Albert's Greenhouse

The unseasonably warm weather of mid-January has luckily not prompted a lot of my plants into dangerously early growth. In fact, the warm daytimes were coupled with near-freezing nighttime temperatures which did a number on several of my outdoor tropicals.

One plant which seems to have been inspired by the record daytime temperatures, however, was my Arum purpureospathum. It's a recent acquisition, coming in dormant during the heat of last August. Recently described ( 1987 by Peter Boyce ), it's native to Southwest Crete and does in fact have a dark purple spathe.

Arum flowers are not only beautiful on the outside, they're beautiful on the inside. I took a brand new single edged razor blade and opened up the infloresence. Female flowers are on the left, then a separator, then the male flowers and another larger hairy section. The hairs are involved in trapping insects in the flower overnight to control pollination.


This Arum is growing with all my other arums partially in the shade of a small tree in the backyard. When I bought the house, the tree's root area was covered in bricks, which I eventually removed to expand the potential gardening area, planting some yellow Clivias, Asarums, and summer-dormant aroids like Arum and Biarum there.

What I did not think about at the time was the unfortunate fact that this particular tree has a very agressive fibrous root system, which has since out-competed most of the older plantings in that bed, filling it with an impenetrable mat of root material. I've had to pull out the Asarums this winter, and the rest of the plants are likely to follow when they go dormant in the summer. Guess I'll have to put some of the bricks back and go to growing in pots under that tree.