Albert's Greenhouse

Southern Spain is a fascinating place - heavily Catholic right now, but with a history of Moorish art and architecture. The Alhambra in Granada is a huge palace and fortress complex completed by Muslim rulers of Spain in the mid to late 14th century. It's filled with beautiful architecture and beautiful gardens. It's also probably one of the biggest tourist attractions in all of Spain.


We visited on a cold, rainy day in early spring as part of a medium sized tour group. A tour group composed primarily of retired Americans who might have been expecting Southern Spain to be a little more sunny and a lot warmer, but who gamely trudged up and down the cold and slippery stone steps to see what must have been a very beautiful place in more gentle weather.

The plants here are nothing particularly special, but the garden design is striking. The use of water and geometric forms is particularly pleasing. Fountains and ponds are everywhere.


The Palacio de Generalife - or Summer Palace - next door has perhaps more beautiful gardens on a smaller scale. The most recent garden restoration there was completed in 1951, and the palace was originally connected to the Alhambra by a covered walkway, which would have been useful.

In the end, the entire tour group survived several hours in the biting cold and rain, and though the term "Alhambra" became a pejorative one for the rest of the tour, I think that we left with not just an impression of extreme cold, but with an appreciation for the grandeur that we had seen.

Wherever I travel, I try to seek out the local botanic gardens. Last spring, I found myself in Madrid, and took the opportunity to spend a few hours at El Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, or the Royal Botanic Garden of Madrid.

Situated in central Madrid, near the Atocha train station and not far from famous museums including the Prado and Reina Sofia‎, the plant collection dates back to a royal collection started in 1794. The gardens cover 20 acres and include a set of glasshouses showcasing arid and tropical climates, along with a small indoor carnivorous plant display. The garden is nowdays primarily a public display garden rather than an academic institution, having been remodeled in 1981 for that purpose.


One of the primary attractions of this garden is that the climate in Madrid is similar to the climate where I live - having the dry summers and cool wet winters typical of the Mediterranean basin. They have large displays of roses, camellias, and bulbous plants which would all grow well for me in my home garden. Interestingly, there is also a sizable display of vegetables grown quite artistically.



The plants of the garden seem to have expanded beyond its boundaries. Almost directly across the street from the garden sits this huge wall completely covered with living plants - definitely a work of botanic art.



I should also note that when it was remodeled in 1992, the old portion of Atocha train station was converted into an indoor tropical garden surrounded by shops and restaurants - worth a short visit in itself.

I got a nice little anthurium a couple years ago: Anthurium flavolineatum. It's one of the few anthuriums which are notable for both their foliage and flower. The flower is quite showy for an Anthurium - dark colored and artistically striped. The leaves are also nicely shaped, and the plant is a small one.

There's not too much information on this species out there on the net. Appears to be from Ecuador. I've found mine to grow well under the moderately tropical conditions of my greenhouse - minimum temperature has been about 65F. It was unhappy when allowed to get too dry, but has otherwise grown and flowered well, and from a small size.

I went, last Saturday, to a meeting of the Bay Area Carnivorous Plant Society up at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. It's a bit of a trek for me - about an hour's drive - but I was able to stop, for the first time, by Annie's Annuals up in Richmond before heading to Berkeley. I picked up about a dozen new plants at Annie's - they actually grow mostly perennials these days. The plants seem a bit cheaper in person than online, and there are plenty of things to interest even the most jaded plant geek.

But - back to the BACPS meeting. The BACPS meets approximately quarterly, publishes an electronic newsletter, holds a summer show, and is completely free to join. Attending the meetings in the UC Botanical Garden is a great deal, as the garden provides the room for free and lets all the attendees in for free. I've been a quasi-member and webpage manager for many years after my friend Bill told me about it. It's unique among plant clubs in attracting a large following of young people.


The middle of winter is not the best time for carnivorous plants in the San Francisco Bay Area. All the stuff which grows well outdoors here ( Sarracenias, Temperate Drosera, Dionea ) is dormant or at least looking really ratty. We're pretty much stuck with some tuberous Drosera, Utricularia, and all the Nepenthes you can afford. I got to take a bunch of close-up photos of very small Utricularia flowers this time.

We also got to see a tiny Nepenthes edwardsiana and a really beautiful Nepenthes ramispina that were brought in for show and tell. Nepenthes edwardsiana is basically not available commercially in the US at this time. It's a highland tropical species requiring cool temperatures, but it has a really cool toothed peristome around the mouth of the pitchers. The tiny specimen we saw had traps less than a centimeter across, but they were already showing the characteristic tooths. Nepenthes ramispina ( pictured at left ) is easier to grow and more available, and this specimen was extremely well-grown. The traps get big in proportion to the leaves and can have very nicely contrasting colors.


The BACPS meetings always have a presentation of some sort. This time, we had four experts in a panel discussion on pest control, fertilization and disease control. They came from many different backgrounds ( the owner of California Carnivores, a horticulturalist with a background in commercial-scale production, the rainforest manager from the California Academy of Sciences, and a former Botanical Garden curator ), and I think the discussion turned out to be a lot more interesting than anybody thought it would be.

The next meeting is April 4th. More pictures from the meeting are here.

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.