More Anthurium stuff

It is no longer possible to stretch the definition of "mid-June" to continue doing mid-June Anthurium seedling updates, but I still have stuff from the book to talk about, so.

A lot of what's left falls into the category of "things I'd noticed myself, but it's nice to have the book confirm it for me anyway." Plus there are a few things I could have noticed if I had been paying closer attention, but only became certain about after taking regular photographs of all the blooms over a period of a couple months.

For example, spadices move over time. When the spathe first opens, the spadix will be lying more or less parallel to it, but as time passes, the spadix becomes more, um, let's call it "perpendicular," to the spathe. We'll let #097 "Colin Ambulance" demonstrate this.

You also probably noticed that Colin changed color too.¹ Not all Anthurium blooms do that to the same degree, and they don't all change color in the same direction,² but enough of them do that it's been sort of surprising to see the changes when I look back at the photos. The book doesn't mention this having much effect on their commercial viability, which surprised me. Certainly it doesn't seem to be a problem for the plants that I see for sale:

NOID Anthurium spotted at Wallace's, during the orchid show in March. I'd guess that the one on the left is the older of the two.
I've also finally begun to understand the mentions of spadix color changes that I've been seeing for as long as I've been reading on-line about Anthuriums. Taking pictures helps.³

When Anthurium spathes first open, the spadices are usually a uniform color. (If the spathe is red, the spadix is usually yellow, occasionally green; if the spathe is pink, the spadix is usually pink.) As the inflorescence ages, a different color, usually white (for red spathes) or lavender (for pink spathes) appears at the base and moves toward the tip. A third color sometimes appears after that, again moving from base to tip. That's usually brown, but I've also seen red and green.

Because I'm usually more interested in the spathe than the spadix when I'm taking photos, I don't have great pictures of this, but here's the progression for one inflorescence of #245 "Sawyer Ad," as it changes from yellow to white to yellow-green:

(From left to right: March 24, April 15, May 5, May 15, May 23, May 30, June 9, June 18, June 24.)
The color change is related to the maturity of the individual flowers on the spadix, which you can tell by the way that the base of the spadix is starting to get lumpy, the way Anthurium spadices do when they've been pollinated, just after it turns green This is one of those things that has long puzzled me -- everybody always notes that the spadix changes color as the flowers mature, but nobody ever specifies the timing or explains how: do they mature just before the color change? Just after? As best as I can tell, the flowers are most receptive to pollen during the white phase, and are finished by the time the third color comes along. Here's #239 "Russ Teanale," which got pollinated a lot more thoroughly, for comparison:

(From left to right: April 15, April 18, May 5, May 15, May 23, May 30, June 9, June 17, June 24, June 29.)
From the look of that, the lowest flowers were already receptive to pollen on April 18 (2nd from left), and had definitely been pollinated by May 23 (5th from left). Not sure what was happening during the month in between, but it's at least consistent with the idea that the window of opportunity is indicated by the second spadix color, whatever it happens to be.⁴

This doesn't have a lot of consequences for me, but it might save me time; I at least don't have to worry about trying to pollinate blooms that are clearly signaling that they're done. It also might help me to get 'Florida' pollinated sometime, since it seems from this that most of the times I've attempted to pollinate it, it hasn't actually been accepting pollen.

There are several more Anthurium-related items to share, which I will get to in time. By the time I'm done with those, there will be even more first-time blooms to show you. (#144 "Graham Reaper" is so pretty, you guys.) And then some more buds will have been produced, and so on and so forth. So if you've been thinking, what I really want to read on PATSP this summer is lots of Anthurium-related posts, I have good news!

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¹ There's some variation because the lighting isn't 100% uniform from one photo session to the next. I've been taking these pictures in the same location, during more or less the same time of day, with the same camera, but the cloudiness varies, and my camera's auto-correct color is a bit of a problem too. So it's not perfect, but it's good enough for you to be able to see what I'm talking about.
² #149 "Heather Boah" is interesting for being one of the few to get darker over time, instead of lighter:

And most of the red spathe / yellow spadix blooms stay essentially the same color no matter how old they get. E.g. #223 "Patty Cake," which lightens very slightly:

The brown tip that appears between May 30 and Jun 18 is the result of it being too close to one of the fluorescent bulbs; it wouldn't have done that had I not accidentally burned it. Also, these photos may exaggerate the amount of color change, since the last two seem to have more light reflecting off the spathe than the first three. I try to keep reflections minimal, but it often doesn't work.
³ As the man said, you can see a lot by just looking. What Mr. Berra neglects to mention is how time-consuming looking can be sometimes.
⁴ I would have tried this with one of the pink/pink blooms, but they tend to have very perpendicular spadices, so I don't usually have consistent in-focus photos of them.

Mid-June Anthurium Update, Part 2

So this is the one that was going to be about Anthurium genetics, but I've realized that even though I've read a bunch in the book and elsewhere, fairly carefully even, I still can't entirely grasp what's going on. It doesn't help that the book is almost 20 years out of date, and that even more complicated explanations are sitting out there on the internet, taunting me with even more details I don't understand, but I suspect the main problem is that I don't have any actual training in genetics, so everything I understand about how genes work is self-taught. That works out okay when it comes to concepts, but I get lost quickly when the specialized vocabulary gets going.

This is uncomfortable. It's especially uncomfortable because I understand enough of the individual pieces that I feel like I ought to be able to understand the whole. And also because understanding what was going on genetically was the whole reason I bought the book¹ in the first place.

Specifically, I wanted to understand #097, "Colin Ambulance," to whom you were introduced in Part 1. Here's Colin again, to refresh your memory:

And here is Colin's seed parent, the NOID purple:

Even taking into account that I don't know who the pollen parent was, it would be hard for me to find a more opposite-colored mother/daughter pair. Aside from 'White Gemini,' I don't even have any varieties that are this light, and 'White Gemini' is probably not the pollen parent.² But then, most of the NOID purple's children don't look much like her. Here are the six known offspring to date:

Clockwise from top left: #046 ("Aurora Boreanaz"), #097 ("Colin Ambulance"), #110 ("Delta Badhand"), #202 ("Mason Pepperspray"), #200 ("Mario Speedwagon"), #108 ("Deena Sequins")
Now, Mario looks enough like his mother that it'd be easy to guess that they were related even if you didn't know. And although Aurora and Deena don't look much like their mother on first glance, that slight purple tint to the spadices would give away the relationship if you stared at them long enough. Maybe even Delta. But it's been a mystery to me how Colin and Mason happened.

Not to spoil the ending, but -- it turns out that that's just how it goes with Anthuriums, a lot of the time. The children don't necessarily resemble their parents very much. Not only do Anthuriums have multiple pigment-making genes, but the expression of those genes is moderated by other genes, one of the pigment genes makes the starting material that the other pigment genes work on,³ and some pigments mask the appearance of other pigments. Put all those genes and their interrelationships into a cross and mix themselves up, and you can cross spathe color A with spathe color Z, expecting to get spathe colors in between A and Z, like C, L, and W, and instead wind up with spathe colors ü, ¿, and ♂. (Though sometimes you also end up getting F, F, and more F -- even the unpredictability is unpredictable.)

The pigments involved in Anthurium spathes are pelargonidin (orange), cyanidin (red), peonidin (purple),⁴ and chlorophyll (green). These colors may be produced in varying quantities, depending on the genes that determine how much pigment to make. So cyanidin is responsible for red spathes, as you'd expect of a red pigment, but it's also (usually) the pigment in pink spathes, just in a lower concentration. Same thing goes for pelargonidin, which can be coral⁵ or orange; chlorophyll, which can be varying intensities of green; and peonidin, which changes color depending on the pH where it is, and how much of it there is, but runs from pink to purple.⁶ The varying intensities of color, in varying combinations, give us all the different possible colors of spathes.

⁷

Pelargonidin, cyanidin, and peonidin are all either being made or not being made, under the direction of one gene for each, and then another gene influences how much is made. (It looks like each pigment has at least one corresponding intensity gene, though I may be misunderstanding that.) But the point is that when you shuffle the pigments around during pollination, sometimes the intensity genes get shuffled around too, and a red crossed with a red may yield a pink, for example.

And the genes influence one another, besides. The gene for "make red pigment" I think uses orange pigment as the starting material; that is, it produces orange pigment, then turns some of it into red pigment. So unless I've misunderstood something badly,⁸ you can't have a red spathe unless there are genes present for making both orange and red. Add to this the possibility that plants with peonidin in them may have different pH in the spathes, and consequently may be producing different colors out of the same genes, and the tendency of red pigment to mask the presence of orange or green pigment, and you can see how variable things might get. The authors of the book at one point crossed two pinks together and wound up with, by their count: 5 bright red, 19 red, 42 light red, 4 dark pink,⁹ 7 pink, 2 orange, 21 coral, 10 light coral, 1 white with a touch of pink,¹⁰ and 29 white.

So you can see how complicated and frustrating being an Anthurium breeder could be, even before you factor in the consequences of randomly pollinating everything with whatever's handy.

Since I haven't been able to do much deliberate crossing, due to the fact that Anthurium inflorescences don't spend that much of their lifetimes shedding pollen or accepting pollen, and the fact that up until pretty recently I didn't have that many plants blooming at once, the semi-unpredictability isn't that big of a problem. It's tough to be frustrated by things standing in the way of your goals when you aren't working toward any particular goals. (In fact, so far, it's been plenty exciting to find out that I can make seedlings at all -- none of the houseplant books talk about growing Anthurium from seed.¹¹) I've basically been a toddler mixing together all the finger-paints and seeing what happens. New colors! New shapes! Cool!

A comparison of the darkest (#005 "Chad Michaels") and lightest (#097 "Colin Ambulance") seedlings I've gotten so far.
And I'm likely to continue finger-painting for a while: I just don't have the facilities to determine what genes I'm working with. In the book and the paper both, the procedure for figuring out what they had was that they just made deliberate crosses between two plants, however many times were necessary to get enough seedlings to be statistically relevant, and then they just grew them all out and counted the colors at the end, for as many different varieties as necessary. Which, we're talking about 75-100 seedlings for each cross, and doing a single pair of plants doesn't tell you much about either plant's genes: you have to compare what you get when you cross each of those two plants with a bunch of others. With 13 cultivars in my founding population here,¹² that's 91 different possible combinations, with each combination producing, say, 75 seedlings, and at minimum, I'm stuck growing out almost 7000 seedlings for two years just to be able to make reasonable guesses about the genetics of what I have. In the meantime, new seedlings have arisen that I will probably also be interested in using for future breeding, so I'd need to cross some of those out as well, to determine what genes they wound up with. So breeding everything out until I understand what genes are present doesn't work. And genetic sequencing is way too expensive, plus I don't think the relevant genes have even been identified, so having the sequences wouldn't necessarily do me any good even if sequencing were affordable. I'm just doomed never to understand exactly what's going on.

So, you know. Fuck it. I might start getting a little more careful with the crosses, and aim in certain directions (In particular, I would love to create a decent-sized, blistered, dark purple spathe, or any green spathe at all,¹³ especially if the leaves were nice, too.¹⁴), but we're probably looking at more finger-painting. Which is fine. If I've learned anything from all this, it's that it's relatively easy to get new colors; the hard part is getting new colors on purpose.

A composite photo of the best picture I've gotten so far for each of the 40 seedlings that had produced a finished bloom, as of 4 June. It's more impressive at full size, should the reader be considering opening it in a new window.

(► indicates seedlings making their first photo appearance on the blog in the mid-June posts)

First column, top to bottom: 005 ("Chad Michaels"), 066 ("Barbara Seville"), 108 ("Deena Sequins"), ►125 ("Anya Wei"), ►232 ("Rhoda Badcek"), ►231 ("Rhea Listick"), 245 ("Sawyer Ad"), 235 ("Rowan DeBoate").
Second column: ►097 ("Colin Ambulance"), 059 ("Bijoux Tuit"), 126 ("Erin Dirtylondry"), 031 ("Sylvester"), 223 ("Patty Cake""), ►244 ("Sara Problem"), 116 ("Eileen Dover"), 282 ("Dave Trading").
Third column: 046 ("Aurora Boreanaz"), 035 ("Alyssa Edwards"), 076 ("Bob Humbug"), 200 ("Mario Speedwagon"), 276 ("Zach Religious"), 243 ("Sal Monella"), 271 ("Wanda Reulthemal"), 234 ("Ross Koz").
Fourth column: 026 ("Peaches Christ"), ►283 ("Anne Pursand"), 239 ("Russ Teanale"), 149 ("Heather Boah"), ►216 ("Gillian Jamm"), 280 ("Jujubee"), ►247 ("Selma Carr"), 273 ("Wes Coast").
Fifth column: ►083 ("Carmen Adairya"), 063 ("Audrey Quest"), ►202 ("Mason Pepperspray"), 085 ("Carson Trucks"), 238 ("Rudy Day"), ►110 ("Delta Badhand"), 118 ("Elijah Sturdabowtit"), 275 ("Yvette Horizon").
Coming up in Part 3: what sorts of things do Anthurium breeders care about, and why? (This will probably take me several days to do, since there are ongoing family things happening, and it's a complicated subject besides. I hope to get a product review post in before Part 3 as well, but we'll see what I'm capable of.)

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¹ For those who want to follow along at home, it's Breeding Anthuriums in Hawaii, Haruyuki Kamemoto and Adelheid R. Kuehnle, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI, 1996. (ISBN: 0-8248-1645-5; Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Half.com; AbeBooks.com; Alibris) [Note if you're interested in buying: definitely do some comparison shopping before you buy. The original list price was $31.00; I've seen used copies available for about $3.50, and as I write this, there's some greedy and hopeful soul on Alibris who wants $123.80, which is just adorbs.]
² 'White Gemini' probably isn't the pollen parent because I can't remember ever seeing 'White Gemini' produce pollen. Anthurium spadices accept pollen before they make it, so any spadix that's highly fertile, like 'White Gemini,' gets pollinated before it makes any pollen of its own. It's also the case that some varieties just never make pollen, though I don't have any reason to think 'White Gemini' is one of those.
³ Such that if both copies of the "make orange pigment" gene are broken, the plant will produce white spathes, even if there are also genes telling the plant to make lots of red pigment. Without the ability to make orange, there's nothing for the plant to make red out of.
⁴ Actually those three are all the 3-rutinosides, but the pelargonidin/cyanidin/peonidin parts are where the color's coming from so it's easier to use the short, inaccurate form of the molecules' names. I know, like you even care.
⁵ Anthurium geneticists use "coral" to mean light orange, though I've always thought of it more as the medium-brightness color midway between pink and orange. Google image search for "coral color" suggests that as a color, "coral" can mean pretty much anything you want it to mean, as long as it's not dark and resides somewhere in the pink/red/orange neighborhood. Clearly someone needs to set some guidelines, but in the meantime, we'll go along with the scientists' fucked-up understanding of what "coral" is, because it'll make things easier to write about.
⁶ Peonidin is only present in hybrid Anthuriums with some A. amnicola or A. formosum in their ancestry. The discovery of A. amnicola, in particular, did a lot for the world's Anthurium breeders, and it was still a relatively new and exciting thing in 1996 when the book was written. (You can hear the excitement in the text every time A. amnicola gets mentioned.)
Not only did A. amnicola introduce the possibility of purple spathes, but it's also been important in creating miniature Anthurium varieties, along with the white-to-lavender A. antioquense.
⁷ And then there are the yellow Anthuriums. You can't make yellow from orange, red, purple, and green. For our purposes, we're going to pretend that the yellows don't exist, because this is all complicated enough already, and anyway, they're probably explainable in the same sort of fashion that all the other colors are. The yellow pigment in most spadices comes from an unidentified (?) flavone (Pelargonidin, cyanidin, and peonidin are all anthocyanins, which are similar to flavones but not quite the same.), and there's a good chance that it's the same molecule in yellow spadices and spathes alike, but I haven't actually run into anything yet that explains yellow Anthuriums genetically, so if you ask me about them I'm probably going to just smile awkwardly, shrug, and try to change the subject.
Unless you're just asking whether or not they exist, in which case I will get very excited indeed. I've seen one in person, once, didn't buy it, have never seen another, and consequently have had a three-year-and-counting case of non-buyer's remorse that still gives me pangs of regret every time I remember.
It looked like this:


I'll also get very agitated if you ask me about dye-injected yellow Anthuriums. It's probably a good show, but stand back and bring a raincoat, as there will be spittle and gesticulations.
⁸ And there's a good chance that I have, because this was the trickiest part of the genetics and I spent a lot of time reading stuff about "recessive epistasis" over and over, hoping to understand it. I feel like I more or less do, but I still don't understand it quite well enough to explain it to people so there's a good chance that I'm not following something properly. Pretty much anything in this whole post could be wrong, but I'm at least trying pretty hard not to be wrong.
⁹ Which I know it wounds like "light red" should mean "pink," but I've seen it for myself, and "light red" is a different color. Damned if I know how to describe the difference to you, but #280 "Jujubee" is definitely light red, and #232 "Rhoda Badcek" is definitely pink, and they are definitely not the same color.

An old, light red inflorescence of #280 "Jujubee."

The dark pink #232 "Rhoda Badcek."
I think the distinction is mainly about the graininess of the color -- "light red" is a mix of full red speckles and white speckles, whereas pink is more uniform. That's at least how I distinguish them when I'm describing the colors to myself. The margins of light red spathes also tend to be fully red, whereas the margins of pink spathes may or may not be darker than the rest of the spathe, which you can also see in the above photos.
¹⁰ Which is also a thing that happens. 'White Gemini,' for example, is usually just white, as so:

But the last bloom I got from it had some streaks of pink at the base:

¹¹ Nor Spathiphyllum or Schlumbergera, as far as that goes. Growing houseplants from seed is sometimes discussed a little bit, usually in the context of indoor/outdoor annual-type plants like coleus, but houseplants are a niche interest to begin with, and growing self-produced seeds of houseplants is even nichier.
¹² pink: NOID pink, 'Pandola,' 'Joli'
red: NOID red, 'Gemini,' 'Red Hot'
red-violet: NOID red-violet, 'Krypton'
purple: NOID purple
orange: 'Florida,' 'Orange Hot' (if I'm feeling charitable)
white: 'White Gemini'
other: 'Peppermint Gemini' (blotchy red and white)
Though 'Joli' hasn't been around long enough to pollinate or have been pollinated; 'Florida' is possibly sterile (I've never seen it produce or accept pollen); I'm unclear about how different 'Gemini'/'White Gemini'/'Peppermint Gemini' actually are from one another; and there's a possibility that the NOID red-violet is also a 'Krypton.' (Neither one blooms very much, and I'm not sure they've ever been blooming simultaneously, so it's tough to make comparisons.) So it's possible that there are only really nine founding varieties.
¹³ Though good luck getting a green; none of the founding varieties are green, and I've seen no indication so far that any of them have genes for green spathes. If someone would like to buy me a 'Midori' so I can pursue this dream, feel free.
¹⁴ The leaves vary from one variety to the next a lot more than you'd think. Or possibly it's that thing where when you spend enough time looking closely at something, you eventually start making distinctions no one else would even see. Not sure which applies here, but I suppose we'll find out whenever I wind up talking about foliage.

Widower (Persea americana)

One of the fundamental problems long-lived plants have to solve is where to propagate themselves. When is not as much of a problem -- you live a long time; if you don't reproduce this year, well, there's always next -- and both why and how are pretty much decided for you already: it's going to be a seed,¹ and you do it or else your whole species is going to go extinct. But where?

If you just let the seeds drop, your next generation is in a decent spot -- you know this because you have managed to live there for however long it's been. However, this also means that your children are going to be competing with you for water and minerals, and you're likely to shade them so much that they won't be able to get any light, and will struggle to get going at first, which will lead some of them to early deaths. Or maybe they'll outcompete you and lead to your early death. Either way, not terribly appealing.

You could set your seeds free to float on the wind, or drop them into a body of water, to float around until they hit a suitable spot: this ensures that at least some of them will wind up far enough away from you that they're not going to compete with you. However, most wind-borne seeds will land in places where they can't grow (too salty, too wet, too rocky, too dry, etc.), and water-borne seeds are mainly going to travel in a single direction -- either around the edge of the lake or downstream. Water travel is nice in that you know that there will be water waiting for the seeds when they get wherever they're going, but it's also very limiting, in terms of total land space: sooner or later, you're trying to drop seeds around the same lake shore that your relatives are already circling, or down the same stream that's nothing but root-to-root you up and down the banks already.

Two varieties of Persea americana fruit: the black one is I think a Hass; the green is a "Slimcado," a variety that's supposed to have 1/3 less fat than . . . something. I don't think the sticker actually said what it has 1/3 less fat than.
Finally, you can take advantage of something more mobile than yourself, which is what the avocado (Persea americana) decided to do. The fruits are calorie-rich, so anything that can eat them² gets a good reward for doing so. They even fall off the tree before they're ripe and then ripen on the ground, which is more convenient if your seed distributor doesn't climb. And the seed is (relatively) huge, hard, and rounded, so it easily survives passage through a large animal's gastrointestinal tract, which as a bonus means that the seed starts its life in a moist, nutrient-rich pile of dung.

If you're an avocado, then, it would seem that you have life all figured out, and you can just lay back and enjoy the rewards of your cleverness while your partner distributes your seeds for you. Right?

Well, you could, if only you hadn't picked this guy to be your seed-carrier:


That's a ground sloth,³ and they went extinct in North and South America about 10,000 years ago, give or take.⁴ But that's okay, 'cause you've got a back-up:

Photo by Leonard G., from Wikipedia.
Oh, shit.

That's a gomphothere, the New World answer to the elephant,⁵ which also started to go extinct around 10,000 years ago,⁶ though the gomphotheres stuck it out quite a while longer -- possibly lasting until as recently as 6000 years ago.

As far as I know, there is no hard evidence to show that either of these animals was definitely the distributor of Persea seeds, but there aren't a lot of candidates: whatever distributed avocados had to be a pretty big animal, because all indications are that they're supposed to be swallowed whole. There are only so many animals big enough to do that at the right spot in the fossil record. It's an educated guess.

Whatever it was, if not the sloths or the gomphotheres, went just as extinct as they did, so the central point remains unchanged. So the widow part of the "person" for this plant is because Persea has lost an animal partner, so to speak. The reason why he's a widower, and not a widow, is because the Nahuatl people of Mexico, who stepped in to take the gomphotheres' and sloths' place,⁷ chose the name for the plant that wound up sticking: ahuacatl, which means, in the Nahuatl language, "testicle."⁸

Fruits on a tree outdoors. Photo by B.navez, via Wikipedia.
No two sources agree on exactly where or when human domestication of the avocado first began, but Wikipedia says the first evidence of avocado use dates to 10,000 BC, and organized human domestication began roughly 8000-9000 years ago. There's also some confusion about the geographic origin of the species, with some sources putting the original range from Central America north to the Rio Grande River and south to Peru, and Wikipedia locating it specifically in the state of Puebla, Mexico. I'm not going to go into the history of avocado cultivation or the peculiarities of cross-pollinating avocados or any of that, nor am I going to talk about how wonderful and delicious they are,⁹ or how nutritious, or how easy to grow outdoors, or any of that, because dammit, this is a houseplant blog and we have to get to the houseplant stuff.

I suspect that most indoor gardeners eventually wind up trying to grow an avocado from seed. Seeds are easy to get, and easy to sprout, so it's sort of a logical thing to try.

Nobody, as a result, tries to sell them as houseplants, though I have my suspicions that a clever enough marketer could probably pull it off: the leaves are a nice, slightly metallic green, and they're not particularly difficult to grow. A new name, maybe a slightly dwarfed habit (either a small-statured variety or a regular variety that's been chemically dwarfed), some kind of made-up legend about them being lucky,¹⁰ and I think a grower could have a hit. The only thing that keeps them from being grown more indoors, I think, is that indoor-grown plants tend not to look that great. But mass-production in Florida and proper pruning of the young plants would take care of that problem, too. I really do think there's money in this idea somewhere.

PROPAGATION: The usual way one starts an avocado is, one removes the seed from the center of a supermarket-bought fruit, washes it off in running water (no soap), suspends it pointed-end-up with toothpicks over a glass of water, puts the whole thing in a warm, sunny spot, and waits for it to split open and begin to sprout.

Seeds suspended in water with toothpicks. Photo by KVDP, from Wikipedia.
This method is fairly straightforward, though there are ways to do it wrong. You should change the water regularly, lest the seed start to rot. Opinions differ on exactly how often to change the water: I'm inclined to say at least once a week, though some sources say once every few weeks. More often is better than less often. You should also maintain the water level more or less constant at about halfway up the seed: don't submerge it completely, and don't let all the water evaporate so the seed dries out.

But you don't have to do it like that. You can also start it directly in soil. If it's decent soil and you keep it moist (not waterlogged: moist) for long enough, in a warm, sunny spot, just under the surface of the soil, that's supposed to work just as well. I've started one in soil before, but that sort of doesn't count: the seed had already sprouted while in the fruit. (I don't know why I didn't get a picture. Sorry.)

Either way, as long as the seeds never dry out, germination is usually pretty reliable. If I remember correctly, although the online advice is usually to wait 4-6 weeks before the sprout emerges, the one we started in water was much faster than that. And the second one didn't even wait on us to take it out of the fruit.

LIGHT: Well, the websites all say that you should give your plant as much light as you can, up to and including full sun, but the plant doesn't necessarily have to have that much: my personal plants get some sun for a few weeks in the summer, but only bright indirect light the rest of the year, and they've done fine. They're not gorgeous, and they might grow faster if they were getting more light, but the point is that they're not that particular about how much direct sun they get, so long as the light they're getting is bright.

Plants grown under lights may grow fast enough to run into the lights, which can bleach and burn the developing younger leaves, causing them to fall off. Keep some distance between artificial light and the top of your plant.

The better of my two plants, at about 11 months old.
WATER: The usual on-line advice is to keep them from ever getting really dry, but not so much that they get sopping wet either. My avocados dried out much more slowly than I was expecting when first potted up a year ago, but lately they're needing water every couple weeks. I don't feel like they're particularly fussy about when they get water, so long as I water thoroughly.

One site said that the leaves of plants which are too wet will curl under, while plants that are too dry will drop leaves. I've never seen either behavior on my plants, and it's not like I'm super-consistent with the watering, so I'm not sure I believe any of this. I have seen curled leaves on other people's plants, but I'm not convinced that this means they're too wet. (I guess if you suspect that the plant's too wet already, this might count as confirmation.)

HUMIDITY: The usual advice is to do something to boost the humidity near the plant as much as possible. I can't say my plants have ever complained about the humidity in here, but then, the humidity here is rarely all that low. If air is too dry, you may get tip burn or dropped lower leaves, though tip burn can also be caused by mineral build-up in the soil, and occasional leaf drop on an older plant is normal.

TEMPERATURE: There's a lot of debate on-line about whether or not established avocado trees, outdoors, can take a freeze or not, but I'm hoping that figuring out who's right isn't important if you're growing an avocado as a houseplant.

PESTS: Nothing in particular. I haven't had any spider mite problems on my plants, and spider mites are the pests I'd have if I were going to have pests.¹¹ Persea species are especially susceptible to a particular mite called the persea mite, but unless you live in an area where avocados are grown outdoors, persea mites aren't likely to be a problem on your plant.

The outdoor growers seem most concerned about beetles, caterpillars, and weevils, none of which are likely to be an issue inside either. Fungal diseases are more of a concern (especially if you're misting to keep humidity up, or if you water from overhead in a shower or something, like I do), and scale and mealybugs are always something to watch out for.

GROOMING: The recommendation for pruning young avocado plants is usually to wait until a stem gets about 6 inches (15 cm) long, then cut it back to 3 inches (8 cm), over and over, until the plant has branched out well. I have a hard time doing this to plants, even when I know they need it,¹² which is one problem, but the other problem is that the plants aren't always co-operative even when you do cut them back. This one, after getting cut back, grew one humongous leaf and one medium-sized leaf, didn't branch, and then stopped doing anything at all for several months:

My stubborn non-branching plant.
You'll also want to check your plant regularly to see whether it needs to be repotted: Persea doesn't like to be cramped. There seems to be general consensus that you shouldn't repot an avocado in the winter; if you can, wait until spring instead.

You're also not likely to get fruit on a plant grown indoors, though it happens occasionally on older plants, especially if they get to summer outdoors. If you do get fruit, it won't be the same kind of fruit you originally purchased.

FEEDING: Feed with a regular houseplant fertilizer at quarter-strength with every watering, or feed every three months at full-strength. The former method is more hassle for you, but probably better for the plant. Older, established plants may need more fertilizer than younger plants of the same size.

Persea is sensitive to mineral buildup and overfertilization; either can result in burnt leaf tips. (Tip burn is also a sign of low humidity, though.) Flushing the pot with a lot of distilled water or rainwater is one way to deal with this; you could also remove as much soil as possible from the roots and replace it with new soil, though that's more traumatic for the plant.

One of my references, the New World Encyclopedia, had this to say about the avocado:

There is an important interdependency between avocados and people. The plant lacks a seed dispersal technique outside of humans. It is hypothesized that it originally co-evolved with large mammals that are now extinct, such as the giant ground sloth, with these ecological partners vital to seed dispersal. New mechanisms have not evolved, but the effectiveness of human intervention has allowed the plant to prosper. Of course, in exchange for this benefit, the avocado provides a nutritional and desirable fruit for people.

This bugs me, because of course a new dispersal mechanism sure as hell has evolved, and we're it. We don't eat the fruit whole and then pass them in our . . . er, "dung," true, but Persea americana doesn't produce the same kind of fruit it used to, either. It's shuffled its genetics around and come up with a different fruit than what existed in the past, and if you don't believe me check this out:

"Criollo" avocados, the fruit of uncultivated Persea americana. Photo by Nick Saum, www.nicksaumphotography.com. Released under the GNU Free Documentation License (CC-BY-SA-3.0). Via Wikipedia.
Sure, we had a more direct and deliberate hand in the reshuffling than the sloths did, breeding them purposely to get the traits we wanted, but it's still evolution. We are part of the environment of the avocado plant, and it's changed to reproduce itself better in this new, slothless environment. Change in successive generations of an organism, over long periods of time, is what evolution is.

This also means, to extend my earlier metaphor, that the once-widowed avocado has remarried, and we're the bride. I hope this works out better for Persea than its previous marriages did.

References in no particular order:¹³

• http://www.avocadosource.com/WAC4/WAC4_p077.pdf
• http://www.thegardenhelper.com/avocado.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomphothere
• http://lancaster.unl.edu/hort/youth/Avocado.shtml
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado
• http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=5086
• http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Avocado
• http://www.kew.org/science-research-data/kew-in-depth/difficult-seeds/species-profiles/persea-americana/index.htm
• http://coopfoodnotes.com/co-op-talk/fresh-from-the-field-avocados-and-you-pt-1/
• http://coopfoodnotes.com/co-op-talk/fresh-from-the-field-avocados-and-you-pt-2/
• http://kgkat.tripod.com/avocado.html
• Poor Richard's Almanac post about P. drymifolia

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Photo credits: Mine unless otherwise identified in the text.

¹ Unless you're a moss, fern, or liverwort. But ew. Who'd want to be one of them?
² (EDITED:) There seems to be broad agreement that the whole plant, including the leaves and fruits, is toxic to mammals, fish, and especially birds. A lot of people reportedly feed pieces of the fruit to their pets without any problems, and it probably is safe for cats and dogs in small amounts, but I don't recommend feeding any part of the avocado to any animal, especially especially especially birds, because you can't know how your particular animal will react or how much might cause a problem, and death is definitely a possible outcome.
I didn't see much suggesting that avocado plants or fruit are dangerous to humans as a group, though some individuals have allergies to the fruit. Humans don't appear to be very sensitive to the actual toxin in avocados (called persin, from the genus name Persea), but children would probably be more strongly affected, so do treat the plant like it's poisonous if you have kids around.
One particular variety of avocado, which depending on the source is either a subspecies (P. a. drymifolia) or species (P. drymifolia), is used in cooking in Mexico, where it is said to impart an anise-like flavor to dishes. The leaves of drymifolia are apparently safe in the amounts one would normally use for cooking, but as far as I can determine, only that particular variety is safe and useful. Drymifolia is distinguished from the others by having fruits with thinner skins, and the leaves smell of anise even before being cooked. Plants being grown as houseplants from supermarket avocados are probably not drymifolia (at best they might be a hybrid of it), so I do not recommend trying to cook with the leaves of a plant you've started from seed. (Even if they aren't toxic, the flavor is not likely to be what you're looking for anyway.) Instead, I'd recommend that you track down a source to sell you a whole plant with a confirmed identity. The only such source P. drymifolia I found on-line was Rolling River Nursery, out of Northern California, but their website doesn't seem to be updated very often ("available spring 2007"), and I have no personal dealings with them at all so I don't know if they're a good place to buy stuff or not. Caveat emptor.
³ Specifically, that's "Rusty," a reconstruction of the giant ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii. Rusty lives (or "lives," rather) at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, where he is apparently one of the major draws. I mean, they have him on the t-shirts and everything:


In person, he's actually kind of terrifying. You maybe don't get this from the photo, but he's enormous -- maybe 8-9 feet (2.4-2.7 m) tall and at least as long. And there are claws, which didn't show up that well in the above photo, but here he is from another angle:


⁴ I'm sure it's just a coincidence that human beings are thought to have arrived in the Americas around 14,500 years ago.
⁵ Technically, the picture above is of a skeleton found in China, but it made the whoops-it's-extinct joke better so I used it. One North American species was Gomphotherium angustidens, which looks pretty darned elephanty with its skin on:

Public domain illustration, from Wikipedia.
As for the relationship between gomphotheres and elephants: the terminology is confusing, and nobody seems terribly inclined to spell the interrelationships out clearly. My understanding is that the order Proboscidea of mammals contains the family Elephantidae (modern elephants), and the extinct families Mammutidae (mastodons), Gomphotheriidae (gomphotheres) and possibly the Stegodontidae (no common name) if you're the kind of person who believes the Stegodontidae should be a separate family. (Not everyone believes this; it's controversial.) So they're . . . fairly related to elephants, and they look quite a bit like elephants, but they aren't technically elephants.
⁶ Coincidence! (It actually might have been: there was an ice age ending around 10,000 years ago. It really might not have been our fault. I would be really surprised if we hadn't found some way to make the situation worse for the gomphotheres, though, because it's what we do.)
⁷ The Nahuatl among others, probably; I have a less than comprehensive understanding of how many distinct groups of people have lived in southern Mexico and Central America during the last 15,000 years, or what most of them would have called Persea americana. You don't know either, so don't go judging me.
⁸ In fact, for quite a while, people assumed that since it resembled a testicle, it had to be good for fertility, and maybe also an aphrodisiac, because people are easily convinced to think about sex and collectively very suggestible. The avocado thus became associated with lewd and promiscuous behavior, to the point where the early commercial growers and marketers had to launch an aggressive PR campaign to convince everyone that it was possible to eat avocados without turning into a huge slut.
⁹ I actually wouldn't know: to the best of my recollection, I've never eaten an avocado. Which you'd think I'd eat one while I was working on the profile, just to be able to say I'd done it, but no. (The avocados in the house are all bought and consumed by the husband. Who has thus far not turned into a huge slut, just in case you had lingering doubts about that.)
¹⁰ Or maybe this would be a good moment in history to bring back the aphrodisiac rumors?
¹¹ I worry that maybe I'm tempting fate by saying so, but I haven't seen a mealybug or scale insect in here in a long time. And it's not like I stopped checking for them.
¹² I don't trust them to resprout. I'm getting better about doing it anyway, but it's still difficult for me.
¹³ (Also I think it's probably an incomplete list. I try to document, but I lose things sometimes. Sorry.)

SUPERWEEDS!

So there's this study everybody's been talking about over the last few days, where some researchers found some genetically modified canola plants growing in the wild in the U.S. And I feel like I have to talk about it a little bit. So I will.

What is canola? Canola is a variety of oilseed rape (Brassica campestris or B. rapa), produced for making cooking oil, animal feed, and other products. It's preferable to regular rape because: the name is less off-putting,¹ its glucosinolate levels are significantly lower, making it more suitable for animal and human consumption,² and it was bred to grow especially well in Canada, though that last one is pretty much only preferable if you live in Canada. In the U.S., North Dakota and Minnesota also grow some canola.

Canola field blooming in Saskatchewan. Photo by Wendy, via Wikipedia.
As with a lot of crops, much canola currently being grown is of genetically modified varieties which resist the herbicides glyphosate (Monsanto's) or gluphosinate (Bayer's). American readers are fairly likely to know glyphosate by the trade name Round-Up.

So what the study (conducted by University of Arkansas scientists) found was that -- brace yourself -- along the sides of roads where genetically-modified, herbicide-resistant canola seed is frequently transported, one can find genetically-modified, herbicide-resistant canola plants growing. I'll give you a moment to pick yourself up off the floor.

The bigger news, though, is that some of the plants researchers found had genes for resistance to both glyphosate and gluphosinate. Now, Monsanto sells canola seeds which resist glyphosate but not gluphosinate, and Bayer sells seeds which resist gluphosinate but not glyphosate, but nobody sells seeds which are resistant to both, because doing so would mean violating one or both companies' patents. Which means that the plants are breeding, along the sides of these roads, and a few lucky plants have managed to snag both resistance genes.

So, wow. Plants of the same species, growing next to one another along the side of the road, can cross-pollinate one another and shuffle their characteristics about. Who could possibly have guessed?

Cue the anti-GMO crowd, who point to this as proof that genetically-altered crops can escape into the wild and breed SUPERWEEDS!, which for some reason is always said like that, in bold all-caps, with the exclamation point. They predict that these SUPERWEEDS! will next cross-pollinate other species, species to which they're not even related, and then we'll have even more SUPERWEEDS! until such point as genetically modified organisms ruin every single thing in the world for all time. Or something like that. I'm a little fuzzy on what the actual problem is that they're seeing.

Canola seeds. (Photo: public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.)
Now, it's possible that there's something to this story that I've missed, and GMO canola really is going to kill us all, but here's why I'm not seeing this as a problem, or even as news:

1) It's not news because this has been seen already. This is apparently the first time it's been spotted in the United States, this escaping of transgenes into the wild, but this is old news to Canada, Japan and Australia. So for anybody to be making a big deal out of it now just because it's happening in the U.S. is a little silly. It makes perfect sense that it would happen, we've seen it happen elsewhere, now it's happened here. So what.

2) Genes don't actually jump species that easily in the wild. I mean, it happens, but part of the reason why we can say that this plant is a Strelitzia and this plant is a Phalaenopsis is because they're genetically distinct enough that they won't breed with one another. The odds of an herbicide-resistance gene from a Brassica being transferred to dandelions or goosefoot is pretty tiny.³ And even if it were, the new plant could be sterile, so you get one lonely hybrid plant that lives its life without setting any seeds and then is never seen again. Or it may just be bad at competing with other plants. Or it could get eaten by a cow. Winning the lottery doesn't protect you from getting struck by lightning.

3) The existence of "wild"⁴ plants with transgenes doesn't actually make it more likely that weeds are going to pick up these herbicide-resistance genes. Plants containing these genes were already growing in large fields all over, next to substantial numbers of uncultivated weeds. We could argue about whether that's a responsible arrangement or not, but either way: if the transgenes were going to spread, they were already doing so, so this discovery is small potatoes next to that.

4) These "wild" plants only have one advantage over non-GMO plants: that they're resistant to herbicides. If we stop using these herbicides because they're no longer effective, then these canola plants no longer have an advantage over other plants they're in competition with.⁵ If they no longer have an advantage, then they're likely to be outcompeted. If they're outcompeted, they die, and the problem goes away on its own.

So even if the transgene for glyphosate resistance spread to every single plant on earth, all that would happen is we'd stop spraying glyphosate. Which we should possibly be doing anyway. This is much less an emergency for the environment and much more an emergency for the herbicide manufacturers.

5) As much glyphosate as people were using, some plant was going to evolve glyphosate resistance sooner or later. We may have sped up the process, but herbicides and pesticides never last forever: glyphosate and gluphosinate wouldn't have either.

So.

I'm more or less indifferent to genetic engineering, personally. I don't see it as being that much different from what people were doing before. Whether a crop plant's genes arise through hundreds of years of selection and breeding, or get borrowed, fully-formed, from a jellyfish, platypus, or ostrich, really doesn't matter that much to me, as far as whether or not I'd eat or grow the plant.

Having said that, I'm still deeply worried about the legal and regulatory issues around GMOs: the patents, the suing of organic farmers because the GMO-using farmers can't keep their pollen to themselves, the Terminator genes, and so forth. Monsanto's done some pretty crooked things already; there's no reason to think they won't do more in the future. This doesn't invalidate the technology, but we might question whether we should trust Monsanto with it. A country with a functioning, representative democracy could probably do something about this situation, but I don't live in one of those, so I'm pretty much stuck with crossing my fingers and hoping Monsanto doesn't manage to ruin anything we can't live without.

Well I'm not the world's most masculine man,
but I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man: so's Canola.
Ca- Ca- Ca- Canola, Ca- Ca- Ca- Canola.
(Photo: Canola field in Temora, New South Wales. Photo by John O'Neill, via Wikipedia.)
There are two points I hope readers take away from this. The first is, I'd like you to remember that it matters a great deal what the transgenes have been introduced to do. Genes aren't automatically safe because genetic engineering has happened; they're also not automatically dangerous. BT corn⁶ worries me a little bit, even though the evidence so far seems to be saying that it doesn't pose a serious threat to non-target organisms like monarch butterflies. I worry anyway because I can see how the BT gene might get out and protect weeds from being eaten, someday, or because I can see how large amounts of BT-producing pollen blowing around in the environment could have consequences for other organisms. Don't think consequences are likely, but I can see how it could work, and I wouldn't necessarily be surprised. But this? Herbicide-resistant canola? Not so much.

The second thing is that I would take it as a personal kindness if everybody would stop calling them SUPERWEEDS! The word "superweed" only has one purpose: to scare people and make them easier to manipulate. It's a dumb, dumb word, and more than being dumb, it's dishonest. We have way, way too many words like that now.⁷ Please stop using it.

I'd be willing to settle for ironic-only usage, if that would be easier on everyone.

References:

James and the Giant Corn (who is responsible for me realizing I had enough to say on the subject to make a blog post out of it, and from whom I may have stolen a couple tiny little points)
New York Times
80 Beats
NPR
Grist (anti-GMO)
International Business Times

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¹ Canola" is an acronym of sorts, standing for "Canadian oil, low acid." Originally this was a trademarked name, but has since become generic for low-acid, low-glucosinolate rapeseed oils. The original name of rape is totally innocent, and comes from the Latin rapum, meaning turnip, to which rape is related.
² Glucosinolates are bitter-tasting compounds found throughout the mustard family (Brassicaceae) and a few other families. If you dislike cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, or cabbage, glucosinolates are probably why.
³ Why? Well, it's complicated, but at least some of the reason is that in order for plants to cross with one another, their chromosomes have to have most of the same genes, in mostly the same order, on more or less the same number of chromosomes. The less-related two plants are, the more genetic changes have accumulated, and the less able they will be to cross.
⁴ I don't think "wild" is exactly the right word here. They can grow in places where they're spilled along the side of the road, and apparently they can also cross and have progeny which also live along the side of the road. But roadsides aren't pristine habitats to begin with, so they're hardly ruining anything we hadn't already ruined.
⁵ In fact, they're likely to be at a disadvantage, if anything. Long story, no time, but maybe someday.
⁶ Corn which has been genetically modified to include a gene for an insect-killing protein from a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis. Among the advantages of BT corn: it doesn't have to be applied to the plant because it's already built-in, it doesn't lose potency during the growing season, and it only affects insects that try to eat parts of the plant. A possible serious disadvantage: pollen, which is spread far and wide through the air, counts as a plant part.
⁷ It's somewhat out of fashion now, but the best example is probably terrorist. It has a real meaning, and occasionally you still see people using it correctly, but most of the time, if somebody starts talking to you about terrorists, that's a sign that someone wants you to turn off part of your brain and be afraid.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

(During Nina's brief exile from the terrarium, while I cleaned it)
Sort of a futuristic look for Nina today, just because I can. It's not clear whether she's accepted the new arrangement of plants just yet, but I've already gotten an unexpected bonus from the change, in that I can now see her most of the time when I look in. For a while there, I really couldn't tell whether she was moving around or not, because whenever I looked in, it was always the same: Stromanthe covering everything, and no visible Nina unless I scanned everything carefully for twenty minutes.

We're also about to change things up again, relatively soon. I found and bought one of the small-leaved white Fittonias like I've been looking for for the terrarium, at the ex-job last Sunday:¹ thinking back, I guess I was aware that they had them, but they were just cuttings on one of the back tables, it seemed like they'd been there a long time, and didn't look like they were doing all that well, so I wasn't expecting them to ever be for sale.

But last Sunday the Fittonias were out for sale, finally, and I bought one. But! Then when I brought it home, I first sprayed it with neem oil. I've been doing this with all the new acquisitions lately, just in case.²

. . . And then I realized that I'd just sprayed an insect-killing substance on a plant that I was planning to enclose with a bunch of crickets. Who are insects, whatever you may have heard, and do sometimes chew on the plants.

So I'm waiting. Google tells me that the half-life³ of the active component, azadirachtin, is roughly 2.5 to 4 days, depending on the conditions, so I'm figuring that at least 95% of it should be gone by August 1, two weeks after the first application.⁴ Or I'll just wait until the plant no longer smells like neem. Probably both. And then she'll have her Fittonia and maybe will no longer be emotionally scarred.

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¹ Ginny Burton had offered to send me one in the comments to last week's Sheba/Nina picture post, but this wound up not working out. Which is fine, because clearly Nina is destined to get one anyway.
² I can't prove that it's helping, but I figure if I got a plant home and then saw bugs of some kind on it, spraying with neem is what I'd do. So it should work just as well to spray the plants if I don't see bugs on them, right? And odds are that some of the plants I've gotten recently have bugs, just by the First Law of Retail Greenhouses, so surely this must have helped me at some point or another.
³ The half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of a given substance to turn into some other substance. The half-life of the radioactive carbon isotope carbon-14, for example, is 5730 years. What this means is that if you have 100 grams of carbon-14, set it aside in a box for 5730 years, and then come back and check it again, you'll find you now have 50 grams of carbon-14 and 50 grams of nitrogen-14. Check again after another 5730 years and you'll have 25 grams of C-14 and 75 grams of N-14. And so on. With radioactivity, this is absolute: C-14 always turns to N-14 that fast, whether it's hot, cold, exposed to sunlight, or whatever. You can't make it faster; you can't make it slower. This reliability is the basis for carbon-dating.
With chemical compounds things are not always as mathematically tidy, but the basic idea still applies: if you're given 100 milligrams of a drug that has a 2-hour half-life in the body, then we'd expect only 50 milligrams to be left two hours after taking the drug, then 25 mg after four hours, 12.5 mg after six hours, and so forth.
⁴ The math is approximate, and it's entirely possible that the stuff breaks down a lot faster than this. It probably doesn't have to be 95% gone anyway; I'm just trying to be careful. Yes, I want the crickets to die, but only if they do so in a way that benefits Nina.

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.