Albert's Greenhouse

Let it not be said that I have a black thumb, for there is one kind of plant that I excel at growing. That would be the kind of plant that is refered to scientifically as the Weedacae, or weedy plants.

The Weedacae are grouped into several tribes, each containing too many genera to mention, so the choice of the grower of Weedacae is indeed both broad and deep. No matter what the growing conditions, you can easily find a member of the Weedacae which will thrive and even plentifully multiply. The family Weedacae encompasses many plant morphologies, including both flowering plants and pteridophytes, vines, succulents, trees, sticker bushes and even unicellular organisms.

The families of the Weedacae are as follows:

Turfverminiceae - this vast, though difficult to spot when not in flower, tribe contains mostly plants with flat leaves that stand less than 2" high. Here, too, we find members of the oxalis and well as dandelions and crabgrass. The operational imperitive for these plants is to grow low enough to avoid decapitation by the lawnmower while producing flower and seed in less than the typical two week lawn maintenance cycle. They like lots of water and fertilizer, and some partial shade as provided by lawn grass.

Potscourgia - Well adapted to life in containers, the members of this family include many plants with explosive or sticky seed capsules which aid in dispersal and entangling roots and stems. The oxalis is a typical member of this tribe, spreading by both sticky, exploding seed capsules and runners to dominate whatever container it finds itself in. Certain ferns are also members of this family.

Butitsatreeaceae - Bushy shrubs to tall trees, the members of this family thrive by putting forward the theory that if it's going to be a tree, it must be the "good" kind of volunteer. We wouldn't want to chop down a nice green tree, now would we? Even a small one must be saved in case it bears fruit or grants shade.

Spinybastardae - Includes the thistles, the brambles, cactacae, certain nettles and some ornamental nightshades. Characterized by spines which can penetrate thick leather gardening gloves, trousers, and 1/2" hardened steel tank armor. Best approached from a distance with a horticultural flame thrower.

I heard somewhere that in terms of biomass, ants are maybe the most successful form of animal life on the planet. Everywhere you go, there will be ants. In the tropics, this is certainly true. In my kitchen, it seems to hold as well, if I haven't been diligent about spraying.

A lot of the plants I grow have natural associations with ants. I don't see these ants in the greenhouse, and when I do see ants in the greenhouse, I get them back out of the greenhouse right quick - they have a tendency to destroy the plants they nest in. However, in the wild, many of the plants I grow attract ants to bring them food or to protect them from being harmed. Here are a few of the ant plants:

Dischidia major/Dischidia rafflesiana - This vine grows its leaves into hollow pickle-shaped structures which house ants. I grow mine attached with some sphagnum moss ( long fiber ) to a cork plaque where it gets regular water, fertilizer and sun. It seems to like the situation as it's in flower right now, and continues to try to escape the plaque and colonize new territory. This plant is similar to Dischidia pectinoides, but has much stiffer and bigger ant leaves. I got it from Tropiflora many years ago when I visited their impressive facility outside Sarasota, FL.

Hydnophytum formaricarum - An epiphyte with a smooth, swollen, hollow base where ants take up residence. It readily makes beautiful orange berries when given sunlight and warmth. Doesn't take too happily to drying out, though. Given the rate at which this thing makes berries, it's a wonder that the nurseries are charging as much as they do.

Myrmecodia sp ( platyrea, whatever else ) - There are several clones of this floating around, but they are all quite similar to Hydnophytum. It has bigger, thinner leaves than Hydnophytum, and a more spiny, wrinkly base, but it still makes very similar orange berries. Both of these plants seem to do well in hanging baskets, but beware getting them too soaking wet or letting them dry out for too long.

Nepenthes bicalcarta - Carnivorous southeast asian pitcher plant with "fangs" below the pitcher. This beautiful plant lives in association with ants - whether as food or as protection, I do not know. I had a beautiful big plant of this in my old greenhouse, but it was a tragic casualty of the move. Now mine is small, but with aspirations of putting its first pitcher out there any day now.

Lecanopteris sinuosa - This truly beautiful fern, with a long, swollen yet slender spotted rhizome, allows nests of ants to live within it. I grow mine on cork bark with a lot of sun, a lot of water, and the occasional spray from the fertilizer spigot. There is a related genus Solanopteris, which is South American rather than Southeast Asian. Andreas Wistuba in Germany is selling quite a selection of Lecanopteris, along with his carnivorous plants.

There are a lot of other plants that live in assosciation with ants out there - orchids, anthuriums, other ferns, hoyas, and many more. They all have fascinating adaptations to their little evil, stinging, kitchen invading commensal partners. I think I'll just keep the two separate for now, thank you very much.

Sometimes, one sets out to do something and unintentionally ends up doing something completely different. This is the story of what has become the sempervivum diversity project.

Many years ago, when I lived in a little house in downtown San Jose, right outside of gangland, my house had no street trees. What it did have was four forlorn squares of dirt in which various bushes had expired due in part to having beer bottles dumped into them at odd hours of the evening. These squares of dirt were in the direct sun, out of reach of the lawn sprinklers, and subject to a certain amount of abuse from passers-by. I realized that for anything the thrive in them, it would either require a miracle, or the next closest thing : succulents.

Of course, I could not be convinced to go out to the nearest freeway offramp and pick up some cuttings of ice plants ( scourge of the California coast ). I had to do something "different". I became fascinated with sempervivums - not only did the name sound encouraging ( means something like ever living ), but the plants were pretty cute, and came in a lot of different colors and patterns. Leaf patterns were and are a big thing with me.

So I sent off to Squaw Mountain Gardens for the cheapest and biggest assortment of sempervivum clippings I could find - something that was basically the castoffs from their propagating projects, intended for a succulent wreath project, but full of little pieces of many different plants. I basically got a bag of unlabeled cuttings, which was just what I was looking for. I raked the soil a little bit and dumped them out there in the fall to fend for themselves.


They've lived happily there beside the lawn, getting plenty of water and fertilizer for a couple of years now, and have filled out the space allotted for their growth. They are pretty, and they're thriving in conditions much wetter and more well fed than they were really designed to see. The interesting thing is that the high species diversity I went to so much trouble to get appears to be on its way out. Giving them competition and a strange environment has caused some of the species to grow very well and outcompete the others. Will I eventually only have a single type of sempervivum in my border? Only time will tell.

... and the Japanese maples in my front courtyard are coming out of dormancy. The trident maple ( Acer burgerianum ) has been in leaf for a while, and my little, scrawny Acer pentaphyllum is still barren, but my various clones of Acer palmatum are finally leafing out in a serious way. The new foliage is still shiny, and even more beautifully colored than in the fall.

Named Japanese maples are propagated by grafting onto a seed-grown rootstock, usually also Acer palmatum. I grow several different varieties, mostly those selected for small size and adaptability to pot growth, since I don't have room for a forest in my little city lot.

Some of my best maple finds have been at farmers markets. My somewhat unusual Acer pentaphyllum was found at a market in Los Gatos. I bought my Acer japonicum at the market in Mountain View from a guy who has a hobby of growing maples in his backyard.

The dry air of the summer eventually gets to my maples, and the leaves on some of them will dry out and brown at the edges. For these few weeks and months of spring, however, I can enjoy the bright and fresh new leaves.

Sometimes, living in the Silicon Valley really gets to you - the traffic, the outrageous housing prices, the hectic pace of life, the constant threat of natural disasters.

Other times, you find the perfect spring Sunday afternoon - sunny and warm, and you drive up to San Francisco, through Golden Gate park, and over the bridge, admiring the beautiful views all the way into rural Marin county, where you photograph the local weed flora.

I grow a lot of plants that are not domesticated. They are clones of plants that were yanked out of some rainforest somewhere, or perhaps grew for seeds harvested in the wild. Not a lot is written about the care of some of these plants, but it's assumed that you need to mimic a plant's natural environment in order for it to grow best.

This has always made a certain amount of sense to me - you would think that each plant has evolved to do best in the environment in which it resides. Plant collectors (and it seems, orchid collectors in particular ) go to great lengths to record the physical attributes of the locations their plants are collected in, hoping that replicating those environments will help to keep the plants happy in cultivation. They take temperature, humidity, soil pH, water chemistry, light intensity and whatever else they can think of.

Yes, you would think that each plant has evolved to do best in the environment in which it resides, but as it turns out, if you thought that, you would be thinking wrong.

Plants grow in the places they grow for a lot of reasons, among them being competition, random chance, predation, and widely spaced catastrophic events. If you go to an environment where a plant grows like crazy 11 months out of the year and then dies in a yearly killing frost, you won't find that plant. You won't find the plant where it will be killed by sheep, migrating flocks of toads, or whatever else. You won't find the plant if it's going to be smothered by Kudzu. However, the plant might grow perfectly fine in these places without the predation, the catastrophes or the competition. These are the sorts of things I try to avoid in my greenhouse. and this is why I don't always put too much stock in information about where the plant does and does not grow in nature. There are just too many variables that hopefully won't occur in my greenhouse.

I've been reading a book recently called "Demons in Eden", which purported to be about the reasons behind and solutions to invasive species. Although material on this particular facet of things is fairly light, it's been a great primer on ecology and environmental niches. In this book, a very relevant experiment done by a German guy is mentioned.

This guy created an artificial experimental meadow, where he graded the soil such that the water table followed a gradient from over a meter deep to just under the soil surface. On this gradient, he planted strips of various small meadow species. He also planted a strip with all the species combined to mimic normal competitive conditions. He then grew the thing for a season, pulled up all the plants, dried them and weighed them. He was able to graph the mass of the plants vs the water table depth. What he found was that when planted separately, most of the plants did best where the water table was a medium depth. But when they had competition from other species, the peaks of their distribution were distributed all over the water table, each finding its own niche again. So the niche environments were only the optimal environments for the plants when they had competition. Without competition, they all grew better somewhere else.

So that orchid pulled out of the tropical forest might grow best for me outdoors in the snow? Unlikely. But the necessity of exactly duplicating the natural growing conditions is certainly in question. Most plants are happy given a little food, a little water, warmth and well drained soil. They are all survivors, and not necessarily perfectly adapted to the environment in which they are found.

For the life of my I cannot understand why it is, but there seem to be only two types of landscaping Camelia in the Bay Area. My old house in San Jose had both types, a beautiful single red one in the front, and a gaudy pink stripey one in the back. My new house in Sunnyvale, being a more modern structure, only has the pink stripey one.

Both pink stripey camelias I've owned - and I'm not that enamored of them in the first place - have suffered massively from camelia flower blight, a fungal infection that renders the flowers brown and ugly even as they are just opening.

It's strangely difficult to find good advice on combatting this disease. Apparently, the disease lives in the mulch and soil at the base of the camelia. Spores float up to the blossoms, cause their rot, and the blossoms fall back to the base of the camelia, thus completing the cycle. Most books and websites seem to trumpet the advice that one should simply pick up the dropped flowers and dispose of them, thus breaking the lifecycle. In my experience, this is futile at best. Since the blossoms die so quickly after they appear, you have to be out there at least once a day, rain or shine, picking off browning blossoms. Even if you manage to do this, the disease is still not well controlled.





More drastic, and possibly chemical, action is needed.

Some places advise replacing the mulch at the base of the camelia just before the flowers open. Others advise a more drastic option of a fungicidal soil drench and foliar sprays. I'm planning to go for broke next year and do the spraying, the drenching, the mulch replacement and the flower picking, and see if I can't beat this.

Camelias are interesting flowers that seem to do well in the Bay Area, other than the flower blight issue. I know that they do not tolerate freezes well, but in the mild climate that we have, they are often the earliest flowers of the spring. Their season is long, given a little irrigation they deal okay with our hot, dry summers, and they provide nice foliage interest all year round. If I can beat the blight, I would like to grow a few more, less common, types. And that single red one as well.

I walked out my front door past two of my yellow clivias this morning, and found that one of them was finally in bloom. The yellow buds have been getting larger and larger for weeks, but it's been cold and rainy so the plant has not grown too fast.

The story of my yellow clivias is a long one.

Several ( maybe 5 or 6 ) years ago, before Clivias had experienced their current resurgence of popularity, there was only one Clivia commonly available. It had these beautiful orange flowers, and it was reasonably cheap. Not content to leave well enough alone, though, plant breeders were deep in development of a yellow flowered version of this orange mainstay of the tropical shade. Why exactly yellow flowers would be considered superior to orange is not clear - of course an additional color morph is nice, and it's a particularly long lived and attractive shade of yellow, but the plant does only flower once a year - most of the year its the deep green strap leaves that provide whatever interest there is.

So this yellow flowered Clivia appears in the White Flower Farm catalog for something like $500.

I don't know about you, but I don't believe I've ever spent more than about $100 on a plant. And that was a pretty big, pretty special plant. This was a clivia with mis-colored flowers.

Anyway, apparently there were people who were willing to drop that kind of money, or something close to it, for a clivia with yellow flowers. And this $500 clivia in the White Flower Farm catalog led to a sort of notoriety - people would use this as a benchmark to justify their ( slightly ) lower prices. It got entertaining. I searched E-Bay for the yellow clivia just to see what the current going rate might be, and to see what sort of justifications were currently being put out for the exceptionally high prices.

Now, the thing about Clivia is, it makes seed. It doesn't make a ton of seed, but it will grow from seed fairly easily. So, the inavailability of yellow clivia was sure to be a temporary phenomenon. And about a year after the appearance of the $500 yellow clivia, an enthusiast put some seedlings up for auction on E-bay for the grand price of $8.00. They weren't absolutely guaranteed to be yellow, but he said there was something like an 80% chance. I bought four.

My $32.00 investment in yellow clivia took about 4 years to first flower. I would say that this is partially because I'm not that great at growing Clivias. I leave them outside in the shade and hope for the best, occasionally watering or fertilizing as the mood strikes. I don't keep very good records either, but so far every flower that I've gotten from the four plants has been a beautiful light yellow.

The plants are clumping now, sprouting shoots from their bases. Their strap leaves are huge, maybe 3 feet long, but thin. They've moved from their original four inch pots up to 2 gallon tubs, and they seem to flower for me every year if I give them enough sun, water and fertilizer. I'm pretty pleased with my $32.00 investment.

I went to Home Depot last night, just prior to the rainstorm, to purchase another shed.

There's an area about 8 feet wide all along the north side of my house between the house and the fence that's good for not much else than little cabinet-like storage sheds. For about $260, I picked up something very much like this, but without the wire shelves. It comes in a huge, flat, cardboard box, which I managed to hoist to the top of my jeep and tie down with about a hundred feet of that free plastic twine they have by the exit. I drove home very slowly.

The outside of the box says something to the effect that you can put this shed together in under 15 minutes. I expressed my doubts to no one in particular, but wonder of wonders, it turned out to be correct. 15 minutes and no tools later, I had a fully functional shed - and just in time for the rain to start.

The shed just snaps together, kind of like legos, but stronger and more interlocking. The only real issue I had with it was that it's built from the top down and therefore cannot be built in place - I had to assemble it on the lawn and then lug it back beside the house to its final resting place. The shed even comes with brackets molded into the sidewalls that allow for the easy installation of shelves cut from regular plywood. It was definitely worth the money.

It decided to be spring again for just a couple of days this past weekend. The weather forecaster is predicting rain soon, but over the weekend we took full advantage and went up to the wine country ( Napa, to be more specific ) for the annual Mustard Festival.

Mustard, allegedly introduced by Spanish missionaries to mark likely places for settlement, grows wild and almost weedlike all over vast regions of Northern California. Its flowers shade the hillsides yellow in the spring, and otherwise it's not good for too much, being somewhat invasive. I don't believe that many Californians harvest the seeds to actually make mustard from these wild plants.




Also plenty of other wildflowers growing in Napa - wild geraniums, wild radish, lupins and many more all grow alongside the roads. This time of the year is a prime wildflower time before the dry, hot days of summer.





The skies are cloudy this morning, and it looks like rain again, but for a brief weekend, we actually saw spring.

So, I went to the hardware store ( I think it was ) last fall and looked at their bulb section. Among the tulips and daffodils and perhaps dahlias, gladiolus and so on, one finds stranger, more tempting things. The pictures on the packages promise much, but one is often disappointed by reality when one plants.

In the bulb section, more than anywhere else, one may occasionally find a gem. The strangest Allium is packaged right next to the daffodils. The most unusual south african bulb shares shelf space with the most common darwin tulip. The species tulip on the other side of the box is hiding out, waiting for the right person. They continue to sell dracunculus vulgaris in huge numbers, apparently. Who buys this stinky plant? I certainly do, but I love the odd, the strange, and the smelly.

I was attracted to Sparaxis, of which I had never heard before. The package looked promising, in that it displayed multi-colored, rounded, patterened flowers, somewhat reminiscent of the South American tigridia lilies I grow. Sparaxis is a South African irid, and the tiny corms packed with some wood shavings that I got didn't seem too promising, but I planted them out anyway in front of the house, and waited.

First, in the fall, little green iris-like leaves poked above the soil, and to my surprise, a few weeks ago I got my first flowers. So far, at least, things are going well. I read that Sparaxis likes a dry summer, which happens to match up almost perfectly with what we have around here, so hopefully the little tubers will multiply and be with me for many years.

I've been doing some rewiring and reconfiguration of my greenhouse recently. You can read about how I built my greenhouse here.

8 feet by 12 feet doesn't sound that small until you're inside the greenhouse, and then you realize that you can really only have one row of shelves on each side - nothing big down the middle and nothing at the ends. So I've started hanging plants on the walls. I grow a lot of epiphytic orchids, aroids and vines.

Hanging plants on the walls leads to wanting to water the aforementioned plants, and I came to the conclusion that putting the electrical outlets at bench level was not such a great idea, given my desires to spray water around randomly - so time for an electrical update, and might as well update the circulation, lighting and ventilation as well.

New Equipment: After seeing various equipment failures, many brought on by cheapo equipment, I've become a sudden fan of more high quality stuff. So, about $1000 later, I've got a couple of Schaefer 12" vent fans, a couple of 16" motorized louvers, and a couple of 8" circulation fans. I've also redone the wiring so all the outlets are up near the ceiling of the greenhouse, all the outlets have water resistant covers, and I've bought an electrical box that hangs down from the ceiling nearer to the center of the greenhouse, in which I've installed two cooling thermostats, a fan speed control, a heating thermostat, a humidistat and a remote thermometer sensor. All this is wired through PVC conduit to control the various outlets.

The idea is that the metal box in the center of the greenhouse will better shade the temperature controllers from the evil effects of the exterior walls and the sun. It will also better protect the already waterproofed thermostats and switches. I've installed a little 12v fan to blow air through the cabinet and keep everything bathed in the ambient greenhouse air.

Hopefully, the two fans and two louvers, connected to two separate thermostats set at slightly different temperatures, will lead to a more robust system that is impervious to failure of any single component.

After dealing with rusting, non-starting, and frankly ugly fluorescent lights ( I only have time for the greenhouse after dark, especially in the winter ), I finally bit the bullet and got some nice new sealed T8 fixtures from Home Depot. They are waterproof, and they start right up, even when the greenhouse is a bit cool ( it only ever gets down to 65F, but does so almost nightly ).

I've also got a fertilizer injector attached to a spray hose, which is mounted in what turns out to be a very inconvenient place. The great dream may be to attach the fertilizer injector directly to the irrigation system, but there are issues with making sure that the fertilized water does not make its way into the carnivorous plant setup. The carnivores can't deal with what they consider contaminated water.

These greenhouse renewals are almost finished, but for me it's an ongoing process. Half the fun for this engineer is trying to design a system that is robust enough to keep all my plants happy through the summer and the winter and everything in between.

So it's been raining - not that uncommon for my part of Northern California in the winter, but sort of cruel given that we had weeks of almost summer-like weather just back in February, and mostly tropical rather than arctic storms before that. There's a dusting of snow on the hills around the Silicon Valley, and I've been caught in hailstorms ( very rare for these parts ) twice in the past two weeks when stepping out for lunch.

At least it seems to be making the plants happy. Some dormant things I ordered from Forest Farm nursery - a magnolia and a Szcheuan pepper tree - are starting to leaf out, proving yet again that the folks at the nursery did not just ship me any old dead twig. The rain has given me yet another reprieve from fixing the underground irrigation leak in front of the house that is slowly killing one of my azaleas.

Given the rain, thoughts turn to fixing the greenhouse watering system, which I spent much of the past few days on. It's drip irrigation using those big, bulky commercial grade drippers (supposed to clog less, and I think they're right..) connected to sprinkler valves. I'm moving away from using the flexible 1/2" tubing and multiple circuits to just one or two circuits on 3/4" PVC connected to sprinkler adaptors. The reason for this is twofold - the flexible tubing doesn't deal well with being supported - no matter how many supports you put it tends to sag in the warmer days of summer, and the flexible tubing was also getting way too many patches and leaks. Any stress or pull on the tubing, and it manages to work its way out of the push-on connectors and spray water all over the greenhouse every morning until I notice it and fix it.

The PVC was supposed to be better. Less leak prone. Less messy to change the number and position of drippers. Last night, I finally got all the pieces together and turned it on for the first time, only to be greeted by a shower of rain - for the first time ever, I had managed to break one of the schedule 40 PVC pipes by stressing it at a joint after it was assembled, and it was squirting water directly at one of my newly installed circulation fans.

After fixing the leak ( a little section of 1" pvc pipe, pvc glue, and a couple of zip ties ), I spent the night disconnecting and re-connecting all the emitters in the greenhouse, plus re-positioning some of the poorly placed ones. Everything except the misters/sprinklers is back in place and working. The larger pots all get their own emitter, and the smaller pots are in trays which get one or more emitters per tray depending on the size. I still need to set up the misters and sprinklers on a separate system since with the whole greenhouse connected, the 3/4" sprinkler valve reduces the pressure too much for such items.

In the last few years, the drip irrigation tubing that is available has changed. The new tubing is much stiffer than the old, and quite a bit less easy to bend. This is bad for the greenhouse setup where I need flexibility to move individual drippers around to a huge number of smallish pots, but I will have to admit that the new tubing seems to seal better than the old.

The misters are mostly intended to wet a few key baskets and a lot of cork plaques which are carrying epiphytes. Since I'm interested primarily in tropicals, I have a huge number of things growing tied to pieces of cork bark and not much else. These hang from the walls and ceiling of the greenhouse, and they need the full coverage that only a mister or sprinkler can provide.

Meanwhile, the rain outside continues, the rain inside has abated, and it's time for a hot drink and wishes for the return of eternal spring to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This year, I finally got my seed starting area together before the actual start of seed starting season. There. Say that three times fast.

In the past, I've started seeds indoors, and I've done it with and without a heating mat, usually on top of some flat surface that was not currently in use - the kitchen table, the filing cabinet, the washing machine. I'd hurriedly try to rig up some source of light just as the seeds came up, and as they turned scraggly, I'd try to add more light, hoping that it would soon be time to plant them all outside and tear down the setup. Well, no longer.

This winter, I got serious. Went out to Home Depot and bought a couple of T-8 fluorescent ballasts, a case of bulbs and some endclips. I cleared off a section of 4-foot wire shelving in the back of my laundry room, wired up six lights, cut up a section of styrofoam insulation for the shelving bottom, and set up my seedling heat mat. The lights are on a 12 hour timer, the heat mat is on a thermostat ( the thermostat sensor is buried in a container of sand on top of the heat mat ), and green growing things are doing quite well, thank you.

The new T-8 fluorescent tubes that are available give off about the same light as a standard 40W fluorescent tube, but are quite a bit thinner and more efficient, taking only 34 watts of electricity to do the same job. The new electronic ballasts help this efficiency, and provide instant start as well, even when it's cold.

So seed starting is a little less ad-hoc now, I have enough light and space to grow on the seedlings for quite a while, and my electric bill has been suitably enhanced. Though not by as much as one would think. 6 tubes @ 34W is 192W for 12 hours/day, which comes out to 2.3kwH/day, or around 50 cents at the exhorbitant rates we're charged here in sunny California. So for an extra $15 per month, I can start my seeds on time and save having to buy seedlings at the local nursery. As with most suburban gardening projects, it's not really that efficient financially ( ever calculate how much that summer tomato cost you? ), but it's certainly rewarding in other ways.

We are all fascinated by plants that move. I grow venus flytraps, myself. I also unintentionally grow something called Biophytum sensitivum, which folds its leaves in a way reminiscent of Mimosa pudica ( common name - sensitive plant ) when it's touched. Though the Biophytum has become a bit of a weed, I still tolerate it - the plants look like little miniature palm trees, but with pretty pink flowers coming up in my greenhouse pots.

Here are some plants that move:

Mimosa pudica - the most famous "sensitive plant". A weed in the tropics, it grows easily if you have fresh seed, flowers look like powder puffs. Touch the leaves once, and they fold up. Touch them again, and the leaf bends towards the ground. There are actually many species of Mimosa which act this way - Mimosa invisa is another which is occasionally available.

Biophytum sensitivum - If mimosa is a plant which gets too big and scraggly for you, try Biophytum. It has the same reproductive tendencies as Mimosa, spreading easily in the greenhouse by seed, but it stays small - less than 4" tall - and has similar touch-sensitive traits. It usually moves a bit slower, though. In my mind, these plants are much more pretty than Mimosa.

Dionaea muscipula - Venus' flytrap is probably the most famous carnivorous plant. This wonder of the plant world probably holds the record for repeatable plant motion speed. The ends of its leaves are formed in to clamshell traps which have just a few sensitive hairs on their insides. Touch the hairs once, and nothing happens. Touch the hairs again, and the trap quickly folds closed. If you're a bug and you're stuck inside, you get digested. Coming from the swamps of Delaware, Venus' flytrap is a bit harder to grow than the other plants mentioned here. See here for some pointers.

Desmodium gyrans - Called the "telegraph plant" because it tends to shake of its own accord when in the sun. I've never actually seen this happen, though I did grow the plant once. Maybe I did not have enough sun. You can find seed on the internet...

Maranta species - These are neither touch sensitive nor fast, but I have a Maranta leuconeura v. erythroneura on my desk at work which moves every day. During the nighttime, the leaves turn more vertical, almost pointing at the ceiling. In the morning, they fold back down to capture the light. This happens every night, and is the Maranta's way of keeping its leaves above those of other plants crawling on the forest floor.

It has been pointed out to us be David Attenborough that all plants actually move. They move very slowly, and usually just by growing, but they do move. His book and BBC television series "The Private Life of Plants" is one of the things that got me into this hobby in the first place. I highly recommend that you pick it up. VHS and the book are available from amazon.com, but the coolest thing is the whole series on 2 DVDs ( PAL and Region 2 coded ) is available from amazon.co.uk.

In six hour-long episodes, we are shown many wonders of the plant world, many in habitat, and most filmed with time-lapse photography to show us how the plants actually do move. Everything from the ecology of the english woodlands to the reasons for the size of Amorphopahllus titanum and rafflesia are discussed. It's a truly amazing series for the botanically inclined.

I grow Zantedeschia "Hercules" in front of my house. This is, like all giants, a plant much desired by some, and a plant which has attracted a lot of rumor and exaggeration.

The calla lily in question is a selection of Zantedeschia from Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco. The plant came to them from Western Hills Nursery in Occidental, CA, and seems closely related to Zantedeschia aethiopica ( the common Calla lily ). Unlike the common form, it has white spotted leaves that reach the size of a serving platter, and is generally a very robust plant. The leaves on mine are only about waist high, and in the place it's growing it gets full sun, which may contribute to the flower stalk not attaining the advertised six foot height. It certainly seems to grow that high in the arboretum itself, but it's a bit more wet and shady there. The beautiful white flower is substantially larger than the typical callas growing on the other side of the path.

This spring ( if it can yet be called that ), my Hercules is showing signs of numerous offsets. Yellow tips of leaves are peeking out of the soil at the base of the plant. This is perhaps an indication that it is time to divide - to encourage more growth of the main stalk, and to offer some friends divisions.

One thing I note about "Hercules" is that it is perfectly happy to flower when it's a small offset in a one gallon pot. In fact, I have a small offset in a one gallon pot I got from Strybing directly that just finished up flowering. This leads one to the conclusion that perhaps the plant in front of my house, despite its huge leaves, is not quite yet full grown.

Why do we try to grow the "biggest" one? Why is it that I have a gingko tree in a 3 gallon pot in my backyard? Why do I have the madake bamboo ( Phyllostachys bambusoides, mature height 72 feet, 6 inches diameter ) in a 20 gallon pot next to it? Why do I have not one, but two, Amorphophallus titanum in my six foot tall greenhouse? Why do I persist in starting baobab seeds? At least "Hercules" has a chance of growing to full size on my property without annoying the neighbors.

My peppers are up by now, little inch-high plants with just their seed leaves poking out of the peat pellets.

Originally from South America, peppers have been adopted by many of the great cuisines of the world - the Thai have particularly pungent varieties, as do the Indians, the Mexicans and the Chinese. Sweet peppers form a wonderful part of various European cuisines. I grew three peppers last year, and this year looks to be a repeat. California Wonder sweet peppers still do exceedingly well in my part of California, forming big, blocky green, then red fruits. Jalapeno "M" is a good performer as well, with meaty and hot pods. I also grow the original bright incandescent orange Habanero, a pepper of carbbean extraction, which is pretty much unbearable.

Why grow my own peppers? Certainly, one can get them easily in the grocery store, and they don't taste particularly worse in the mass produced form. I figure it's sort of the same reason people like to grow poisonous plants, or plants with medicinal use - a fascination with being able to grow something with a particular power over our metabolism.

We've found that hot peppers store well and retain their heat in the deep freeze, so as we work through last year's frozen bounty, we'll be waiting on the brightly colored fruits of the late summer from the garden.

This is not your standard hoya. For one thing, it produces a cluster of a dozen flowers or so, each one the size of a quarter. For another, in the evenings, these flowers emit a scent that can only be described as sweetly fruity.

I've had this plant for many years now - it's in a one gallon pot in a warm and sunny part of my greenhouse, climbing up a two foot trellis anchored in the pot.

Hoyas are asclepiads - members of the milkweed family. When their stems are cut, they bleed a white, sticky sap. Also in this family are the Stapelias, Huernias and Ceropegias, all of which have fascinatingly bizarre flower structures.

The typical hoya growth habit involves first sending out a bare tendril to wrap around whatever is nearby. Once the tendril is secured, pairs of leaves begin to grow at intervals, and perhaps flower stalks. The clusters of flowers grow from more-or-less permanent stalks that may produce many flushes over time.

I planted tomatoes last weekend. Tomato seeds, that is.

Living in the suburbs of Silicon Valley as I do, I don't have a lot of room for sprawling viney plants. Still, I find the room to grow tomatoes. Of all the vegetables you can grow in your garden, they are perhaps the most rewarding - in season, even the poorest backyard tomato outshines what you can get at the grocery store. And there's something of value in eating that which you have nurtured yourself.

We experiment with varieties. Heirlooms, hybrids, free seeds that came with the yearly burpee order. This year, I'm trying 5 kinds: Black Cherry, Sungold, Brandywine, Better Boy and Green Zebra. I've tried these all before, but depending on the year, one or another will do better or worse. Those that do worse perhaps deserve another chance. Those that do better are obviously keepers. And the seed packet is not yet finished, so... we plant more than we really need.

I grow the vines hanging in 5 gallon plastic buckets. It reduces disease and pests, it stunts the vines a bit, and it looks pretty cool. Last year, my potting mix did not have sufficient fertilizer early on, so I got a pretty late and pretty small harvest, once I managed to add some triple-sixteen. This year, that problem will be rectified.

Last year something was eating the tomatoes. I think it was one of the black squirrels that run around the neighborhood. We have underground powerlines in my neighborhood, and I often wonder how that effects the squirrel population. They have no bypasses on which to cross the streets, but I don't see little squirrel bodies littering the roads. We are careful drivers.

I've placed the tomato seeds in jiffy-7 peat pellets, set them in a little humidity dome "greenhouse", placed the tray on my heating pad, and am now waiting for the first little green shoots to poke their way through the soil. It's not that the peat pellets are necessarily better for seed starting, but they are easy to use, relatively cheap ( I picked up an entire case from Mellinger's before they closed ), and above all, convenient. Other than the black cherry, which is very slow to start, I expect to see some results real soon now...

I've been watching recently a BBC show called "A Year at Kew". So far, there are two years worth of the series available on DVD from the BBC at amazon.co.uk.

It's not available in the US (yet), and the DVD's are PAL encoded. Amazon claims they're not region coded, but it may or may not work on your DVD player.

This is a really engaging series. Basically, it tells stories about maintaining the gardens and glasshouses, plus some of the overseas projects that Kew coordinates, including seed collecting expeditions for the Millenium Seedbank. You get to meet a lot of the people working at Kew and see behind the scenes at their special events. At last - there's a reality show for plant geeks.

It's a great show if you're into botanical gardens, glasshouses, or botanical travel.
12 episodes in two disks per season. Highly recommended.