Albert's Greenhouse

Silk Floss Trees of Cupertino

2007-10-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

City landscaping can be boring. It's usually based on the idea of minimal maintenance, minimal plant cost, and marginally acceptable aesthetics.

But occasionally, it surprises even me.

The silk floss tree ( Chorisia speciosa ) looks very tropical, with strange spines on the trunk and brilliant pink flowers appearing in the fall. In fact, it's a native of Brazil and Argentina. But it turns out that it can survive temperatures down to 20F on an occasional basis, which means it survives in select locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The two major places to see it that I know of are a large planting in the parking lot of the Cupertino Target ( pictured here), and a couple places at Stanford University.

It seems as though the thorniness of the trunk varies greatly, from the extreme pictured here to some trees having very few thorns - in this case just on the other side of the parking lot.

Bot. Lat. Abbr.

2007-10-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of undiscovered plants out there in the big wide world. Swathes of them. It's big news when a mammal unknown to science is found. It's barely noticed when a new plant comes to light.

Somehow the sources of the plants are not tied very well to the describers and namers of the plants. The guy who pulls something out of the jungle, propagates and eventually sells it may be far removed from the guy who writes and publishes a formal description.

We have a lot of names that are wrong or incomplete.

The incomplete ones, when done well, can be a bit confusing. There's usually some abbreviation in the name like "sp. aff."

Here's a run-down of some of the ones I see on a daily basis:

cv. = "cultivar" ; a specific selection. Might be a species or might not be, but it identifies a particular set of genes specially bred or selected. A cultivar may be registered or may be trademarked, and it refers to a specific clone of a plant.

aff. = "affinis" ; same base as our word "affinity". Means that the plant might be a new species, or its identity hasn't been completely determined, but it's like another species. So Alocasia aff. nebula would be an Alocasia that looks like A. nebula. It might even be Alocasia nebula, but it's either a little different or nobody with enough experience has had the time to make a positive identification.

cf. = "confer" ; Latin for "compare", this is similar to aff. in that when an identification is uncertain it means the plant looks at least somewhat like a particular other species.

sp. = "species" ; this is often used when a plant's genus has been determined, but not its species. Anthurium sp. would be something that looks like it's an Anthurium, but hasn't been indentified further. This is also combined with some of the other abbreviations above to further indicate the unidentified nature of the plant, or followed by a location name or collection number. It is not used for hybrids.

sp. nov. = "species nova" ; meaning a new species, as yet undescribed. This is used for plants where the new name has not been officially published, but the namer is pretty certain that the plant has never been published before. It is not used for hybrids.

ssp. = "subspecies" ; just like it says, some plant classifications are divided down below the species level. There's Biarum tenuifolium ssp. tenuifolium and also several others including Biarum tenuifolium ssp. galianii. They may be the same species, but they're from distinct populations.

subsp. = see ssp.

var. = "variety" ; very similar to the subspecies designation, this designates a particular type or strain of the species. For instance, there's Anchomanes difformis and Anchomanes difformis var. welwitschii. Both are the same species, but var. welwitschii is a special form of the plant.

f. = "forma" ; somewhat similar to cv, it's preferentially used to indicate a specific form occuring in nature rather than manmade.

x = "cross" ; this is an indication of hybrid parentage of the plant.

The x may indicate the parentage of the plant, like "Anthurium dressleri x radicans". The female parent is traditionally listed first, but sometimes it's just in alphabetical order.
The x may indicate the given name of a cross like "Nepenthes x hookeriana", which is a cross between Nepenthes ampullaria and Nepenthes rafflesiana. Not that you'd know that from the name.

hort. = "horticultural" ; this indicates that the name is a a common designation, and not a properly derived scientific name. It also hints that the origins of the plant are somewhat unknown.

There's a good and very readable page on plant naming at the Victorian Carnivorous Plant Society webpage. Carnivorous plant names are pretty messed up and complicated, so they have good reason to be concerned.

Vine Maple

2007-10-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

I write mostly about tropical plants, but that's not to say that I lack an appreciation for those plants blessed with the fortitude to withstand colder climates. And the rainforests of Oregon and Washington harbor quite a number of interesting species - though perhaps nowhere near the diversity of their tropical analogs.

I had the fortune to be visiting my parents in Western Oregon last weekend about the time that the vine maples were turning color. Anyone who believes that the only real place to go for fall color is in the Northeast would be well rewarded to take a hike into the Cascade Mountain range in Oregon in the fall, braving whatever weather might befall them at the time.

These trees are growing in crevices of a lava flow on the trail to Proxy Falls. It was raining lightly the entire time we were up there, but it was well worth it.

A Year at Kew, Season 3

2007-10-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

The very first post on this blog, in spring of 2006, was about a reality TV show. My kind of reality TV show. It's called "A Year at Kew" and it's a British series, available on DVD only in PAL format ( your DVD player might not play it - I had to buy a region free player with a PAL to NTSC converter ). There are also a couple of companion books available in both the UK and the USA.

It's been 2 TV seasons since, and I just got season 3 in the mail. By "Royal Post" from amazon.co.uk. I'm halfway through the season so far, and there have been very interesting segments on trying to germinate 200 year old seeds, a trip to very very rural China in search of a medicinal orchid, and pest control in a really big, really old glasshouse, to name a few.

The series follows various projects and events at Kew in the framework of an entire year's worth of experience. Various Kew staff members have become minor TV stars. You get to see a whole lot of behind-the-scenes activity and the show follows botanists and horticulturalists from Kew as they travel to various locations around the world ( like China, Japan and Madagascar ) to study, assist local gardens, and collect plants and seed.

The accusation could be leveled that it's more of a PR vehicle for Kew than anything else, but while this is without a doubt true, it's an entertaining one which matches my interests quite well. They show a lot of glasshouse stuff, a lot of landscaping stuff, arboriculture, how some of the exhibits are put together, art and artists, backstage at the herbarium, library and millenium seed bank, and Kew's youth programs.

I've not been a big fan of reality programming on television, but this is more like a documentary about Kew that's managed to span 3 seasons of material and not get repetitive or boring. I strongly recommend that anyone with a little time and money to spare give it a try - it's a special series, and I doubt we'll see it in the USA anytime soon.

Why I go to Orchid Shows

2007-10-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

One thing you may have noticed about this blog, if you've been reading it for a while, is that I don't talk that much about orchids. Sure, I have a tropical greenhouse, and I do grow a few ( mainly Coryanthes, Stanhopea, Cirrhopetalums and a Cymbidium ), but I'm no orchid nut.

Still, I do go to orchid shows, and it's not just to smell the pretty flowers.

It turns out that many of the people who grow orchids also grow other intersting things. Well... interesting if you happen to be me.

I went to the San Francisco Orchid Society Orchid fest the other weekend. It's the smaller cousin of their big spring Pacific Orchid Expo ( which I've tried occasionally to attend on the weekends - the line's way too long for someone with my level of patience ). It lasts two days, has a bunch of vendors and a few show plants, and has the advantage of being only moderately well attended.

So I was able to park. I was able to walk up to the door, pay my $3, and waltz right in.

I found a couple of orchids. I picked up a paphiopedilum, a random species orchid with rugose leaves, and two other very interesting little plants: Platycerium madagascariense and Streptocarpus dunnii. These were plants I had my eye on for a while, but for various reasons had been unwilling to pay enough to obtain.

Platycerium madagascariense was going for about $80 + shipping on E-bay, and there were suddenly quite a few small ones available. I picked mine up from an orchid vendor at the show for $25.00+tax. It's a really pretty staghorn fern with rippled shield fronds, and apparently it's not too easy to grow. The advice out there seems to indicate that it likes more water and humidity than other staghorns, and there's some theory about cloud forest conditions that's contradicted by some growers. Time will tell if I can provide it good conditions.

Streptocarpus dunnii actually wasn't on my desired list, but Streptocarpus grandis has been on there for years - and the two plants have a very similar growth habit. Many years ago, I actually acquired and germinated some seed, but I must have kept it too moist and too dark for too long because I was never able to proceed past the seedling stage with these plants. The attraction of these plants is that they grow a single, long leaf ( up to about 3 feet long in some cases ) for their entire life. They are gesneriads, related to some extent to your standard african violet. Hopefully, I'll be able to keep my seedling alive now that I have a little more knowledge of its requirements for good drainage and bright light.

The final benefit of the orchid show was that I dragged my wife ( a non-plant-obsessed person ) along to see the pretty flowers and help me carry things. And she found out that the spring orchid show has a preview gala event ... with wine ... and hors d'oeuvers. And she may not be plant-obsessed, but she likes a good gala, so it looks hopeful that we'll make it to the big show next year.

Platycerium elephantotis - Elephant Staghorn Fern

2007-09-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

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

Anthurium seeds and other myths

2007-09-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Rare Plants

2007-09-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Time for a new home

2007-09-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

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.

A Collection of Ant Plants

2007-09-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

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.

A Prefect Pair

2007-09-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

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.

What's this, then?

2007-09-15T08:19:00.001-07:00

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.

Free Books!

2007-09-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Taccas - the Bat Flowers

2007-09-11T09:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Sundew Rebirth

2007-03-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

At some point, it becomes clear that one has too many plants and not enough time. Or at least it should become clear.

For instance, ever since I was a child, I have absolutely loved the drosera, or sundews. The idea of a plant that creates its own sticky flytrap, and the wraps its deadly leaves around whatever it captures, has fascinated me to no end ever since seeing it in glorious time-lapse action in an old 8mm educational film in junior high school.

So I grow a lot of droseras. There are cool miniatures from Australia, beautiful rosettes from South America, and even species native to the west coast of the United States not a hundred miles from where I live.

But there are tradeoffs here. You can spend your entire life exhaustively researching a few plants and know everything about them. Or you can collect hundreds and hundreds of different plants with different requirements and then have neither the time nor the energy to actually look up whether they are supposed to go dormant in the winter.

I still have no idea whether this drosera was supposed to go dormant this fall, but I am certainly glad to see it sprouting a few new leaves now that spring is just around the corner.

Myrmecodia - Ant Plant Time Again

2007-03-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

I grow a lot of tropical ant plants in my greenhouse. These are plants which have evolved special relationships with ants - providing them with food and/or shelter in exchange for protection and fertilization.

This Myrmecodia is a southeast asian species which grows a hollowed out stem in which ants take up residence. I like the myrmecodias - though it is difficult to obtain more than the one or two species which have been introduced throughout the rare plant trade in the USA. They grow in interesting shapes and they seem to do well in generic tropical conditions - usually in hanging baskets so they don't rot for overwatering.

They also readily flower - producing miniscule white infloesences and then beautiful orange berries. If you leave the berries on the plant long enough ( see the picture), they eventually dry out and the seeds inside sprout into little additional plantlets, right on the stem of the original plant. Not that I'm recommending this. I just got lazy and I don't really need any more plants. It's usually better to take off the berries, remove the seeds, and immediately plant them in dampish long fiber sphagnum moss. It takes just a couple of years to get a mature plant this way.

Sweet Alyssum - is it a weed?

2007-03-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Aside from the calla lilies, Sweet Alyssum ( Lobularia maritima ) is another plant which grows half as a bedding flower and half as a weed in my climate. And right now, the few self seeded plants I allow are in their full glory... if glory can be assigned to a plant which is only 4" tall.

I see this plant offered as an annual, to be mixed in with the primroses and pansies in the mild winter garden, and it does make a nice sea of white foamy flowers wherever it goes. In my opinion, the beautiful floral show is not the plants strong point - its heavenly scent is actually what makes it a keeper. And these past few weeks, when the sun has chosen to shine, that scent has been in great evidence.

Walking out of my office building, where a few plants have been placed among the other disposable annuals, I was greeted by a power smell of sweet honeysuckle. And it was not the primroses, nor was it the flowering plums ... it was this little white groundcover, half weed and half flower, which was perfuming the entire parking lot.

Zantedeschia odorata

2007-03-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

Those of you ( yes, all three of you ) who are long-time readers of this excuse for a blog may have noticed that I report a lot on calla lilies, or the Zantedeschia. These native aroids of Africa grow exceptionally well in much of the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, and produce flowers for a large percentage of the year. Aside from the generic white calla, I grow a giant version and a new one for me - a scented white calla. I picked up my Zantedeschia odorata at the Berkeley Botanical Garden plant sale last year, and it's lived in a one gallon pot in front of my house since then. This late winter, it finally flowered for me, after producing a prodigious flush of leaves. I am happy to report that the light, almost citrusy, scent is very pleasing. It's supposed to be like freesia, which I suppose might be the case, though I don't really have a good memory for smells, and can't even remember if I've actually smelt freesia.

The plant does look a lot like the regular calla lily ( Zantedeschia aethiopica ) to the casual observer. it appears to have a shorter and more well defined flowering season, and perhaps a longer flower stalk. It is also very much more amenable to container culture than the more common version, at least in my short experience. I would not have expected such growth in a one gallon pot.

They just don't make them like they used to.

2007-03-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

So. Armed with my new squirrel and rat protection devices, I set out to the big orange store in hopes of obtaining new potting soil for my new planter so I could finally grow and eat a ripe tomato. And I got there. And I bought a huge bag of vermiculite, and a huge bag of perlite, and several bags of Supersoil and a bag of chicken manure. And I stuffed it all in the back of the SUV and drove home.

I have, in the past several years, become a great proponent of Supersoil. It's made locally, and it has always in my experience been a superior product - mostly because it's apparently milled to a finer consistency than a lot of the bark/potting soil that's out there for a little less money.

After one too many bags of the cheap potting mix that turned out looking like rejects from the landscaping bark heap, Supersoil has held a place of honor in my potting arsenel. Combined with a lightening agent like perlite, it's in pretty much every single pot in the greenhouse. It also serves duty in my raised beds and supports much of the rest of my gardening endeavours.

You can imagine, then, my disappointment at the latest purchase when I ripped open the six bags I had bought to fine ... bark. And not particularly finely ground bark, either. I don't know if I got the scrapings from the bottom of the lot or what, but I got five bags that I would be very hesitant to use in the greenhouse. They're going in the raised beds, but either something has changed in the formulation of my beloved potting mix, or I just got a very bad batch.

In order to assuage my disappointment, I opened up the bag of chicken manure to mix in with it. This is supposedly composted chicken manure, suitable for light amending of various soils/etc.

I am, as they say, familiar with the chicken manure product, having grown up in the presence of a great many live chickens. In fact, there was a chicken farm not far down the road from my primary school, the smell from which regularly provided rustic charm to our neighborhood when not overshadowed by the scent of the smallish pork operation a few miles in the other direction.

Having only recently transitioned from seeing chicken manure as an overabundant resource to be disposed of to seeing it as a precious source of fertilization when properly composted, I feel somewhat qualified to comment on the contents of the bag. The bag contained what looked for all the world like rice hulls. Pretty dry ones, at that.

Am I just having bad luck here? Is there some sort of chicken waste shortage that's causing the amendment companies to turn to other sources? Am I not getting what I paid for?

I suppose I could try to return the chicken manure ... like a broken light fixture ... but I think I would like to be able to continue shopping at the big orange store for a while longer yet, and plopping a half open bag of alleged chicken leavings onto the customer service counter doesn't seem like a great way to curry favor with the staff. On the other hand, it would appropriately describe the general success of this particular shopping trip.

Squirrel Cage

2007-03-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

First, they came for the peaches, and I swore a bit but did nothing.
Then, they came for the tomatoes, and I tried to keep them out with bird netting, which did basically nothing ... except trap some rather bemused looking mourning doves.
Now, they have come for the cucumber flowers and that is about enough of that.

I speak of the neighborhood squirrels, which are a pretty black variety, and quite entertaining at a distance. After an almost complete vegetable gardening fiasco ( they left the habanero peppers alone, but did manage to gnaw on everything else including the eggplant ) last year, I determined that either massive neighborhood squirrel genocide or some other defensive measure was absolutely necessary if I wanted to enjoy the fruits (literally and figuratively ) of my gardening labors.

Enter the squirrel cage. It's 6 feet tall, about 20 feet long and over 5 feet wide. It encloses my entire vegetable garden which runs alongside the greenhouse, hopefully protecting it from invasion by any animal more than a centimeter or so in diameter, be it from the sides or from above.

I built it in an afternoon out of treated 2x4's using joist hangers and deck screws. The covering is a 1/2" aviary netting typically sold for the purpose of keeping birds in. The netting is attached to the frame with galvanized staples, and since the netting came in at most 4 foot widths, I tied the edges of the netting together by hand where it must stretch 6 or 7 feet tall. The bottom of the netting is blocked by river rocks and dirt, hopefully keeping the casual digger at bay. Access is provided by a gate made of some redwood lattice attached to the aviary netting by the ever useful artifice of eight plastic zip ties.

So far, I haven't found a bird or beast inside yet - and I have managed to plant several plots of seed and a couple of seedlings which remain unmolested so far. I have high hopes for a squirrel free future.

Oh Rats!

2007-03-05T08:00:00.000-08:00

The #1 news story of the past week in some circles brings to mind a problem of my own in the recent past. This problem no doubt comes to the attention of every tropical greenhouse owner at one time or another, and that problem is rats.

I always scoffed a bit inside at my friends and their stories of rat problems in their greenhouses. After all, they must be living in the wrong neighborhood, or leaving the doors open, or maybe practicing poor plant hygiene, right? I had seen some rat skeletons in the crawl space underneath my home, but had otherwise no hard evidence to back it up. I live near the last remaining corn field in all of the city of Sunnyvale, and my house also backs up on a small creek ( or perhaps drainage ditch ), so I really should have been prepared.

Early this winter, humility was regained as I began to notice some otherwise healthy looking stanhopea orchid leaves, apparently gnawed off and fallen to the floor. And out of the corner of my eye, it appeared that something scampered out of sight as I opened the door to the greenhouse one night. A hole mysteriously appeared and enlarged near the swamp cooler, and I knew that something had to be done ... and fast - before my precious plants became rodent food.

I can well see the attraction - the greenhouse is warm, offers plenty of hiding places, there's good fresh water, and if you like tropical foliage or want to dig for tubers, there is also tons of food.

My attack on the rodent guests was twofold. First, I blocked off their avenues of access with chicken wire ( though I suppose they could still slip or gnaw their way in if they were determined ), and second I set out some rat poison. I won't poison the squirrels which have attacked my garden and eaten my vegetables, but I draw the line at rats. Cuteness is, after all, a perfectly valid survival trait.

In any case, the rat poison mostly disappeared for a few days, as did any trace of the rats. There are no more mysterious bite marks on my orchids, and I have a newfound respect for the need for vermin control in any greenhouse in the late fall.

It's been my experience that rats, squirrels, racoons and such are quite capable of learning where the food and shelter is, and that it's a much bigger effort to deter such an animal once it knows what it wants to do. Hopefully, the poison quashed this particular line of inquiry and the chicken mesh will keep future curious interlopers at bay.

Helicodiceros

2007-03-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

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.

The Big Freeze

2007-03-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Winter of 2006-2007 will be remembered in California by gardeners as one of the cold ones. A quick snap down to the mid 20's, here on the penninsula of the San Francisco Bay was mirrored in much of the rest of the state by temperatures which were enough to damage much of the citrus and avocado crops, as well as hurting the fields of vegetables.

Wandering around my neighborhood, I am reminded why we don't grow certain plants in these parts. Maybe even a decade of mild temperatures will allow the epiphyllums, bananas, and other sub-tropicals to thrive, but a quick hard freeze that might happen once or twice in ten years will turn that sort of landscaping to mush.

The most telling thing about the damage from the cold is the massive variation in amount of damage depending on the exact location. It really brings out the micro-climates. For instance, my epiphyllums on the outer wall of a sheltered courtyard are pretty much toast. My larger collection of epiphyllums in hanging baskets under the south eave of my garage suffered almost no damage. The Clivias planted in the ground near the fence but under the shelter of a tree have mushy leaves. The Clivias on my doorstep are just fine, thank you, and starting to flower.

The point is that not only do microclimates make a difference - I don't have the faintest idea why one particular microclimate is better than another. What seems like a sheltered location under a tree turns into an area of carnage which the the doorstep is more protected than a wall a few feet away. This falls into the somewhat dubious category of information that is useful, but not revolutionary. I can just remember that certan plants do better in certain spots, but with very little idea why.

Mouse Tails

2007-02-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

Arisarum proboscideum is a plant uniquely suited for culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. It just works. By which I mean that if it's given the right place, it grows happily without a lot of worry, but doesn't spread like a plague. It likes a bit of shade, a bit of water, and to be left largely alone.

It's an aroid, which is a genus that can provide strange leaves and even stranger flowers, but it's not too controversial for the woodland garden. The leaves are nothing much to look at, but peer under them and you find a small purple flower that is a work of art on a very small scale. It doesn't hurt that it seems to have a long flowering season during the winter months when not all that much else is happening.

It's a plant that takes a little time to really appreciate. And a little time to spread enough to make an impact. But it's one plant I would not be without.

Orchids Blooming

2007-02-27T20:00:00.000-08:00

What's going on in the greenhouse is dependant on the season, strangely enough.
Despite relatively stable temperatures and moisture, the changing of day length brings different plants into flower at different times.

These huge stanhopeas grow in hanging baskets on a piece of metal pipe which runs the length of the single aisle in my greenhouse. The plants themselves are not too much to behold when out of flower. Squat pseudobulbs give rise to a single ribbed leaf each.

But sometime in late summer, a shoot pokes its way from the bottom of the baskets, and buds - sometimes just one, and sometimes as many as five or six, swell at the end of the hanging stalk. One night, they pop open and release what must be one of the nicest and mightiest scents in the greenhouse. The ratio of flower to plant size is nothing to scoff about either.

I find they do well in moderately bright light, and flower best for me with plenty of fertilization. The wire baskets are lined with long fiber sphagnum moss, then filled with a very lose, well draining mixture of wood chips, carbon, and clay pellets. Dividing and re-potting is needed every few years.

The infloresences look a bit like wax sculptures. They feel waxy too. They are complicated traps for little euglossine bees in their native habitat, and almost all have beautifully scented oils which fill the greenhouse with a pleasant aroma. The closely related coryanthes have even more spectacularly complex flowers.

I like these orchids. They are complex, not seen too often, have a very different flowering habit, and despite all this are remarkably easy to grow in a tropical greenhouse.