Bad Influence (Coffea arabica)

This is in fact the same plant as the one that gives us commercial coffee. As the botanical name suggests, it's from the general Horn of Africa area, though the specifics are still being argued about, particularly the question of whether it was first farmed on the African or Arabian side of the Red Sea.

The general area where Coffea arabica is native; Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen in particular. (I couldn't find an actual range map: consensus seems to be that it all started in Ethiopia somewhere.)
We also, of course, have no real idea who first cultivated it, either. There is a cute and almost certainly false story involving an Ethiopian goatherder: the story says he noticed that goats eating the berries became more playful and energetic (for some reason almost every account uses the word "frisky"), tried them himself, and then went on to farm the plants purposefully for the beans. This story almost has to be leaving out a few important developments, like for example whether the berries or the beans were the initial justification for early coffee farmers: the flesh of the berries is edible, and apparently tastes good, though it doesn't contain caffeine as far as I can tell. But in any case, we can glean at least this much from the tale: 1) it was a long time ago, 2) Starbucks didn't invent coffee, and 3) people like caffeine.

(A more thorough and interesting story, including an explanation of why we associate the word "mocha" with coffee, the theft that led to the first European coffee production, and the highly caffeinated political radicalism that started in the first coffeehouses, can be found here, at the website of the International Coffee Organization.)

Coffee growing is now an international business, and almost 80% of the coffee produced is from Coffea arabica. Most of the world's crop is from Brazil (about a third of the total), but there are other coffee growers in Central America (Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras), Southeast Asia (Vietnam, India, Indonesia), tropical South America (Peru, Columbia), and its native Africa (Ethiopia), as well as smaller growers scattered elsewhere around the world. In the year 2000, U.S. consumption of coffee was 22.1 gallons per capita; in that same year, my own personal consumption was probably about 500 gallons in a year.¹

The remaining 20% of coffee that is not Coffea arabica is from Coffea canephora, a related species with higher caffeine content but a harsher taste. C. arabica is the more delicate plant, and are more susceptible to burn (especially at low altitude) and certain diseases, but it produces the superior beverage.

There are a few varieties and cultivars of Coffea arabica, including some crosses with C. canephora, but none of them are exactly household words, and aren't especially relevant to houseplants. There is one variety, referred to here as "purpurascens," which supposedly has purple leaves, but I couldn't track down any pictures, and in any case it's not something you see in stores. Maybe someday?

C. arabica is in the family Rubiaceae, which is also home to Gardenia jasminoides. If you tilt your head and squint a little bit, you can kind of see the family resemblance: both have very glossy, dark green leaves, with white, fragrant flowers.

Coffea isn't as difficult a plant indoors as Gardenia, but it's still pretty demanding. My own big issue, and at least for the moment, the biggest issue for the plants at work, is temperature: although the greenhouse is warm, there are cold spots, or spots where roof condensation causes persistent cold drips (previously mentioned in Ficus maclellandii). The largest of the Coffea arabica at work (which has since sold, but is pictured below) has been dropping yellow leaves every now and again, and my much smaller plant at home is doing the same thing. I would be more worried about this if not for the fact that I've had a customer ask me about the very same behavior on her Coffea at home, and I recently saw a large plant with berries and everything in another retail greenhouse that was also dropping leaves. I figure this more or less clinches it: yellowing leaves during winter has to mean either that the plant is too cold (which is plausible for all four of my examples) or that this is a normal reaction to shorter day length. In either case, it's a winter thing, and there's not a whole lot I can do about it.

The biggest of the work Coffea arabica plants, since sold, which very sneakily started branching and going all treelike while still in its original four-inch pot. By the time I noticed that it was shading out neighboring plants, it had developed to this point and had to be moved up to a six-inch pot.
Come summer, the big issue will be water: C. arabica transpires enormously when it's in full growth mode, and consequently it needs to be watered a lot, even inside in an air-conditioned living room. In the greenhouse at the end of last summer, we were needing to water the Coffea and Codiaeum variegatum two or three times a day. (Meanwhile, many of the other plants were scorching, or notching,² or otherwise falling to pieces.) Both over- and underwatering can be problems: with mine I water when the pot feels noticeably light, and that's worked okay so far.

Other than those two things, you're basically aiming for a tropical, really tropical, rainforesty kind of situation: high humidity (too little will get you brown leaf margins) and high light (pretty much the more, the better, though this has to be eased into gradually or the plant will burn). Some sites say east or west exposure, with the implication being that south is too much: I think south is the only reasonable place to put them, so we have ourselves a controversy. I wouldn't put a Coffea in full sun outdoors, though, just so we're clear: though they do eventually get to be tree-sized, I'm told they need shade when they're younger.

None of the Coffea arabicas I know personally have been especially prone to pests, and they're not likely to need any more grooming than just the usual removal of dead leaves. They are supposed to be pretty heavy feeders, though, and every site I've seen that addresses soil at all is very insistent that they need soil with really, really awesome drainage. No particular kind of food is necessary, as far as I can tell, so long as there is some: 20-20-20 should work just fine, mixed according to the label directions and given once a month or so.

But what you're really interested in is, can I grow my own coffee beans at home, right?

Well, it's not likely to be practical. But.

Plants are mature enough to flower at around three or four years old, and will, if given good enough conditions, flower every year thereafter. Flowers are white, fragrant, and star-shaped, and are produced along the leaf axils.


Coffea canephora is dependent on cross-pollination, but C. arabica, with twice as many chromosomes (44, compared to canephora's 22), is self-fertile and will fruit without any intervention on your part.³ Berries (sometimes called coffee "cherries") will form, but they take roughly nine months to ripen. Ripening is signified by a change in color (they turn red, hence "cherry"), and doesn't happen all at once: berries that are right next to one another don't necessarily ripen at the same time. The flesh of the "cherry" is edible, though most of the weight and volume is taken up by a pit, which usually contains two seeds (the coffee "beans" you're familiar with). Once in a while, three seeds are found in the same pit; slightly more often than that, there will be only one seed. These solo beans are referred to as "peaberries" and have a different flavor than the regular beans. Peaberries are often separated out from the batch and sold separately, at a higher price.

Beans intended for beverage use must be roasted before they can be ground: roasted beans have a better flavor, apparently. I'm not going to go into the specifics of how you roast your own coffee beans, but you can find a description of the process here and another one here, if you're really that interested.

"Cherries."
Beans for propagation also go through some changes: in the wild, they're usually passed through the digestive tract of a bird, because, um . . . well, who among us doesn't want to be passed through the digestive tract of a bird?⁴ If you're germinating your own seeds at home, this is probably not going to be practical, but that's okay, 'cause it's not entirely necessary either. Seeds which have been removed from their pits and allowed to quietly dry somewhere can be planted; this site says that the best germination rate is observed for seeds which are about eight weeks old. I'd assume bottom heat would be helpful for germination, and probably also a humidity tent, but I didn't find any specific instructions for how to do this, so your guess is as good as mine, I suppose.⁵

Propagation from cuttings is also said to be possible, but apparently it's not done often, and when it is done it doesn't succeed that often. I haven't tried it myself, but I would guess that bottom heat and a humidity tent would be useful here too.

Coffea arabica will get to be a tree, in time, if not routinely pruned back. 40 feet (13 meters) is not unheard of. On coffee plantations, plants are pruned to keep them at a convenient height for harvesting, usually around 6 feet (2 meters). Individual plants can be very long-lived, as well: they begin to produce fruit at about 3 or 4 years old, reaches its full yield at about 6 years old, and can live to be 60-100 years old, given good conditions.

My personal plant, late October 2007
In keeping with the vague quality of drug-pusherness surrounding the plant, it's also somewhat noteworthy that Coffea arabica has become invasive in the Australian rainforest. (hat-tip to the Invasive Species Weblog for the link) The article doesn't say, but I'm guessing that the relatively quick growth and abundant, animal-spread seed, probably have a lot to do with its success. I was unable to find evidence of invasive Coffea plants elsewhere, though that doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

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Photo credits:

map: public domain from a site I can't remember
work plant, my personal plant: me
flowering plant, "cherries:" Marcelo Corrêa at the Wikipedia entry for Coffea arabica

References:
http://invasivespecies.blogspot.com/2005/11/over-edge-environment-news-service-has.html
http://www.thegardenhelper.com/coffee.html
http://www.coffeeresearch.org/agriculture/coffeeplant.htm
http://www.ico.org/botanical.asp
http://coffee.wikia.com/wiki/Coffea_arabica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_coffee

¹ You'll be happy to know that this is down to the much more reasonable 180 gal/yr. I was working, for most of the year 2000, as night auditor in a motel, and the actual paperwork I had to do only took me a couple hours: I had nothing to do between about 1 AM and 5 AM except smoke and drink coffee, and consequently developed a bit of a dependency on both. "Bad influence" indeed, though I do loves me some coffee, so I don't feel especially guilty about this. (The math: 12 cups before work and about 10 cups while at work = 22 cups/day. 22 cups/d times 365 d/yr times 1 gal/16 cups = 501.8 gallons / yr. Now it's more like eight cups a day, which I think we can all agree is quite moderate by comparison.)
² "Notching" is a quirky little thing that Dracaena deremensis (especially 'Warneckei') does when it's too hot: incoming new leaves develop what look like cuts, at the base of the leaf. The growers' guide says that light foliar sprays of boron will make it stop happening, but any damaged leaves will remain damaged. For indoor growers, the more sensible approach to notching would be to move the plant out of the heat and light that's causing the notching in the first place. I don't think it's very likely to happen indoors anyway. D. deremensis also get a mosaic-type pattern where the veins stay green but everything else yellows (this is called chlorosis, or netting), and although they will return to green when temperatures go back to normal, getting back to normal takes months.
³ One of the weirder things about being a plant is that every once in a while, a plant inherits a whole extra set of chromosomes from a parent, or spontaneously doubles its own, and still functions perfectly well as a plant. Often, there is also an increase in the number for some part of the plant: ten petals on the flower instead of five, bigger fruit, more seeds. This situation is referred to by the technical name "polyploidy," and it's fascinating stuff, if that's the kind of stuff you find fascinating. Polyploid animals also happen, with some species being entirely polyploid. In most cases, of course, having a whole extra set of chromosomes will just fuck you up: double your chromosomes at your own risk.
⁴ (Hey. Don’t judge.)
⁵ (No it's not. My guess is totally better.)

Unfinished business re: Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash'

Just updating the record to include pictures of the flower:


and the seed pods:


of Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash.' Many of you will have seen these in person before, and will think me kind of lame for making a whole post out of these, but so it goes.

This particular flower stalk isn't the most impressive I've ever seen. I mean, it should be adequate as far as getting me all the seeds I could want and then some, but they do get a lot bigger than this.

Damsel in Distress (Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana')

I don't seem to be able to go to Lowe's without encountering a gigantic Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana' for $5 and having to take it home. The first time it happened was last June, and the plant was badly sunburned from being outside in the summer heat. A few days ago, I ran into another one, and this time I'm not quite sure what the problem was: it doesn't seem to have anything obviously wrong with it.

The sunburned plant has more or less recovered, though it did lose a growing tip (which is okay: more are beginning to break). The original plan, to try to sell it for a profit by taking it to a consignment store, is still theoretically operative, though I've become a little bit attached to it by now and would kind of rather hold on to it. I mean, after all, I saved it from being destroyed by the heartless Lowe's bastards, so how mean would I have to be to send it back out into the cold, cruel world to be bought by someone who doesn't know how to take care of plants?

The sunburned plant.
The newer plant is in a more ambiguous place: I couldn't find any pests on it, and the stems felt solid. The only real problems it had as far as I could tell were that some of the lowest leaves had gone black and crispy, which doesn't necessarily mean anything, and the stems were a little wobbly in the pot, which isn't especially easy to fix but isn't unusual for Dracaena fragrans either. It might also have gotten a little chilled on the way out to the car (Lowe's offered no protective plastic bags), though so far all that's happened is that one of the sprouts has died. Even if it did get cold, though, this isn't likely to be fatal to the plant as a whole, and there are plenty of growing tips to work with.

The recent plant, cleaned-up.
These aren't usually in bad shape, of course. In fact, Dracaena fragrans is one of the easier houseplants out there. Lowe's just isn't all that interested in taking care of its plants.¹ Am I complaining? Little bit, yeah. I do have a tendency to anthropomorphize plants (Which you may have noticed.), and consequently it pains me to see plants on the discount rack that didn't have to wind up there. Though I'm not above encouraging this kind of behavior by taking said plants home, either.

Dracaena fragrans is native to Africa,² where it does double duty as an understory plant and as a full-grown tree, though it has long since expanded its range: it's been an indoor plant in Europe since the mid-1700s.³ The wild plant is plain green; the variety with the yellow stripe down the middle is a variety called 'Massangeana,' and is of unknown (to me) provenance. There is also said to be a variety called 'Lindenii,' in which the colors are reversed (yellow margins and a green stripe in the center of the leaf), but I've never seen such a plant in person.⁴

Plants will not grow corn, and don't even look that much like the real corn plant (Zea mays). There is enough similarity between the leaves that I can see where the common name came from. Once in a while I've allowed myself to think, whoa, look at all the Dracaenas! when traveling through rural areas around here in the summer. Knowing better is no reason not to entertain the occasional illusion.

Historically, most Dracaena fragrans sold in the U.S. are grown two times: the first time is on farms in Central America (or, once the global economy got really pervasive, anywhere else with an appropriately tropical climate), where canes are periodically harvested and cut to specified lengths (usually two, three or four-foot long pieces). The ends of the cane are then given a quick coat of wax,⁵ to keep the canes from losing too much water during transport, and then they get shipped to growers in Florida, or, to a lesser extent, other states which produce tropical foliage plants (Texas, California), where they are stuck in their final containers, the foliage is allowed to resprout, and then they are shipped to retail stores to be purchased by consumers. The staggered-cane style is used because it gives the impression of base-to-top foliage that would be more or less impossible to achieve with single-cane plants, or multiple canes of the same height, since the plants normally drop lower leaves as they grow.⁶

Waxed cane top. Obviously points were not being awarded for neatness.
Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana' is very easy to grow, and isn't particularly picky about most aspects of its care, though there are things that will make it look better or worse than others.

The biggest issues revolve around water: like with most other Dracaena varieties, this one can roll with periods of neglect, but will not put up with overwatering for long. This is especially the case when the plant is kept in a relatively dark spot: it will downshift its metabolism to match the light it's getting, and if you don't reduce the water to match, you'll have some rotted canes on your hands. The other issue is that, as with Chlorophytum comosum, these plants are sensitive about fluoride levels, and will develop burnt tips if they're getting too much. Since most of these plants are watered in place, without any dumping of the water that flows through the soil, and since many people water too little at a time anyway, most plants will eventually build up enough fluoride in the soil to have problems. The solution, or at least one possible solution, is to make a point of periodically flushing the soil well with large amounts of water, say every three months, every six months, something like that. This isn't the ideal solution, but it's one that most people could probably pull off if they really had to. Another way to go would be to water with distilled water only – that might get expensive, but at least you won't be adding any fluoride.

Newly-purchased plants are especially susceptible to being overwatered, since cane-type plants like these (Dracaena, Yucca guatemalensis, etc.) are often not very well-rooted when they're shipped out. A cane two inches in diameter might only have one tiny little root, which could easily be overwhelmed by too much water. After you've grown one for a while, especially if it's in good conditions (warm, bright, humid), a root system will get going and you can water more like for any other plant, but until you've seen the roots for yourself, it's good to assume that there really aren't any.

Propagation isn't easy either, though the difficult part is mostly getting the opportunity: the plants grow slowly, especially indoors, meaning that a typical indoor gardener in a temperate zone isn't terribly likely to have a lot of spare canes laying around to experiment with. So it's not like you're going to be able to propagate at will, like you would for Pilea cadierei or Philodendron hederaceum or something.

Propagation is almost always from pieces of woody cane: green cane, like from a side sprout, is theoretically possible, but the growers' guide advises against it, and my one (failed) attempt at propagation of Dracaena fragrans thus far was with green cane, which succumbed pretty quickly to rot, so I tend to agree with him.

Woody cuttings are supposed to be relatively easy, though I haven't tried any myself. The usual procedure is to cut the cane into three- or four-inch segments, plant them upright in soil, and wait for them to root and break buds. The growers' guide says that rooting hormone should speed up the process, and even goes so far as to say that cutting the base of the canes around the edges with a circular saw every couple inches will induce more rooting. This probably isn't practical for people in home situations, but I suppose one never knows.

Thinner canes are said to root better, but thicker ones are more likely to form more growing tips. It seems not to be an issue particularly if you have to plant a cane deeply, or compact the soil around it (the commercially-produced variety, obviously, needs this in order to stay upright, whether it's good for the plant or not, to cover up the fact that it probably has no roots to speak of). Tenting the cutting in a plastic bag, or placing it in a warm, bright (no sun), humid space should also improve your odds of success, though rot is always a potential issue. If you're really worried about rot, cuttings can be rooted in sand, which may or may not be a more sterile medium. Misting isn't a good idea, according to the growers' guide. It's pretty much always going to be a slow process: figure about eight weeks.

It may go without saying, but: the plant won't root upside down, so if you're cutting up a long cane, be sure to have some kind of system in place so you can keep track of which end to plant. If the cane rolls off the table and spins around on the kitchen linoleum and you have no guess which end is up, you might be able to get it to sprout sideways, if you lay it half-buried in whatever soil you're planning to use, though I have no suggestions for how to deal with the resulting sprouts, which will not necessarily line up well with any roots that form.


Rooted canes can sprout in a variable number of spots. If a cane sprouts only once, the growers' guide recommends removing that bud, the idea being that usually the plant will respond by growing multiple heads. If, on the other hand, the problem is too many heads (too many will result in reduced development and / or greater incidence of tip burn, as well as just looking a little weird), removing all but the biggest few is said to help.⁷ My June rescue plant had a couple of sprouts when I bought it that it later dropped, and is presently starting another set of them: I'm unsure about whether to encourage this or not.


Other cultural conditions are not going to be that big of a deal for most indoor growers. Dracaena fragrans tolerates low humidity, though very low humidity levels may lead to tip scorch, especially if it's also dealing with high fluoride levels: the growers' guide recommends humidity of at least 40% at all times, which most people, most of the time, should be able to get. Winters, obviously, are tough, but that's true for a lot of plants. Temperature can be a touchy subject, especially during transport: cold injury begins to happen around 50ºF (10ºC), and wind makes the resulting injury much more severe. Typically, cold will lead to brown margins on the most exposed leaves, plus the possibility of dead bands across the leaves that emerge from the growing tip for a while thereafter. Heat injury is less common, both because the plant tolerates heat reasonably well and because it's somewhat self-regulating: the growers' guide says that in hot weather, the leaves twist themselves so as to be less directly exposed to the sun (they then go back to normal when they're cooler). I haven't seen that myself, but I'm going to be watching as we head toward summer, because that kind of adaptation always impresses the hell out of me. If heat does cause damage, it's usually expressed as burned tips and margins. Excessive sun exposure will bleach leaves out permanently, as well, though these photos don’t show it well:⁸


The paler parts, that sort of look like they might just be the light reflecting off the leaf, really are bleaching from the sun. Except, obviously, for the parts that actually are the result of light reflecting off the leaf.
(Which, now that I put this up, I'm realizing that there's an older Dracaena fragrans at work that got badly burned last year in the greenhouse, which would have been a much better case study to photograph, and I forgot to take pictures and now it's too late to do anything about it. Oh well.)

Finally, pests are not often a problem, though Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana' is subject to all the same slings and arrows as other plants: mealybugs, mites, scale, etc. None seem to be especially fond of this plant in particular.

The "fragrans" part of the botanical name refers to the flowers, which are, I'm told, quite impressively fragrant, and can permeate a whole two-story house with their scent, which is said to be pleasant. I've never smelled them myself. (The description I ran into most often was "honeysuckle," which does exactly nothing for me because I'm not familiar with what honeysuckle smells like.) Whether you want that much scent is questionable: it's not unheard of for people to move a D. fragrans elsewhere during flowering, especially if it's in a room they have to be in a lot, for example a bedroom, just so that the smell isn't completely overpowering. Flowers also drip with nectar, which can drip on anything underneath them and, in the worst-case scenario, ruin things. Realistically, it's more likely just to make stuff sticky, but either way, it may be worth your time to grab a dropcloth, if you notice blooming in progress on your plant (and you will notice, if it happens). The flowers can be cut off, if you really can't stand the smell and the dripping, though I think they must not be that terrible, because I don't read about people having to cut them off all that often.

The only real serious down side with a flowering plant is that the growing tip which produced the flower will die when the show is over. It's serious, but not tragic, because the plant will generally have other growing tips on it (they have to be pretty old and large in order to flower), and if it doesn't, new ones will sprout before all the leaves on the old one drop. You just need to be aware that the old tip will die, lest you panic and start messing with the plant after it flowers, thinking that it needs you to do something, when it was already perfectly happy. That's just how they roll.


I'm aware that this post has made them sound troublesome and difficult, so let me just say again that really they're not. The reason you're always seeing them in offices is because they like that sort of thing. Just don't overwater. That Lowe's seems not to be able to understand concepts like overwatering and underwatering isn't the plant's fault, and need not be your problem, either. So go mount your steed and rescue some damsels, if you're so inclined.

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Photo credit: flowers - Josh Krup, at the Wikipedia entry for Dracaena fragrans. All others: author's own.

¹ Which is not to say that there aren't perfectly nice people working there, and that said people don't care about or like plants. I'm sure some of them do, just by the law of averages if nothing else. But whatever corporate logic dictates the running of the plant departments in Lowe's clearly is not all that interested in the well-being of the plants, which suggests that it's not cost-effective for the employees to care for the plants, which suggests that either the employees are paid remarkably little (not that I'm raking in the bucks myself, but . . . well, actually, I guess there's not much up side to that, really. I'm not raking in the bucks. *Sigh.* Great. Now I'm going to be depressed.), the wholesale prices are so obscenely cheap that they're making huge profits on the plants regardless of what they do, or (most likely) both.
² Precisely where in Africa is something I'm not really capable of answering: the growers' guide says Upper Guinea; Wikipedia says West Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia. Not only are these not the same place, but they're not even particularly close to one another. If we add in the inevitable confusion from people expanding its range artificially, the original location of D. fragrans gets hazier still. But at least we can nail down a continent.
³ (Says the growers' guide, anyway.)
⁴ There is a cultivar of D. deremensis called 'Lemon-Lime,' or (less frequently) 'Goldstar,' which has more or less this coloration. I like 'Lemon-Lime' a great deal, but it's kind of obviously not a cultivar of D. fragrans. 'Lindenii' is something else. This site explains away the rarity of 'Lindenii' as a side effect of its sensitivity to fluoride: dead spots appear in the margins and work inward in plants affected by fluoride toxicity, which is marketing death for a plant where the brightly-colored margins are the main selling point. (UPDATE: I actually found and purchased a 'Lindenii' around here, if you want to see what it looks like.) (SECOND UPDATE: It was probably actually D. fragrans 'Sol,' which looks enough like the way 'Lindenii' is always described that it is likely either an improved variety of 'Lindenii' or a renaming.)
⁵ Or, according to the growers' guide, a wax-concrete mixture, which raises some questions for me that Mr. Griffith leaves unanswered.
⁶ This is the same reason why Yucca guatemalensis is usually sold as staggered-height canes. People want floor-to-ceiling leaves, so they get floor-to-ceiling leaves, even if the leaves have to be provided by multiple plants. Yucca guatemalensis is also produced on cane farms, in a manner very similar to what's described in the text for Dracaena fragrans.
⁷ This is the case with Yucca guatemalensis too.
⁸ The most sunburnt leaves eventually got cut off, either because they were going brown anyway or because the bleaching was too severe for the plant to be presentable.

Random plant event: Monadenium stapelioides Euphorbia drupifera flowers

The ID here is tentative: I think Monadenium is right but have no idea how to go about determining a species. (Please share if you think you know: I'm certainly open to ideas.) Also I don't remember what website made me think it might be stapelioides, and I have a nasty sinus headache at the moment which makes me kind of unmotivated to try to track it down.



The flowers aren't especially decorative, or sticky, or scented, or anything like that. They, like the plant as a whole, are more odd than decorative. But hey.

Clicking on a picture will get you a bigger version, if you're interested in details.



(Correct ID happened because I unknowingly ordered a new one, and recognized it when it arrived on the 17 Aug 2008 shipment of tropical plants at work. The one pictured in this post has lived with me at home since 1 Aug 2008.)

Random plant event: Dionaea muscipula flowering

So far, my goal of nursing the Dionaea muscipula along through the winter is going well, to the point where they've all budded. I knew this was possible in theory, but it's still a surprise, and now we're all eagerly anticipating whatever flowers we're going to get.

Click the picture to (somewhat) enlarge.

In a rare (possibly even unprecedented) non-wonderful move, Wonderful Co-Worker took the Venus flytraps out of the bright but cold place where they had been doing so well, and stuck them out in the middle of the greenhouse so the customers could see them. I appreciate the logic, that the ultimate goal is to sell them, and I agree that plants in flower (or at least in bud -- none of them have opened yet) are more likely to sell, but their dormancy wasn't necessarily over as far as I was concerned, and if this sets them back so that they all go black and die after I've tried so hard for them not to, then I'm gonna be pissed. The customers are supposed to kill the plants, if the plants are to be killed. Not us.

But anyway. It was terribly difficult to get pictures of this that were properly focused: I tried and tried for a close-up shot and failed miserably. If they don't all die or sell before the flowers actually open, I'll attempt to follow up with a picture of the flowers.

Bonus unrelated link:

I saw this a couple days ago, and find it intriguing. That's a story I want to hear more about.

Single Mother (Chlorophytum comosum)

A few jobs ago, I remember a Puerto Rican co-worker saying that she wanted to give her mother a plant for . . . some kind of event, I forget. Mother's Day, or a birthday, something like that. The problem was that she didn't think her mother was especially good with plants, so it needed to be something fairly low-maintenance. I forget what all we discussed, but I do remember suggesting a "spider plant" to her and being met with blank looks. A what?

Oh, um, they're also called "airplane plants," they used to be really popular in the 70s, kinda grassy-looking, with a white stripe down the middle of the leaves, you know. They get little baby plants on runners?


Oh, she said. No, I think that would just be weird.

Why weird? What's weird about it?

Well, she said, in Puerto Rico, they call that plant "mala madre," which translates as "bad mother." That might be awkward, as a gift for your mother.

Guess so, yeah. I retract the suggestion.

I never really found out why the plant is thought of as being a bad mother. I don't even know if the problem is supposed to be that it holds the baby plants too tightly to itself, or not tightly enough. Maybe it's something else entirely. So the whole thing is kind of weird for me to think about, but nevertheless, there it is.

I've also run into customers who had issues with this because it's called "spider plant;" arachnophobes or something, I guess. So it doesn't really catch any breaks in the naming department, in any language, so from here out we'll be using the scientific name, which is in Greek and Latin: Chlorophytum comosum.¹


Chlorophytum comosum is a houseplant of fairly long standing; it's native to South African forest floors and has been kept as an indoor plant for decades. The wild plant is solid green; plants with white or yellow variegation are sports that have been kept going by propagating plantlets.

Chlorophytum comosum can be perpetuated more or less indefinitely: the picture immediately above is of my husband's plant, originally a gift from his mother, which he has managed to keep going through seven generations. This seventh one has yet to produce any plantlets, which is unusual but not unheard of: sometimes they take a long time to do this. The growers' guide says that "plantlet production is distinctly photoperiod related," and claims that variegated varieties produce more plantlets during short days, while solid green varieties send out runners during long days. This might be correct, but I think there's got to be more to it than that, because my husband's plant has been around for a couple years now and hasn't made any runners at all yet, irrespective of day length. A different source says that bright light and long days will encourage offsets regardless of variety. Both say that "interrupting" the plant during the night by turning a light on it will encourage production of runners as well. I don't care enough to try this personally, but feel free.

The way this plant is usually grown is in hanging baskets, as in this picture:


The reason for this is that hanging baskets permit the runners to hang over the edge of the pot, which creates a waterfall / cascade sort of effect that a lot of people like. Because of this, they're excellent plants to use when you want to block out an unpleasant view. Individual plantlets die from time to time, though infrequently: every so often I pick a couple out of the monster plants at work. Exposing plantlets to a lot of hot, dry air is a good, efficient way to kill them, if that's something you're into.

To propagate, just pull off one of the plantlets (they come off pretty easily, which may be why I find dead ones on the monster hanging baskets from time to time) and stick it in dirt, or water. The only way they'll fail, as far as I can tell, is if you keep them in sopping wet soil, and even then it's pretty difficult to kill them: the best you can do usually is just kind of disappoint them a little.


Plantlets will outgrow small pots in a matter of weeks, given good (bright, warm, humid) conditions, though they don't seem to mind terribly if they're potbound. Given even more time, however, the continuing growth of the roots will eventually push the whole root ball up and out of the pot, a phenomenon which also occurs with asparagus ferns (Asparagus setaceus, A. densiflorus 'Myersii' and A. densiflorus 'Sprengeri') and occasionally with Sansevieria trifasciata, though it's faster for Asparagus and slower for Sansevieria.

There are not actually all that many things that can go wrong with Chlorophytum comosum, as befits the extremely low difficulty level above. What problems do exist tend to be cosmetic, rather than potentially lethal.

The most common is tip burn: the tips of the leaves turn black and begin to die back towards the center of the plant. There are a number of factors which contribute to this, but generally the problem is that the soil has built up a level of fluoride, sodium, or boron which is harmful to the plant. Extreme heat (prolonged exposure to temperatures above 90ºF) can also result in tip burn. According to a few sources, including my growers' guide, the specific substance causing the burn can be determined from its appearance: sodium causes black tips, boron causes tan or gray tips, and fluoride causes reddish tips. (High temperature or excessive light is said to lead to light gray or yellowish patches, not necessarily at the leaf tips, though the plants we've moved closer to a heat source at work have mostly just gotten black tips, in those cases where there was a reaction.) Excess sodium is probably from softened water; excess boron is probably from overfertilization; excess fluoride is probably from overfertilization or too much perlite in the soil,² though in a few cases the water may just contain a lot of fluoride naturally and you have no choice but to switch to bottled, distilled, or reverse-osmosis water.

In any of these cases, flushing the soil heavily and thoroughly with regular tap water isn't going to hurt anything, and may help the plant a little bit in the short term. If you are not watering your plants until water runs through the bottom of the pot and then discarding the water that runs through, or if (worse!) you are using a pot without drainage holes, you're going to build minerals up in the pot to the point where tip burn of some kind or another is more or less inevitable.

Chlorophytum comosum are also "heavy breathers," for lack of a better term. This means that they are said to be very good at removing chemicals from the air,³ and the NASA study that showed that plants could clean air was particularly effusive on the advantages of Chlorophytum comosum. The down side to this is that they also breathe deeply of stuff that can harm them, including ethylene (a very small component of natural gas, and also a plant hormone released through a variety of processes; click the link for details), certain insecticides (notably chlorpyriphos), and bleach (which is probably the most relevant chemical for our purposes, since it's the one you're most likely to use around the plant). The solution? Try not to use bleach, or the certain insecticides, near the plant, and if you must, then provide good ventilation.


Diseases and pests, on the other hand, are not usually a problem. Mealybugs (including the dread root mealybug) and scale are specifically mentioned here and there, as are caterpillars, though caterpillars aren't likely to be problems inside, and mealybugs and scale don't seem to be common problems. In the event that you have mealybugs or scale, my recommendation would be that you just take a plantlet off and start over, but if you really want to try to save the parent plant, I'd skip the rubbing-alcohol step and go directly to the systemic insecticide, whether this be imidacloprid or something else. The growers' guide recommends bendiocarb, S-kinoprene, or acephate, though I couldn't promise you that these are available for home use.

This might all sound pretty bad (tip burn! chemical sensitivity!), but if this is the worst you got, you have a pretty easy plant on your hands. Honest. Light levels can range from filtered sun down to moderate (light that's too low will slow or stop new growth, and leaves will droop noticeably). Watering is also flexible: the roots can store a lot of water to get a plant through a drought, and plants can also roll with a wet spell, though neither extreme is tolerated indefinitely. Humidity is essentially a non-issue, though extremely dry air may bring on or accelerate tip burn. Feeding should be minimal to nonexistent: they don't need much in the first place, and too much will just cause problems, especially if your fertilizer preparation includes boron.

Chlorophytum comosum will not survive really cold temperatures, but it can go down to just above freezing before it's actually damaged, and it actually can freeze and then come back in spring, I'm told, so cold isn't a huge issue. (Not that the plant is any happier to almost die and then struggle back than you would be: I'm not recommending leaving your plants outside in the winter if they're going to freeze.) I expected to find that it was an invasive species somewhere, just because the runners and rapid growth rate seem custom-made for invasiveness, but it really hasn't been an enormous problem anywhere as far as I could find, though it has established itself in a few Pacific islands.

There are a few cultivars, though the differences between some of them are extremely minor. The 'Hawaiian' version has yellowish variegation instead of white: my personal plant (the little one in the photo after the how-to-propagate paragraph) is a 'Hawaiian.' 'Bonnie' has leaves which curl dramatically, often all the way around to the underside of the pot (the previous photo of the hanging basket is a 'Bonnie'). There are also varieties with the variegation pattern reversed (i.e. white edges and green center), though the cultivar names begin getting confusing at this point so I'm going to drop the subject in a moment. There are pictures and side-by-side comparisons of some of the cultivars on these pages, and the author gives every indication of knowing what he's talking about: the species, 'Bonnie,' 'Ocean,' 'Picturatum,' 'Silver Surfer,' 'Variegatum,' and 'Vittatum.'

So, what kind of mother is it really? Well, I couldn't say exactly, though overworked seems like a reasonable adjective for any plant that has this many children. And where is the father? Hmmm?


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Photo credits: first hanging basket (a 'Bonnie'): anonymous donation from a Garden Webber. Others: my own.

¹ The scientific name isn't much of an improvement either; it translates more or less as "long-haired green plant." But that's still better than "bad mother."
² Some minerals naturally also contain a lot of fluoride, including perlite and some phosphates. This is normally benign, but soil mixes containing a lot of perlite, or fertilizers with high phosphorous content (phosphorous is the middle number on the package: a fertilizer labeled 10-20-10 is a high-P fertilizer), may incidentally contain enough fluoride to cause a problem for sensitive plants.
³ I say "said to be" because I'm not quite sure I buy into the whole plants-as-removers-of-toxic-chemicals hype. I mean, I believe that they can absorb a lot of chemicals: benzene, trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, etc. I just question whether most people, under most circumstances, would be affected by the levels of the chemicals in question anyway, i.e., whether it matters that these plants are able to do this. That said, it's certainly not going to hurt you if they do take chemicals out of the air, and plants are nice for lots of other reasons, so whatever (see my longer essay on the subject here). I just worry that concern about vague environmental "toxins" is causing us to lose perspective about which things are actually dangerous.
My grandmother smoked herself into emphysema, but was phobic about microwaves because she read somewhere that they destroy nutrients, and she was adamant about not destroying nutrients. (Microwaves do destroy nutrients. So does heating them on the stove. So does exposing them to oxygen.) I can't complain too much, since I got a microwave as a result (her children bought her one because she was getting to the point of being too weak to cook for herself, as the result of the emphysema and related medical issues, so she wasn't eating – seriously, she weighed like 70-80 pounds when she died. But she wouldn't take the microwave, so they wound up taking it back, and somehow I ended up with it. Which was nice, because I had just moved, and kind of needed one.), but if she'd been as scared of smoking as she'd been of microwaves, she'd probably still be alive. Not to mention the convoluted logic of not eating any nutrients because you don't want to lose a fraction of them by cooking them in the microwave.
So are there dangerous chemicals out there? Sure. Are some of them in your home? No doubt. Are you breathing them in right this minute? Odds are. Are said chemicals going to be what kills you? I'd be surprised.

Random plant event: Aloe aristata hybrid offsetting

I apologize for the relative crappiness of the photo; it wasn't an easy picture to get because the offset isn't visible from most angles, and lighting became an issue too. (There are actually two offsets forming, but all of the pictures of the other one looked even worse than this.) You get the general idea, though.

This is exciting to me mostly because this is my favorite of the various Aloe varieties/hybrids I have (maybe: I like several of them, of course. This'd be way up on the list, though, if I were to rank them.), and I'm looking forward to being able to propagate it, assuming that everything goes well with the development of the offsets. I'll get to making a proper plant profile for this one eventually, but for now, just know that this is what I look forward to being able to reproduce, someday:


(UPDATE: This is probably Aloe aristata x Gasteria batesiana, not the species Aloe aristata, as it was originally identified.)

LOLSpath