usually about a foot (30 cm) long and weighs something like 4 to 9 pounds (1.8-4.1 kg), though 20-lb. fruits (9.1 kg) have happened. The plants as a whole run about 3.3-4.9 feet tall (1-1.5 m) and about as wide, particularly in locations without frost, planted in soil. Container-grown plants, or plants in cooler areas, are smaller. Some (most?) varieties have sharp spines along the leaf margins. Like most bromeliads, plants are typically single rosettes of leaves, though occasionally two heads will form, and plants that have flowered and fruited will die slowly while producing offsets around the outside of the plant's base.

I took a bunch of notes about the history of which pineapple tycoons set up in which areas, but I'm leaving that out because it bores me and also because I'm trying to keep this profile under 60,000 words long. I'm also going to skip over the exact process by which pineapples are planted, grown, and harvested: it's more interesting than the tycoon thing, and I apologize to the one reader who was hoping to get full instructions on how to become a pineapple farmer, but we have to draw the line somewhere. (See the references at the end of the post, though, for some referrals to pages that will have the answers you seek.)

Field of cultivated pineapple in Ghana.
Culturally, the pineapple is associated with hospitality, for reasons I've never been clear on, and I had hoped to find out the explanation for that while writing this profile. It turns out that there are two related but different answers to the question, which are both right.

The first is that New England sea captains, after being off at sea for long periods of time, would announce their safe return by impaling a pineapple on a fence post outside their home. Because, I guess, everybody made a stop to pick up pineapples no matter what the trip, or something. This seems to me like a waste of a perfectly good pineapple (especially in context of the second explanation: wait for it), but I suppose it's fast. I mean, it'd be a lot more work for them to have to paint a sign, or sew a flag, or take out an "I have returned from my voyage. Come to my home and listen to my seafaring stories." ad in the paper or something. So having a pineapple outside the home was a signal that you were receiving guests, and then people who received guests professionally (hoteliers, e.g.) co-opted this personal signal and made it commercial, as businesspeople do, and eventually everybody was putting pineapples on everything but nobody knew exactly why. Even today, pineapple finials are occasionally seen, for example:

Finial in the shape of a pineapple.
Though the signal has lost some of its strength over time. Now, if you see a pineapple finial at somebody's house and walk in and ask to hear their stories about wenching and sea-monsters, they just call the cops on you and act like you're the crazy one when you try to explain that the pineapple was an invitation, and then your husband has to come bail you out of jail just because some rich asshole doesn't know about the history of New England sea captaining.

I mean, like it's my fault that somebody's a hospitality tease.

Anyway. The second explanation is that pineapples, because there were only just so many of them in 17th and 18th-Century America, and they were expensive when you could find them, came to be the item to have at your party to show everybody how fabulously wealthy and cool you were. I watched a lot of rap videos to try to determine what the equivalent item would be in 2010, and my best guess is stripper poles.¹²

I bet these people have some awesome parties.
So, naturally, people who wanted to appear wealthy but weren't had a problem.¹³ This problem was neatly solved by the bakers or confectioners who imported the pineapples, in the form of -- and this time I am not shitting you at all -- pineapple rentals. People who were having a party could rent a pineapple, which was usually placed high up, as part of a centerpiece, so it would still be visible but nobody could reach it to eat it. Then the host would return the pineapple to the store the following day, where it would either be rented out again, or sold to someone who was wealthy enough to eat it for real.

This absolutely blows my mind. Of all the things a person could rent for a party, they were renting pineapples.¹⁴ And this sort of thing continued for a long time. I mean, it wasn't like they did it for a couple years and then everybody got tired of it. This went on for decades.

But anyway. So the hospitality association came about because, obviously, the best hosts would spare no expense in producing a great party, and so if one saw a pineapple at a party, that indicated that it was going to be an awesome party. Hence hospitality.

Market display of pineapples.
This all sounds very warm and cuddly so far: parties! Story-telling! Friends and family! There are, however, some less-cuddly aspects to the species. Like with Cissus quadrangularis, Ananas comosus has been tried as a cure for basically every malady known to humankind, and so no matter what you have, there will be someone, somewhere, telling you that pineapples are the perfect cure for it.¹⁵ Some problems seem to have more backing than others -- scurvy, obviously, we know works (pineapples are high in vitamin C; you can get 94% of your recommended daily allowance from one cup of pineapple). Likewise, it really is probably effective at expelling intestinal worms, and its purgative/laxative/emetic effects on the digestive system (particularly from unripe fruit, the descriptions of which sound damned unpleasant) are mentioned often enough that I think that's probably true as well. I'd also be surprised if science didn't eventually back up the female reproductive uses (inducing labor, miscarriage, or menstruation), because they're mentioned pretty consistently, and also because there's at least a little research showing that large amounts of pineapple juice can induce uterine contractions. In mice, granted. But still. This might still be just a folk myth with no basis in reality -- some folk myths are like that -- but it's a really persistent one.

On the negative side, it interferes with blood clotting, and consequently should not be eaten by people with certain kinds of kidney or liver disease, or hemophilia.¹⁶ The sharp marginal spines can inflict serious wounds, which can become infected; this is apparently (?) an occupational hazard for people who work with pineapples. Overconsumption of pineapple can cause the mouth to swell, lips or the corners of the mouth to bleed, and the whole digestive system to get unsettled (nausea, vomiting, etc.). Also some people's skin is easily irritated by pineapple juice or leaves, even if it's not being eaten.

Photo showing the overall habit. Likely Ananas bracteatus instead of A. comosus, but I'm not really sure.
The most interesting thing about pineapple's defense system, though, is bromelain. Bromelain is a mixture of two enzymes with the ability to break proteins into smaller pieces. Enzymes with this ability are called proteases, and all organisms have them. In the human body, they're used in the digestive system to break down the proteins we eat and in the blood to initiate blood clotting, as well as other, harder-to-explain things. Bromelain happens to be a particularly economical protease to extract, and most of the world's production comes from the flowering stalks after the fruits are cut off, which are both fairly high in bromelain and would otherwise be thrown away. Most of us have encountered bromelain in the form of meat tenderizer: sprinkled on uncooked meat, or added to a marinade, the bromelain softens the meat by cutting meat proteins into smaller pieces, essentially pre-digesting it and thereby making it more tender. Pineapple-based marinades work the same way.¹⁷

This all sounds great, but of course skin is made of proteins too. One of the occupational hazards of working with pineapple fruit continually is, I'm told, that your fingerprints dissolve away. They'll come back if you avoid contact with bromelain for long enough -- it's not permanent -- but still. Unsettling. (Though good for crime, I suppose: there's always a silver lining!) Also made of protein: gelatin, which is the reason why you can't add chunks of fresh pineapple to Jell-O and get it to set up properly. In order to set up, the individual molecules of protein in gelatin have to tangle around one another and stick together, in sort of the same way that throwing a bunch of long pieces of yarn together in a dryer and letting it run for a couple hours is eventually going to give you a big wad of knotted yarn. If, on the other hand, there's something in the mix that's cutting these long protein molecules into smaller pieces as they try to tangle up in one another (imagine there's a fairy inside the dryer with a pair of scissors, cutting the yarn into smaller and smaller pieces as it tumbles), then they'll never tangle properly, and the mix remains watery. You can read a somewhat longer explanation for all of this here, though my explanation is better. They don't have the yarn analogy.

But, some of you may be saying, I've eaten gelatin that had pineapple chunks in it before, and it was solid and everything, so you must be wrong.

Oh ye of little faith.

Cooking and canning both denature¹⁸ bromelain, so canned or cooked pineapple can be used in Jell-O just fine, if you really have to have pineapple in your gelatin. You just can't use it fresh from the pineapple itself. In the same way, you can't use canned or cooked pineapple to tenderize meat.

And now you know.


Bromelain is also used medically, especially in fighting inflammation, treating burns, and following surgery, though obviously you don't want to throw an enzyme that can dissolve your body just anywhere.

Random little tidbit of information I couldn't fit in anywhere else: the fibers in pineapple leaves are strong enough to be used to make cloth. Supposedly it's also really good-quality, comfortable, silky-feeling cloth, too, but of course that's just what they would want you to think.

So that's it for Part I of the plant profile, the trivia portion. To sum up: Carmen Miranda, Brazil/Paraguay, pine cones, life is hard for pedants, CAM photosynthesis, hummingbirds, wenching, being arrested for trespassing, pineapple rental, stripper poles, purgative, uterine contractions, proteases, fingerprints, Jell-O, cloth.

And now, I'll cover how to care for one as a houseplant, in Part II.

Pages consulted for this post, though not necessarily used:

• RECOMMENDED: Pineapples - Marietta College (large-scale commercial fruit production in Costa Rica)
• Abortifacient effect of steroids from Ananas comosus and their analogues on mice (.pdf; exactly what the title says)
• Pineapple - Wikipedia (various and sundry)
• Ananas comosus (Purdue.edu) (medical, large-scale production, ploidy, toxicity, cultivars)
• Ananas comosus (Davesgarden.com) (description of seeds, some personal medical anecdotes, outdoor growing, propagation)
• Botany Photo of the Day: Ananas comosus (history, medical anecdote)
• Ananas comosus (Stokes Tropicals) (history)
• RECOMMENDED: ITA's Study Portal: Pineapple (Ananas comosus L.) (botany, cultivars, history, medical, use as fiber)
• Poisonous plants: Ananas comosus (toxicology, medical)
• Heart Diseases as related to Ananas comosus (basically worthless)
• Pineapple Fruit History (history)
• Pineapple Fruit Facts (botany, a little about large-scale production)
• Floridata: Ananas comosus (outdoor growing, a little botany)
• The Pineapple as a Symbol of Hospitality (hospitality; nearly worthless)
• RECOMMENDED: The Story of the Pineapple, a Symbol of Hospitality (hospitality)
• Pineapple as Symbol of Hospitality (hospitality)
• Pineapple, Princess of Fruits and Symbol of Hospitality (hospitality, history of production)
• WikiAnswers (hospitality)
• Social History of the Pineapple (history)

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Photo credits:
B/W picture of Carmen Miranda - Wikipedia
Color picture of Carmen Miranda - Wikimedia Commons
John Rose and Charles II - Wikipedia entry for pineapple
clump of plants in soil - Bouba, from Wikimedia Commons page for Ananas comosus
close-up of flower - Anonymous, at Wikipedia
fruit on black background - my own
field of cultivated pineapples - hiyori13 at Wikimedia Commons
finial - my own (photo, not my own finial)
stripper pole - Themaven, at Wikipedia page for Pole dance
fruit at market - David at Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
plant with bright red fruit, close-up of fruit - both H. Zell at Wikimedia Commons

¹ Carmen Miranda was born in Portugal, but her family relocated to Brazil when she was very young. So, less Brazilian than I would like, but still Brazilian by any measure that counts.
² (Ref.) Though Wikipedia is currently crediting the Guaraní for the name. And some sources say the name was "nana," not "anana." Either way, the Tupi and/or Guaraní would have interpreted a significant percentage of doo-wop music as being about pineapples. ("Sha-na-na-na-na")
³ Comosus, the species name, is from the Latin for "tufted."
⁴ I found one site in my searching that was sort of confused on this point, and had gotten pineapples, a single genus, mixed up with the whole bromeliad family, and made reference to "2000 species of pineapple," which is certainly incorrect.
⁵ Specifically, these are the red pineapple, Ananas bracteatus, and the delightfully repetitive dwarf pineapple, Ananas nanus. Red pineapples are alleged to taste similar to A. comosus, but less juicy. I couldn't find any reviews of the dwarf pineapple.

Developing fruit. This is probably A. bracteatus, though I'm not positive.
If you live in the sort of family where grandmothers are called "Nana," find a dwarf pineapple plant to give to your grandmother immediately: the joy of being able to refer to "Nana's Ananas nanus" will surely be worth whatever it costs to obtain the plant.
And actually, as far as it goes, if one grandmother is named Anna, and there's another grandmother from whom she must be distinguished, and Anna's big into baking, and willing to use nearly inedible fruits in said baking, then one could, in theory, someday, refer to "Nana Anna's anise 'n' Ananas nanus cookies." It is my understanding that if a person ever gets to say something like that in a context where it actually refers to a real, non-hypothetical thing, and the reference makes sense to everyone in the conversation, then you win at life forever.
⁶ There's that word again!
⁷ And, again, I need to correct some misinformation I found: one site said that since pineapples were bromeliads, they don't get nutrition through their roots and therefore the quality of the potting mix they're in is irrelevant. This is really not true at all for pineapples, and it's only sort of true for most of the other bromeliads grown as houseplants.
⁸ I've covered triploidy, tetraploidy, etc., at some length in the Phalaenopsis profile, which you can see if you're interested in the subject, but the short explanation is: most plants have two copies of each chromosome, but triploids have three, and tetraploids have four.
⁹ The botanical term for this is syncarp, which you should try to remember because later there's going to be a quiz. Other syncarps you may be familiar with: raspberries (Rubus sp.), blackberries (also Rubus sp.), mulberries (Morus sp.).
¹⁰ Hummingbirds are strictly New World species, so pineapple producers elsewhere, like Thailand, don't have to worry about pollination from native birds. I suspect, but could not confirm, that Asian countries probably prohibit importation of hummingbirds in the same way Hawaii does. Be interesting to know, if anybody happens to.
¹¹ This page says that the sheer scale of the Costa Rican plantations, as well as the fact that plantations generally only grow a single variety at a time, keeps hummingbird pollination from being a problem.
¹² It's pretty much my only guess, actually. So yeah, pineapples were the stripper poles of the 1700s. Why not?
¹³ Those people never have a good time, actually. They're like pedants.
¹⁴ One of the husband's suggestions when I asked for suggestions for the Ananas comosus "person" besides Carmen Miranda was "harpist," on the grounds that hiring a harpist to play at your party served the same sort of purpose: it shows you have money, and you're classy. Carmen won out in the end because of the Brazil and fruit-on-the-head parallels, and because the mental image of a harpist with a stripper pole was just too bizarre (yet tempting) to work into the post, but I do like this analogy.
¹⁵ A partial list of the conditions pineapples supposedly fix: pain relief, treatment for warts/corns/tumors, to induce labor/miscarriage/menstruation, to increase sweating, as a laxative and/or purgative, to kill intestinal parasites (particularly worms of various types), bladder ailments, scarlet fever, sprains, diuretic, to cure venereal disease, respiratory ailments, seasickness, sore throat, scurvy, and hemorrhoids. (Apparently everything cures hemorrhoids; Cissus quadrangularis and Euphorbia tirucalli will also, supposedly, fix you right up. I do not recommend you try any of these, especially the Euphorbia.)
¹⁶ Wikiposedly. I have my doubts on this one, because the main component of pineapple juice that would affect blood clotting, bromelain, which I'll talk about in just a second, wouldn't get into the blood stream on its own just from ingestion. If there's anything else in pineapples that would affect blood clotting, nobody has anything specific to say about what it is. So if this is you, ask your doctor about pineapple consumption. And then come back and tell me what s/he said.
¹⁷ Papayas (Carica papaya) contain a similar enzyme, papain, which is also used in meat tenderizers. I don't know which, bromelain or papain, is more common in such products, but both have been used at one time or another. Figs, kiwi fruit, and a handful of other edibles also contain proteases which make them problematic for the great gelatin-oriented chefs of the world.
¹⁸ Proteins, in order to function properly and do whatever they're supposed to do, have to be folded in specific ways. Certain treatments, like adding salt, alcohol, acid, or heat, can cause proteins to misfold, making them no longer able to do whatever enzymatic function they're supposed to do. When you cook an egg white, and it changes from clear to white, that's the result of its proteins being denatured by the heat; instead of being compact little globs that float around one another in water, they get stretched out and tangle in one another, leaving a solid (or at least solider) cooked egg instead of a watery raw egg. This is also why cooking food makes it safer to eat: any pathogenic organisms that might be present also contain proteins, and if their proteins become denatured, then they die and can't hurt you.

PATSP Learning Moment #2

When everybody tells you that Homalomena 'Selby' can never ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to dry out, believe them.

Pretty picture: NOID orchid

Usually, NOID orchids are NOIDs because we don't have an identification for them at all. This particular NOID is a NOID because we have more than one identification tag for it, the tags don't agree with one another, and I don't think either of the tags actually refer to the flower in question.

It's pretty anyway, though.


We got two of this same plant in yesterday's tropical order. One had a tag in it saying "Mtssa. Shelob 'Webmaster.'" The other plant had a tag saying "Odcdm. Alxra. Pacific Paradox 'Yellow Star.'"

The latter doesn't exist, according to Google Image Search, and the shorter "Alxra. Pacific Paradox 'Yellow Star' gets a "Did you mean alcra. pacific paradox 'yellow star?'"

'Yellow Star' is similar, but still different: the brown spots are more concentrated in the center of the flower. This might be the same thing, but might not. (Picture of 'Yellow Star') The search for the other tag turns up something that looks a lot like the Miltassa we've seen recently, which is not surprising since it's from the same cross.

So: I think it's the Alcra. (Alcra. = Aliceara, which is Brassia x Miltonia x Oncidium; Alxra. does actually exist, and refers to the similar but distinct Alexanderara, which is the same mix as Aliceara but with the addition of some Cochlioda genes. Confused yet?) I just don't think it's that particular one.

So I think it's clear that the moral of the story is, don't assume you know what it is just 'cause it has a tag in it. Which if you've been buying plants for any length of time at all you already knew, or at least suspected, anyway.

Science! (Why Your Digital Camera Disagrees With You)

Ever wonder why the colors in your digital pictures don't look like the real thing? Wonder no more!

Although the makers of cameras have always tried to make it so that the film (for old, non-digital cameras) or electronic receptors (for digital ones) are only responsive to the same wavelengths of light that the human eye is, and in the same relative proportions, they're using different materials, so the match is never going to be perfect, however many filters and layers and amplifiers and etc. get added to the camera.

(Or, check that: the match will not be perfect until we're carrying around cameras made of meat. Close enough to never?)

The human eye is only capable of seeing wavelengths between about 380 (violet) and 750 (red) nanometers. I don't know what all else might be going on, but at least one of the issues with my own personal digital camera is that it's capable of seeing wavelengths of light of around 940 nm. How do I know? Because that's the frequency used by a lot of remote controls (and I'm making the somewhat unwarranted assumption that my remote must operate at 940 too). 940 nm is in the infrared range, which is not visible to the eye, but my camera can see it, as shown here:


But it gets significantly worse, because as you can tell from the photo, my camera sees this light as purple, which is on the opposite side of the spectrum from infrared. Possibly it wouldn't be that noticeable if your camera saw infrared as red: they're close enough in the spectrum that a lot of things that absorb or reflect one probably also absorb or reflect the other. But since your camera is seeing something that's close to red as being purple, which is on the opposite side of the spectrum, that adds a bit of unpredictability to the situation.

This is probably the reason for the difficulty I've mentioned in getting blue and purple plants to look right in the camera, by the way. (Probably also the issue with Saintpaulia flowers being unphotographable.) Plants that reflect a lot of infrared (or ultraviolet, too, actually) are going to end up looking more purple to the camera than plants that don't, but my eye can't tell the difference between the plants that reflect those wavelengths and the ones that don't, so sometimes colors go all weird on me, and sometimes they don't.

And that's just for the infrared. My camera probably sees ultraviolet, too; I just don't have a good way to check that one. Maybe someday.

Is there a way to fix this? Not a very practical one, unfortunately. Using a photo editing program to subtract the blue added by the camera might help, but of course that's going to subtract blue from the background and leaves and everything else, too, unless you can isolate only the flower or whatever that looks wrong. Some software will let you do that, and some won't. Somebody somewhere also probably sells filters you can use to block out infrared light, but probably it's easier just to adjust the color after the fact.

Anyway. So now you know. Take pictures of your own remote controls. See what you find. It'll be fun.

PATSP Learning Moment #1

Found this one out today:

Sometimes letting the cactus fall off the bench is better than catching it.