Unsung Hero (Hylocereus undatus)

Pity poor Hylocereus undatus.¹ Though a perfectly interesting species in its own right, you'll never see it when you're looking over the plants at your local Lowe's or supermarket or garden center or wherever you buy them, even if you're looking directly at it. Why's that? Because 99.99% of the time, you're seeing this:



These brightly-colored cacti are actually two different species of cacti grafted together. The top plant in these photos is a Gymnocalycium species, often called "moon cactus," which has mutated in such a way that it is unable (or maybe just unwilling: they seem kind of spoiled if you ask me) to produce the chlorophyll it needs to photosynthesize. These have been around for years: I remember seeing them as a little kid. The ones I remember, though, were always kind of a neon red: the pinks and yellows and oranges and purples like in the picture are a semi-new development.

The Gymnocalycium produces offsets pretty easily, even when grafted, and the offsets so produced can be grafted to a new base, perpetuating the plant, though it's my understanding that even the best grafts only last a few years, as the base grows faster than the Gymnocalycium. After that point, the difference in speed between the two becomes too great for the graft to hold together, and the two split apart. Some of the sites I ran across in researching this one seemed to be suggesting that the Gymnocalycium, if removed from the base and replanted, will remain colored until it dies from lack of food; other sites implied that severed grafts would spontaneously begin to produce chlorophyll even though they never had previously, and could be planted on their own. My personal suspicion is that both are true: the "purple" grafts, if you look closely, do contain some green, towards the center of the plant:



So they probably could begin making food for themselves if they really needed to. Peanut butter sandwiches, at least. At the same time, the neon yellow and orange and pink give no indication of having any green pigment in them whatsoever, and so I would guess that those probably couldn't make it on their own. We do have a few plain green Gymnocalycium at work, but they don't do anything terribly interesting and just look like your ordinary small green beanbag-shaped cactus. A couple of them do color up a little in the summer: they stay green but have a red / purple cast to them, especially on the most exposed portions of the plants. It's not especially attractive: mostly they just look kind of burnt.

But who cares about the Gymnocalyciums anyway, right? What we're really interested in is the base, the sad little, put-upon, servant of a plant that's doing all the heavy lifting.



The above is my own personal plant. I got it from Lowe's, after an excruciating wait to see whether anybody else was going to take it. It was one of a number of grafted cacti they had, all of them Gymnocalycium/Hylocereus types, but on this particular one, the graft had come off, and there were sprouts from each corner of the Hylocereus. I wanted to buy it, but the original plant was like $3.47, which seemed like a lot for a plant that was kinda, you know, broken. So I waited, and waited, and then finally there it was, waiting for me, on the half-price racks.

It's done well for me so far. It grew really quickly when it first arrived, and has settled down a little bit now that we're in the middle of winter. One of the bigger surprises was the sudden appearance of aerial roots from the center of the stem segments:



This is perfectly normal, just not something I was expecting to see. The aerial roots are like aerial roots on anything else: they're not mandatory. If you don't like them, you can cut them off; if they dry up and die, the plant isn't necessarily hurt any.

The thing I was most surprised about, though, was that when I started looking into it, I found out that this was the same plant that gives us the dragon fruit, or pitaya. As a bonus surprise, I found out that "dragon fruit" really existed: I'd actually assumed that there was probably no such thing. (Based on the name, it sounded like a marketing ploy to me, and it's not like I'd seen any in the grocery store.)² But they are real, and they look like this:

Photo: Allen Timothy Chang, at the Wikipedia entry for pitaya

I think you'll agree that "dragon fruit" seems like an appropriate name. The interior of the fruit is full of small, crunchy black seeds, which are (I hear) pretty easily sprouted; the pulp surrounding the seeds is white, pink, or red, depending on its ancestry. It is apparently typical for the fruit to be served chilled, and the flesh scooped out of the rind with a spoon. The taste is said to be something like a melon or kiwi (the crunchy seeds contribute to the kiwi comparison): sweet, but not intense.

The flowers are also kind of a big deal:

Photo: "roychai," at the Wikipedia entry for pitaya

The flowers are short-lived, opening only for one night. They're pretty damned elaborate, as you can see from the picture, and are heavily scented. By all accounts, they're awesome flowers, but alas, I've never seen one of those in person either.

Plants have to be large, if not old, in order to set blooms and fruit. Mine clearly has a ways to go. They are supposed to grow faster and do better in general if you give them something to hang onto, like with Monstera deliciosa, though since they get big (20 feet is not unheard of), you're going to want to choose something you can add to over time. They will climb trees in the wild, though they're not picky, and will attach to burlap-covered poles, concrete walls, slow-moving pets, or whatever.³ At least a couple places I ran across on-line seemed to be suggesting that it's reasonable to expect blooms at about two years old and / or two feet tall; to get fruit you need somewhat bigger plants, and the flowers have to be pollinated. I haven't seen anybody address the question of whether plants are self-fertile.

Care is fairly typical cactus, though since this is a jungle species (the Hylocereus genus as a whole is native to the Caribbean and Central America south to the northmost part of South America), it's somewhat more flexible about certain things. Full sun is desirable indoors; the plant can be moved outside during the summer but should be shaded from the hottest summer sun, and obviously one will want to make any big shifts in light level somewhat gradually. The plant adapts to a pretty wide range of soils, and tolerates very hot and very cold conditions (up to 110ºF/43ºC, down to freezing or below, though they can only withstand short periods of cold, so don't push this too hard). Humidity is essentially a non-issue.

Propagation is said to be pretty simple: they root easily from cuttings that have been allowed to dry for a day or two: stand the cutting up on a well-draining soil and water when the soil gets dry, and the plant will handle the rest. It's also supposed to be a piece of cake to sprout seeds, if you're lucky enough to get a fruit to take seeds from: my understanding is that a moist but not soggy, fairly loose soil mix, seeds sprinkled around on top, and a plastic bag over the top of the mix is all you really need. Seedlings can be transplanted when they've grown beyond their seed leaves.

I'm a little clueless on watering; I've been going with the standard cactus approach of letting it get pretty dry between waterings, which with my plant winds up being about every 10-14 days. So far, so good, though I have seen a few things around the net that suggest that this needs to be cut back even further during the winter. So far, there are no complaints, so I'm inclined to keep doing what I've been doing. But we'll see how it goes.

I'm going to assume mealybugs can be a problem, because when the hell are they ever not, but I haven't had any yet.

They're known for getting kind of top-heavy. Wider, shallower pots are sometimes advised for this, to lower the center of gravity, but you still have to bear in mind that the roots only need as much soil as they need, and you can't move them into a pot that's larger than they need without there being some consequences.

I don't expect to get fruit from this plant. I don't even really expect flowers, to tell the truth. But I do like it, all the same, for being this totally cool plant that was hidden in plain sight: crazy flowers, alien-looking fruit, a tree-climbing cactus, and the only time I ever saw it, it was relegated to being the low-key servant for some lazy-ass Gymnocalycium that won't even make their own chlorophyll. Not that you should go to your local plant supplier and start liberating the Hylocereus by knocking off their grafts: that would be wrong, if amusing ("Grow, my pretties! Grow and be free!"). But, you know, sooner or later you'll see one where the graft has come off on its own, through normal handling or whatever,⁴ and depending on where you find yourself, you may be able to get it for a song, if you ask the right people. And it'd be worth getting.

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Photo credits: fruit and flower as noted in text; all others are my own.

¹ (Some or all of this post will also apply to the closely-related species Hylocereus trigonus. The differences between H. trigonus and H. undatus are small enough that I couldn't determine how anyone tells them apart. So feel free to pity H. trigonus as well, if you are so moved.)
² (I can sometimes be too skeptical for my own good.)
³ There is considerable on-line disagreement about exactly how fast these grow, with some sides saying they're practically a blur and others saying that they take forever to get anywhere. Based on the speed of my own, thus far, and the information at this site, I lean towards blur, but your results may vary, especially if you and I actually own different species. Selenicereus spp. are similar-looking, and also have big Las-Vegas-showgirl flower production extravaganzas, but appear to work much more slowly. Also different Hylocereus species can, I think, reasonably be expected to grow at differing speeds. Anyone with actual information about this, even anecdotal, is encouraged to share in the comments.
⁴ Thus far, nothing like this has happened to the batch we got a couple weeks ago, for which I am grateful. They've actually even sold pretty well. I'm not a fan of grafted cacti, never have been, and I liked them even less well when I read that the graft isn't stable for more than a few years, so I was kind of against ordering them in the first place, but apparently the rest of the world likes the damn garish and fake things better than I do.

Random plant event: Ledebouria socialis flowers

I bought a Ledebouria socialislast April, and divided it into three plants, and then it did nothing all summer. Recently, all three divisions have been producing new bulbs, but nothing's blooming, and nothing seems likely to, either. How much do I mind? Ennh. Not that much. It's fine. But still, I'm glad that some of them bloomed at work, so I could see what that's like.



If there's a scent to the flowers, it's really subtle; the plants in question are near a fan so it's hard to be sure that there's nothing, but it's not anything that's going to knock you on your back or anything.

Also, some of the plants have flowered, and others didn't, even though they're all in more or less the same conditions and getting more or less the same care. Not clear what that means, but I'm guessing it must be an age / size thing.

College Roommate (Hatiora salicornioides)

Like a lot of people, I doodle. Quite a bit less than I used to, but then, I don’t spend nearly as much time in boring classes as I used to, either, so I have fewer opportunities. There was a period beginning in high school, and lasting until a few years after college, where I had a fairly limited number of default doodles. I did spider webs (not very good ones), occasionally pipes (there was some fairly elaborate plumbing going on in my margins from time to time), fireworks, and once in a while a fountainy plant like a Dracaena or a Beaucarnea would surface. But I was especially fond of this one:


As you can see, my artistic skills aren't the greatest (they weren't then, either), but then, they don't have to be for something like this. You draw a couple lines coming from a point, then two or three lines from the end of each of those lines, then two or three lines from the end of each of those lines, and so on, and eventually you wind up with a "plant" of sorts.

Originally, this was just me doodling, and was abstract, but then at some point during I think my sophomore year of college, I saw this for sale somewhere:


and, naturally, I had to have one. So I bought it and took it back to the dorm, where it lived for a semester or so, after which point I seem to have lost track of it. I think I gave it to someone to take care of for the summer, and he killed it, or I forgot about getting it back, or we had a falling-out, or something. It was a while ago.

For both of those reasons, the doodling and the period in college when I owned one, this plant has a nostalgic quality to me, which I find endearing. I had to wait a long time (like, ten years or so) before I was able to find another, though: they're not especially popular.

They deserve to be, though. They're very easily grown and propagated, they rarely have pest problems, and they're not messy. They even have good manners – I couldn't find any references to it being invasive, and you know how rare a thing that is. I also couldn't dig up anything about toxicity one way or the other, though some plants from the same genus are said to be toxic to kids and pets, so I'd assume this one is too, just to be on the safe side.¹

The only real requirements here have to do with light and water: light needs to be bright indirect light at minimum. Some sites advise against full sun for this species, but I think it's probably still a good idea for indoor growers: my plant has been in a pretty bright west window for months and it still looks like it's reaching for more light. Maybe that's normal, but I suspect it's trying to tell me something.

Although Hatiora salicornioides² is in the cactus family, its watering schedule should be more like that of a regular houseplant: it's not good to keep them constantly dry, but watering when about halfway dry (or even a little wetter) will work just fine during the summer; in late fall / early winter, they should be allowed to dry out more between waterings. They're not easy to overwater during the period of active growth: if you can keep a Philodendron hederaceum (and most people can), you can keep one of these. A well-draining soil mix is helpful but not necessarily mandatory, because the plant will give you plenty of feedback: overwatering causes pieces of stem to yellow and fall off; underwatering causes the whole plant to shrivel up.³ These are epiphytes in nature (rainforest epiphytes, actually, which is why they're okay with being kept wet), so they don't need or want a dense, soggy, peaty soil, but bagged mix cut with some perlite and/or coarse sand has worked fine for me.


I have never had any pest problems with my own plants, but I've read stuff on line which suggests that mealybugs can be a problem for this species. Since mealybugs can be a problem for any species (keep watching: there's a post about mealybugs in the pipeline here: I'm thinking Saturday), I'm inclined to believe this, but even still, that's not a reason not to get one so much as it's a reason to check it over carefully when you buy.

It's a fast grower in general, though there's a bit of a winter slowdown (more of a late-fall full stop, actually, from what I've seen), and propagation is very simple: I have probably doubled the overall mass of my plant since I bought it. Some of the cuttings were sent out on trades through Garden Web, some came with me to work to be sold there, some have made new plants here at home. Propagation can be done at any time of year, but it seems to work the best in summer: I cut a piece off (it seems not to matter whether the cut is in the middle of a segment or at the end), let it dry overnight (not necessarily mandatory, though I recommend it), and then stick it in soil and wait. I have yet to see any of them actually fail, though a few of them at work have shriveled from being too wet for too long, or from getting pulled loose from the soil. I tried rooting in perlite once, which didn't work for me so well, though some of the problem there was that I didn't keep the moisture level up in the perlite. The cuttings from the perlite transferred to soil without incident and took off shortly thereafter.

The plant is supposed to produce smallish yellow flowers on the end of the stems in spring and early summer; I've never seen a plant in flower. The pictures don't look all that impressive, and anyway, flowers would complicate the doodles, so I don't care so much, but I'm a little curious. It would certainly be cool if it happened. (UPDATE: It eventually did.)

As it's a cactus, it has the ability to grow thorns, though it's inconsistent about doing so and any thorns it does grow are hardly dangerous. A few segments here and there will grow lots of white, thin spines about the width and stiffness of a hair; most of the plant will be smooth.

I'll grant that this is not really what you'd call a beautiful plant. Stems grow until they bend under their own weight, which can look nice in a hanging basket, if that's your thing, but mostly it's about the oddity of the form and the weird, bottle-shaped stem segments, and all that. Not everybody would find that appealing, and maybe it's just that Hatiora salicornioides and I go back a long time that makes me like them. But I think they've been undeservedly ignored for far too long.

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Photo credits: me.

¹ Probably worth pausing here to note that, however toxic H. salicornioides might be, it's got to be a lot less so than the similar-looking but much larger Euphorbia tirucalli.
² It is also known by Rhipsalis salicornioides, Hariota stricta, Hariota villigera, Rhipsalis villigera, Rhipsalis stricta, Rhipsalis bambusoides, Hariota bambusoides, Hatiora bambusoides, Rhipsalis teres, Cactus salicornioides, Cactus lyratus, and Hariota salicornioides. Plus I probably missed some. Clearly some sort of horrible taxonomic turf war is underway, or just ended, or something. It's possible that some of these are still valid names for some other plant.
³ The exception to this is with newly rooted cuttings, which will sometimes shrivel if they're too wet. The root system is very small for the size of the plant and is easily overwhelmed.

The Mystery of the Returned Ficus

I came back from lunch a few days ago and there was a woman with a Ficus benjamina all wrapped up at the front counter next to her. And I thought, okay, we sold another Ficus benjamina, good on us.

Then I got back to the potting room, and there was a bagged up benjamina there too. A mystery was afoot! (Or ahand. Or ajar. At least, a mystery was a vailable. Maybe two vailables.)

So I went up to the counter and asked what the story was with this plant, and, after the lady and her tree left, I was told that this customer had called and complained that she bought a Ficus from us some weeks ago, and that when she got it home, it started dropping tons of leaves and generally acted miserable.

Oh, she was told over the phone, they'll do that. Just keep it away from heat vents and give it plenty of light, and it'll come around eventually. Customer's response: oh, no, I have the perfect spot for it; it's the plant, not me, and you sold it to me so it's really all your fault.

Long story short, the customer talked long enough, and hard enough, to a large enough number of people, that eventually she wore us down. We don't do exchanges on houseplants because they're not guaranteed, and they're not guaranteed because there's no way to be sure that people are giving appropriate care to the plants. We encourage people to call and ask questions, and we're even willing to do a physical inspection if someone's willing to go to the trouble of bringing a plant in to us, but we don't do exchanges for non-guaranteed plants.

And this is something I hate about customer service: you can have a perfectly reasonable policy, for perfectly reasonable reasons, and most of the customers will be fine with that and play within those rules. There will also be a handful of customers who are likeable enough, or disadvantaged enough, or regular enough, or whatever, that you don't feel bad about offering to bend the rules for them without them even having to ask. And then there's the handful of customers who comprehend that there are rules, but somehow don't feel like the rules should have to apply to them. And it actually drives me crazy that those customers, more often than not, get whatever completely unreasonable thing they're asking for, and set precedents, and then before you know it, every time Mrs. So-and-so buys her groceries, somebody has to carry them to her car three blocks away because she's Mrs. So-and-so and that's just what you do for Mrs. So-and-so.

Anyway.

So this lady got to walk out with another perfectly healthy Ficus, fresh off the truck, and sticks us with one that isn't going to be sellable for at least a few months, because the perfectly healthy plant we sold her didn't work right in her perfect spot for it, under her perfect care. Grrr.

The best part happened when I took the plastic bags off of it, though, to assess the damage, and it was immediately obvious what had happened. In fact, it was so immediately obvious that it was hysterically funny, I thought (everybody else had a comment, but I was the only one who thought it was funny).

A minor factor in the situation is that she'd added a layer of what I assume is garden soil to the top of the pot. Don't do this. Not ever. Garden soil is too heavy, it won't drain, it'll lead you straight to root rot, plus it could have bug eggs or weed seeds or whatever. Potting soil for containerized plants is different from topsoil for a reason. But that wasn't the main problem. Can you solve the mystery of the returned Ficus just from examining the picture? This very thing was mentioned in passing, in the abovelinked Ficus benjamina profile. . . .

(Photo converted to black and white to heighten mysterious / noir / spooky effect.)

(Answer to be found in comments. No fair looking before you have your own theory, though.)

Employee (Senecio macroglossus)

I've never been an employer, but I've been a supervisor, once, briefly, during a disastrous three months of my life just out of college, at a Pizza Hut in Waco, Texas. One of the cooks was, I think, illiterate, and interpreted all long words beginning with "P" as either pepperoni or pineapple, according to his mood; one of the delivery drivers had fathered babies all over the Waco metro area and liked to visit them after he delivered his pizzas, and sometimes he liked to visit them before he delivered his pizzas, too. So I'd get calls from people telling me that they'd ordered their pizza two hours ago and what the hell, and I'd have to promise them free pizzas in the future and stuff. The waitresses tried really hard to avoid doing anything that they didn't absolutely have to do, which sometimes included serving the customers.¹ The assistant manager, also gay but a good 20 years my senior, was constantly hinting in a creepy way that he and I should get together sometime, with no regard for my complete lack of enthusiasm about the idea (or the fact that I was still, technically, in the closet as far as work went, or at least really trying to be, which made it a shade creepier). The guy who actually owned the franchise seemed to regard it more as a hobby than as a source of income, so any complaints about any of this were met with overwhelming indifference.

At the time, my Pizza Hut period was the lowest point my life had yet hit, but I was only 22 and there were unfathomably worse things waiting for me at 23. (23 was a terrible, terrible age.) I lasted all of three months at the job, and only one month as supervisor, which ended when I got called at 8 AM on a day off one too many times. It wasn't my fault that what's-his-face didn't show up, and the schedule says I have the day off, so leave me the hell alone and let me sleep.


This plant reminds me of that time period.

It's not a difficult plant to keep alive, is the good news. It's even very, very easy to propagate. It grows very very quickly once established – literally putting on several inches in a week when it's motivated.

The bad news? It almost never, ever looks good, because it alternates between growing like a weed and dropping leaves as fast as it grew them.

It could be that this isn't a feature of the plant, that it's a matter of me being inept with the watering. Lord knows I've been responsible for plenty of inappropriate watering, over the years. But as best as I can determine – and I have been watching, okay – the plant just decides from time to time that it's going to get rid of a few inches' worth of leaves, and then it does, and there's nothing you can offer it that's going to convince it to hang on to them. For the longest time, I blamed myself for overwatering, because leaves tended to drop after I watered. So I held way back, and . . . well, the situation actually did improve a little bit; the plant does better if kept slightly on the drier side. But it was still ripping off clumps of leaves and hurling them at me on a regular basis over nothing.

It's very aggravating to have a plant in your home that plays with your emotions this way. You see it put on six inches practically overnight, and get excited: yes, yes, it's finally taking off! You like me, you really like me! Go baby go! only to have it slack off severely when it thinks you're no longer paying attention.

This one shows up, punches the clock, grows when it thinks it's being watched, and screws around the rest of the time.


From looking around on-line, I get the impression that these are not commonly grown as indoor plants. There aren't a lot of sites providing any information about growing them outside, either, and most of the ones that do spend more time ooohing and aaahing over the flowers, which are big, yellow-to-white daisy-like things that you wouldn't expect from a plant that looks so much like English ivy (Hedera helix). (I've never seen the flowers, so I can't tell you anything about them. There's an extremely underwhelming picture of a flower here.)

So I'm just going from my experience here, but:

They seem to be unhappy with any amount or frequency of watering, no matter what you do. My own seem to be least unhappy with a cactus-like cycle: heavy drenching, followed by drying out to the point of being almost completely dry, followed by heavy drenching again. If I water more frequently than that, the lowest leaves get limp and yellow overnight; if I water less frequently than that, the tips of the lowest leaves will begin to turn black on Monday, and by Tuesday the whole leaf is shriveled, brown and crumbly. I would ordinarily blame soil, because soil has historically caused a lot of problems for me, but I checked that out, and it's got fine soil: it's just being a slacker. So don't overwater, don't underwater, and be prepared to groom like you've never groomed before.²

Light seems to be pretty flexible, as far as I can tell: I had³ mine under fluorescents (technically it's more to the side of fluorescents, but whatever) and they never seemed to object; the conditions at work are probably the equivalent of filtered sun, and they're okay there too. So let's call it bright and move on.

Everything else seems to be more or less a non-issue. Cold and heat aren't necessarily desirable, but the plant seems to roll with them. Propagation is so simple that your toddler could do it (but, um, don't do this: the plant is toxic. Forget I said anything.), and is the same cut-and-stick-in-dirt procedure that we've seen with Tradescantia pallida and Pilea cadierei. I have not yet seen any evidence that this plant cares about humidity levels. Pests are negligible, though aphids, of all things, are said to like it, and in fact mine did have aphids when I bought it.⁴

I imagine it's probably pretty when in bloom, though. The flowers are said to have a "lemony" fragrance; the same site claims that the crushed foliage does too. I've never detected any fragrance, pleasant or un-, from the crushed foliage. (That site also claims that it's very drought-tolerant, which has not been my experience either, though in that case we'll make an allowance for indoor growing vs. outdoor growing.)

I will give it at least this much: I've had a better experience, all-around, with Senecio macroglossus than I have with Hedera helix, the plant it sometimes fills in for (You know: Hedera calls in sick, Senecio needs some extra hours. . . .). The pest-resistance is a big plus, and it's also nice that humidity doesn't seem to be an issue. Hedera helix lasts about five seconds in our apartment, and Senecio macroglossus has been around for eleven months. But it's been disappointing all the same.


UPDATE 1/30/10: Have adjusted the difficulty level down to 3.9 from 5.4, because although the plant I had when I wrote this post was fired, I've brought in a new one that seems to be working out much better. I'm not sure how to account for the difference completely, but the new plant is in a much smaller pot, proportionately speaking, has much faster-draining soil, and gets a lot more light. Any of these things, individually or in combination, might have made the difference.

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Photo credits: me.

¹ (Tips, schmips, apparently being the theory. Never quite figured that one out.)
² Or at least, groom like you haven't groomed since Tradescantia pallida. Or the Boston fern (Nephrolepis exaltata), perhaps, if you're one of those people.
³ The past tense here is because I dumped my plant as of yesterday. Took some cuttings first, but I'm really unhappy with the plant as a whole, and watering all the plants yesterday took me 5 1/2 hours so I'm really trying to drop the ones that are clearly just not working out. And I've been unhappy with this plant for a long time. So.
⁴ Though since this was also my easiest pest problem ever, I'm inclined to give the plant a pass on this point. Five minutes with the sprayer in the kitchen sink, and they were never heard from again. Aphids are wusses.

LOLSpath

Supermodel (Dizygotheca elegantissima)

Readers who like mood music with their plant-related reading, and are by and large cool with drag queens,¹ are encouraged to play the video below. Or anybody who just misses RuPaul, for that matter: what has she been doing lately? Everybody else can just proceed to the text.

Skinny leaves, skinny stems, skinny petioles, fussy, high-maintenance, tall: what could Dizygotheca elegantissima be but a supermodel?



I happen to like this plant, though I hadn't given it a lot of thought until a few months ago. They have a reputation for being buggy, and, frankly, I have enough bug problems to worry about already. But . . . you know how it is. You see a plant every day, you develop a kind of obsession about it, you do the math one day and find out you could buy it with your employee discount for less than $3, and then suddenly it's sitting on the back of the toilet. Whoops.

Shortly thereafter, K-Mart had a bunch of these too: 4-inch pots containing three plants for about $3. So I bought three of those as well. Double whoops.

And the results have been, shall we say, mixed. They were all doing nicely until one of the periodic plant rearrangements moved the K-Mart batch to the mini-greenhouse. They sat there happily for a while and then suddenly began pitching leaves left, right and center. I don't know what happened precisely: there may have been a situation with some spider mites, though I was never sure if I saw any or not. In any case. No air circulation + soil that was basically pure peat² + possibly some contributing spider mites = badness and leaf drop.



I took them back out, sprayed them with some neem oil, and gave them spots with better air circulation, and things improved, though most of the plants had bare spots where leaves had been lost, so I potted them all up together in a single pot to hide the pitifulness. I have no idea what's going to happen now: they have better soil, which should make them happy, and the grouping of them should keep the local humidity a little higher, but at the same time, air circulation is down, and they're in a warmer spot, which might encourage spider mites. Really no way to know until it happens. So far, things seem to be okay, though there are some early signs that there's going to be another round of leaf drop before it's over. Call it a hunch.

I should probably mention sooner or later that Dizygotheca elegantissima is not the correct name for this plant anymore. It is now placed in the genus Schefflera, along with the more common houseplants Schefflera actinophylla and S. arboricola. The family resemblance is sort of difficult to see with young plants, since elegantissima has very long, thin leaflets (as opposed to the others' oval ones), which are a dark, almost metallic black-green (as opposed to the others' plain green, or green with cream-yellow variegation), and so on and so forth. But if you look at more mature plants,³ and others in the Schefflera family (e.g. the pictures at davesgarden.com of S. digitata, S. taiwaniana, and the 'Nova' cultivar of S. actinophylla⁴), it becomes more obvious that no, Schefflera is probably the right genus. Readers who are still not convinced should look at this photo, also from davesgarden.com, which shows mature and immature foliage side-by-side, or this one, which shows mature plants.

This, to me, is a tragic loss of a good botanical name. More than that, really, because "Dizygotheca elegantissima," to me, somehow sounded the way the plant looked. It was just the right name for this plant. So I am making the conscious and public decision to continue to call it Dizygotheca for at least a little while longer, even though I wouldn't ordinarily don't do that, and I resent people who perpetuate inaccurate names, because I'm just not ready to give it up yet.

Anyway. There are at least a couple cultivars, which I wasn't aware of until pretty recently. Asiatica Nursery has one for sale which is called 'White Parsley;' I've also seen a plant going by the name 'Gold Crest' at Lowe's, which is different in having cream variegation around the outside edge of the leaves, and the Exotic Angel website lists a 'Galaxy' that they seem to think is something special, though I'm not clear why they think that, a variegated 'Galaxy,' and 'Olympia,' which seems to be the regular plant with unusually fat leaves – it's possible that this version grows mature leaves at a younger age, or it may just be that the leaves are broader all the way around.

I haven't met any actual human supermodels, but what I hear is that they're frighteningly skinny and demanding. So you can guess where I'm going with this.



One of the reasons you don't see Dizygotheca in more stores overlaps with Dracaena sanderiana: they aren't busy, fluffy, full-looking plants unless you stick a bunch of them together. There are up sides to this: they rarely take up much more horizontal space than their pot does, which can be useful in filling specific empty spots in a home, or in a group planting.⁵ But even so.

Older plants do get wider (because they develop longer petioles with age: this is also a general Schefflera characteristic), though they don't branch spontaneously. Cutting off the growing tip may encourage a too-skinny plant to bush out a little, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had to be done a few times before it took, or if the end result wasn't really all that great. (You think Gisele Bündchen does everything she's asked, the first time, precisely as instructed? Puh-leeze.)

This all makes Dizygotheca a plausibly good plant for apartment-dwellers or the otherwise space-challenged: they might get taller, but they're not going to push everything out of a small room like a Pandanus veitchii (screw pine) might. But. There are plenty of easier plants available for that situation, foremost among them the Dracaena family (D. fragrans in particular).

So far, mine are doing okay, and I’m pleased about this, because they are charming plants, especially when they're small. I especially love the weird metallic green-black color, which is unusual in the plant world. There aren't any other plants like it. But -- I worry about their long-term future here.

Which brings me, after 1600 some words, to the real problem with Dizygotheca elegantissima: she's a diva, in the Naomi Campbell mold. She doesn't like temperature swings, doesn't like dark places, doesn't like dry air or dry soil. Of course, soil that's too wet is also unacceptable, and good air circulation is a must (it just has to be air circulating at exactly the same temperature as all the previous air: no sharp changes.). Also all of the drinking glasses must be triple-wrapped in plastic, and if there are M-n-Ms in the dressing room, the blue ones must be removed.

Bugs, also, are potentially a huge issue. Spider mites love the Araliaceae family in general, and Scheffleras in particular, and as far as I can determine, the situation is even worse when it comes to mealybugs. So at the very least, if you're going to keep this one, you need to be prepared to be ready to jump to attention at the first sign of any trouble, because it can get out of hand really quickly. And girl, if there is a bug problem, you better work.



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Photo credit: all me.

¹ Though RuPaul is in kind of a class by herself, as "drag queens" go. For those readers not up on gay culture, which I'm going to assume is most of them: being a drag queen is different from transvestitism, which in its strictest sense is a sexual fetish (man derives sexual pleasure from dressing up in women's clothing), and it's different from being transgendered, which in its strictest sense is a psychological and medical condition (more or less the "woman trapped in a man's body" thing). Most of the time, someone who does drag does so as theater: there is an event involved, like a lip-synching contest or a fundraiser or a parade, and the performer dresses as a woman to become the character they play for such events (a given performer typically only "does" one character during any given time period, though there are exceptions). The performer may or may not try to pass for (appear to the casual observer to be) a woman, depending on individual tastes and the demands of the event.
The point here is to make it clear that drag queens, and gay men in general, do not believe themselves to be women, nor do they, in most cases, want to be women. Drag is primarily theater. For this reason, the term "female impersonator," which is sometimes used for drag queens, can be offensive in certain contexts. They're not impersonating women; they're impersonating drag queens, and that's a whole different category.
The correct pronoun to use for a drag performer in costume is "she." Out of costume is "he." There are exceptions, including some performers who are genuinely indifferent to which pronoun you use, but this is the safer way to go until you hear otherwise.
I've only really had extended contact with one drag queen in my life, who may not be typical but who did take me with him to a drag show in Waterloo once: he did a lot of fundraisers for various worthy causes, and as performers are usually compensated for participating in this kind of thing, he made enough money doing it to sustain it as a hobby. He lip-synched, mostly to very sentimental, down-tempo stuff by Reba McEntire. Nice guy, though I worried about his safety sometimes, and still occasionally do. Worried a bit about my own safety, actually, that night, when he and I and several other people (some still in drag from the show and some not) went to Perkins for a 2 AM meal. But it was kind of worth it: I didn't have any desire to do drag at the time, and I still don't, but it's a pretty wild subculture, as subcultures go. I mean, the outfits alone. . . .
² That's what they were planted in when I bought them, and I didn't change the soil because I didn't want to traumatize them unnecessarily. Bad call, it looks like.
³ (Continuing the trend we've seen with Monstera deliciosa, Syngonium podophyllum, Epipremnum aureum and others)
⁴ WANT!
⁵ Not that I approve of group plantings, as a rule. It's not impossible for them to work out, but even your longer-lived group plantings are still short-term: the plants with more aggressive root systems will, sooner or later, choke out the slower-growing plants, and then you either have to split the group up or let them die one by one. There's not really a middle ground here. And even that protracted unhappy ending is only available in the situations where you can get together a group of plants that 1) look okay together and 2) need more or less similar conditions. I've tried to assemble such groups for work purposes from time to time, and although there are occasionally combinations that turn out shockingly well (Peperomia argyreia, the "watermelon Peperomia," plus Dracaena sanderiana, plus a white-striped Chlorophytum comosum, or spider plant, all works out reasonably well. The Peperomia has gray and green stripes, the Chlorophytum is green and white striped, and the Dracaena ties it all together by being gray and green and white, and striped. I'm very proud of that one, though so far nobody's wanted to buy it.), by and large it's tough to do. A flower will be just a couple shades too orange, or a perfect fit will need a completely different watering regimen, or whatever. I suspect the flower shop guys get around this by just ignoring cultural requirements entirely and going with whatever looks good in the moment.
There. I said it. And I'm not sorry.

Random plant event: Tradescantia spathacea flowers

I've seen these before, but this is the first one that was actually my plant. I've been thinking that this plant must be angry with me, lately, because I moved it a while back to a colder spot and it's been shedding leaves. But apparently if it's upset, it's not that upset.

This is another plant I got as a cutting from "hopefulauthor" at Garden Web (the first being the Schlumbergera mentioned here), in an exchange this summer, and it's the second of the cuttings from that exchange to bloom. There were also a couple cuttings of Ludisia discolor ("jewel orchid"), which are still alive: dare I hope to go three for three?