Albert's Greenhouse

I had a very nice Platycerium elephantotis some years ago which died under mysterious circumstances. It's really the only staghorn fern that holds much interest for me, other than the expensive and difficult Platycerium madagascariense. I think it's the undivided fertile fronds that attract me.

I got a small one in the mail the other day. I'm going to let it stabilize over the winter, and then I plan to mount it on a board and hang it in a hot and sunny place in the greenhouse.

Platyceriums, or staghorn ferns, are all large tropical epiphytic ferns with a unique growth habit. In nature, they grow attached to the sides of trees. Most of them can grow into massive colonial plantings. Platycerium elephantotis is from tropical Africa, and apparently a seasonally dry area. The fern can survive almost completely drying out, but it cannot survive constant moisture and is prone to fungal infections. Wet and warm summer growing conditions are follwed by a period of drier winter dormancy.

Sources are pretty unanimous in the statement that Platycerium elephantotis is synonymous with Platycerium angolense, an older name. The reasons behind the change in name are somewhat more obscure. While it is true that the P. elephantotis name is somewhat more descriptive of the growth habit, and that the range extends far outside of Angola, that's rarely enough evidence to institute a name change. Elephantotis does sound cooler.

Anyway, armed with a greater knowledge of the habits and desires of this particularly lovely staghorn fern, I will hopefully have more success with this new acquisition.

Platycerium links:

- The Platycerium Site
- Roy Vail's Platycerium Hobbyist's Handbook
- Some Dude selling ferns on his blog
- Information from Master Gardener Online

As a guy who has his e-mail address online in various places ( I administer the www.aroid.org website as well as www.bacps.org and this here greenhouse site/blog thingy ), and despite my best efforts, I get a lot of e-mail. And aside from the e-mails offering dubious business opportunities and the ability to purchase illicit substances at a discount, I get a surprisingly large number of communications from Southeast Asia from apparently serious people wondering where they can get Anthurium seeds. And I'm not just talking two or three people - this is something like ten people, some of whom are apparently willing to pay big money to get large quantities of seeds shipped over there.

And my job - if you can call it that - is a difficult one. Because these people don't speak very good English. And because their request for Anthurium seed indicates a more complex problem than a simple need for some plant material.

Let me explain: nobody sells Anthurium seed in quantity. Pretty much nobody sells Anthurium seed at all.

All of the Anthuriums you are going to see at your local garden center, at the Walmart, or at your favorite florist are produced through tissue culture by places like Agristarts. The small plants, called liners, produced by these companies are grown out by other companies like Silver Krome Gardens and sold on to bigger retailers. Nowhere in this process is anything resembling a seed. And the vast majority of the plants grown from tissue culture are very standard, very common things. The market demands pretty, and reasonably disposable, Anthurium andreanum hybrids, and that's what gets produced.

The only people who grow Anthurium from seed are breeders of Anthurium andreanum cultivar, and backyard nurseries growing strange plants. And they sell to a very limited market. Produce 20 plants a year of a rare variety and you can sell it for $50 each. Produce 200 plants a year, and you've saturated the market - you might be able to get $5 each, but it's a lot more work. The vast majority of Anthuriums, even those with very interesting foliage, don't do well in the dry and dark atmosphere of our homes.

Growing Anthurium from seed is a tricky business. You usually need two separate infloresences from the mother plant in the right stage of growth in order to even get the seed to set. The seed can take almost a year to mature. The seeds don't store, and don't even ship well. Anthurium berries rot quickly and the seeds die if they dry out. The seeds are small, the seedlings are sensitive, and are very slow growing under most conditions. It's almost always easier to take and root divisions or cuttings than to pollinate an infloresence and grow out the seedlings.

So the vast quantities of seed these folks are looking for don't exist. And even those who do have seed generally have their own uses for it.

The smaller growers are also painfully aware of the effects of market saturation, and may not want to share their propagation materials with someone who could put the plant into tissue culture. It's not so much that they don't want to spread the plant around, but that they want to recoup some of their investment into getting the plant introduced into cultivation in the first place.

For instance, Anthurium warocqueanum and Anthurium veitchii were once very hard to obtain and very expensive. They were propagated by cuttings and seed only. They were put into tissue culture a couple of years ago and are now both common and cheap. In fact, it is difficult to sell them because though they are attractive, they do very poorly in people's homes. You need a greenhouse in order to grow them to their full potential, or even to keep them alive for more than a few months.

Occasionally, the original importer of a plant variety may enter into a revenue sharing agreement with a tissue culture lab in an attempt to get a plant more widely disseminated, but often these plants turn out to be ill-suited for the mass market anyway.

It turns out the economics and practicalities of distributing a rare Anthurium species are a lot more complex than just producing some seed or dumping a species into tissue culture.

I admit it: I buy plants on E-bay. And apparently, so do a lot of other people. At any given point in time, there are probably about 30,000 items listed on E-bay under the category of live plants. Strangely, plants and seeds are pretty much the only living things you can buy on E-bay. Live animals, even the really really resilient ones, are apparently forbidden. Delicate plants are perfectly fine, however.

In the course of buying plants on E-bay, I have read a whole bunch of plant titles and descriptions. And let me tell you that there are some creative people out there.

I just checked, and as of Monday morning, there's 1504 items on E-bay in the Plants section with the word "RARE" in the title. These supposedly "rare" plants include things like Typhonium venosum and Amorphophallus konjac, the two easiest and most prolific tuberous aroids. There's Sarracenia leucophylla, an easy growing pitcher plant. There are several packets of mixed cactus seed. And there's Dorstenia foetida, a greenhouse weed if I ever saw one.

Things I could go down to the local home depot and have a good chance of buying, like Adenium obseum are described as "rare". A maranta I could get in the Walmart nursery section is apparently "rare" to some sellers. So is the venus flytrap you often see near unto death on a rack at the hardware store.

To be fair, some of the items described as "rare" are actually not all that common, or at least new to commerce. And only about 5% of the plants listed under the category have "rare" in their titles. But it's difficult to narrow it down to those one or two things you couldn't get at a bricks and mortar store in your town, or at the very least at several stores on the internet.

But please - just a few rules?

-- If it's in tissue culture at a large producer, it's not rare. ( some carnivorous plants in tissue culture are actually very small production, difficult to get, and possibly extinct in the wild )
-- If it's a weed, it's not rare.
-- If it's growing wild in your backyard, it's not rare.
-- If you are selling one a day, it's not rare. At least not after the first week.
-- If you can get it at Walmart, it's definitely not rare.

I've had this Amorphophallus titanum for many years. It all started out with a table of plants out of tissue culture on a bench at Dewey Fisk's place in Florida many years ago, a time when nobody had any for sale anywhere. And for $65, I became the proud owner of a plant that I knew I had no hope of growing to maturity. But it was rare - and there was some attraction to it from the point of view that the petiole was smooth, splotched and beautiful. And at the time I figured I might get a bigger greenhouse one day.

Well, I moved and got a smaller greenhouse. With a 6.5 foot ceiling. And this summer, the tuber resprouted and the leaf immediately hit the aforementioned ceiling. A friend of mine took it as a sign to build a bigger greenhouse when it happened to him. I took it as a sign that I would need to donate the plant.

The plant is now happily in its new home at a local university, helping young people learn about the great variety that is out there in the plant world. And I have a lot more room in the greenhouse - for more stuff I have no hope of growing to maturity.

And it turns out that the world is full of people willing to pay good money to buy a plant they have no hope of keeping alive for more than a year or two - that they for the most part have no place owning to begin with. Just mention the "biggest" flower, the "largest" leaf, or the most rare anything, and you've created an instant market composed of people who simply must have whatever it is. No matter if they can't grow it well, and no matter if it's not very interesting for reasons other than its rarity.

I was at Lowe's yesterday to pick up some a few pots, and as is my habit, I stopped by the houseplant section to see what the latest and greatest thing to come of out the shadehouses of Florida might be. And among the usual alocasias and spahtiphyllums was a section of pots with what looked for all the world to be a small tropical tree. And the label said - "grows to 40 feet tall" on it. This was a houseplant, and it was being sold in a non-tropical climate. Nobody I know has a 40 foot ceiling. But somebody had the idea to produce the tree and market it, all with the knowledge that it's totally unsuited for any climate we can provide it. And apparently, people were buying them, too.

So much of what we buy is based on what the plant looks like when we buy it - we fall in love with something, but we have little idea what it will become.

Every so often, a much ignored segment of plant fandom experiences a renaissance. That's quietly happened over the past couple of years among the ten or fifteen of us who are vitally interested in ant plants.

I was able to order, this late summer, not one or two or three different myrmecodias, but a total of eight different ant plants, right off of e-bay. And I could have had eight different ant ferns ... if I were willing to pay through the nose for it.

This is unheard of. No more than 3 years ago, it was nearly impossible to get ant ferns from anyone in the USA, and we were limited to one or two species of caudiciform ant plants with poor documentation and questionable naming. Now we have available to us many different types with reasonably accurate descriptions and names.

How did this happen? One guy named Frank in Michigan got interested. Very interested. And he went to the trouble of asking some questions, finding some papers, badgering some people who had mislabeled stuff, and importing and growing some plants. And he started selling them on E-Bay. And that's how renaissance happens in the exotic plant world. One guy gets interested, and that's all it takes to really make a difference.

Thanks, Frank. For the plants, and especially for taking the time to share.

I got about 4 or 5 seedlings of Zamia pseudoparasitica from a grower in Hawaii a few years ago, and they were variously donated to random people except for a pair I kept for myself. And those both formed cones for me this year. Surprisingly, considering my usual luck, I ended up with a matched pair of plants - one male ( on the right ) and one female ( on the left ). Which led me to ponder whether I might want to try a pollination experiment, and whether the cones would mature at the same time, and if I really wanted to stress the plants and generate more seed. And I went and looked up how to pollinate cycads, and it seemed kind of difficult and confusing, involving a dry method and a wet method and figuring out exactly when the respective cones were going to become fertile. And I decided that maybe it wasn't really worth it all. But it's neat to have a mated pair.

This particular species of Zamia isn't found too commonly in collections, and it's notable for being the only described epiphytic cycad. There's apparently an unnamed cycad found in Ecuador which also grows in trees. Zamia pseudoparasitica is from elevations around 1000m on the Atlantic side of Panama, where a combination of fog and nearly continuous strong winds shaped its habit.

I grow these plants in wooden orchid baskets lined with sphagnum and filled with a loose and coarse epiphyte friendly mix (might contain clay pellets, fir bark, charcoal chunks, packing peanuts - depends on what I had on hand when I potted them up ). They seem to like very warm temperatures, and plenty of water with their good drainage.

Back on 2002, two specimen plants of Zamia pseudoparasitica were stolen from Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami, Florida. I saw the actual plants a few years before the theft, and they were absolutely huge, with fronds over 8 feet long. Despite an offered $25,000 reward, the plants were never recovered. Although it's difficult to imagine what would motivate someone to steal a couple of huge, airborne trees from a public garden, it's even more difficult to imagine how they might have done something like this - it's not easy to move trees that big even in daylight with the equipment and permission.

My Zamia psueudoparasitica family is luckily much smaller than that - over five years old, but still barely more than seedlings.

I picked up this succulent at Trader Joe's. I have no idea what it is, but isn't it cool looking? It might be some sort of cactus relative, simply because it does have patches of what look like spines. It also has vestigial leaves of a sort.

This brings up the point, that I think the target audience for this sort of plant doesn't really care what it is so long as they have a name for it. They will be happy calling it an "Assorted Succulent", but for some reason I demand more. I want to know how it fits in - where did it come from? what's it related to? Without a name, I can't get that information.

It was grown by Nurserymen's Exchange, probably just across the hill from me in Halfmoon Bay. Seems like every succulent in every garden center around here comes from them, and the variety is stunning as is the lack of any labeling, even as to genus. Oh well. It's still a cool looking plant.

If you're like me, you read a lot. And if you're like me and you read a lot, you read a lot about plants and natural history. And you might have found that a lot of the best natural history books are about 100 years out of print - written in the 19th century by Victorian plant hunters and explorers who were seeing some things out in the jungle for the first time ever.

These books are often hard to find, being out of print so long. For a while, Project Gutenberg has been scanning some of them in, and has been a great source of text files. Want to read Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin? Or Alfred Russel Wallace's work on the Malay Archipelago, where he independently came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection? It's all right there.

But now, there is even more! Google books now has scans of many of the same books and more, complete with all the pictures and drawings, downloadable by the page, or as a full length PDF. There's Henry Bates work The Naturalist on the River Amazons, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes by Richard Spruce, and tons more I'll leave it to you to discover. (Hint: See my page on books for a few more links).

This sort of work is a boon to those of us who just want to read the words of these great explorers, and don't want to spend $1000 on an antique book in high demand by collectors. It's great that we can now get the whole experience, complete with the plates. Hopefully, more books will become available in this format in the future.

Once upon a time, it was very rare to see a Tacca in a nursery. Just the other day, I saw one for sale at the San Francisco farmers market. Then I saw one in the window of a mattress store in Palo Alto. This is what tissue culture will do for you, I guess.

For those not familiar with Taccas, they are a low growing plant with the weirdest infloresence you or I have ever seen - lots of little tendrils coming out of this thing. There's a black bat flower: Tacca chantrieri, a couple of whiter bat flowers : Tacca nivea and Tacca integrifolia, and some weird things like Tacca lentopetaloides, which is basically green, but in a bad-hair-day kind of way.

Taccas are from Southeast Asia and Africa, and looking at the leaves, one could be forgiven for believing that that they are related in some way to the Aroids or perhaps the Gingers. But no, it turns out that the family is actually most closely related to true yams, or the Dioscoriceae.

Tacca seems to like boggy, moderate light conditions, with lots of humidity and some heat. Tacca integrifolia, at least, does very well sitting continuously in a tray of water ... as long as it gets sufficient heat. They seem like plants of the marshy understory, and aren't too demanding except for the issue with heat and water.

Tacca seeds are an infamous source of great frustration for many tropical plant enthusiasts, and it's great to see that somebody's finally put a few plants into tissue culture. The seeds, for those who don't already know from painful experience, were apparently designed to survive bad times, because once they dry out, they will just sit around for years in the germination bed, doing absolutely nothing. Technically still alive, they absolutely refuse to germinate. The older they get, the longer they take. And I never got a germination rate above about 5% out of commercially sourced seeds. Just buy one or two of the tissue cultured plants that are out there, and skip the seeds. That's my advice.

If you want more advice, here's a good site: sleepy_oaks was growing and selling them before growing and selling them was fashionable.