Random plant event: Ficus maclellandii flowers

Maybe it's more like, the Ficus fruits, since the fruit and the flower are kinda the same thing with Ficus (see Wikipedia). Either way, I guess.

Sadly, I won't be able to watch this fruit develop, because when I asked a co-worker to confirm whether it was an actual fig or some kind of weird growth, he did so by pulling the fruit off the tree, cutting it open, and then throwing it away before I could protest or even get a photo. (He also was under the impression, or seemed to be, that the wasps which pollinate Ficus somehow spontaneously generate themselves in the fruit, because he said there should be a wasp in the fruit he sliced open. The wasps are actually a very specialized species which aren't found in North America -- or if they've been introduced, they're still not in Iowa -- so there's no reason why there should have been.) There are two more fruits forming on the same branch, which I'm just not going to show to him; we'll see if maybe that protects them from the knife-happy co-worker.



(Full profile on Ficus maclellandii here.)

Everything's Coming Up Anthuriums

(The title is more amusing if you imagine it sung by Ethel Merman.)

I don't know if it's meaningful, but lately it seems like I've been running into a lot of stuff about Anthurium cultivars, particularly A. andraeanum. I'm also noticing that the aforelinked post is getting a lot of hits, more than most of the other plant profile pages.¹

Bafflingly, it seems to be impossible for me to get a good picture of my own plants. I can't figure it out. They're really not normally this blurry.

So, with that in mind, I'm doing the first PATSP link dump about Anthuriums. Here we go:

Water Roots did a long piece on Anthurium recently, which is very much worth checking out.

Anthurium is also one of the fastest-growing segments of the horticulture industry, apparently because there are suddenly many highly-trained plant cultivators working round the clock to create new varieties, some of which are legitimately exciting and cool. Not all of these are necessarily available yet in the town (or continent, alas) where you live, but even so, the Earth is now home to Anthurium cultivars in the following colors:

*pink
*bright red
*white, with a pink spadix
*another pink
*pink veins on cream background, which over time shade into pink-on-pink, with a white spadix tipped in orange and green²
*lemon-yellow spathe with a white, yellow and green spadix²
*a double-spathed brown flower with red veins
*a slightly orangish red
*red with green "ears"
*brown

At work, we're going to be getting another shipment of tropical plants from Florida at the end of the month, which has me very excited: we're supposed to have just a ton of Anthuriums in there (including Anthurium crystallinum 'Mehani:' I don't intend to buy one, 'cause I don't think I could keep it alive, but I'm curious about how they're going to look), as well as a Dracaena I want ('Art'), and a whole mess of Haworthias. It's going to be an expensive shipment for me, I'm betting, even though I am just about sick of losing entire days to plant-watering and I have no places for any more plants anyway. WCW³ is almost beside herself with anticipation over a batch of Vanilla orchids -- not only have I never seen her that excited before, I've very nearly never seen anyone over the age of twelve that excited about anything.⁴

My own Anthuriums (and thank you for asking) aren't actually doing all that well at the moment; I didn't clue in to the change in season, so I was keeping them too wet, and they've dropped some leaves. I think we're going to pull out of this, though, relatively soon. This is happening to a degree with the ones at work, too.

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¹ It would not surprise me if this was a popular page solely because the title has the word "hooker" in it. I can't decide whether or how much this bothers me.
² WANT!
³ (Do I need to keep explaining that this stands for "wonderful co-worker," and is meant sincerely, or no?)
⁴ Just in passing, I'd like to mention that this is one of the most wonderful things about my job. Previously, I worked in a couple grocery stores, and people go to grocery stores because they have to, not because they want to, and this shows up in how they deal with staff, and other customers. Not a good time. People come to look at houseplants, on the other hand, because they want to, by and large, and consequently most of them are in a really good mood. It's nice to see people see the plants, and get excited about a find, or about learning something (a customer just yesterday was just giddy when she found out that sometimes you can grow Citrus from cuttings and have it bloom). That WCW and I occasionally also get to behave like this is just gravy.

LOLSpath

It's that time again . . . .

Identical Cousins, Part I (Plectranthus verticillatus)

(I don't know about this. Do people still know "The Patty Duke Show?" 'Cause that's where this "identical cousins" thing comes from: stay tuned for Part II, which will probably be posted Saturday.)

This is the plant commonly called Swedish ivy. The botanical name has been P. australis and P. nummularius, and a lot of people still use one or the other of those, but currently, officially, the name is P. verticillatus. It's native to Australia, one of a pretty small number of houseplants¹ which are. (UPDATE: Yeah, um, this might be wrong too. There is no consensus about where this plant is from. The most authoritative-sounding sources say South and/or East Africa, but other sources claim Australia or Southeast Asia.)



Beyond that – well, let's say this was a difficult plant to research. Not only is the botanical name sort of uncertain at the moment, but there seem to be a number of plants with the common name "Swedish ivy," which confuses things. Also, this is sometimes called "creeping Charlie" as well, which makes it one of a gazillion plants going by that name, including the other "identical cousin." Care information is likewise all over the place, with some people saying that it's called Swedish ivy because it can handle cold temperatures and was consequently popular in Sweden, and other people saying not to let it get below 55ºF, which conflict of advice may well be because different people are talking about different species. There are, altogether, maybe ten to fifteen different plants involved in this whole mess. This is why common names drive me insane, and why I stick to the scientific names as much as I can (in case you'd ever wondered).²

So I'm going to just skip over all that and talk about what my own plant, and the identical ones at work, seem to like, and if somebody has a problem with that then we can just take this outside and settle this like childish men.

Ahem.

Care information: this is an easy plant to keep alive, but it's a pain to keep it looking nice. Light is the main difficulty I have with mine (or the ones at work, for that matter): too little, and the stems get weak and elongated, but too much, and the leaves bleach out. They do self-branch, a bit, though if you want a presentable, bushy plant, you have to pinch back the tips occasionally. They also seem to be pretty heavy feeders, but that's sort of to be expected for a plant that grows as fast as it does.



None of these are enormous problems, and there are a number of good points, too: overwatering and underwatering are taken in stride (though watering when the soil is about halfway dry, or a little drier, seems to be about ideal), it isn't particularly prone to pests, and humidity and temperature seem to be non-issues as far as I've seen. Plus it propagates easier than almost anything – root it in soil, root it in water, root it in dirty socks (haven't tried it, but I bet you $5 it would work: just, you know, keep the socks damp but not soaked, and send me a picture). This is useful in a few ways: one, you can always give away cuttings if somebody asks, secure in the knowledge that you can easily get more where that came from, and two, if you get tired of a particular plant that isn't looking great, starting it over takes about three minutes and a glass of water. You can also fill in empty spots in a plant pretty easily, just by taking a cutting, making a hole in the soil, and sticking the cutting in the hole: this won't work out every time, but it will work often enough.

If you're adding cuttings to an existing pot, you shouldn't have any worries about the soil. If you're trying to start a new plant entirely, in most cases you still won't have to be concerned about soil, but make sure it's not something that's going to be really heavy and wet, because too much water will cause the cuttings to fail.

Plectranthus verticillatus seems to be one of the old standard plants, though it's not often sold in stores: it's one of those like Tradescantia zebrina (wandering Jew) that gets passed around from person to person and generation to generation without ever really seeing retail.³ We sell it at work, and it's not a big mover, though hanging baskets do well if they're full. Unfortunately, the hanging baskets I started in the early fall have gotten way too much light, and are kind of a sickly yellowish color. I'm hoping that if I move them to a darker spot, the leaves will green up, but even if the old leaves don't get darker, the new growth should be normal. It'll fix itself one way or the other.

There's also a variegated version, which looks almost exactly the same:



For reasons which aren't entirely clear to me, my variegated plants have not done nearly as well as I was expecting. I think a lot of my problem is just that I didn't plant a lot of cuttings together in the first place, so they don't look as full, but I've also had a lot of cuttings (30-40%?) fail at once when the weather turned colder here, because the soil was suddenly staying soaked for long periods.⁴ It's not such that I can't take more cuttings and go on with my life, but I'm not entirely sure that I want to: they revert to all-green pretty readily anyway, and I already have plenty of green Swedish ivy.

This is, in any case, a really excellent beginners' plant: it's not difficult to keep alive, and it grows gratifyingly quickly when it's happy. I find it difficult to get excited about, but it's hard to find fault with it, either.

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Photo credits: me.

¹ Among the others: Schefflera actinophylla and S. arboricola, and Araucaria bidwillii (monkey-puzzle tree Bunya pine, or bunya-bunya tree). It's not a long list, though.
² Best example of this I can think of, which I either used at Pick a Plant or else really, really meant to use there: if I say "zebra plant" to you, you probably have a more or less immediate picture in your head of which species you expect me to be talking about. The trouble is, you have no way to know whether the zebra plant I'm talking about is the succulent Haworthia attenuata, the yellow-flowering Aphelandra squarrosa, the foliage plant Calathea zebrina (and to make that more ridiculous, the photo for C. zebrina at this site is a picture of Calathea ornata instead. Also, there is apparently a second Calathea, C. bella, called "zebra plant," so even if you get the genus right, we might still be talking about different species), the outdoor plant Sanchezia nobilis glaucophylla, or the bromeliad Aechmea chantinii. Even if you have a hard time with the scientific names, you should be able to see from this example why they're necessary.
³ Though I'm told that Tradescantia zebrina actually sells really well here in the spring, so maybe I'm going to find out that it's a hot retail item after all, in a few months.
⁴ A little baffling, actually, since the temperature and amount of light and so forth didn't really change that much: the plants just stopped taking up water one day, is what it looks like.

Unfinished business re: Chamaedorea seifrizii flowers

In the original post about this, I mentioned that we had two plants flowering, but the colors were different, and the darker of the two was in a spot that was difficult to photograph. This has since been remedied, so I give you: the other Chamaedorea seifrizii flower. We're still unclear about when or whether to try to get seeds out of this. This flower looks like a better candidate, though: the berry-things are larger and have a richer color, which often means good things.

Unfinished business re: Alternanthera dentata 'Purple Knight'

Remember when I said that Alternanthera dentata 'Purple Knight' cuttings would collapse within hours of being taken? Well it turns out that the whole plant will do this too, especially if you move it somewhere where you can't monitor its progress and then forget about it. It may yet come back -- I didn't call it a Practical Joker for nothing -- but even so, you can imagine the stab in the heart I felt this morning, when I was checking for things to water and found this:



I guess I'll let you know if/when it comes back. I'm posting this mostly as an illustration of what cuttings will do, since I didn't have one available when I made the original post.

UPDATE: It came back. It's a little wrinkly, still, but it came back. Utterly insane.

Random plant event: Ludisia discolor buds

Ludisia discolor (sometimes also Ludisia discolor) is one of the plants called "jewel orchid;" I knew they bloomed, but I don't think I've ever actually seen it happen. I was caught completely off guard by the buds -- we have four at work, and all four are budding simultaneously. I'm looking forward to seeing what the flowers look like.

Greta Garbo (Aspidistra lurida 'Milky Way')

"I never said, 'I want to be alone.'
I only said, 'I want to be let alone.'
There is all the difference."

-Greta Garbo, about her famous but misremembered
line in the movie Grand Hotel


I bought one of these a couple summers ago (July '05), and it did fine for me for a solid year and a half, and then one day last winter I noticed it had spider mites. There ensued a long spell of swishing the leaves through sinkfuls of soapy water, and hand-wiping leaves with wet paper towels, and dry paper towels, and spraying the plant in the kitchen sink, and all kinds of other stuff. Then, for some reason I no longer remember, I bought a second, smaller plant, which also promptly got mites, and then I decided that the way to fix it all was to pot the two plants together. I don't remember the actual thought processes involved.

Inevitably, the whole thing failed, and I had to pitch the plants out and start over later with a new one, which is so far going well, cross your fingers. But it should have become obvious to you some time ago (from the quote, if nothing else) that the problem was, the plant wanted to be let alone.

Greta Garbo.
Which is not to say that I shouldn't have done something about the spider mites. But I was definitely getting the plant too wet – every time I sprayed it with water, every time I did the soapy-water thing in the sink, I was also watering it, even when I wasn't trying to. During the winter, Aspidistra goes more or less dormant, and isn't really interested in water. This isn't absolute – you still have to water it once or twice, maybe – but ideally, you should just leave it someplace cool that gets a little bit of light and let it wait out the winter without too much fuss. I didn't know this (or if I knew it, it wasn't on my mind much) at the time this all went down.

What I should have done, probably, is give it a quick cursory wipedown with some damp paper towels and then spray it with one of the many oil-based mite products out there. We have one at work (Mite-X) that is primarily cottonseed oil, I think, with some clove and garlic oil mixed in,¹ which I'm not overly impressed with when it comes to getting rid of mites on our plants at work, but that's maybe not an entirely fair test, since we never do all the plants at once, so there's no way to be sure that the oil hasn't worked beautifully, right before the plants are re-infested by whatever plants we set them next to. So I'm willing to give Mite-X the benefit of the doubt there. We also have a few preparations that include neem oil, though they're pricey, and list "clarified hydrophobic extract of neem oil" on the ingredients, as opposed to cold-pressed neem, which I've been told (at Garden Web) is vastly superior, because only cold-pressing preserves the active ingredients of neem in suitable quantity, or something like that. Unless I've misunderstood something along the way, which happens. In the last week or two, I've bought some of the clarified hydrophobic . . ., etc., and used it on some Dizygotheca elegantissima that I suspected of having mite issues, and while it's too soon to have a report on the effectiveness, I can tell you right now that the smell makes me kind of want to wretch. Not everybody has that problem with it, but for myself, I'm thinking summertime, well-ventilated outdoor use only.


You may be thinking, well what about actual poisons, though? Something synthetic and super-toxic to living things? You ain't-a-one of them organic fellers, are ye?²

I don’t mind a good synthetic chemical every once in a while, no. I mean, I have a chemistry degree, for chrissakes, so it's not like I'm afraid of chemicals. I actually rather like and approve of chemicals. But, you know, if these are mites I've brought home with me from work, as they probably are, then they've been getting sprayed every week, or every other week, with some form of noxious chemical which is probably formulated specifically for mites, and yet we still always have them. Some of this is because we bring new stuff in all the time, and there's no way to be 100% certain that it's 100% pest-free, but the more reasonable guess is that we probably just never get all of them in the first place, and we're building a race of resistant supermites which will eventually take over and enslave us all.³ So I'm not actually impressed with the effectiveness of hard-core industrial poisons. And anyway for a small infestation, like on a single plant, physical removal is plausible, so full-scale warfare isn't necessarily even a good idea. I mean, for mealybugs or whiteflies I'll go get the flamethrower out of the attic,⁴ but for mites? On one plant? Nah.

I don't know that the oil thing would have worked, for sure, but it would have been better to try that. If nothing else, I might have been able to get the plant through the winter and into a more active season, and once it was growing again I could maybe have used a combination of water and oil and soap.


In any case. They're not fast growers in general, though in my experience they do add leaves at a good rate during summer and fall. Sort of like Sansevieria trifasciata – they aren't often motivated to do a whole lot, but when they decide to wake up, they can add a pretty good amount of foliage in a pretty short period. The slow growth overall means that plants are often expensive for their size.

Under normal circumstances, Aspidistra is a very easy plant to keep indoors. It's unusually tolerant when it comes to temperature, humidity, neglect, and low light. Spider mites do find it attractive, and it's best to err on the side of underwatering (especially during the winter), but those are fairly minor points, unless you, you know, drench it repeatedly with water because you're freaking out about it getting spider mites. Mostly, you just have to refrain from fussing with it too much – even repotting isn't a good idea unless the plant really, really needs it. Just let it alone. It'll be fine.

UPDATE (1/30/10): Raised the difficulty level from 1.1 to 4.8, a pretty dramatic adjustment, because the replacement plant also just fell apart on me, over nothing, and I had been leaving it alone, so I give up. I don't know what it wanted, and I officially don't care anymore. Cast-iron plant my ass.

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Photo credits:
Aspidistra -- me.
Greta Garbo -- public domain via Wikipedia

¹ Why clove and garlic? I suspect it's so that the product has a funky smell, which will make consumers believe that it's doing something. Though sometimes I am too cynical for my own good, and I suppose they could both be expected to repel some kinds of bugs.
² My apologies. I lapsed into cowboy/pirate-speak there for a second.
³ I, for one, welcome our new arthropod overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted blogging personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground English ivy farms. (slightly modified quote from "The Simpsons")
⁴ "We had to destroy the plant in order to save it."