Albert's Greenhouse

Winter is a great time for the temperate aroids. So many are adapted to a mediterranean climate where the summers are dry and warm, and the winters are wet and mild. More aroids than I can count are putting out their best foliage right now. This helicodiceros is a prime example.

Some potting advice on helicodiceros I recently saw on an aroid mailing list from D. Christopher Rogers would probably apply to just about any of the aroids from the mediterranean coast:

I have my plants as a very generous gift from a buddy. I live 30 minutes northwest of Sacramento on the west side of the California Central Valley at an altitude of about 20 m (65 ft). The USDA Plant Hardiness Map puts me in on the border of Zone 9a and 9b. We sometimes get a maritime influence from the Sacramento River Delta to the south west, keeping us from dropping below 0C (32F) and covering us with maritime fog. However, cold air coming down the valleys in the Interior Coast Ranges to the west will push us down to –2C (28F). This year was particularly cold, and we had two weeks with lows between –5C (22F) and 1C (33F). Normally we have a typical Mediterranean climate, with a hot, dry summer and a cool, wet winter, but this year it has been very dry. The lack of cloud cover has let us drop in temperature. (Although we finally got some rain last night!!!)

I have had the Helicodiceros muscivorus two years now, and in both years they started popping up in January. Last year was very wet, and we had very little frost at all. The small plants pop up first. The frost did not seem to bother them at all. The larger plants began pushing up at the end of January (both years). I have them under a very large, very old butterfly bush (Buddelia davidii), where they receive morning sun from 9 AM to a little after 12. Immediately to the west of them is my greenhouse, and they get light filtered through the greenhouse until 4 PM. Last year, the large plant produced two flowers in May, and I hope to get more flowers this year.

The plants are potted, and are sitting with (also potted) Arum italicum, A. dioscoridis dioscoridis, A. cyrenaicum, A. sintenesii, A. hygrophilum, A. palestinum, Arisarum simmorrhinum, and Dracunculus vulgaris, which are all up. The Dracunculus came up at the same time as the Helicodiceros, but the others have all been up since November. There are also several pots of Arisaema and Pinellia that have not come up yet, and I do not expect them for some time yet.

I pot the bulbs on a layer of sand, with a rich medium of peat, compost, pumice and sand around and on top. The bottom sand layer seems to help prevent rot.

I personally have the tubers in a smallish pot with good drainage. Perhaps not good enough as they don't seem quite as happy as they could be - throwing off lots of little bulbs rather than growing the main bulb. Repotting is probably a project for the summer when they go dormant again.