Spring Growth Pt. 2

Here is the promised follow-up to last post.  Yes, I know it’s more than “a few days” late, but I doubt there’s anyone following this blog and actively waiting for updates.  These pictures are a month old, so there has been some more growth since then.  I’ll post updates if anything truly exciting happens.  Anyway, here we go!

unknown aroid

Here is an aroid of some sort that a friend gave to me.  If anyone knows what it might be, let me know!  It’s hardy here in NYC (apparently zone 6b), and must be related to jack-in-the-pulpit.  Unfortunately, the inflorescence was slightly past its peak when I took this picture, as evidenced by the browning on the tip of the spadix and top of the spathe.  That aside, this is an utterly ridiculous flower spike.  It’s almost a parody of a normal aroid inflorescence.

For those of you not familiar with this type of inflorescence, here’s how it breaks down.  The long, pointy thing coming out of the top is the spadix.  The part wrapped around it is the spathe, and it covers and protects the actual flowers on the base of the spadix.  In the picture below I’ve pulled of the spadix to reveal the separate clusters of male and female flowers.

the deconstructed inflorescence

This closeup shows how the spadix is actually fused to the spathe on the back, a fact which surprised me.  The male flowers are on top, and the female ones are below.  Aroids usually prevent self-fertalization by releasing pollen when the female flowers are not receptive to pollination.

And now for a completely different biome!  I grew this puppy from seed:

Adansonia digitata

Yes, this is my very own baobab seedling.  The trees are native to Australia, and develop huge, swollen trunks at maturity.  This gives them the colloquial moniker “bottle tree.”  You can see that the base of this one is already swelling, giving the trunk a nice taper, even at just a few months old.  I find this both surprising and pleasing.  I’m not sure why the leaves are so vertical, but for some reason they have moved to a more horizontal position since this picture was taken.  The species name alludes to the fact that the mature foliage of this plant is palmately compound, which is to say that it looks like a hand.  The young leaves, as seen in the picture, are borne singly.  During the winter this will get a dry dormant period to simulate the alternation of wet and dry seasons in its natural habitat.

And here is a true desert gem:

Welwitschia mirabilis

These three (along with one other in a different pot) are my babies.  Also raised from seed which I got from Silverhill Seeds in Cape Town, South Africa.  This plant is one of the famous limit cases of botany, an adaptive extreme.  They live in the Namibian Desert in Namibia and Angola (and maybe a tiny bit in South Africa).  As the picture shows, each plant has two “leaves.”  The bottom pair, however, are the cotelydons, and will fall off within the year.  The top two leaves, amazingly, are the only ones the plant will ever produce.  Rather than grow new leaves, Welwitschia elongates these two leaves continuously from the bottom.  Eventually the desert wind will split them into ribbons that pile up on top of themselves, giving the impression of multiple leaves.  These are technically gymnosperms, which makes them more closely related to pine trees than to anything that flowers.  It’s well worth doing a search for large older plants.  They hypothesize that some of the desert specimens are upwards of 2,000 years old.

To transition back to the tropics, a few posts ago I mentioned a Brassavola that I won at the Manhattan Orchid Society raffle a few months back.  Here, belatedly, is the picture of it.

Brassavola cordata

You can see a fair amount of dead stuff on here.  Like I said, I am rescuing it from the brink of death.  The short left growth is new since it passed into my care.  The right hand leaf that’s cut off by the bottom of the picture is substantially longer, even with half of it dead and removed.  The little guys hitching a ride on the top are Florida strap ferns (Campyloneurum phyllitidis) that I put there to see if they would grow.  So far they haven’t grown, but they haven’t died either.

I know I promised pictures of an orchid flower last post, but I’m going to renege since I think this post  is long enough for now.  Perhaps the flower will get an entire post of its own.  Additionally, keen eyes will have noticed new plants on my plant list (who am I kidding, no one actually noticed that).  These will get their own writeup with pictures ex post haste.

In the meantime, happy growing!

New Addition!

So I’ve been a member of the Manhattan Orchid Society (MOS) for a few months now (since I moved here in September).  For any readers in the NYC area interested in orchids, I would highly recommend it.  The meetings are always fun and informative, and the group is full of great people.  At any rate, every meeting they have a raffle table where members bring in extra plants that they don’t want.  I shelled out $2 for five tickets.  Considering the large number of plants, I had a good likelihood of getting picked eventually, but I feel like I always have bad luck with these things.  Eventually, my number did come up, to my relief and surprise.

Having perused the table beforehand, I knew exactly what I wanted.  There was a mostly-dead-looking mounted Brassavola cordata that I felt I could rehabilitate from the brink.  It only had one actual leaf (half of which had died back), but I saw that there were several pseudobulbs still alive and green, and that there were, in fact, a number of growing leads that, with love and attention, would soon be taking off.  All in all, I felt that this plant had a lot of potential to look very nice in 6 months to a year.

My initial problem was that the day after the MOS meeting I was scheduled to go home to Chicago for a week.  I put a friend in charge of my plant watering (no small task) and took off.  She performed valiantly in the face of the daunting, Herculean feat put in front of her.  However, apparently this particular Brassavola needed more than a misting every other day.  Most of the new growth died back on me.  It still has the (half) leaf and three other pseudobulbs.  I think I see one, maybe two, leads that still look alive.  I’ve upped my misting frequency and volume, and hopefully these new leads will hang in there and grow into healthy new leaves.  It’s condition has stabilized since I got back almost two weeks ago, so I’m feeling optimistic.  I find it odd, however, since I’m growing a Brassavola nodosa that seems happy with mistings once a week.  Pictures might be coming soon.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

Til next time, happy growing!