I can has frog: the conclusion. . . .

Those of you following the harrowing two-day saga of the green tree frog I found in the box of plants (original post here) will be pleased to know that the frog has been placed in a suitable home. Apparently one of the Iowa City Water Treatment sites has a good-sized terrarium in its lobby, and my husband took him there this morning at the advice of the local animal shelter.

Since the camera was with me today, I have no pictures of the new home, but I'm assured that it's nice, and I'm encouraged to come by and visit sometime.

The frog could not be reached for comment.

Brain (Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash')

And in the thrilling conclusion to the Breakfast Club plant series, we have . . .

More name confusion. The species name is given in different places as Chlorophytum amaniense, C. orchidastrum, or C. orchidantheroides, and a few places say it's a hybrid and just call it C. x 'Fire Flash.' We will be emulating the example of the last one there, because I have no way of figuring out who's right, and neither do you (probably),¹ and it's not the most important thing to nail down anyway. There's more confusion about the cultivar name: sometimes it's the poetic 'Fire Flash' or 'Fire Glory,' sometimes the bluntly descriptive 'Green Orange,' and occasionally the sort of opaque 'Mandarin Plant.' 'Fire Flash' seems to be the name by which it's most commonly known, so that's what we're going with here too.²

Care information for this plant on the web varies from site to site. I have not found it to have any really hardcore preferences whatsoever, though some sites disagree with me on that. I suspect that what all this confusion about names and care signifies is, it's relatively new to the industry (it seems to have first shown up in the late 1990s), and everybody just grows it in a way that's convenient for them and calls it whatever they think sounds best, and tries to inflict these preferences on everybody else. But I don't know for sure or anything.

What we have here is a relative of the spider plant, Chlorophytum comosum. It doesn't form runners and offsets, though: what it does instead is, it throws seeds everyfuckingwhere. The seeds don't have the best germination rate (in one set of 50 last winter, I got three to sprout; this seems to be more or less typical), but what they lack in vigor, they make up for in sheer quantity.


I couldn't come up with a picture of a flower: none of the ones at work or at home are in flower at the moment. If you've seen a spider plant flower, though, you've more or less seen it: the flowers are about 1/2 of an inch (1 cm) in diameter, white, and have six petals. They generally last a day. On 'Fire Flash,' the flowers are borne in groups, though, instead of singly like with C. comosum: a spike rises from the middle of the plant, flowers bloom and fade over a period of a week or so, and then each flower becomes a small triangular pod. (Flowers will form pods whether or not they're pollinated: like "Brian" in the movie, 'Fire Flash' is a virgin. At least usually.)

I don't know of any way to make the plants flower: both of mine were either already in flower when I bought them, or flowered right after I got them (which was in December), and neither has shown any inclination to go again in the year since. It's possible that they only flower once, but I'd guess that they probably just have particular environmental triggers that I haven't provided. The ones at work in the greenhouse haven't flowered since I've been there either. Maybe it's a day-length thing. (UPDATE: See this post for more about flowering.)

Spider plants also get these pods, occasionally, which I didn't realize until very recently: it seems to be a family characteristic, though spider plants' pods are beige to light orange, and 'Fire Flash' gets pods which are the same pink-orange color as its stems. The pods can remain on the plant for a long time: though they will eventually, left to their own devices, go black/brown and dry up, this can take weeks. It seems to be okay to cut off the flower spike after a couple weeks of waiting, which will make the pods dry up faster; I don't know if this affects the germination rate or not.

Seedling, roughly 9 months old
Each pod contains three rows of seeds, which are small (about 2 mm across), rounded, and black. Each row has three to five seeds in it. Plants seem to vary a lot in how many pods they produce per flowering, but 30-70 is more or less the range. If you do all the math, like a Brain would, you can see that one flowering is good for roughly 270-1050 seeds, which even at a germination rate of 3 in 50, means that you could expect one flower spike to get you between 16 and 63 new plants.

Getting the seeds out is relatively simple: when the pods turn black, they also become crumbly. You can open them up with a pair of tweezers and shake out, or pull out, the seeds.³ If seeds are kept in a dry, room-temperature spot, they seem to last for quite a while, though I assume the germination rate declines over time, and they can develop mold even in dry storage. I'm testing a batch of seeds now to see if mold makes them less sproutable. (UPDATE: It does. If they're moldy, toss 'em out. You can always get more.)

As far as sowing seeds goes, I've always just sprinkled them over damp soil and then covered them with a very light layer of dry. Nothing more complicated than that. Sometimes I don't even bother with the layer of dry soil. Judging from work, what's more successful is to throw them back in with the parent plant and go on about your business: I don't know if this actually improves the germination rate or not, but it's easier to get the soil moisture right for germination if you don't have to think about it at all, and if it's in with the parent, you don't have to think about it at all. If the flower spike is not removed, plants will self-sow eventually regardless, as we can see in this plant from work:⁴


Self-sown plants in the soil of an older plant

I transplanted my seedlings to individual pots when they got their third leaves, which is about three months after sowing, give or take a few weeks. Seedlings lack the orange coloration until they're about six months old and about three inches across, at which point they're still tiny, but they start looking like small versions of the plant they came from.

But wait! There's more!



In addition to being absurdly prolific, which would be a smart enough thing for a plant to do, 'Fire Flash' is also very difficult to kill. It tolerates very low levels of light. It also tolerates high levels, though with too much light the leaves will develop hideous black patches or bleach out to an unhealthy-looking yellow, usually both at once, so it's best not to get carried away.

'Fire Flash' is so easygoing about watering, I don't even know what it might prefer. Water it every day, water it every six months: it doesn't seem to have an opinion. I mean, I know it must have a breaking point somewhere, but I don't know what it would take. The secret to drought survival is, apparently, the little root nodules visible in the above photo, which store water. They have about the same texture and consistency as a potato,⁵ but as far as I've been able to determine, they aren't capable of sprouting new plants like potatoes are: they store water, and maybe starch, and that's all they do. On-line consensus seems to be to keep the plants fairly moist, but if you miss a week, or two, or five, don't sweat it.

Humidity levels are a big point of disagreement on-line, with some sites insisting that 'Fire Flash' has to have 40% humidity, minimum, in order to do well, and others not mentioning humidity at all. I can't say I've seen any evidence that the plants care about this either, and 40% isn't all that much anyway, so I'm inclined to say this isn't worth going to any trouble over. (If you see a lot of black leaf tips, you might try misting just to see if it helps.) Air temperature also doesn't seem to be a big deal, though one site says that they suffer chilling injury (undescribed, of course) if temperatures go below 50ºF for more than 12 hours, and I suspect I've lost leaves here and there from cold damage on the plants at home, which are near a cold window.

In fact, the only serious issue I have with these is grooming: the petioles ("stem" connecting the leaf to the stalk) are brittle and easily broken. Because of this, it's not a good plant for high-traffic spots. Old flower stalks go black and become unsightly, and need to be removed. Any tear in a leaf or break in a petiole will develop black marks outlining the injury. Unwanted seedlings may pop up in the pot from time to time in older plants, though that's minor: the only reasons you might care are 1) if you want some smaller plants or 2) if the seedlings get tall enough to cover up the orange stems on the parent. Black scorch marks appear on plants in very strong light, or in cold temperatures, and some of the plants at work have burnt tips and some don’t. So there is some maintenance, which is not intense but is constant.

I have seen the claim on-line that this plant, like Chlorophytum comosum, is extremely sensitive to fluoride and will develop black splotches and tips if you even talk about fluoride on the phone while in the plant's vicinity. I think this is probably overstated, but it's something to keep in mind if you have plants that are consistently getting black tips: make sure they're not hot, cold, or getting too much light, and then if that doesn't work, try humidifying and using distilled water. I water my own plants with fluoridated tap water, and they do have brown tips, even though I flush the soil at each watering. Whether there's a cause-effect relationship there, I don't know, but it doesn't bother me enough to try to change what I'm doing: the tips aren't that pronounced. Anybody whose experiences differ significantly from what I've described here is encouraged to comment or e-mail.

Clay pots might be helpful with respect to the fluoride issue, since they do have a tendency to concentrate minerals outside the pot. The main reason my larger 'Fire Flash' are in clay pots, though, is because the colors of the pot and plant match really well and I think this looks nice. Granted that as the pots age, the match is increasingly imperfect. But oh well.

It bugs me sometimes, a little bit, that more people aren't interested in this plant. They don't sell well, and I feel bad for them. At the same time, I understand. It's difficult for us to keep them looking nice: they especially suffered this summer, when the greenhouse got hot – and the fact that we had several of them in high-light spots didn't help either. I felt kind of the same way about Brian, in the movie – it didn't seem fair that everybody else pairs off and he's stuck writing the essay.⁶ With any luck, we'll figure out a way to keep them cooler and darker this summer, and people will realize that they're not that bad, but I suppose it can't take very long to saturate the market on 'Fire Flash,' either. If they're hard to kill, and everybody can make as many of their own as they could possibly want . . . maybe they're not really the plant to stake a business on. I dunno.

In any case. I think what we've learned here is that each of us is really a Ficus, and a Monstera, and a Murraya, and a Philodendron, and a Chlorophytum. Or something like that. As much fun as this has been, I'm not in any big hurry to try something like it again. Some of these were hard. Though ever since the comments for Criminal, a few days ago, I'm kicking myself over not doing the self-heading Philodendrons as the girls from Heathers, so . . . well, so I'm not saying it couldn't happen again.

UPDATE: Here's a link to an Unfinished business post on this plant, which includes a picture of the actual flower and some seed pods.

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Photo credits: Anthony Michael Hall: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: my own.

¹ But hey, if you do, drop me a line.
² There is an outside chance that the different names might refer to actual different cultivars, though all the pictures I've ever seen look like the same plant to me, regardless of what they were called. The differences, if any, must be damned subtle.
³ The seeds roll, so it's good to do this over a plate or something, if you're interested in maximum seedage.
⁴ We have little incentive to pull the seedlings. They could be potted up on their own and sold, but there are so many of them, and the plants are just not strong sellers. So they sit in there with the parent.
⁵ I have, in fact, been tempted to nibble on one, just a little, just to see what it's like. It'd probably be safe – Chlorophytum species aren't renowned for being toxic in the way that Dieffenbachia or Euphorbia tirucalli are – but it's probably just as well I've been able to resist so far, 'cause you never know.
⁶ A lot of my feelings on Brian in the movie are because that's who I would have related to best, in high school (college too, as far as it goes). I was a Brain, and most of my friends were Brains, Basket Cases, or both at once. Occasionally there was a Princess or Criminal. The Athletes were underrepresented because I was completely unable to relate to them and far too attracted to them, both of which bring down the quality of conversation.

I can has frog?

Um. So I was pulling the plants out of boxes and taking the plastic sleeves off them and attaching price tags and whatnot, and after a few hours of this, I look down in the box of asparagus ferns I've been unpacking and see this guy.

(It's somewhat alarming, by the way, to look down into a box of plants and see movement. Just in case you'd ever wondered.)

There's no point in leaving him in the greenhouse, because the pesticides would get him. I couldn't bring myself to do that. Mercy killing was out of the question also -- that's never gone well for me either. So I caught him and brought him home, and now I have no idea what to do. We gave him a shot glass full of water and a few fragments of roast beef (the theory being that frogs are carnivorous, even if they don't normally kill and consume cattle -- though what a PBS nature special that would be), and a plant for oxygen, but this leaves a lot of questions open, obviously.

I suspect he's probably doomed regardless of what I do. But I'm willing to try to meet him halfway. Anybody want to make any wild stabs in the dark on this one?

UPDATE: I'm reasonably sure that what I have is a Hyla cinerea, or green tree frog. As it happens, they're a popular species of pet frog, and they're even the state amphibian for two states (LA and GA). The down side is that they are said to need a lot of space: the articles I ran into on-line all seem to agree that a ten-gallon is the absolute minimum possible, plus there's advice about non-chlorinated water and sterilizing terrarium materials in bleach-and-water solutions before adding them to the terrarium, and there's all this stuff about crickets, and . . . well, and I need another thing to take care of like I need another piece of caucus-related campaign literature, so something is going to have to be done. I just have no idea what one does with excess frogs. Pet stores? Animal shelter? Still trolling for suggestions, here. . . .

Oh, and -- they don't eat roast beef, but then we kind of suspected that.

UPDATE: The story concludes here.

Random plant event: Dischidia nummularia flower

This plant was an oddball: both the only one of its kind that we had, and a plant I'd never heard of before. I got this picture of a flower a few days before the plant sold, but the lucky part is that because of the flower, the plant got my attention and I took a few cuttings before it sold. So far the cuttings seem to be doing okay, knock wood.

It's not that the flower is anything amazing or special. I actually walked right by it any number of times, I'm sure, before I saw it, and it didn't have any charming scent or anything either. But hey.

Criminal (Philodendron x 'Autumn')

Okay. So here's where things start to get a little weird. What could it mean to call a plant a "criminal?" What laws do plants break? What laws could plants break?

I mean, I suppose you could call invasive or weedy species "outlaw plants," if you wanted, and there's also the possibility that pot-breakers should be punished in some legal fashion, but, I don't know, somehow this wasn't a satisfying way of looking at the situation, to me, and anyway I've already done those particular plants, so I'd have to come up with something different.

So let's take a step way the hell back and ask ourselves what the contract actually is between a person and a houseplant. At first glance, it seems like the obligations are mostly on the human's side: we agree to water, feed, defend against insects, clean, mist, prune, and so on and so forth. But, the plant, in turn, is expected to: grow, keep itself more or less presentable, reproduce when requested to do so, and not give in overly easily to the attentions of others, by which we mostly mean bugs. In other words, the plant is more or less expected to be a 1950s TV housewife, but without the vacuuming-in-pearls business.¹

In that light, a criminal plant would be the opposite: unattractive, no growth, unpropagatable, bug-prone, some kind of terrible joke of a plant that thinks you're just swell and everything but would really rather be out burning its bras and taking drugs with those dirty, dirty hippies.

Ahem. Perhaps I've let the metaphor get away from me. But still, you see the thought process. And in those terms, for me, there is really only one plant that's even competitive for the Criminal slot, and that is Philodendron x 'Autumn.'


Those of you who know me will have been expecting Syngonium podophyllum, and it's true that Syngonium and I have had our share of difficulties, but the problems were really entirely my fault: once I learned that it was all my fault, we've been getting along better. Not perfectly, but well enough that Syngonium doesn't qualify. Philodendron x 'Autumn' does.

I have had this plant for almost a year now (I bought it on January 6, 2007, so we've only got two or three weeks left before we hit an anniversary.). In that time, it has come as close to doing absolutely nothing as I think a plant can. Hell, even my Zamioculcas zamiifolia eventually grew a leaf, and propagated. 'Autumn' lost three leaves, and gained four, and that is all.

And it doesn't even look especially presentable:


As with the corresponding character in The Breakfast Club ("John Bender"), Autumn's problems are not entirely of its own making. There's been a little abuse, much of it inadvertent. I repotted it as soon as I got it home, just as I had done a few months prior with some similarly-sized 'Moonlight' Philodendrons (which had done beautifully for me, by the way, and are still looking quite fetching even as I type), and waited.

Eventually it became apparent that there was Something Wrong. It was staying wet after waterings way longer than it should have, like two or three times longer than the 'Moonlights.' A soil inspection turned up the fact that the poor thing had basically no roots anymore, and furthermore was in soil that would have been too heavy and wet for a perfectly healthy plant (if I'm remembering right, it would probably have been straight Miracle Gro), and had rocks blocking its drainage holes anyway.² So it got brand-new, somewhat improved soil, and then, to my everlasting shame, I stuck it back into the four-inch plastic pot which had been too large and water-retaining for it in the first place. I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe I didn't have anything smaller at the time.

But otherwise, it got reasonably good treatment. It was watered when the top inch or two was dry (however infrequently that happened), it got decent light and a fair amount of warmth (it was certainly never cold), I never saw any bugs on it. And all it could ever muster were these little tiny leaves about two inches long, some of which never even unrolled all the way.

So eventually I took it out of the pot again, to see what was up, and – it still has no roots to speak of. Just a two-inch taproot, nothing more. So. I moved it down again, into a still smaller pot (now a three-inch square),³ and still we wait.

'Autumn' is rumored to be the most difficult of the four cultivars in its little clique: 'Autumn' is bad, 'Prince of Orange' can be reasoned with sometimes but is still kind of fussy, 'Moonlight' and 'Imperial Red' are everybody's buddies. I don't have any idea why this is: it makes no sense to me. (Your results may vary anyway.)

Consequently, though, 'Autumn' rates a much higher difficulty level. My experiences aren't necessarily typical, but I've heard enough things from enough people to make me think that it likes to be somewhat drier (hence: more rot-prone, more drought-resistant) and better-lit than 'Moonlight.' Not that doing those things will help you, if it decides you're not worthy of its respect: then it'll just make fun of your wardrobe and tear up a library book. But it's something you can try nevertheless. I suspect, too, that this is one of those plants like Dieffenbachia spp., where some people find it terribly easy and will read this whole piece thinking I'm insane, while others find it impossible no matter what they do and will be nodding their heads as they go. There are a few plants like that. (Pothos is another one: mine are all falling apart on me lately.)

In the greenhouse, 'Autumn,' 'Prince of Orange,' 'Moonlight,' and 'Imperial Red' all behave more or less the same: I haven't noticed any of them being more problematic than any of the others. Only at home has there been a difference. So it could be that I'm making too big a deal of the differences, and I just happened to get a specimen of 'Autumn' that was a bit of a bum. Time will tell. For right now, it's doing only as much work as necessary to keep me from throwing it in the trash, and that won't be enough to save it indefinitely. Watch your back, 'Autumn.'

EDITED 5/13/08: Decreased difficulty level from 5.1 to 4.4 after the combination of downpotting and public humiliation seemed to turn the plant around (see this post). It's still more difficult than the similar Philodendrons, but it looks like a lot of the mess was my fault.

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Photo credit: Judd Nelson: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: my own.

¹ (Or, looked at in a more sinister way: 1950s housewives were expected to be potted plants, more or less, except that they also had to do chores.)
² Whether or not to put rocks in the bottoms of your pots "for drainage" is between you and your god(s): I won't tell you that you have to or that you shouldn't. There's a lot of disagreement about the practice: some people always do it, for everything, all the time, and other people never do it because they believe it to be harmful. I personally fall mostly in the latter camp, though I make exceptions in the event that one is trying to move a plant from a standard-proportioned pot to an unusually tall and skinny one, in which case having rocks or clay shards or something in the bottom might well improve the inevitable center-of-gravity issues that this kind of pot always has. And there's also something to be said for doing something besides setting the plant down on top of six inches of wet, rootless soil, which couldn't possibly end well. The simpler way of dealing with this, though, is to just not use such a tall and narrow pot in the first place.
I myself always stuck stones in the bottom of pots for years, because my mother did and I assumed that that meant it was useful for something. In actuality, though, I think it generally either does nothing or impedes drainage, usually the former.
³ Did you know that round pots are measured by the diameter across the top, but square pots are measured by the length of the diagonal, by industry convention? A "three-inch" square pot is a square with sides 2.1 inches long. This leads to all kinds of chaos and confusion.

Random plant event: Davallia cuttings finally take, sorta:

Several months back, I cut my Davallia trichomanoides tyermanii all up because it needed to be repotted, and the rhizomes had grown over the sides of the pot they were in. So I cut them all back, moved the plant, and then tried to root the rhizomes, because I'd been told one could do that sort of thing.

Months later, I have to say, this has not paid off like I thought it might. I started 19 sets, each containing three small cuttings, and of all of those, only two seem to be alive at all, and of those two, only one appears to be doing well.

This is not necessarily bad, condidering that I didn't know what I was doing, but even so: I should have used longer sections of rhizome, I should have found some way of pinning them to the ground that worked, and I probably should have used something other than potting soil to try to root them in, because I think the potting soil wound up too soggy or too dry most of the time.

That said, I think I have a new plant (maybe two) anyway:

LOLSpath

I don't think there's anything I can add to this.

Princess (Murraya paniculata)

This plant was my husband's decision. He doesn't choose plants for us very often, but about a year ago (Dec. 29, in fact), we were at the greenhouse where I now work, and he saw this, and decided he wanted it. And I was all like, no, no, are you kidding, it's $50, and we'll never be able to keep it alive more than a few months, but he ignored me and bought it anyway, as sometimes happens. And so naturally it's turned out to be one of my favorite plants, which means that now, it pretty much gets everything it wants, all the time, and I have to admit that I was wrong every time I tell this story, which is relatively often. (Though I was still right about the Hedera helix, which he bought at about the same time. So there.)

The plant is, by now, a bit spoiled. During the summer, I was watering it about every three days, which may not sound unreasonable until you consider that this is a huge plant, in a big (three-gallon?) pot:


And it was actually using that much water, too. Heavy watering kept it alive for quite a while, but it never bloomed as much as it did when we first got it, until I started feeding it. First I was feeding at half-strength, every month or so. And what I noticed was that it started blooming about every month or so. So then I started feeding at every watering, again in half-strength, and then it bloomed all the time. So then I started watering at full-strength with every watering, and – it kinda stopped, actually. I think the issue is that I did this at the same time that we had a bunch of cold, gray days outside, and so it had the food but not the light. In any case, it's the only plant that I feed that often, or make a point of feeding at all, because it's the only one that responds when I do.

Light is also important if you want it to bloom: ours here has gotten one of the coveted front-and-center spots in the only south window, because that's what it wanted and it tends to get what it wants. Often, buds will form all over the plant after a feeding and watering, but only the ones facing the window will develop and open, at least until the plant gets rotated.

The rest of the care is not terribly hard. Full sun, lots of food and water, but temperature is not a big deal: according to one site, it's hardy outdoors to 28ºF, and can be grown outdoors in zone 9b, so I think we can assume that any indoor temperature should be fine. I've worried about the humidity from time to time, but it hasn't seemed to have any problems with that, even in the winters when it's dry in here. It will dump a bunch of leaves if the soil gets too dry, which are a pain to pick up, and the flowers wind up all over the floor all the time when the plant is happy (individual flowers last only two or three days), so it gets some difficulty points added for grooming.

The leaves are dark green and naturally stay shiny. Growth is slow, but fairly consistent throughout the year.

The flowers smell more or less identical to orange blossoms (my mother's comment recently was that "it smells like Texas," referring to the orange groves all over the lower Rio Grande Valley where we used to live, and she came up with this before I told her that the plants were related). I've gotten sufficiently accustomed to the smell that it's starting to just smell like "home" to me: unless there's been some kind of terrible incident, the Murraya is usually the first smell I notice when I come through the door, and it's in bloom often enough that there's an association built-up. It's nice to come home to.

The first set of flowers we got turned into small (less than an inch long) reddish fruits after the petals fell off; most of the flowers in subsequent batches, and all the flowers for at least the last nine months, have failed to fruit and I'm not sure why. I kept some of the early fruits, thinking that seeds could be planted and all that, but they went moldy almost immediately so I pitched them. It turns out, after some investigation, that moldy fruit may still contain viable seeds, but the plant hasn't given me another chance in a very long time, so unless and until it decides I've learned my lesson, that information is kinda useless to me. Everything I've read about propagation suggests that cuttings are not easily done and have a high failure rate, but seeds are relatively easy (though the plant will not flower until it's at least a year or two old, and seedlings aren't quick growers). I tried rooting a cutting once, some time ago, and it didn't go anywhere, though that was before the mini-greenhouse.


Murraya paniculata also has a long association with human beings. It's native from India, south and east to Pakistan, China (reflected in one of the common names, "Chinese box") and the Philippines, and then south through Malaysia, Indonesia, and into Australia. It is used as an outdoor ornamental, frequently as a hedge, in all kinds of tropical climates, with the predictable result that it is an invasive species in many islands of the South Pacific (including Hawaii), non-native areas of Australia (primarily Queensland), and south Florida: birds spread the seeds by eating the fruits.¹

Humans have used the twigs as chew-sticks for cleaning teeth, the leaves for flavoring food, and various parts of the plant as treatment for dysentery and minor aches. The leaves are said to have an astringent effect, and so are used in the healing of wounds. Couldn't actually vouch for any of these practices personally, but the food-flavoring part interests me. (Actually, the minor-aches part interests me too: everything has been hurting, especially my head and neck, for the last two or three days. I don't know if I'm getting sick or what. Even if I am, I'm not sure I'm ready to start gnawing on the houseplants just yet, but I'm not going to rule it out.)

The wood is said to be used occasionally in woodcarvings or furniture, though this is not common because it's not economical: the plant just doesn't grow quickly enough.

The plant is used in bonsai a lot more than I ever suspected, too, because it will sprout from old wood after being cut back and isn't that tough to care for or induce to flower. (I admit to being a little puzzled about how one gets it to flower without feeding, or how one maintains it as a bonsai if one is feeding it enough to get it to flower. I'm also puzzled about why you'd want it to flower – the flowers aren't huge, but they're big enough that it seems like they'd be way out of proportion in a bonsai setting. Clearly more investigation is needed.)

Murraya also has connections to some interesting culture: this site says that in Javanese culture, the plant is said to be capable of warding off witchcraft, bad luck, and the devil himself.² The story I find more congenial is from the specific Javanese site of Jogjakarta Sultanate, where the king always stopped to think by a Murraya tree before entering the palace hall for a meeting, so that the plant became associated with wisdom and contemplation.³ 'Cause, I mean, if you're looking for a way to banish devils and witchcraft, you could do a lot worse than taking some occasional quiet time to think about stuff.

I'm just saying.

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Photo credits:
Molly Ringwald: from leavemethewhite.com; all others: my own.

¹ The fruits are said not to be edible by people, but I doubt that means that they're toxic, just that they don't taste good. Incidentally, nothing I ran across suggested that any part of this plant is toxic to pets or children, which should be of interest to readers with one or both.
² This has not been my experience, at least in the bad luck department: I have about as much bad luck now as I ever did. It does seem to be effective as a devil repellent, though: I have spotted no devils in nearly a year. It is also an effective thermonuclear bomb repellent, elephant repellent, and great-white-sharks-falling-from-the-sky repellent. It is less effective at warding off loss of employment and drunken college students, though in fairness, I don't think there's anything that can repel drunken college students.
Related note: Our upstairs neighbors just came back from wherever they've been for the last few days, and started up a drunken party with bongo drums at about 10:15 PM last night. This would be less problematic if they had longer attention spans, or any kind of natural rhythm whatsoever, but instead the drums start and stop, get louder and softer, arrive on, just before, or just after the beats, and come in 90-second segments before morphing into some other pattern, so it's impossible to try to sleep through. We called the cops, because it sounded like there were several of them (guys, not drums -- we think there are only one or two drums) and they were drinking and yelling, and also because anybody who doesn't understand that bongo drums at 10:15 PM in an apartment building is a bad idea is probably not going to respond to reason anyway. To their credit, they stopped pretty immediately. I personally hope that they stopped immediately because they all spent the night in jail for underage drinking, but that's because I am a mean, mean fucker when I can't get to sleep when I want to sleep.
³ Well, wisdom, contemplation, and royalty, let's note.