Albert's Greenhouse

If nothing else believes it's really spring now, the Anthuriums in my greenhouse know.

Before you get all excited about possible pictures of pretty flowers, I would like to make one thing clear: Being a certified plant nut, I'm not growing those domesticated things you see in your florist shop. I'm growing just about everything else, but not those. So the flowers I speak of are perhaps going to be a little disappointing. They're mostly kind of beige, green and dark purple, for instance. They're also pretty small. No petals here.

Anthurium is a huge genus, and there are plenty of undescribed species to go around. All but maybe 3 species have fairly nondescript blooms when compared to the florist's anthurium. I grow them for the leaf patterns, mostly, not the flowers.

So here we go:
See? I told you. Nothing really that spectacular.

Above is Anthurium veitchii. To the left, Anthurium reflexinervum. To the right, Anthurium friedrichstallii.

There are a bunch more below.






The anthurium spadix ( the long hot-dog shaped part, for those of you less technical readers ) contains many small male and female flowers, all clumped together. After the flower opens, the female flowers are first to mature, often exuding a slightly sticky liquid. If pollen lands on the spadix at that time, the female flowers will be fertilized. Eventually, the female flowers become either fertilized or infertile, and then the male flowers produce a coating of sticky pollen.

Anthurium flowers are mostly not self-fertile because the pollen appears only after the female flowers have finished. In order to get seed, I need to find plants in bloom at the same time, one in the earlier female stage and one in the later pollen producing stage. Many of my anthurium plants frustrate this because I may have only one plant in flower at a time. If I do manage to pollinate, I get will often get berries, usually red in color. The journey from berry to fullgrown plant is a long one.

For whatever reason, anthurium seedlings are very slow to grow for me. Perhaps that is just the way they are, or perhaps they need some sort of symbiotic fungus, or ant interaction, or just some more fertilizer. In any case, the journey from seed to even a small plant can take years.

On the other hand, from small plant to large plant can be very fast.

I have some seedlings of highland anthuriums that I have been growing for three years or more, and which only now have exceeded 4" is size. This is for a plant which eventually will become very large, at least in the wild.

So I wait, and I watch for two flowers at the same time, and I hope that someday I will get some more berries.