Random plant event: mutant Platycodon?

Not only does this Platycodon flower have three more petals than usual, but it's tagged Platycodon 'Fuji White' besides. The tag could be a mistake (tags do get switched around, and dropped, and so forth), but the petal thing is absolutely the plant's own idea.


I've seen a couple plants try for ten petals, here and there, though that's less surprising. I already knew that sometimes plants double their petal count (usually because they've doubled chromosome number). But this is different.

Actually, do these even count as petals, exactly? I mean, they're all fused together, right? So is it normally five petals, or one really big petal? Is there a botanist in the house?

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light

(SLOW BROWSER WARNING: Image-heavy post.)

Ordinarily, to shoot a picture of a leaf, you put the camera between the light source and the leaf. The light reflects off the leaf, enters the camera, and you have a picture. This is what happens if you instead make the light go through the leaf before entering the camera:

Anthurium andraeanum 'Pacora,' mature leaf. The random, no-particular-reason picture that started this whole thing.

Homalomena 'Emerald Gem.' More graceful than expected.

Anthurium andraeanum 'Pacora,' newish leaf. Reminds me of lightning, oddly.

Ficus lyrata. The broad, thin, flat leaves of the Araceae family seem to work best for this; this is one of only three pictures (out of fifteen) that isn't an aroid.

Dieffenbachia 'Triumph.' Natural light, instead of fluorescent, for this one, not that you can really tell.

Cordyline fruticosa 'Kiwi.' The second non-aroid.

Dieffenbachia 'Sterling.' I find this picture especially stunning, which is probably related to it being one of my two favorite Dieffenbachia cultivars.

Philodendron hederaceum micans. Kinda looks like a heavily stylized tropical fish, to me.

Aglaonema 'Stars.' Being so close-up makes it easy to see the two different layers of variegation: there's the green layer with white dots, and the other green layer with darker green splotches.

Philodendron 'Imperial Red.' Had to play around a little with the color on this one, as there were some unavoidable bluish reflections on the underside of the leaf. The white dots here are probably due to mechanical trauma of some kind while the leaf was developing. Ficus lyrata, above, does this too, though there the damage gets darker, not lighter.

Philodendron gloriosum. Ooo! Contrasty!

Dieffenbachia 'Camouflage.' So weird close-up; I'd never noticed that the veins are such a dark green compared to the leaf.

Maranta leuconeura 'Marisela.' The last non-aroid.

Dieffenbachia 'Tiki.' Same types of variegation as Aglaonema 'Stars,' if you'll notice: the main difference is that the dark blotches are connected by dark veins in spots as well.

Aglaonema 'Red Gold.' The leaf is in and out of focus because it's not very flat, but this is still my favorite of the pictures. Actually, going in and out of focus kind of makes it better. More abstract.

If Plants Could Speak

Random plant event: Neoregelia 'Fireball' blooming

Many Neoregelia varieties change leaf colors when they're in bloom, usually toward the plant's center, like this. This doesn't happen to be one of those varieties, though. 'Fireball' just turns reddish when it's getting lots of sun (hence the name). Apparently being on the corner of the table gives it just enough light to put it over the edge to redness, while all the other plants on the table stay green.

Pretty picture: assorted blooming plants from work, Part 2 of 2

My camera is frustratingly unable to capture certain shades of purple accurately. The pictures may be crystal-clear and gorgeous, but all the red always gets sucked out of the purple. It's actually kind of a problem. Adding red with Irfanview doesn't help, because the red also gets added to everything else: it's no use getting the flower the right color if the clouds are pink and the leaves are yellow. It's frustrating, but I soldier bravely onward.

Daucus carota, Queen Anne's lace
There are some plants that people seem to love to hate. Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), or perhaps kudzu (Pueraria lobata), for example. Queen Anne's lace seems to be sort of the opposite: it's the plant people kind of hate to love. It's not particularly practical -- you can't really eat it or make baskets out of it or repel insects with it -- but it is, undeniably, pretty in that Julia set kind of fractally way, and that appears to be enough.

We don't actually sell this at work, but I felt the post needed another picture, so it got in. (I'm actually a little surprised we don't; it wouldn't be our first invasive plant, see next picture.)

Eichhornia crassipes
This one actually disturbs me a little bit. We do sell water hyacinth, despite the fact that it's a known invasive and is very disruptive in the ecosystems to which it's been introduced (via blocking light from deeper water, starving the water of oxygen, displacing native plants, and so forth). Granted that it wouldn't be invasive here, since it's not able to survive freezes (though I haven't seen it definitely stated that the seeds, which are plentiful, couldn't overwinter), but it's not like a fair amount of damage couldn't be done in a single season, too, under the right circumstances. On the other hand, the flowers are quite pretty. There's a weird peacock sort of quality to the top petal that intrigues me.

Angelonia 'Serena Purple'
I actively dislike Angelonia, for unfair reasons. Our entire stock (four or five different varieties) got a bad spider mite infestation toward the end of the spring and couldn't really be snapped out of it, so we had to throw it out. Or at least we wound up throwing most of it out; I think the plant in this picture is one that we managed to salvage. It's an attractive plant when it's healthy, but it goes downhill so fast.

Salvia nemorosa 'Marcus'
This one's nice. I'm not really a fan of any of the millions of different Salvia smells, but this one is less offensive than most, and the blooms are a genuinely pretty color, and seem to last for a long time. So it's not so bad.

Delphinium 'Purple Passion'
This is the most shameful example of the camera not giving me the right color when it comes to blues and purples. The real thing is both darker and redder. I've not actually spent much time dealing with, or noticing, the Delphiniums, until the last couple weeks, so I don't have much to add to that. I suppose I could say that I like the word. Delphinium. It's nice.

Pretty picture: assorted blooming plants from work, Part 1 of 2

Begonia NOID.
We have more interesting Begonias than this, but this is the one I got a picture of. People don't really seem to care for it, and I can't say as I blame them. The ones at work are only now, two months after people would maybe have bought them, starting to look presentable. Not so much fashionably late to the party as showing up to the party at the wrong location, the day after it was held. We will have to propagate earlier next year.

Rosa x 'Radrazz'
I haven't taken any pictures of the roses at work before this, mostly because the roses are the domain of the nursery lot, not the greenhouse, and so I don't normally have much of a valid, work-related excuse for being among them. (Same thing for the trees and shrubs, actually: we do have them, I'm just never around them.) Also I just kind of don't get what the big deal is (please don't hate me, Niels): as far as I can tell, they're just one more flowering plant, one that gets sick a lot. I used to like the cut flowers, too, until I read Flower Confidential (I'm still intending to do that review someday.); now I'm a little uneasy about them. I'm willing to be educated on why roses are the best plants ever, if anybody wants to: it's clear that there must be a lot of people who think this.

Lobelia cardinalis.
The color is even more eye-searingly red in person. It's hard for me to see this, which is surely among the reddest red I've ever experienced, as being related to L. erinus, which is just about the bluest blue. But apparently they are related, and there are other plants in the genus that they resemble even less than they resemble one another. Lobelia is just a varied genus, I guess.

Zinnia 'Profusion Fire'
All the Zinnias were sold a long time ago; this is from a planter that the nursery lot put together to decorate the lot with. (It's probably technically for sale: pretty much everything is for sale. The boss would sell the floor if someone made a good enough offer. There is, however, no marked price on the planter, so if someone were to ask we'd have to make up a number on the spot.)

Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm'
My way of renouncing the comment I made earlier about not liking black-eyed susans. They're okay. I'm a little confused about what the difference is between 'Goldsturm' and the plants I see growing along the sides of the road here. There's nothing that jumps out at me to say this plant is clearly better than those plants, yet it's a cultivar and those are not. Why?

Random plant event: Cereus peruvianus flower bud

These Cereus peruvianus are from work.¹ When they arrived, at the beginning of June, one of them had a flower bud on it, but it dropped the bud within a few days and I figured that was probably the end of that story.

Maybe not, as it turns out. Though I'm not likely to get a good picture of the bloom, even if it does reach maturity, because I'm not there at night when it would open. We've had a large Epiphyllum bloom recently (last week) too, and because it's a night-bloomer, I didn't get to see that one either.

Still, props to the cactus for making the attempt. Especially if it's the same plant that dropped the previous bud. And who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and catch the tail end of it some morning when I get to work.

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The picture above was taken last Saturday, and I wrote the post on Sunday. Since then, as of yesterday (Wednesday), the bud did actually develop into a flower, which was awesome. However -- the majority of pictures I took of it are crap, which is disappointing. Below are the best ones I got.


I should probably acknowledge that this is an improvement on not getting to see the flower at all, like I expected.


It had closed up by about 1 PM, but at least everybody got to see it. I'd moved it up to the front counter for the day, figuring that if ever it was going to catch the eye of a customer, today -- and by today I mean Wednesday, which is when I'm writing this -- would be the day. But no.


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¹ (My own large Cereus peruvianus are officially deceased, in that I've taken them off the spreadsheets, but in actuality they're alive and sitting outside on the little sliver of space between our door and the neighbor's door. I gave up hope with the mealybugs some time ago, but the husband wouldn't permit me to throw the plants away, so I still fight mealybugs during infrequent fits of optimism. The plants themselves are having a ball out there: after holding steady at about 5 feet tall for a couple years, they've suddenly started to grow again, both of them, and the more ambitious of the two has put on five and a half inches in about a month, and is now taller than I am. Which of course just makes me more conflicted, because I want them to grow and be happy and all that, but I don't want to bring them back in and reinstate them on the spreadsheets and everything if they're going to die a slow lingering mealybug death and take other plants down with them.)

LOLCactus / The Great Dampening

It's been a very wet year. I had kind of expected that after the Snowiest Winter Ever (actually, I think the winter only came in second-wettest, but that's still a lot of snow¹), and the Five-Hundred-Year Flood, we were probably due for a Worst Drought in Recorded History to finish out the summer. This didn't happen; instead, we've continued to be wet, though not in a record-setting way. Just lots of thunderstorms, lots of wind and rain, lots of mornings where I arrive at work to find all the perennials, shrubs and trees laying on the ground and have to stand them back up.

Why does this pertain to our deflated cactus? Well, because: the roof of the greenhouse has a pair of vents running the length of the greenhouse along the ridge, which can be opened. And during days in the summer, they always are. All the way. At night, these are generally lowered part-way, so that if it should rain, the water will roll off the vent flaps, land on the roof, and roll off harmlessly into the alley. And that would totally work, if rain fell straight down, at a moderate pace.

Perhaps you see where I'm going with this.

But instead there are wind and torrential downpours of rain. So even when the plants are inside, we sometimes wind up overwatering. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the only cactus we've lost.

There have also been a few issues with mildew, particularly on the Gerbera daisies, for the same reason. And a lot of the outdoor plants have plain old root rot, though some of our rot issues could have been avoided had certain people refrained from telling me over and over that I needed to be staying on top of the watering, and ohmigod the plants can dry out like [snaps] that if it gets hot and windy out, and oh noes! I think I see wilting! so be sure and water water water.²

Gerbera with mildew. We have about twenty that look like this, and about twenty that look a lot better than this but still have some mildew here and there.
And then the slugs will speak for generations to come about The Great Dampening of 2008, which is a whole other issue. I want to like the slugs; I sorta think they're cute, how they're all formless and blobby and slimy and stuff. But I've found them on everything. In the greenhouse, out of the greenhouse, everywhere. And they're less adorable in large numbers, I gotta say.

Gather around, children, and let me tell you about how wonderful things used to be, back in aught-eight. The world was full of delicious damp leaves, and we had respect for our elders. . . .
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¹ and it was awesome!
² (Not that I'm bitter.)