Burger's Onion

Maple Sugaring Begins

2012-02-13T16:12:00.002-05:00

On Saturday I got set up with the two Sugar Maples that I tapped last year, and the sap is now flowing. It hasn't been much so far, but the weather forecast for the next week is looking OK for sap runs. I'm going to try making syrup from a Red Maple this year, too. Red Maple sap is supposed to be lower in sugar content, and the season ends earlier, but I'm curious about what the resulting syrup will be like. Red Maples are also relatively common in my neighborhood, so if they yield a tasty product, it might be worth tapping more of them.

Maple Sugaring: 2012 Mayan Apocalypse-style

2012-02-06T16:07:00.006-05:00

Sugar Maples, Eastern Hemlocks and others on a decidedly non-wintry Connecticut day a week ago.

Here in New England, the 2011-12 winter season is most likely going to be the warmest on record. We had a freak snowstorm just before Halloween, that knocked out the power for three days at my place, and for almost two weeks in some towns to the northwest of here (a combination of high winds and heavy wet snow that stuck to trees still in full leaf due to a warm autumn, caused catastrophic damage in wooded areas). For the next three months, and continuing this week, the weather seemed to get stuck in something similar to early April conditions, with just two brief winter-like cold snaps.

The Sugar Maples weathered the October storm just fine, being tough northern trees that tend to drop their leaves early, but I have no idea what sort of maple sugaring season to expect, if any, after such a balmy winter. The sap run doesn't seem to be starting early; we're just a week away from the traditional start and I don't see any of the usual signs like sap icicles dripping from broken maple twigs. Frigid night temperatures and a thick snow pack are some of the factors usually associated with good sugaring years, and we have neither of these things now. It doesn't look good for the 2012 maple syrup harvest, but the weather has been so far outside of normal experience that I don't think anyone knows for sure what's coming. I guess I'll clean up my tapping equipment, get it into the woods this weekend, and see what happens.

Anigozanthos manglesii

2012-01-24T16:12:00.006-05:00

Anigozanthos--or "Kangaroo Paws"--is a genus endemic to the southwestern corner of Australia, where a Mediterranean-type climate and nutrient-poor, acidic soils have lead to the development of a scrubby vegetation called Kwongan. Kwongan resembles the Fynbos vegetation of South Africa, which occurs under similar conditions, and the two vegetation types share quite a few of their characteristic plant families. Anigozanthos is part of the Haemodoracaeae or Bloodroot Family (no relation to the North American wildflower Sanguinaria, which is also called Bloodroot), which is represented in South Africa by the genera Wachendorfia, Dilatris and others. The Haemodoraceae have generally hairy inflorescences of flowers that are dorsiventrally symmetrical (can be divided into mirror images by only a single plane) or asymmetrical, and roots that are often brightly pigmented, and sometimes blood red.

The most common Kangaroo Paws in cultivation are A. flavidus and hybrids that incorporate A. flavidus, which are all relatively robust and vigorous plants. Anigozanthos manglesii is more finicky, requiring stronger sun to grow properly, and reportedly being very susceptible to a fungal infection called Ink Spot Disease, which fortunately doesn't seem to have made it into the botanical collections at UConn. The plants pictured here are flowering for the first time at UConn, at about two years old from seed collected near Perth, Australia. They do well in full sun in a cool greenhouse, in an acidic, peat-based soil that is allowed to surface-dry between waterings. Potted Anigozanthos plants grow and flower best when given a regular dose of dilute high-nitrogen fertilizer, but intense light and a cool winter growth period are probably the more critical requirements for success.

Talk in Philly

2011-11-11T16:28:00.002-05:00

Ferocactus viridescens var. viridescens, Dudleya edulis.

This Sunday I'm giving a talk at the Philadelphia Cactus and Succulent Society, titled "Succulents of Southern California." The presentation will include elements from my blog posts on the subject earlier this year, but greatly expanded.

Tylecodon opelii

2011-10-19T16:54:00.008-04:00

There's big excitement (for me, at least) in the latest issue of the Cactus and Succulent Journal: Ernst van Jaarsveld of Kirstenbosch and Steve Hammer of the Sphaeroid Institute have named a new species of Tylecodon in my honor. Tylecodon opelii is a winter-growing geophyte, with dark marble-sized and marble-shaped leaves, endemic to fields of broken quartz in the northern Knersvlakte in South Africa's Western Cape.

Tylecodon opelii in cultivation, late winter.

The new Tylecodon is set apart from its relatives by spheroid leaves that are dark green to nearly black and almost glabrous, with just a few fine hairs. It's probably most closely related to T. occultans, though that species has more flattened leaves and less elongated tubers.

The quartz field habitat of Tylecodon opelii.

The corner of the Knersvlakte where I first ran into what is now T. opelii back in the austral winter of 2000 is loaded with little geophytes and succulents. The white quartz covering the ground reflects and disperses sunlight, creating a microhabitat where dwarf vegetation can thrive. In places without the quartz, darker soils absorb light and heat up to the point where small plants at ground level get cooked. I have fond memories of hiking through this strange landscape, scanning the ground for interesting plants, finding round black leaves coming up between the pebbles and thinking: "Hmm, what Tylecodon is this? I've never seen it before." I'm very grateful that it wound up getting named after me, years later.

--
van Jaarsveld, E.J. and S. Hammer 2011. Tylecodon opelii, a new obligatory quartz-gravel species from the Northern Knersvlakte (Western Cape, South Africa). Cactus and Succulent Journal (US) 83: 140-145.

--
There's a short blurb on Tylecodon opelii on the University of Connecticut website, too.

Welwitschia seeds!

2011-09-30T16:31:00.005-04:00

The Welwitschia mirabilis plants at UConn produced abundant fully-formed cones for the first time, this past summer. On warm afternoons in midsummer, the mature female cones produced "pollination drops," or droplets of nectar at the end of hair-like extensions of the ovules. The male cones have nectaries, as well, which probably attract insect pollinators in the wild in Namibia.

I placed pollen from the males into the pollination drops of female cones for several days running back in July, and two months later the seeds are starting to mature. Some of the seeds are very light and thin, and are probably duds, but quite a few look like viable Welwitschia seed. I may plant a few now to see what happens, though it probably isn't the best time of year.

Female cones with pollination drops, back in midsummer.

Succulents of Coastal Southern California 2: Cacti etc.

2011-09-22T17:18:00.004-04:00

Ferocactus viridescens var. viridescens overlooking the Pacific at Torrey Pines State Reserve.

Apart from the Crassulaceae (stonecrop family), the Cactaceae (cactus family) is probably the group of succulent plants that is most prominent in the flora of the San Diego area. The most frequently encountered cacti are Opuntia and Cylindropuntia species, the prickly pears and chollas. There are several species of each genus in the area, ready to stick unwary hikers with barbed spines and glochids. Some, like Opuntia littoralis, form impressive spiky clumps.

Opuntia littoralis among spring wildflowers at Torrey Pines.

Ferocactus viridescens looks a little out of place in the chaparral of the coastal regions; the genus is much more widespread in true desert, inland. This small barrel cactus grows mostly on open gravelly slopes, though I spotted a few plants under the scrubby vegetation that dominates the area. Ferocactus viridescens seems to be relatively rare, and getting more so: a botanist told me about a large population in downtown San Diego that persisted for many years on a steep slope amid the parking lots and hotel complexes, which was just recently wiped out by development.

The cactus genera Mammillaria and Bergerocactus are also represented in coastal SoCal, though I’ve never spotted them in the wild. The local climate is almost entirely winter-rainfall, and it seems like the native cacti in the area grow and flower mainly in the cooler part of spring. I suspect that they would do most of their growing in the summer sun if cultivated in a greenhouse in the Northeast, but it would be worth experimenting with keeping them active in the winter.

Yucca shidigera at Torrey Pines.

Yucca and related genera Hesperoyucca and Agave (family Agavaceae) are also encountered in the patchy remnants of the wilds of greater San Diego. Yucca schidigera, Spanish Dagger, is widespread in the Sonoran and Mohave deserts, as well as the chaparral. It branches from the base and grows into a good-sized shrub, often taller than a person.

Marah macrocarpus in a weedy hedgerow on the agricultural outskirts of Vista, Ca.

Marah macrocarpus, California Manroot, is a caudiciform plant in the squash family (Cucurbitaceae). Marah produces scrambling, leafy vines in the winter and spring, but the interesting part of the plant, from the perspective of the succulent-plant fan, is the massive tuber. In the wild, the tuber stays unseen deep underground, but caudiciform growers can raise their Manroots partially above ground for viewing. So to speak.

Mesembryanthemum crystallinum on the beach. Invasive, but pretty.

Finally, the beaches and freeway medians of Southern California are host to a wide variety of ice plants (family Aizoaceae). Most of these are introduced from South Africa, but at least one species—Carpobrotus aequilaterus (Sour Fig)—is most likely native. Some of the exotic ice plants, including Mesembryanthemum and other species of Carpobrotus, have become invasive weeds, sometimes even encountered in wild areas.

The alien Carpobrotus edulis, grown as a groundcover in Vista, California. The native C. aequilaterus is similar, but with violet flowers.

Succulents of Coastal Southern California: Dudleya

2011-08-12T16:17:00.004-04:00

Dudleya pulverulenta on granitic rock in Vista, California, April 2011.

The San Diego area experiences some of the most agreeable weather in the world. It has a mild Mediterranean climate where frost is a rarity and unpleasant heat is almost as uncommon; for months on end the forecast is “morning fog in coastal areas, then sunny with a high near 80.” Given a little irrigation, a huge range of tropical and subtropical flowers and fruits will grow like mad. A breakfast of the most delicious oranges and avocados can be obtained by merely reaching up and plucking it from the trees. Southwestern California is a land of milk and honey.

All of this is common knowledge, and as a result there is hardly an acre of land in coastal Southern California that hasn’t been converted to houses, strip malls, roads and farms. But here and there, one can find remnants of the original scrubby chaparral vegetation, which includes some interesting succulent plants.

Plants from the genus Dudleya are the characteristic succulents of the coastal chaparral. Dudleyas are rosette plants with succulent leaves, which often resemble Echeveria. In some ways, Dudleya is the winter-rainfall climate equivalent of Echeveria (which are summer-growing plants), although the two genera are not closely related, with Dudleya falling out near Sedum in recent evolutionary studies of the family Crassulaceae.

Dudleya edulis (left) and D. pulverulenta (right) on the beach at Torrey Pines.

The most common Dudleya in the vicinity of San Diego is D. pulverulenta, the Chalk Rose, which favors rocky slopes and can occasionally be found growing in road cuts. Chalk Roses can be stunningly beautiful plants, waxy white and bigger than dinner plates, with tall racemes of red tubular flowers that are pollinated by hummingbirds.

Dudleya edulis, or Fingertips Live-forever, is a more strictly coastal species with upright cylindrical leaves, like handfuls of string beans. Supposedly, the leaves can be eaten as a raw or cooked vegetable. Another species that seems to be most frequent on the coast, though it can occur inland on mountains, is D. lanceolata, which looks a lot like a greenish, pointy-leaved Echeveria.

Dudleya lanceolata at Torrey Pines. The Martian weed around the Dudleya is Crassula connata, a tiny winter annual.

The rarest Dudleya of San Diego County is D. blochmaniae ssp. brevifolia, which is found on a handful of sites near the ocean, growing on patches of open ground among pebbly, iron-rich concretions. It is a tiny plant, with globular leaves only a centimeter or so long, which blend in well with the dark concretions. It only grows in the winter and spring, and dies back to a subterranean tuber in warm weather. Fortunately, the primary population of D. blochmaniae ssp. brevifolia is protected within Torrey Pines State Park.

Dudleya blochmaniae ssp. brevifolia, getting ready to flower in April at Torrey Pines.

Dudleyas hardly seem to be cultivated at all by C&S people on the eastern seaboard, possibly because they are strict winter-growers, which can be tricky to accommodate outside of Mediterranean climes. They don’t seem to be too difficult, though, if they can be given plenty of sun and a fair amount of water in the cooler months, and a warm, dry summer rest. Water can accumulate among the waxy leaves of species like D. pulverulenta, and this should be drained off in order to avoid rot. In the wild, the rosettes are often held near vertically against cliff faces, so pooling rain is not an issue.

I’ll have more on the cacti and succulents of Southern California in a future post.

Heterotroph Invasion

2011-07-21T16:10:00.006-04:00

This summer has been a good one for mushrooms and other non-photosynthetic, non-motile denizens of my yard, possibly because of unusually wet weather up until a couple of weeks ago. First up, two species of Monotropa, a genus the Ericaceae (heath family), that look superficially like fungi, but which are actually flowering plants that rely on a more or less parasitic relationship with real fungi for their organic nutrient needs.

Monotropa uniflora, Indian Pipe.

Monotropa hypopithys, Pinesap. This species is relatively uncommon, and is associated with pine trees. Presumably, it parasitizes fungi that have a symbiotic relationship with pine roots.

Next up, three things from the fungal kingdom. I don't know from mushrooms, so if anybody has ideas on identifications, leave a comment.

This one is probably Boletus chrysenteron. It's alarmingly large, about 20 cm across.

Boletus sp.? This one is growing under Eastern Hemlock trees, if that tells you mycologists anything. [Edited to add: possibly Leccinum sp.]

This thing has pores on the underside of its cap, like the boletes, and is growing under White Oaks. I'm coming up empty on possible names with my mushroom book. [edited to add: probably Strobilomyces floccopus, the Old Man of the Woods.]

I've also had these hanging around the neighborhood, mostly at dusk in pine trees. I'm no zoologist, but I checked some books, and they are probably some kind of chordate. Definitely metazoans, at any rate.

Titan Arum in Full Bloom

2011-06-16T22:39:00.003-04:00

The Corpse Flower is fully open and producing waves of cabbage-y, fishy odor right now, near 11:00 PM. These photos are from just before sunset, when the lighting was better, and the smell was potent but not quite as overpowering as it is at the moment. The weather has been pretty warm lately, and I think that has encouraged a strong flowering event this time, even if the inflorescence is a little on the short side (~5 feet). The spathe is further reflexed than in previous blooms, and the colors seem a bit brighter.

Titan Arum Bloom - June 16, 2011

2011-06-16T15:16:00.004-04:00

3:00 PM

I just checked the Amorphophallus titanum plant, and the spathe had completely pulled away from the spadix in the two hours since I last looked at it. Tonight will be the night! I would expect it to be fully open by 8:00-10:00, and at the peak of fragrance around 12:00. By tomorrow morning it will be partially closed up, and not nearly as smelly.

The greenhouse will be open until late (1:00 AM), and then open again bright and early tomorrow at our usual time.

Corpse Flower: Reloaded

2011-06-15T16:37:00.003-04:00

One of the Amorphophallus titanum plants at the UConn greenhouses is preparing to flower again. This is the Titan Arum or Corpse Flower, or what visitors tend to ask about as "that big stinky plant." The last time we had a bloom was in 2008, and I did a fair amount of blogging about it, which I won't try to repeat, though there are some points worth noting.

The individual Titan Arum in question is UConn's plant #5, which was the first of its kind to bloom in New England, back in 2004, and which bloomed again in 2007. Strangely, the plant bloomed again in 2008, without first going through the normal period of vegetative growth. It had foliage over most of the past 3 years, and seems to be back on a proper growth cycle now: dormancy--leaf--dormancy--flowering--dormancy--leaf--etc.

As with the previous three inflorescences on Titan #5, the petal-like spathe is right-handed (i.e., it wraps around itself towards the viewer's right). Left-handed inflorescences are also possible with this species, from what I've seen in photos.

The frilly edge of the spathe is starting to look a little loose, and its interior has changed from greenish to purple-black over the past week or so, so the opening of the bloom is getting close. The growth of the spadix (central poke-y bit) has slowed down to about 3-4 cm per day, which is another indication that the inflorescence is nearly mature. I predicted a couple of weeks ago that the big stink would be on June 20th, and I'll stand by that guess for now, but it could easily be tomorrow. The exact day is difficult to judge, but on that day we'll know by mid-afternoon. There will be announcements on the greenhouse website as soon as we know, so you can rush to campus. The flowers last for only a day or two, and are really only in peak condition for a few hours the night they open.

Other distractions in the Asian tropical room include fruit on the banana plant (Musa, unknown seedless cultivar). I've eaten fruits from this plant before, and they seem more or less identical to the usual supermarket Cavendish.

Memorial Day Bog Walk

2011-06-04T16:47:00.003-04:00

Iris versicolor, Northern Blue Flag.

Memorial Day is usually a good time to catch some of the more impressive native wildflowers here in New England. This year, I checked out an unnamed bog at an undisclosed location in Willington, Connecticut. Walking to the bog there were some richer swampy spots where the wild geraniums and blue flag iris were in full bloom.

Cyprepedium acuale, Pink Lady-slipper (this photo actually from Mansfield Hollow State Park).

Closer to the bog, the vegetation changed to indicate the presence of nutrient-poor, acidic, bog-friendly soil. Sugar Maples and White Ash were replaced by pines and oaks as the dominant trees, and the understory started to include Pink Lady-slipper orchids in flower, and one little patch of Epigea repens (Trailing Arbutus).

Ledum groenlandicum, Labrador Tea, in the Willington bog.

After a short but slightly hairy time navigating the inevitable marginal ring of open water and peaty muck at the edge, I emerged into a sunny sphagnum bog. This is a floating bog, though the open parts are mostly dense enough with moss and scrub to provide secure footing. It is still irresistible to bounce up and down a little bit, and watch the dwarf trees within a 20 foot radius sway back and forth.

Ledum, or Labrador Tea, was in full bloom. Labrador Tea is mainly a boreal plant, though it hangs on here and there in bogs in the more temperate parts of the eastern US. The leaves have a distinctive brown fuzzy underside, and can in fact be used to make a somewhat wintergreen-tasting tea. The Willington bog is the only local spot I know of where it grows, and I had never caught it in flower before.

Sarracenia purpurea var. purpurea, the Purple Pitcher Plant.

The pitcher plant flowers weren't quite open yet for the most part. There aren't a huge number of Sarracenia in this bog, though the population seems pretty stable. There aren't any sundews in this bog at all, which is strange; it looks perfect for Round-leaved Sundews at least, and the other area bogs have one or both of the local Drosera species. It's doubly odd because there is an area of seeps not half a mile away where both sundews grow in large numbers.

Picea mariana, Black Spruce, about 1 m tall, with female cones.

Another interesting feature of this bog is a large population of Black Spruce trees, stunted into natural bonsai. Black Spruce, like Ledum, is primarily a boreal plant, which persists in boggy spots and the occasional cold mountain slope in southern New England. There is a tiny mistletoe, Arceuthobium pusillum, that grows on the spruce trees in the Willington bog, but I couldn't find it this time. I seem to recall seeing it once before, years ago when I first visited this location, in later summer, but that time the mistletoe was pointed out by the late Les Mehrhoff, who knew the local flora twice as well as anyone else. It is a shame that Les won't be guiding any more bog walks.

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

2011-06-04T12:51:00.004-04:00

Ferocactus cylindraceus on the hills around Mountain Palm Springs.

One of the highlights of this April’s Cactus and Succulent Society of America convention, in San Diego, was the mid-week field trip. There were various options, including garden and nursery tours, but I chose to explore the Anza-Borrego Desert by bus and on foot, with expert guides Andrew Wilson and Dr. Juergen Menzel. There was an Anza-Borrego off-road trip, as well, though it seems to have involved less walking, and more bouncing around on crumby roads, with attendant vehicle breakdowns, so I feel that I chose wisely.

Mammillaria dioica (female plant) at Box Canyon.

Anza-Borrego is about a two-hour drive east from San Diego. We started out in coastal Mediterranean scrub (or what was left of it) near the hotel, then headed into the Cuyamaca Mountains, which are sparsely forested with oaks and poplars, with fields of yellow wildflowers on valley floors. Then came a long descent through increasingly scorched, arid landscapes to the town of Ocotillo, on the desert floor, below sea level.

Bursera microphylla at Mountain Palm Springs.

Our longest hike was to Mountain Palm Springs, near the southern edge of the park. There we saw hundreds of chollas (Cylindropuntia bigelovii and others) and barrel cacti (Ferocactus cylindraceus), including some remarkable multi-headed and crested specimens. There were also a few desert iguanas, but the lizards were about the only creatures out and about on a hot and blazingly sunny day. The reward at the end of the hike was a stop at a genuine desert oasis, where water seeps out of the ground and a grove of California Fan Palms (Washingtonia filifera) provides a shady spot for contemplating a giant old Elephant Tree (Bursera microphylla).

Agave deserti and Echinocereus engelmanii at Box Canyon.

The next stop was Box Canyon, site of the first wagon road into Southern California. The vegetation here was slightly lusher, dominated by flowering shrubs like Brittlebush (Encelia farinosa). There were impenetrable thickets of Century Plant (Agave deserti), and clusters of Strawberry Hedgehog Cactus (Echinocereus engelmannii) in full bloom.

Nolina parryi.

Other shorter stops included lunch at Tamarisk Grove, where a short nature trail featured abundant flowering specimens of California Fishhook Cactus (Mammillaria dioica) and Ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens). We admired a huge plant of the locally rare beargrass, Nolina parryi, by the side of the road, and spent some time in the town of Borrego Springs, shopping for fresh organic desert grapefruit and checking out the park visitor center. I was parched and tired by the end of the day, but it was an unforgettable trip!

Fouquieria splendens and friends, nature trail at Tamarisk Grove.

Trailing Arbutus

2011-05-11T16:52:00.004-04:00

It's more or less peak season for spring ephemerals and woodland wildflowers here in southern New England. This clump of Epigea repens (Trailing Arbutus - family Ericaceae) was growing on a seep on an open slope on Wachusett Mountain in west-central Massachusetts. There was quite a bit of variation in flower color, with most being pure white, and this individual being about the darkest violet I could find. Trailing Arbutus flowers have a strong sweet smell, which is difficult to compare with other flowers. I think it's a little like rubber cement, but I haven't met anyone who agreed with that assessment with any real enthusiasm. It's pretty close to the fragrance of Conophytum hammeri flowers, not that that comparison is going to be of much use to most people.

Epigea is rare in my traditional stomping grounds in Connecticut and the NY metro area; I can think of maybe half a dozen spots where a few plants grew, and some of those have disappeared since the '80s. It still seems to be fairly common in woods up in the greater Worcester area, though.

San Diego Trip

2011-05-02T16:53:00.003-04:00

Washingtonia filifera, Mountain Palm Springs, Anza Borrego State Park.

I'm back from Southern California, and mostly recovered from a long but exciting week of plant talks, desert walks and generally eating a lot of avocados and oranges. My presentations at the CSSA Conference went over pretty well, it seemed. The one on nomenclatural changes (the breakup of the portulaca family, the disappearance of the genus Monadenium etc.) got a bigger audience response than my Conophytum show, weirdly enough. I attended a lot of great talks, too, and was especially interested in the presentations by the two South African speakers, Gideon Smith and Andrew Hankey.

I went on one of the CSSA field trips to Anza Borrego State Park, which was spectacular, with thousands of barrel cacti (Ferocactus cylindraceus), ocotillos (Fouquieria splendens), and a walk out to a refreshingly cool palm oasis. I also spent some time at Balboa Park in San Diego, visiting with Steve Hammer in Vista, and exploring beautiful Torrey Pines State Reserve on the coast. I'll write more later, and maybe try to work some of my better photos together into some kind of slide show for the Connecticut CSS.

National Cactus Con '11

2011-04-18T16:24:00.003-04:00

Conophytum maughanii (material from Smorenskadu, Northern Cape)

The Cactus and Succulent Society of America Convention is coming up next week in San Diego. I'll be flying out later this week to attend, and to spend a few days hanging out with plant people in Southern California. I hope to get out to the beach too, and maybe see some spring wildflowers at Anza-Borrego State Park.

I'll be giving two presentations at the Con. One will be more of a soft and squishy natural history and cultivation talk, about a generally soft and squishy genus of plants, Conophytum. The other will probably be a bit more of a hard slog, dealing with higher-level taxonomic changes in various succulent plant groups, and the new research results from evolutionary biology that have been forcing the changes. We'll see how well the talks go over with a national-level audience.

Maple Sugaring II

2011-03-21T16:10:00.003-04:00

Homemade maple syrup (light early season and cloudy, unfiltered mid-season).

The maple sugaring operation has been fairly successful. Earlier on in the season, back in late February, the syrup was very light in color, with a delicate flavor, whereas more recent batches have been darker and stronger. This pattern is apparently caused by the fact that the earliest sap is richer in sugar, and needs less cooking and concentrating, and by increased microbial activity with warmer weather later on.

Record high temperatures at the end of last week could have put an end to the sap flow, but my trees started producing again after a refreeze on Saturday. The coming week looks like it might have some good sugaring conditions, with lows below freezing and highs in the low 40s (~7 C). We'll see what happens; I don't expect the season to last too much longer in any event.

The evaporation process produces a cloudy precipitate called "sugar sand," which has a slightly bitter taste. Mostly I've just been waiting for it to settle, then pouring off the clear syrup, but I've also salvaged some additional syrup by reheating the dregs and putting it through a coffee filter, which was an annoyingly slow, messy process. It would be great to have a home centrifuge, or at least a vacuum filtration system to speed things up!

My costs so far have been less than $10 for electricity for boiling, $7 for spiles (taps), and $2 for filters, which has yielded about 2 quarts of syrup. That works out to less than half the retail cost of local maple syrup, which is better than I had expected. The economics look a lot less favorable if I count the cost of my time (probably 10 minutes a day for four weeks collecting sap, and maybe 15-20 hours total for boiling, though that didn't need continuous supervision).

River's Edge Sugar House.

Last weekend I visited an actual commercial sugar shack, River's Edge Sugar House on Connecticut Route 89 in the wilds of Ashford. They have around 2000 taps, and use a reverse osmosis system and a large wood-fired evaporator to make syrup. The folks who run it were happy to chat about their setup, and I bought some really good maple candy and honey from them.

Commercial evaporator, with fresh sap starting at left, and the late stages to finished syrup in the lower divided pan.

Stop in at River's Edge if you're in the Quiet Corner of Connecticut; it was a fun and informative trip. You can also order syrup and other sweet stuff from them through the mail.

Maple Sugaring

2011-03-03T16:17:00.003-05:00

My new late-winter entertainment is maple sugaring. I've got two good-sized Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) trees in back of my house, and bought a couple of taps for them the other week. Sap production has been pretty good, with half a dozen days over the past two weeks having just the right sort of weather (freezing at night, but sunny and warmish during the day).

The snow pack is still hanging in there. Today the temperatures have been too cold for anything to flow, but the sugaring weather outlook for the weekend is promising. I've been storing the collected sap in buckets in a hole in a snowbank.

On a good day, each tap produces more than a gallon of sap. The raw liquid is very slightly sweet (and makes an interesting basis for a cup of tea), but needs to be reduced about 40:1 to make syrup.

I've been boiling the sap down on my stove, which is probably the most inefficient and expensive possible way of making maple syrup. It makes the house warm and humidified, at least, and judicious exhaust fan use keeps moisture from building up to the point where the wallpaper peels. Maybe next year I'll set up a propane or wood-fired evaporating pan outdoors. It is useful to let the sap freeze outside, and discard the ice, before boiling: the ice is almost pure water, and the sugar is concentrated in the remaining liquid, at no cost.

Pinguicula ehlersiae

2011-02-17T13:36:00.004-05:00

This neat little Mexican butterwort is flowering in the UConn greenhouses right now. Mexico is a hotspot of butterwort diversity, with about 25 different species. Pinguicula ehlersiae, like the majority of Mexican species in the genus, shows strongly seasonal growth. During the summer, when it tends to be rainy and humid in its habitat, it produces large, flat leaves that catch small insects in sticky secretions. In winter, P. ehlersiae grows the stubby, succulent leaves seen here, and can withstand a certain amount of drought. One usually thinks of carnivorous plants like the butterworts as being denizens of bogs and other wet places, but some Mexican Pinguicula grow right next to cacti, agaves, and other familiar succulent plants.

Don't Taste the Rainbow

2011-02-14T16:48:00.002-05:00

Amorphophallus bulbifer is ripening a lot of fruit this year, at the UConn EEB greenhouses. In spite of appearances, and the fact that birds or some other animal disperser probably eats them, it would probably be a bad idea for a person to sample these berries. Amorphophallus is an aroid (family Araceae), a group known for being toxic to humans. In many aroids, all parts of the plant contain microscopic calcium oxalate crystals, which irritate the lining of the mouth and throat, causing intense pain and swelling that can be life-threatening if the airway becomes constricted. In some aroids and for some people, the crystals can even cause pain and rashes on the skin of hands exposed to sap from cut plant parts.

Snow Days

2011-01-31T16:45:00.004-05:00

The past year has been a strange one for weather. Last summer was the hottest on record in the northeast U.S., and this January is going to be the snowiest month on record for some parts of Connecticut. Well, it's been a good test of the house I moved to last June, whose heating, cooling, snow removal and general structural characteristics seem to be adequate under extreme conditions.

I enjoy a certain amount of snow, but this winter is getting kind of traumatic. I'm wondering where I'm going to shovel it to, if we get much more. Well, the roof is cleared off in anticipation of tomorrow's storm, and late-winter flowering bulbs like Freesia are doing their thing in the UConn greenhouse, so spring isn't too far off. We're gaining more than two minutes of daylight every day in my area, and the sun is noticeably stronger than it was a few weeks ago. By mid-March, any sort of serious cold or snow is very unlikely here. Six weeks to go!

To get the Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society in the mood for spring, the February meeting (Sunday the 6th) will feature a program by Devan Parker about starting seeds under artificial lights. On February 19th, I'll be giving a talk to the Cactus and Succulent Society of Massachusetts about Conophytum, everyone's favorite genus of winter-growing succulent plants. And at the end of the month, Nutmeggers can look forward to the Connecticut Flower and Garden Show, where I'm giving a demonstration about succulents for the windowsill, and a slide show about Pelargonium (geranium relatives). The time until spring will fly by, I'm sure.

Viscum minimum: a Dwarf African Mistletoe

2010-12-01T16:29:00.006-05:00

Viscum minimum fruit emerging from its host.

Parasitic plants, which obtain some or all of their water and nutrients by attaching to a free-living host plant, seem to be unusually well represented in the floras of desert regions. Mistletoes (genus Viscum), probably the most familiar of vegetable parasites, may be encountered in arid places (and elsewhere) in the old and new worlds. Mistletoes are usually hemiparasitic, meaning that they extract water and minerals from their host, but are green and can manufacture some of their own nutritional needs via photosynthesis, like ordinary plants.

Viscum minimum is a minuscule mistletoe endemic to South Africa, where it grows inside of the succulent stems of euphorbias. Most of the time, V. minimum grows internally, with no indication of its presence on the exterior of the host plant. However, when it reproduces, the mistletoe’s greenish flowers and showy orange-red berries break through the euphorbia’s skin, in order for pollination and seed dispersal to take place.

Old plant of Euphorbia polygona ‘Snowflake.’

Viscum minimum is one of the few types of mistletoe that is ever cultivated outside of its native land. The host plant, usually Euphorbia polygona, is an easy to grow and attractive addition to a greenhouse or windowsill succulent collection. The mistletoe, which can be acquired either in the form of an infected euphorbia cutting or by smearing fresh, sticky seeds onto the surface of a suitable host, doesn’t cause significant harm to its host plant, and will produce crops of colorful fruit in time for the holidays year after year.

Frozen Flytraps

2010-11-09T16:06:00.004-05:00

Connecticut got its first slushy snowfall of the season yesterday, and I took this photo of the Venus' Flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) in pots outside of the UConn biology greenhouses. They'll be fine, and can in fact take quite a bit more cold than this. Flytraps aren't tropical plants at all, and in their native land (the coastal Carolinas), they are dormant in winter and receive a fair amount of frost, and the occasional snow. New England winters might be too much for them, though, especially fully exposed to the elements in pots out of the ground, so I'll soon move them to a refrigerated room (temps just above freezing) for a couple more months of cold dormancy.

Planted in the ground, Dionaea can sometimes survive winters in southern New England, even without mulch or other extra protection. I've seen plants make it through several years in local bog gardens, though they seem to suffer a bit in colder than average years, and don't come back in spring 100% of the time. With a mulch of pine needles, they seem to be pretty reliable.

Eriospermum paradoxum

2010-09-20T16:41:00.003-04:00

Cool nights and shorter days mean that winter-growing succulent plants are becoming active. Here is a pot of Eriospermum paradoxum, a tuberous plant from South Africa, blooming in cultivation in Connecticut. The flowers have a very strong fragrance, reminiscent of narcissus. After the flowers are finished, the tubers produce small leaves with a branched outgrowth that resembles a miniature Christmas tree. The leaves last until April or so, gathering weak winter sun to fuel the growth of the subterranean tubers, which will survive the summer heat in a dormant state before flowering again next autumn.

Fungus Among Us

2010-08-30T16:22:00.003-04:00

Calostoma cinnabarina

I think that the rain last week has been encouraging our mycelial forest friends, and over the weekend I found a bunch of these strange objects growing in the woods along the Fenton River in Mansfield Center. After a bit of poking around in mushroom books, I'm fairly confident that they are Calostoma cinnabarina, or Pretty Lips, a fungus with some similarities to puffballs, though apparently the two are not related. A gelatinous protective layer and inner membrane peel away from the puffball part when the spores ripen, creating a little pile of tapioca-looking jelly with curled up bits of membrane in it.

Sunflowers

2010-08-23T16:41:00.003-04:00

Helianthus annuus 'Mammoth Russian'

It's feeling like the waning days of summer here in Connecticut. Just the other day I took this photo out in a baking campus garden; today it's windy, cool and drizzling. Well, we can use the rain, and it's supposed to be back to heat and humidity by the weekend.

The Mealybug Destroyer

2010-08-05T15:51:00.004-04:00

Cryptolaemus feeding on a mealybug infestation on an ice plant (Aptenia).

The common name “Mealybug Destroyer” sounds like it might be part of the advertising for an overhyped, doubtfully effective gardening product, but when applied to the predatory beetle Cryptolaemus montrouzieri, it’s actually appropriate. Here at the University of Connecticut greenhouses, we’ve been trying to minimize the use of pesticides, and rely instead on beneficial insects and other biological controls for pests, as part of an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program. Cryptolaemus has been critical to our efforts to beat one of the worst enemies of indoor horticulture.

Cryptolaemus is a tropical lady beetle, related to the native and Asian lady beetles commonly found in gardens (and houses) in New England. Adult “crypts” are small, nondescript brown and black beetles, which eat mealybugs and mealybug eggs. Cryptolaemus larvae are what really earn the name Mealybug Destroyer, though. These are camouflaged to look like large, fast moving mealybugs, and they devour pests at a prodigious rate. They mostly go after Citrus Mealybug and Long-tailed Mealybug, but in a pinch they will settle for other insect pests; I’ve seen them make short work of an infestation of Brown Soft Scale, for instance.

Mealybug Destroyers do best in warm, humid conditions, and even in a greenhouse usually don’t survive through the winter. Adult beetles can be ordered through the mail in the spring, from specialist suppliers such as IPM Laboratories. Once a population of crypts gets established, it can quickly become a problem to find enough mealybug-infested plants to keep them fed.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to make use of Cryptolaemus in all but the largest home collections of plants. It’s fairly expensive to acquire a package of the beetles (the joke in the horticulture industry is that IPM stands for “I Pay More”), and you really need a large number of plants with a lot of mealies to support a population of Mealybug Destroyers. The beetles are far more sensitive to pesticide residues than the pests are, and probably won’t survive if systemic insecticides have been applied within the past six months, or possibly longer (pests evolve resistance to chemicals used to control them, but populations of beneficial insects have likely never been exposed to pesticides). Still, under the right circumstances, Cryptolaemus montrouzieri can be a devastatingly effective weapon in the battle against mealybugs.

Newport Flower Show 2010

2010-06-24T19:00:00.006-04:00

The Newport Flower Show starts up tomorrow. I was out there bright and early this morning to lend a hand with "passing" entries for the judged show, which basically meant checking for proper naming, making sure no pest-infested or otherwise unsuitable material got through, and filling in paperwork. It was a nice excuse to check out the show setup and a little bit of Newport, and catch up with New England plant people.

The show is held in and around Rosecliff, one of the 19th century mansions along Bellevue Avenue. It's a somewhat fancier venue than the Connecticut Flower Show's Hartford Convention Center.

Massachusetts cactus club bigwig Paul C. and his wife relax on the terrace. It was a hot day, but there was a pleasant sea breeze.

The theme of this year's show was Safari Flora & Fauna, so plants native to Africa were well represented, such as Art S.'s award-winning Aloe plicatilis being wheeled into place here.

Back in the registration tent, the succulent plant entries had all been processed and the action had moved on to cut flowers, so my duties were finished for the day.

Just in time for a late lunch at Rhode Island institution Flo's Clam Shack. The eats at Flo's were pretty typical deep fried seafood, probably a bit fresher and less oily than average for beach food joints.

I meandered down to the beach, but a storm was moving in (possibly remnants of the one that apparently trashed part of Bridgeport earlier in the day), so I decided on a quick retreat back to the safety of northeastern Connecticut.

New York Botanical Garden

2010-06-14T16:51:00.006-04:00

On Saturday, about 50 people from southern New England enjoyed a day at the New York Botanical Garden. The Connecticut and Massachusetts cactus clubs chartered a bus for the trip to the Bronx. The weather was fine, and the gardens seemed more spectacular than ever!

The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, home to a world class collection of exotic plants. The Victoria plants and other tropical water lilies weren't really out yet.

CCSS regular Sully in the New World Desert house, with a Boojum in the background.

The Lithops, Conophytum and other mesemb plants were in a glass case in the Old World Desert house. I think the glass is to prevent visitors from swiping or molesting them.

Theobroma cacao, the chocolate tree. The fruits were all pretty high up.

The Conservatory is slated for major renovations soon, so we got in our trip just in time. In the corners of the palm house there were some recently moved specimens, possibly intended as replacements for some of the old palms that are getting too large.

Cavendishia grandifolia, a blueberry relative in the highland tropical greenhouse. The NYBG has a long history of research in the neotropics (Central and South America), and their living collections from this area are especially good. Nobody else grows some of the plants they grow.

There is a huge area of gardens outside the Conservatory, too. The Rockefeller Rose Garden was just about at its peak.

The rose gardens were completely redone about 20 years ago.

Everyone who knows about carnivorous plants is always aghast at the Sarracenia (North American Pitcher Plants) growing on a seemingly dry slope in the acid-loving plant beds in the rock garden. The plants have persisted there for several years; I suspect the soil below the gravel stays pretty wet.

Trunk of Prunus serrula, the Birch Bark Cherry: the bark looks and feels like ribbon candy.

Hardy cactus expert John Spain admires the rock garden. Next month, the CCSS is meeting at John's house, where he will lead a workshop on making hypertufa troughs like the ones seen here (well, probably they won't turn out quite that nicely, but you can try).

Uncarina grandidieri

2010-05-27T16:22:00.003-04:00

Uncarina grandidieri is a small tree with a fat caudiciform base, originally from Madagascar. The eight foot high specimen at UConn flowers profusely every spring as it begins its growing season. During the warmer months, when Uncarina plants are active, they can be treated like tropicals, and watered and fertilized generously. In the winter, they are deciduous, and can be kept nearly dry.

Conophytum bachelorum: the Bachelors’ Cone Plant

2010-04-25T11:41:00.002-04:00

Conophytum bachelorum, with fresh leaves in September (the cone-shaped body is a pair of fused leaves containing water-storing tissue).

The whereabouts of Conophytum bachelorum was a long term, vexing mystery for students of mesembs (succulent plants in the family Aizoaceae) and living stones. Discovered in the late 1970s, the distinctively purplish button-like succulent was missing in action for decades, known only from dried herbarium specimens and a single living individual cultivated in England. In 2004, C. bachelorum was rediscovered on an obscure quartzite hill in the sparsely populated northwestern corner of South Africa, and a few seeds eventually made their way to mesemb enthusiasts such as myself.

As with many winter-active South African natives, the seeds germinated and grew strongly when planted in early autumn, and coddled for their early years with bright sun and regular doses of dilute fertilizer in the cool months, and some shade and misting in summer to prevent scorching. Conophytum bachelorum seems to be especially sensitive to summer sunburn, which proved fatal to seedlings in the collections of several experienced growers. In the wild, the plants grow close enough to the coast to experience frequent fog, which may explain how they get by in Namaqualand while having such thin skins.

Conophytum bachelorum in flower in March.

Conophytum bachelorum’s schedule not quite the same as that of the typical Conophytum. The plants flower over an extended period in spring, whereas the overwhelming majority of conos bloom in early autumn. The growing season of C. bachelorum is unusually early, with plants showing a strong tendency to start growing in the waning days of summer if water is available, and to go dormant in late winter (March or even February in the northern hemisphere), weeks or months before most winter-growers fold up shop. As a consequence, the plants flower when they look dormant, covered over by the freshly dried remains of their old leaves.

Young C. bachelorum plants in cultivation, dating from the rediscovery of the wild population, are now flowering and setting seed on a regular basis in several collections around the world. It may be a few more years, but soon enough this neat little succulent should become more generally available.

Miraculotuberum, a New Caudiciform Succulent

2010-04-01T07:55:00.005-04:00

Exciting discoveries in the plant world always seem to come from remote mountains in strange and foreign places, such as Canada. It came as a shock to the botanical community when a large and distinctive new caudex-forming succulent plant—Miraculotuberum stopandshopensis—was found right here in the northeastern United States.

Miraculotuberum stopandshopensis in the greenhouse of an anonymous collector.

Miraculotuberum was first collected in 2008, near Nyack, New York, by famed explorer and succulent plant enthusiast Dr. Don Javranos, seen in this video discussing his find. Little is known about the plant’s habitat, and the exact location is being kept secret. Presumably, M. stopandshopensis grows in a temperate desert environment, although desert conditions are uncommon in suburban New York. The plant exhibits several adaptations to life in an arid climate, including an absence of foliage leaves, and a thick waxy coating to prevent desiccation. The spectacular caudex of Miraculotuberum has a bitter taste and sulfurous smell, which deter herbivory by animals and children.

In cultivation, Miraculotuberum is challenging, and plants frequently fail to establish even under the best conditions. Given its northern range, Miraculotuberum is probably winter-hardy, and might make for an interesting addition to an outdoor cactus and succulent bed. Plants are not yet widely available, though they are offered on eBay, where large specimens imported from New York have sparked bidding wars among growers of caudiciform plants, and sold for thousands of dollars. Ironically, it is rumored that ignorant local people in Miraculotuberum’s native habitat sell specimen-size plants to unscrupulous nurserymen for as little as 19 cents per pound.

Signs of Spring

2010-03-27T17:39:00.003-04:00

Galanthus nivalis

I caught this clump of snowdrops during the freakishly warm weather last weekend. Temperatures have cooled off since then, but the snowdrops have faded, and a few daffodils located in warm sites are starting to open up.

King Protea

2010-03-17T16:30:00.003-04:00

Protea cynaroides or King Protea, the national flower of South Africa, is doing its thing in the UConn greenhouses right now. The flowers (technically flowering shoots composed of many small florets) last for weeks, and there are a couple of additional buds developing, so there should be a nice show for the rest of the spring. The bloom in the photo is the size of a dinner plate. It has a funny sort of chemical smell, not exactly floral but not unpleasant either. The artists among my readership might be reminded of the smell of kneaded eraser.

Nothern greenhouse collections don't seem to include proteas very often, which is a shame. They're not overly difficult in cultivation, and this King Protea flowers every year in Connecticut. I use a nutrient-poor, acidic soil (5 peat moss : 2 perlite : 1 horticultural charcoal), and keep the plants in a very sunny spot in a cool greenhouse. Members of the family Proteaceae are said to be sensitive to excess phosphorous, so it's probably best to fertilize cautiously, using a high-nitrogen formulation.

Marsh Botanic Gardens Hosts the CCSS

2010-03-12T16:30:00.006-05:00

Last weekend, the Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society held their monthly meeting at Yale's Marsh Botanic Gardens. The weather was about as good as it gets in early March, with lots of sun and jacket-free temperatures, and at least 40 people showed up. I was really impressed by the new greenhouses at Marsh, which just opened up last month. The desert plant room wasn't completely finished, but what was there looked great. I'm looking forward to returning sometime to see how they have progressed in filling up all that new space.

The cactus club inspects the new desert collection.

Curator Dave G. also let us tour the old Lord and Burnham greenhouses at Marsh B.G., which are much more cramped than the new facility, as well as being prone to flooding in rainy weather.

Butcher’s Broom: Ruscus aculeatus

2010-02-27T14:55:00.003-05:00

Ruscus aculeatus, or Butcher’s Broom, isn’t exactly the showiest plant in the Mediterranean plant collection here at the UConn greenhouses, but it frequently attracts the attention of more observant visitors. Ruscus looks a little like a grayish, knee-high holly bush from a distance, but when examined closely it reveals a puzzling characteristic: its tiny, green flowers and marble-sized red fruits emerge from the middle of what look like its leaves. Normally, we think of flowers growing at the end of stems. Botanical science confirms common impressions about plant morphology in this case; developmentally, it would be just about impossible for a flower to grow directly from a leaf.

The mystery of flower-bearing leaves in Butcher’s Broom is solved when we consider the possibility that those pointy, flat greenish appendages might not be real leaves at all. Indeed, the evidence from detailed study of the position and development of leafy structures in Ruscus indicates that they are really cladodes (sometimes called phylloclades), or flattened, green, leaf-like shoots. The real leaves of Ruscus are reduced to tiny, scale-like remnants, sometimes visible at the base of the cladodes in young shoots. So, Ruscus flowers are borne on stems, just like in any other plant, but the stems have a very unusual form.

Of the half dozen species of Ruscus, R. aculeatus seems to have the spikiest, thickest “leaves,” and is generally the most suitable for growing in collections of succulent plants. It can take soil that dries out completely between waterings, but is also surprisingly tolerant of low light levels. As a houseplant, Ruscus isn’t quite as unkillable as its distant relatives the Snake Plants (Sansevieria), but it still requires persistence and special effort to actually snuff one. Butcher’s Broom can take all sorts of temperature regimes, but does best with cool winters. Growth is always very slow, but a healthy plant will flower and send up new branches from its underground rhizomes when the days are short.

Ruscus aculeatus is not especially common in cultivation, but a few mail order nurseries (such as Plant Delights in North Carolina) do offer it. Florists use other species of Ruscus as “foliage” in arrangements, dry or fresh, though the cut stems can’t be used to start new plants, since they do not root. For those with a truly black thumb, florists sometimes stock fake silk and plastic Ruscus.

Pinguicula lusitanica - the Pale Butterwort

2010-01-24T13:37:00.003-05:00

It's the dead of winter here in Connecticut, and Pinguicula lusitanica is looking its best. The biggest rosettes in the photo are only about 2 cm across, but that's about the maximum size for this annual to short-lived perennial carnivore from the western Mediterranean and Atlantic coast of Europe and northern Africa. The cultivation of this funny little butterwort perplexed me, until I realized that it is primarily winter-growing: the plants sulk in hot weather, and the seeds are reluctant to sprout in spring. It's now something of a weed in the carnivore collection out in the temperate greenhouse.

The leaves of Pinguicula lusitanica are distinctive, with edges curled over to the extent that they are almost tubular. The exposed part of the upper leaf surface is covered with hairs, and the sticky glandular trichomes are mostly hidden away under the curled margins (you can see some glandular surfaces exposed on the leaf at 7 o'clock on the rosette at left). Now I'm curious about how the plants trap insects in habitat: do the hairs guide prey into the overhanging part, where they are swamped in mucilage and digested? The traps seem almost pitcher plant-ish.

Help Wanted

2010-01-13T17:08:00.002-05:00

A quick heads-up for the plant professionals out there: the University of Connecticut Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Plant Growth Facility is now hiring. This is a full-time position is for a horticulturist specializing in tropical plants. The details are available at the greenhouse website.

Diplosoma luckhoffii

2009-12-25T14:33:00.003-05:00

Diplosoma luckhoffii (MRO209, east of Bitterfontein, Western Cape), a little over a year old from seed. Flower about 1 cm wide.

Diplosoma luckhoffii is a tiny winter-growing succulent from South Africa. The plants are completely dormant for much of the year, persisting as button-like bodies at or just below the soil surface, protected by a layer of dried up leaf tissue. When rain and heavy dew wet the soil in the cooler months, Diplosoma cracks out of its shell and sends up a pair of mushy green leaves, covered with sparkling, bubbly water-storage cells ("bladder cells"). Flowers are produced in mid- or late winter. The flowers often don't open very well, at least in cultivation, but set seed easily, and even self-pollinate sometimes.

Quartz flats in the northern Knersvlakte, where I collected Diplosoma seed in 2004.

Diplosoma luckhoffii is endemic to the Knersvlakte, a very clearly defined patch of desert only a few hours drive north of Cape Town. The Knersvlakte is characterized by low, rolling topography with frequent patches of snow-white quartz gravel. Not all of that quartz is entirely natural, and one occasionally runs across pieces that were shaped into blades by stone age people. Diplosoma, along with a diverse assemblage of other dwarf succulents in the Aizoaceae (mesemb family) and other families, lives only on soil with a dense cover of quartz rubble; the quartz moderates the temperature at ground level, and makes it possible for stubby little plants to survive the summer without cooking.

The cultivation of D. luckhoffii is fairly difficult. The plants are short lived, not usually surviving for more than three or four years even under ideal conditions, and as a consequence are never available except as seed, as far as I have seen. Diplosoma seed is almost as fine as dust, and should be sown in autumn on the surface of a mineral soil (sandy loam leavened with perlite, vermiculite and course sand) in the pot where they will stay permanently. Seedlings and mature plants alike demand brilliant sunshine, cool night temperatures and careful watering when active. The soil should dry out slightly at the surface between waterings, but remain slightly moist below ground at all times. During the warm-weather dormancy, pots of Diplosoma can be left dry, aside from an occasional misting on sunny days. When happy, Diplosoma sometimes flowers at the end of its first season, though more often the plants rot or terminally desiccate while still pinhead-size.

I have never heard of Diplosoma being successfully cultivated outside of a cool, airy and brightly-lit greenhouse, but I know someone who is trying it under fluorescent lights (right next to the tubes, for maximum illumination). It will be interesting if she succeeds!

The Shortest Day

2009-12-21T16:54:00.002-05:00

Happy (northern winter) solstice! The day will be 1 second longer tomorrow, in my neck of the woods. This photograph is actually of a minor snow event earlier this month, not the Christmas air travel schedule crusher from this past weekend. The current snow pack is much more impressive, but not as pretty.

Epiphyte Tree at UConn Greenhouses

2009-12-09T16:36:00.004-05:00

One of the big events this past fall here at the University of Connecticut greenhouses has been the completion of an epiphyte tree in the entryway, which had previously been somewhat cramped and lacking in focus. The new entryway provides space for tours to assemble, and a point of interest to draw visitors in.

Epiphytes are plants that live on the surface of other plants, using their hosts for support but not acting as parasites. About the only epiphytes that occur naturally here in Connecticut are tiny mosses and liverworts that grow on tree trunks, but in tropical climates trees may be festooned with diverse communities of orchids, bromeliads, ferns and others.

The UConn epiphyte tree was put together over the summer, with many hours of volunteer help from the Connecticut Orchid Society. It is constructed around a skeleton of steel pipes clamped together into a hexagonal trunk, with additional pipes jutting out above head level to create branches. The trunk is covered with panels of expanded metal, which do a good job of rounding out the angular underlying structure. All of the basic structural materials were recycled from old bench parts from the greenhouses.

Clint Morse and members of the C.O.S. assemble the epiphyte tree's internal skeleton.

Probably the most time-consuming part of the construction of the epiphyte tree was covering it with bark. We used natural cork oak bark, which is harvested—sustainably, without killing the trees—in the western Mediterranean region. The C.O.S. and greenhouse manager Clint Morse laboriously fit pieces of bark together, sometimes cutting them to fit or softening them with steam in a large autoclave to mold them into the right shape, then wired them in place. Gaps were filled in with slivers of bark glued in place, or clumps of coconut fiber. The branches of the epiphyte tree were covered with special ordered bark tubes (taken whole from smaller cork oak trunks).

Some of the initial plantings were done as the bark was being fit into place, using epiphytes already established on pieces of cork. More plants were wired or glued into place later, and these should anchor themselves and spread with time. We’re still working on fine-tuning the tree and its plantings, but stop in and check it out if you’re in the area!

Elizabeth Park C&S Display

2009-11-23T16:20:00.003-05:00

Putnam Greenhouse at Elizabeth Park, Hartford.

I was over at Elizabeth Park in Hartford this weekend, to drop off some plants and fliers for an educational display of cactus and succulent plants put together by the Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society. I met Lisa Silvestri of the Friends of Elizabeth Park there, and we got the plants to a favorable place in the public greenhouse, then talked for a while about plants and the park. The F.o.E.P. even provided lunch at the Pond House, which was a treat.

The display is mostly basic stuff, but maybe it will get people interested in succulent plants or attract some new members to the CCSS. Stop in and check it out: the display will be there until March or so. Next year, I'd like to get the cactus club to Elizabeth Park for one of our official meetings, so it was nice to make some contacts with the Friends.

The Tale of the Red Hand

2009-10-30T16:48:00.004-04:00

The Old English Cemetery, Sutherland. Photo via Kambrokind Guest House.

One of the few “true” ghost stories that I know happens to have a botanical and succulent plant theme. As with all true ghost stories, it happened to a friend of a friend who shall remain nameless, many years ago, and has certainly changed with each telling, probably in significant ways, to turn it into a satisfying narrative, and to make it more frightening and inexplicable. I don’t for a moment think that the cold, high veld around Sutherland is really haunted by a shambling lich or some other, less describable terror from beyond. But still, I will be tempted to double-check the windows the next time I park my car to take a nap after a long drive.

Sutherland is far back in the mountains to the northeast of Cape Town, South Africa. I recall flying over the area on the way to the Fairest Cape one July—at the height of the southern winter—and glimpsing a dimly lit, snow-covered landscape through a break in the clouds. The sight was unsettling, ghosts or no, for someone fresh from summer in New England and contemplating a month of camping in the desert. Sutherland is one of the coldest places in Africa, with rocky plains in every direction sparsely vegetated with low scrub and hardy little succulents.

A certain respected South African botanist was doing fieldwork around Sutherland in the middle of winter. At the end of a long day of driving, hiking and collecting specimens, he found himself on a little-used road, miles from nowhere, and decided to park, get some rest and continue plant hunting in the morning. After supper out of a can, heated on a camp stove by the side of the road, he decided that the weather was going to be too frosty for sleeping under the stars. So, he got into the car, reclined the seat, and got settled in his sleeping bag.

The temperature was bitterly cold that night, by African standards if not by the standards here in Connecticut, and the botanist closed the windows tight, and wore his jacket inside of the sleeping bag. The chill was still uncomfortable, and he was awake for some time before falling into an uneasy sleep.

Some time after midnight, he awoke with the feeling that he was no longer alone. Nervously, he looked around the car, and saw a disembodied hand—emaciated, deep bloody red and faintly internally phosphorescent—reaching for him from out of the dark, right inside of the cab with him. He just about leapt out of his sleeping bag in a panicked attempt to escape the hand, but the spectral visitor vanished almost as soon as it was seen.

There are a number of possible explanations for the Red Hand: certainly, people commonly experience strange and sometimes realistic hallucinations when emerging from troubled sleep. One can’t entirely rule out the actions of living humans, though the area was very remote, and the blasted, treeless landscape didn’t offer many places where a thief could have hid when the frightened botanist searched the area around his car. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the incident was this: the night was frigid and the botanist was certain that he had closed the windows to keep out the wind before going to sleep. But afterwards, he found that the window in the direction from which the hand had approached was rolled down part of the way.

Autumn in New England

2009-10-16T13:11:00.003-04:00

It's been sort of a dreary summer in Connecticut, and the fall foliage isn't really the best this year. Still, the view from Spring Hill in Storrs isn't too shabby.

A uniform silver haze in the sky the other day gave rise to some unusual light effects: note the ring around the sun, with bright spots at 9:00, 12:00 (and presumably 3:00 behind the low clouds). Was this a portent of bad weather?

Yes, as a matter of fact, it was a portent of bad weather. Wet snow flurries fell yesterday afternoon through this morning, on and off. Snow before the leaves fall is pretty rare, and it was fortunate that it wasn't cold or heavy enough for much accumulation: heavy snow sticking on the leaves of deciduous trees can cause serious damage. There weren't any downed branches or power outages that I noticed, and the snow is gone now.

Talk in Massachusetts

2009-10-16T12:30:00.003-04:00

Pelargonium oblongatum (section Hoarea), a tuberous caudiciform from Namaqualand in South Africa's Northern Cape, in flower in late spring.

I've got a talk coming up this Saturday, at the Cactus and Succulent Society of Massachusetts, at Tower Hill Botanical Garden near Worcester. The meeting runs 1:00 to 4:00, and I'll probably start yakking at around 2:30.

My topic is going to be "Succulent Pelargonium." Pelargoniums are members of the geranium family, primarily native to South Africa. The usual garden center geraniums are hybrid Pelargonium, but the genus also includes probably 150+ species from arid habitats with succulent stems, succulent roots, or even somewhat succulent leaves. My talk will be a basic introduction to the group, covering a range of succulent species, with diversions into cultivation and propagation. I'll bring along some extra seedlings for people to try at home, too.

I'll be doing a similar talk for the Philadelphia Cactus and Succulent Society in November.

Anacampseros hillii

2009-09-22T17:18:00.004-04:00

Anacampseros hillii is flowering for me right now. This plant was only described in 2008, and is hardly cultivated anywhere, so I've been trying to produce some seed to spread around. It hasn't been easy to propagate: the flowers only open for a few hours starting around 2:00-3:00 in the afternoon, and they are self incompatible (pollen from a different individual is needed to make seed). My two plants never seem to synchronize properly, though I did manage to succeed once by saving some pollen from plant A in the fridge, and applying it to plant B when it bloomed a week later. I think I managed the same trick this year; we'll see in a few weeks. Oddly, the original description (Williamson, G. 2008. Aloe 45) has the plants as being self-fertile. It may be that there is variation in the presence of incompatibility.

Anacampseros hillii is truly minute, which probably explains why it eluded detection for so long while growing on rather well-botanized quartz flats in the Knersvlakte north of the relatively major town of Vanrhynsdorp. The flowers are about 1 cm across, and the plant is normally represented above ground by just one or two tiny blackish green leaves and a nub of hairy stem. The spindle-shaped tuber underground has about the bulk of a peanut or two, sans shell.

The plant is probably related to the similarly dwarf Anacampseros comptonii, which grows fairly close by, though in quite a different habitat on cooler, wetter elevations. Anacampseros is part of the Portulacaceae (purslane family), better known for the garden annual portulaca.

Hondebal in Flower

2009-09-08T16:25:00.004-04:00

Larryleachia cf. marlothii, the Hondebal, in cultivation at the University of Connecticut, September 2009.

The Hondebal ("dog ball" in Afrikaans...) is a stem-succulent in the Apocynaceae (milkweed family) with a fairly wide distribution in the arid parts of Namibia and western South Africa. The taxonomy of the Hondebals is about as convoluted as it could be for a group with probably just two species, which have been assigned to seven different genera at various times. The name "Trichocaulon," which is how I originally learned them, is a sentimental favorite, but I think they're more properly placed in the genus Larryleachia. For now. I grew the plants in the photo from seed that was labeled at L. cactiformis, but I suspect that they are really the other species, L. marlothii, based on the pale, speckled flowers.

Hondebals can be finicky, but can also grow rapidly if they are kept happy. These plants are flowering at only about a year and a half old. I use a sandy soil with very little organic content, and keep the plants in a really dry, sunny spot right next to the Lithops. So far, Larryleachia has been doing better than many of the other stapeliads in the UConn greenhouse, possibly because the plants are relatively tolerant of winter chills.

Welwitschia Cones

2009-08-25T17:35:00.005-04:00

Welwitschia mirabilis at the University of Connecticut.

Welwitschia mirabilis is a gymnosperm (cone bearing, non-flowering seed plant) endemic to the Namib Desert in southwestern Africa. Welwitschia is in a category of its own in the plant kingdom, morphologically speaking: seedlings produce exactly two foliage leaves before the shoot apex aborts. The resulting stubby trunk with pair of strap-like leaves can live for centuries, gradually expanding by growing from the region where the leaves are attached.

There is an extensive mythology surrounding the cultivation of Welwitschia, but the plants aren’t as difficult as one might be led to believe. They don’t actually need to be grown in tall, skinny drainpipes, and may in fact benefit from planting in a wide container (or in a ground bed in a greenhouse), which allows room for an extensive network of surface roots to develop. It is possible to transplant them, though Welwitschia roots are a bit on the delicate side. They can also grow fairly quickly: the large mature plants at the University of Connecticut in the photos are only about 12 years old. For the past several summers, these plants have produced cones.

Welwitschia plants are either male or female (i.e., they are dioecious). So far here at UConn, we only have had fully formed cones on male plants like the one in the photo above, but the production of seed should be possible, eventually, as more of our plants reach maturity.

Certain aspects of the reproductive biology of Welwitschia and its relatives in the plant order Gnetales are similar to reproduction in flowering plants, and for a time Welwitschia and the flowering plants were considered to be fairly closely related. More recent information on the evolutionary biology of the vegetable kingdom has pretty well sunk this idea, though, placing Welwitschia and friends much closer to pines and other conifers. Likely fossil relatives of Welwitschia, with similar leaves and reproductive structures, are known from North and South America. Some of the fossil species were apparently tree-like, with branches.

Organic Pest Control, the Mad Botany Way

2009-08-24T17:00:00.004-04:00

So, there was an outbreak of fruit flies in the kitchen last week. The place looked like an introductory genetics lab in May, when the students start to get lazy about disposing of their old Drosophila cultures. After more prosaic control options--such as cleaning out the compost bucket--were exhausted, I starting thinking about the possibilities for mopping up the abundant fruit fly stragglers. If only I had something sticky like flypaper, with a sweet smell to draw the insect pests to their doom...

Then I remembered that I have access to Drosphyllum lusitanicum, the Portuguese Sundew or Dewy Pine, a large carnivorous plant from the western Mediterranean with leaves that drip with mucilaginous goo and smell strongly of honey.

Drosophyllum turns out to be brutally efficient at offing Drosophila. The first flies were caught before I even set the plant down by the sink, and within an hour it looked like the majority of the infestation was glued to the leaves and in the process of being digested. I brought the Drosophyllum back to its greenhouse lair after a couple of days: it's not the sort of plant that would survive in typical kitchen conditions for long. Besides, there wasn't anything left for it to eat.

For those tempted to try growing their own Drosophyllum, there are cultural notes at the ICPS website.

Hail to the King, Baby

2009-07-31T16:21:00.003-04:00

Drosera regia in cultivation in Connecticut, June 2009. Leaves about 40 cm (16 inches) long.

Drosera regia, the King Sundew, is one of the giants among carnivorous plants, apparently growing close to a meter tall in some situations. Its natural range is a small patch of mountainous terrain north of Cape Town, South Africa, and it occupies an evolutionarily isolated branch of the sundew family tree, being the only surviving representative of a very early-diverging lineage. King Sundews are uncommon in cultivation, having a reputation for being slow-growing and temperamental. These plants at the University of Connecticut were started from seed collected in Bainskloof, South Africa, and are flowering for the first time at age 4.

Drosera regia flower.

I had several individual King Sundews flowering at the same time, so I cross-pollinated them. Six weeks later, the first seed capsules have started to ripen, and it looks like pollination was successful. Even seeds are big in D. regia: about the size of poppyseed, which is gigantic by Drosera standards.

Drosera regia, ripe capsule and seeds (pencil tip for scale).

Jerry Barad's 53rd Open House

2009-07-13T16:41:00.009-04:00

Jerry Barad discusses salvaging plantlets from a favorite variegated Agave potatorum, which was in the process of dying after it flowered.

For more than half a century, Jerry and Bea Barad have been hosting an annual open house at their spectacular private collection of cacti and succulents in New Jersey. This year, the Massachusetts and Connecticut cactus clubs decided to work together to charter a bus down to Jerry's place for the big event.

Dr. Barad made a living as a gynecologist before his retirement, but in his free time he is also a serious student of succulent plants who has traveled extensively in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and the Canary Islands, and published his findings in national and international journals. His area of specialization is stapeliads (succulents in the Apocynaceae, or milkweed family), but he grows pretty much everything. Outside of stapeliads, his collections of Haworthia and Echeveria are especially impressive.

Stapeliad festival.

Stapelia vetula, which has dropped some of its milkweed-like seeds to the left of the flower.

Jerry has two greenhouses. The smaller one is devoted mainly to the Crassulaceae: Echeveria, Crassula, and other members of the stonecrop family. The larger, older greenhouse is divided into halves, with a warm section given over to stapeliads, pachypodiums and other more tropical plants, and a cooler section with cacti, Haworthia, mesembs and more.

Variegated Haworthia truncata. Nothing that a little 2, 4-D wouldn't clear up. I'm not a fan of variegates, but actually, that is impressive.

Outside of the greenhouse, the grounds are like a miniature botanical garden/zoo, with hardy cactus and succulent rockeries, koi pond, bamboo grove, orchards, sheep pasture, a giant vegetable garden and carefully tended borders with annuals and dozens of large Brugmansia (Angel's Trumpet) plants that are planted out every spring, then dug out and stored in a cool garage all winter. It must be an enormous job to take care of it all, but Jerry does have hired help.

The view from the house. The greenhouses are behind the clump of bamboo (Phyllostachys aureosulcata?) at left.

The trip went smoothly, and I think everyone had a great day photographing plants, meeting fellow enthusiasts from all over the region, and just lounging by the pool. I'll be looking forward to visiting the Barads again some time!

Connecticut visitors Martha B., Bill B. and Ken M. between the koi pond and the swimming pool.

Echeveria and other Mexican Crassulaceae in the smaller greenhouse.

Impatiens mirabilis, a semi-succulent lithophyte (plant that grows on rocks) from tropical Southeast Asia.

Euphorbia piscidermis, a remarkable example of evolutionary convergence with the unrelated cactus genus Pelecyphora.

Me next to a giant Adenia (A. fruticosa?), which apparently grew from a piece of stem that Jerry left by the post many decades ago.

Carnivorous Plants at Tolland Marsh Pond

2009-06-14T16:16:00.010-04:00

Tolland Marsh Pond, May 31, 2009. Sarracenia flower at lower center.

Tolland Marsh Pond is a rather large (half a mile north to south) wetland, located in my neighborhood in the northeastern corner of Connecticut. The waters of the pond itself are acidic and dark, and ringed with a wide swampy margin of sedges, sphagnum moss, and thickets of blueberry and buttonbush. This is the kind of place where carnivorous plants grow, and in a recent trip to the pond I managed to find several different species of insect-eating greenery.

Sarracenia purpurea ssp. purpurea. Note mosquitoes in lower left pitcher; these may be Wyeomia smithii, a pitcher plant commensal.

The most impressive carnivorous plant native to New England is the Purple Pitcher Plant, Sarracenia purpurea. The pitcher plants were in full bloom when I checked them in late May. The dark maroon flowers attract pollinating bees, and are held well above the modified, water-filled leaves.

Sarracenia purpurea flower, about 2 inches across.

The leaves are the business end of the plant; the part that actually traps and kills insects, then breaks them down in order to obtain nitrogen and other nutrients that are in short supply in bogs. Unlike some carnivorous plants, Sarracenia purpurea does not move. Prey is attracted by the coloration of the leaf and nectar that it secretes. Unlucky critters slide into the pool of liquid inside, drown and are digested by bacterial action.

Pitcher plants and cranberries. The fruit must have come through the winter, but it was still edible, if a bit mushy.

At Tolland Marsh Pond, pitcher plants are present in a few open, boggy areas, but don’t seem to be tremendously abundant. I’ve seen a few dozen plants, but there are large areas of potential habitat that I haven’t checked.

Drosera rotundifolia. A few plants of this species are visible in the cranberry photo above, too.

Drosera intermedia favors wetter, muckier parts of the bog.

The pond is also home to both of the species of sundew that occur in inland Connecticut, Drosera rotundifolia and D. intermedia. Sundews have glandular tentacles on their leaves that secrete sticky mucilage, and trap small insects. The tentacles and leaves slowly fold around and digest their prey. Drosera rotundifolia grows all around the pond in sphagnum moss, or on half submerged waterlogged wood. Drosera intermedia isn’t as widespread, and I saw just a few patches of it in mucky peat in open areas on floating mats of moss and vegetation.

Tolland Marsh Pond: edge of the marshy parts of the area viewed through laurel thicket, White Oak and Red Maple. There is a pond out there, but you can't see it from here.

Tolland Marsh Pond isn’t easily accessible, which does have the beneficial effect of limiting the number of visitors to a fairly fragile habitat. There are a few informal trails around the pond, but my botanizing has involved a good deal of bushwhacking through laurel thicket (Mountain Laurel is pretty, but it is a slow and scratchy process to cross a dense stand of it). The marshes where the carnivorous plants occur are treacherous as well, with floating hummocks and sphagnum mats providing doubtful footing over sunless water and peat slurry of indeterminate depth. Tolland Marsh Pond also has Poison Sumac (Toxicodendron vernix), which is a bit like Poison Ivy, but twice as toxic and as tall as a lilac. Nasty, nasty stuff, which normal people will fortunately never run into, since it is almost entirely confined to bogs.

Tolland Marsh Pond, January 2009.

Sarracenia purpurea is evergreen, and although the leaves are low to the ground and can be hidden by even a little snow, the old seed heads are distinctive and fairly tall. So, winter is a good time to explore bogs for Purple Pitcher Plant populations. Places that are inaccessible in summer--too solid to be navigable by boat, but too unstable to negotiate safely on foot--can be reached by an easy walk after a long cold spell has frozen the landscape solid. And, there are no leaves on the Poison Sumac to worry about brushing up against.

Two Sarracenia purpurea flower stalks sticking above the snow (lower left and center).

I first found pitcher plants at Tolland Marsh Pond by taking advantage of good conditions for frozen bog walks this past winter. It would have been easier to find the plants if there hadn't been so much snow, but the old seed heads are fairly easy to spot, and seem to persist well into the cold season. There were even seeds still present in the capsules in January.

A little digging reveals the rest of the plant. Sarracenia purpurea leaves tend to turn solid red in winter, possibly to protect against light damage while the plants are dormant. The pitcher plants that I've seen in winter at Tolland Marsh Pond were close to open water in the center of the wetland, while the ones that I've been able to check on in summer were near solid land around the edge. In between, there is a stretch of possible habitat where I haven't looked. Time to think about another expedition!

Aloe dichotoma: the Quiver Tree

2009-06-01T16:16:00.003-04:00

An Aloe dichotoma forest east of Ratelpoort, Northern Cape, South Africa (August, 2004).

In Namaqualand, in the arid northwestern corner of South Africa, about the closest thing to a forest that a traveler in search of shade will find are groves of Quiver Trees—Aloe dichotoma, or Kokerboom in Afrikaans—growing on rocky slopes. At about 10 to 20 feet high, Quiver Trees are giants of the succulent plant world, if on the small side by ordinary tree standards.

The forest of Aloe dichotoma in the photo is located near Ratelpoort in central Namaqualand, where some of the finest stands of this species that I have seen occur. Quiver Trees are widespread in the arid parts of southern Africa, growing naturally throughout much of the Northern Cape Province in the RSA, and north well into Namibia. There is quite a bit of variation in the form of the plants, and a short, highly branched form found in the northern part of the species’ range is sometimes recognized as a separate entity, Aloe ramosissima.

The common names Quiver Tree and Kokerboom both refer to the former usage of hollowed-out A. dichotoma stems as containers for arrows, by Khoisan people. Aloe dichotoma has been put to other ethnobotanical uses, as well. In the not too distant past in the hinterlands of South Africa, farmers without electricity would fashion A. dichotoma wood into boxes that served as crude refrigerators. The wood is very light and porous, and if kept wet by a drip of water a Kokerboom container apparently stays quite cool from evaporation. I actually saw a Kokerboom refrigerator outside of a farmhouse in Bushmanland, years ago, though the device had been idle for some time.

Aloe dichotoma seedling, about a foot high at four years of age.

The homeland of the Quiver Tree receives its rain in winter, for the most part, but cultivated A. dichotoma plants pretty much seem to grow whenever water is available. Ordinary cactus and succulent soil mixes and watering regimes seem to work well with the Kokerboom, though it is not nearly as tolerant of poor light as its houseplant cousin, Aloe vera. Seed is usually available from Silverhill Seeds, and can quickly yield nice little plants, especially if the seedlings are given plenty of root run. I started my seedlings in the autumn, though I wouldn’t be overly surprised if it was possible to germinate seed in other seasons.

Aloe dichotoma with Connecticut Yankee for scale. The landscape, with domes of red gneiss/granite, is typical of Namaqualand. This is the farm Namaras, southeast of Springbok (July, 2004).

Lady's Slippers at Mansfield Hollow

2009-05-25T17:32:00.004-04:00

Memorial Day is usually flowering time for Cypripedium acaule (Pink Lady's Slipper), a native orchid that occurs here and there in northeastern Connecticut. Last weekend, I checked out a few local populations that I knew from previous years, and didn't see much in the way of flowers or buds, so I figured it was going to be a bad year for Lady's Slippers. However, poking around Mansfield Hollow State Park today, I ran across some really impressive stands of this somewhat uncommon wildflower. There was a little evidence of damage from deer and two-legged vermin (one plant pulled up and left by a trail), but also many dozens of plants at the peak of bloom.

The Mansfield Hollow and Mansfield Center region is underlain by thick layers of rough, nutrient-poor sand and gravel left over from the glaciers. The trees are mostly White Pine and various oaks, and there are blasted heaths of bare sand where vegetation has never managed to recolonize old roads or gravel pits. There's a neat overview of the local geology here. However, areas with exceptionally poor soil like this are always home to interesting plants.

Dry, acidic woods like these are the typical home of Cypripedium acaule. The plants seem to favor somewhat open sites in the forest, and patches of Lady's Slippers tend to come and go over the years as old sites get overgrown and new gaps open up. The long, toothy leaves in the background are an American Chestnut sprout, another frequent component of the flora in this type of habitat.

In the harshest spots where the orchids hang on, they're shorter than the plants deeper in the woods. This was a population under some stunted pines near an open gravel slope; the canopy was thin enough and the soil dry and poor enough that there were also patches of Reindeer Lichen (Cladonia rangiferina).

Pink Lady's Slipper is protected in Connecticut (doubly so in state parks), so visitors should tread lightly around the plants, and not pick or dig them under any circumstances. In any event, the plants need very specialized conditions to grow and are nearly impossible to transplant (gardeners should not take that as challenge! Seriously, it is cruel and wrong to swipe these plants from the wild), and are best enjoyed in situ.

CSSM Show at Tower Hill

2009-05-16T19:37:00.002-04:00

The third annual Cactus and Succulent Society of Massachusetts Show is going on this weekend, at the Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Mass. I was there early this morning for judging duties, and was impressed by the quality of the plants on display and the enthusiasm of the CSSM membership.

The sales area included about half a dozen vendors selling C&S, rock garden plants, pottery and even Amorphophallus corms.

The oranges were moved outside of the Orangerie for the summer, wrapped in fabric temporarily until they acclimate to the sun, I assume.

The territory freed up inside of the Orangerie was used for the judged cactus and succulent show. The Tower Hill greenhouse was one of the best settings I've ever seen for a plant show; natural lighting and an airy space really make a difference.

The grounds at Tower Hill are beautiful, if you need a break from cacti. The lilacs are just a little past their peak this weekend.

Lachenalia patula: a Bulb with Succulent Leaves

2009-05-01T16:18:00.003-04:00

Lachenalia patula in late March. Material from Liebendal, near Vredendal, Western Cape, South Africa.

Bulbs with truly succulent aboveground leaves are almost unheard of: the whole point of having a bulb is that the foliage leaves can be active when growing conditions are optimal, and be dropped as soon as heat, drought or cold brings growth to a halt. In the majority of bulbous plants, even those from deserts, the only significant storage of water and nutrients occurs in the modified subterranean leaves that form the bulb itself. Lachenalia patula is almost unique*, as a bulb with chunky, low-surface-area foliage leaves full of water-storing tissue.

Lachenalia patula is a winter-growing bulb from arid areas in the Western Cape of South Africa. As far as I know, it is restricted to the southern parts of a desolate-looking but botanically rich area called the Knersvlakte, on flats and rolling hills often covered with white quartz pebbles. The bulbs of L. patula are small compared to the rest of the plant, only about 1 cm across, and covered in blackish tunics. Most of the approximately 70 species of Lachenalia come from seasonally moist habitats in the winter-rainfall zone of South Africa, and have thin leaves. Lachenalia patula’s succulent leaves may be a special adaptation to harsh conditions in the Knersvlakte.

In cultivation, L. patula needs very strong sun, and does well in cramped pots of poor, well-drained soil. In winter, the soil should be kept just slightly moist at all times: don’t let it stay soggy, but be sure that the leaves don’t start to wilt. The flowers tend to emerge in late March for me, and have a moderately strong sweet smell. They always seem to bloom about a week too early to look good for the CCSS Show. The plants rapidly go deciduous in April, as the seed ripens. As with other winter bulbs, the pot can be stored somewhere out of the way and neglected during the long warm weather dormancy.

Lachenalia patula can be propagated by seed, which are best sown in early autumn, and take two to three years to yield flowering-sized bulbs. The seedlings are agreeably peculiar little things, with perfectly cylindrical leaves, as opposed to the channeled leaves of adult plants. Like other lachenalias, L. patula can also be started from leaf cuttings, which are most likely to succeed if taken early in the growing season, as soon as the leaves are expanded.

*A few species of Drimia and Ornithogalum, including the weird O. unifoliatum, also have convincingly succulent foliage leaves.

Sarracenia in Bloom

2009-04-17T16:56:00.002-04:00

It's been about a month and a half since the Sarracenia plants finished their winter nap in cold storage, and many of them are flowering. This one is Sarracenia flava, the Yellow Pitcher Plant, a carnivore native to the southeastern United States from Virginia to Florida. The particular form in the photo, without any red markings around the pitcher mouths, is relatively common in the Carolinas, according to Donald Schnell in Carnivorous Plants of the United States and Canada.

Sarracenia flava is an imposing thing, as carnivorous plants go, and this one has leaves about 25 inches (64 cm) tall. When it is placed outside in the summer, the pitchers fill up almost to their tops with trapped flies, wasps and yellow jackets.

Connecticut Cactus & Succulent Show

2009-04-02T16:32:00.002-04:00

Conophytum plants, starting to go dormant.

This weekend is the Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society's annual show and sale, at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury. The show is always a good time, and totally free of charge, apart from whatever you might be tempted into spending at the vendors or the auction. I'll be giving a short talk about living stones (such as Lithops and Conophytum) on Saturday at 3:15. Maybe I'll see some of you there!

Spring, This Time for Real

2009-03-17T16:16:00.003-04:00

Flower shows in February are nice, but actual spring weather has now arrived outside in Connecticut. This is the Snow Crocus, Crocus tommasinianus, always one of the first spring flowers.

There was no shortage of honeybees around the flowers a little later in the day. Meanwhile, back inside the greenhouse, conophytums and other winter-growing succulents are looking bedraggled and ready for their summer dormancy.

Century Plant Seedlings: 99 Years 11 Months to Go

2009-03-14T10:48:00.008-04:00

Agave filifera ssp. shidigera seedlings. Can you spot the aphid, which I didn't notice until after I downloaded the photo?

Last fall I wrote about the blooming of the Agave filifera ssp. schidigera plant in the University of Connecticut greenhouses. At the time, I was a little doubtful that I would get any seeds from the plant, since I did not have another individual available with which to cross pollinate it. However, I did attempt to self pollinate some of the flowers. It turns out that I needn't have worried: the Century Plant produced hundreds of fruits, even from flowers that I didn't physically pollinate.

The university's A. filifera didn't seem to be completely self-fertile; most of the seeds were small, white, and didn't germinate. But, each capsule contained a dozen viable, well-formed black seeds, so there was more than enough material to replace the parent plant, now in its terminal decline.

Ripe Agave filifera ssp. shidigera fruits.

I harvested and planted the seeds as soon as the fruits started to dry out and open, about four months after flowering. The seeds were sown in ordinary cactus and succulent mix (2 peat-based potting mix : 2 sand : 1 pumice : 1 Turface, more or less), lightly covered with course sand, placed in a sunny spot and kept moist. The seedlings emerged within a week, and a month or so later, are starting to produce their first foliage leaves.

The seedlings ought to be quite recognizable as little agaves by the end of the summer. It won't literally take 100 years for them to reach flowering size, though it is likely to be decades before the next generation of A. filifera plants blooms at UConn.

Spring is Here, Oh, Spring is Here

2009-02-22T17:23:00.005-05:00

...Life is skittles, and life is beer, at least in the Hartford Convention Center. The Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut held the Connecticut Flower & Garden Show this past weekend. I was there on Saturday to answer questions at the display from the UConn EEB Plant Growth Facility, and there was a steady stream of people, and the word was that it was difficult to even find a parking space by early afternoon. Things were busy, but I did take some time to do some photography.

Here's the display from the UConn greenhouses. It's a bit heavy on succulent plants and carnivorous plants. No messing around with arborvitaes and forced tulips for us.

Next door to the greenhouse table was Cheri C. from the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History, with an educational exhibit on plants that are sources of fibers. Did you know that course fibers useful for rope making can be extracted from Sansevieria, the omnipresent potted Snake Plant?

The Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society also had a booth in the educational exhibit section of the show, here manned by longtime CCSS-er Sully. The next big event for the CCSS is their annual show the first weekend in April, in Waterbury.

Out on the main floor, the New England Carnivorous Plant Society had a booth. Shaun M. and Wild Bill could barely keep up with the hordes of budding flytrap enthusiasts asking questions about the miniature garden of terror the NECPS had set up.

The numerous vendors included Judy B. of Lauray of Salisbury, with an eclectic selection of succulents, orchids and gesneriads.

Black Jungle also had a big presence. This was their first year at the Hartford Flower Show, but it seemed like they were keeping busy. In past years, commercial sources of carnivorous plants had been few and far between at the show, so I'm sure there was some pent up demand.

I didn't get many photos of the garden installations, but I really liked this one from the Connecticut Horticultural Society, who put together a charming mockup of an urban garden complete with vegetable patch and compost bin.

Ginkgo, and the Trouble with Living Fossils

2009-02-12T07:51:00.004-05:00

Ginkgo lined walkway at the University of Tokyo.

The Maidenhair Tree, Ginkgo biloba, is the last surviving remnant of a group of non-flowering seed plants (phylum Ginkgophyta) that way back in the Mesozoic had a worldwide distribution and were represented by multiple genera and species. Ginkgo came to the attention of European botanists in 1690, via cultivated trees in Japan, though it seems that the original home of G. biloba was the mountains of southwestern China. It is debatable whether truly wild populations of Ginkgo trees even exist anymore, but through cultivation the Ginkgophyta have regained shades of the ubiquity that they had in the age of the dinosaurs.

Ginkgo is a classic example of what are sometimes called “living fossils,” a lone hanger-on from a group that was far more diverse, widespread and ecologically important in the distant past, as revealed by the fossil record. The genus Ginkgo itself is known from the upper Triassic (200 million years ago) onward, with some fossils being quite similar, at least in form, to the modern Maidenhair Tree.

The term “living fossil” bothers me, though. Present day ginkgos aren’t identical to the fossils, and many of the ancient ginkgophytes don’t resemble the modern street tree in the slightest, unless viewed by someone with a background in paleobotany and plant morphology. The basic workings of genetics imply that it is essentially impossible for a real world population to remain genetically static from one generation to the next, let alone for millions of generations. So, Gingko biloba is certainly not a literal living fossil, untouched by the passage of time.

Even non-literal applications of “living fossil” are problematic. Ginkgos qualify as living fossils in large part simply because there weren’t that many of them around before people took them into cultivation, and they were confined to one obscure corner of eastern Eurasia. If it so happened that thousands of species of Ginkgophyta had survived into the present, and they grew in every forest, savannah, patch of desert scrub and vacant lot north of Antarctica, nobody would call them living fossils, never mind that they bore similarities to certain fossil remains.

Old Ginkgo tree at Washinomiya Shrine, Saitama, Japan. This individual has been coppiced: the original trunk was cut, and the tree is resprouting with multiple stems.

In our world, the Ginkgophyta barely squeaked by into the present, and another group of seed plants, the Magnoliophyta or flowering plants, diversified and came to dominate most terrestrial ecosystems. The designation of Ginkgo as a living fossil, and magnoliophytes—for example, petunias—as just ordinary plants, is purely retroactive and largely arbitrary: flowering plants, after all, have a fossil record that extends well back into the Mesozoic. Flowering plants share a common ancestor with Ginkgo, and the two lineages have been evolving for exactly the same amount of time since they diverged. A living fossil is more a matter of perception and lack of familiarity, than anything inherent in the plant.

In some alternate reality where pernicious ginkgophyte weeds infest suburban gardens of edible tomato-like ginkgophytes, and the only flowering plant that has dodged extinction is one species of petunia growing in a remote valley in Peru, perceptions would be different. Ginkgo biloba would be just another street tree, and petunias would be living fossils, a rare and freakish survival from a vanished world.

Reference: Gifford, E.M. & A.S. Foster. 1989. The Morphology and Evolution of Vascular Plants, Third Edition. W.H. Freeman and Co., New York.

Bald Eagles in NY

2009-02-08T15:40:00.004-05:00

Eagles at George's Island, Montrose, NY.

On Saturday I got over to Westchester County, New York, to visit some family and friends. The afternoon's amusement was attending Eaglefest, at various sites along the Hudson River in the Croton-on-Hudson vicinity. It went over well: the weather was considerably warmer than it has been lately, and we saw plenty of juvenile and adult Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), flying, perching, and at one point getting chased by a Red-tailed Hawk, which looked puny in comparison. My wildlife photography skills and equipment aren't up to National Geographic standards, but the bird-shaped blobs in the photos are eagles.

George's Island wide view. There are about 20 eagles in the trees.

Darwin's Orchid in Flower

2009-01-28T16:31:00.005-05:00

Here at the UConn Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Greenhouses we have a special treat, just in time for Darwin Day and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, coming up on February 12. The specimen of Angraecum sesquipedale, commonly known as "Darwin's Orchid," is in bloom, complete with the improbably long nectar spur that lead the great biologist to predict the existence of a pollinating moth with an improbably long nectar-sucking proboscis. This particular flower has a spur about 30 cm (11.5 inches) long, for example, with nectar at the base. The pale color of the flower, and its spicy-musky scent (strongest at night) are also typical features of moth-pollinated blooms. The hypothesized moth, Xanthopan morgani ssp. praedicta, was discovered in 1903, 21 years after Darwin's death, and only quite recently has anyone actually observed the moth doing its thing in the rainforests of Madagascar.

The special genius of Darwin is evidenced here not so much by the fact that he realized that only a moth with an outsized proboscis would be attracted to an Angraecum sequipedale flower--any clever naturalist with a basic knowledge of pollination biology could have intuited the characteristics of the sort of critter that would be needed to pollinate such a bloom--but in that he provided a clear explanation for the history and peculiar details of the Angraecum story. Here's the man himself:

If the Angræcum in its native forests secretes more nectar than did the vigorous plants sent me by Mr. Bateman, so that the nectary becomes filled, small moths might obtain their share, but they would not benefit the plant. The pollinia would not be withdrawn until some huge moth, with a wonderfully long proboscis, tried to drain the last drop. If such great moths were to become extinct in Madagascar, assuredly the Angræcum would become extinct. On the other hand, as the nectar, at least in the lower part of the nectary, is stored safe from depredation by other insects, the extinction of the Angræcum would probably be a serious loss to these moths. We can thus partially understand how the astonishing length of the nectary may have been acquired by successive modifications. As certain moths of Madagascar became larger through natural selection in relation to their general conditions of life, either in the larval or mature state, or as the proboscis alone was lengthened to obtain honey from the Angræcum and other deep tubular flowers, those individual plants of the Angræcum which had the longest nectaries (and the nectary varies much in length in some Orchids), and which, consequently, compelled the moths to insert their probosces up to the very base, would be fertilised. These plants would yield most seed, and the seedlings would generally inherit longer nectaries; and so it would be in successive generations of the plant and moth. Thus it would appear that there has been a race in gaining length between the nectary of the Angræcum and the proboscis of certain moths; but the Angræcum has triumphed, for it flourishes and abounds in the forests of Madagascar, and still troubles each moth to insert its proboscis as far as possible in order to drain the last drop of nectar.

Darwin, C. R. 1862. On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing. pp. 201-203. London: John Murray. [Darwin Online link]

The orchid is not providing nectar out of some vegetable sense of charity, it is making the moth struggle for every drop and still holding a little more just out of reach, maximizing the chances that the moth will get stuck with pollinia (specialized adhesive pollen bodies) to carry to the stigma of the next Angraecum flower. The average nectar spur is a bit longer than the average proboscis. The moth, for its part, just wants a meal, and may in fact be actively trying to avoid getting a package of orchid pollen glued to its mouth parts, but is forced to cram its head all the way into the flower by the lure of the nectar at the bottom of that overly long spur.

The seemingly absurd length of nectar spur and moth proboscis is the outcome of an evolutionary arms race. Moths with slightly longer proboscises got more nectar, and prospered. Orchids with slightly longer spurs were more effective at foisting pollen onto moths and getting moths to deposit pollen onto their stigmas. Any angraecums with spurs shorter than a moth proboscis were unable to force the moths into the proper position to pick up or drop off pollen, and would have found themselves on the wrong end of the process of natural selection. The arms race may very well be ongoing to this day, unless one or other of the combatants has come up against structural limitations to the length of tube it can support.

A. sequipedale is on display in the EEB greenhouses for as long as the flower holds up (probably a week or so), and anyone who's in the area is welcome to stop in and see it in person.

Eriospermum cervicorne

2009-01-22T16:54:00.004-05:00

Eriospermum cervicorne plants in January (about 3 inches/8cm tall).

The New England woods may be icy and silent this time of year, but inside of the greenhouse the South African winter bulbs are green and active. South Africa is home to the most diverse flora of geophytes—bulbs, tubers and other plants that survive unfavorable conditions as underground storage organs—in the world, and many of these come from the winter-rainfall zone in the southern and western parts of the country. Winter geophytes have adapted to grow in the temperate, rainy winter months, and then hunker down for a long dormancy in the dry summer heat.

Eriospermum cervicorne (“deer antlers with hairy seeds,” more or less) is a tuberous plant found in sandy soil on granitic hills in central Namaqualand, in western South Africa. In late summer the tubers, which look like smallish russet potatoes, send up racemes of white flowers. Only after the flowers are finished and seed is set, in autumn, do the leaves appear. As with many Eriospermum species, the flowers of E. cervicorne are fairly bland, while the foliage is distinctive and memorable.

The leaves of E. cervicorne are borne singly, one per tuber, and are dominated by a mop of antler-like outgrowths called enations. Enations are green emergences from the upper surface of the leaf, which increase the plant’s light-catching photosynthetic area (important for plants trying to intercept weak winter sun, even in sunny southern Africa), while being more resistant to wind damage than just a larger flat leaf.

Enations seem to be an evolutionary alternative to dissected leaves (sometimes termed compound leaves), in a genus where the pattern of leaf development precludes the growth of ordinary dissected leaves. Eriospermums are monocots, like lilies or grasses, and have leaves that expand from a basal zone of cell division. Therefore, they cannot develop complex dissected leaves, like those in ferns, through the action of growing points along the leaf margin. Enations can be thought of as an unorthodox method of producing a shrubby, wind-resistant photosynthetic surface, in a group of plants with developmental constraints that rule out the usual sorts of finely divided leaves.

Like most South African geophytes, E. cervicorne appreciates cool nights (anything short of frost is fine) and warm days this time of year. Soil moisture is important for proper growth in the cool season: the plants should never dry out completely, but shouldn’t stay soggy, either. The limiting factor for northerners trying to cultivate winter-active desert plants like E. cervicorne is likely to be sunlight; the plants will soak up as many hours of direct sun as can be provided. During the dormant period, from April to August or so, Eriospermum pots can be left in a sheltered corner out of the rain and neglected.

Japan Trip

2008-12-01T16:09:00.009-05:00

Tougudou hall, on the grounds of Ginkakuji (the Silver Pavilion) in Kyoto: my current desktop image.

People occasionally somehow get the idea that I’m an enthusiastic and frequent traveler, but that’s pretty far from the truth. I stick close to home most of the time, though every once in a long while I scrape together enough money and enthusiasm to do something big, like my vacation in Japan this October.

I went over with a couple of friends from Connecticut, which was great for defraying costs and providing moral support. We planned out our own itinerary, which also cut expenses, in addition to providing the freedom to go where we wanted at our own pace. It worked out well, though it certainly helped that we all knew some Japanese, and had some friends over there.

I traveled in the southern part of the main island of Japan, in the Tokyo and Kyoto regions. This area has a humid subtropical climate, somewhat similar to the coastal Carolinas and Georgia, and October is considered a good time to visit: not stifling, but not frosty, either. Apparently, this October was unusually hot and hazy, and the weather was more summer-like than I had expected. It wasn’t unpleasant, but I quickly went through my supply of short-sleeved shirts.

Tokyo’s “electric town,” Akihabara. Across the street are a crane-game arcade, and infamous amateur comic shop Tora no Ana (The Tiger's Den).

Tokyo is a little overwhelming. It’s one of the largest cities in the world, with close to 13 million residents, and the urban landscape stretches out to the horizon in every direction when viewed from the top of the skyscrapers in Shinjuku (you can take the elevator up the Tokyo Metropolitan Building for free). But it isn’t too hard to get around; the train system is user friendly, and important signs usually give English translations.

Echeverias and a Peanut Cactus (Chamaecereus silvestrii) along a street in Tokyo.

Home base was a traditional inn (or ryokan) called Homeikan, close to the University of Tokyo, in a quiet residential neighborhood. I quickly felt comfortable in the area, which wasn’t nearly as hectic as the central parts of the city. There wasn’t much space for horticulture, but the inn had a small but immaculately maintained traditional garden. Around the neighborhood, people had collections of potted plants wherever they could find space, and I even spotted some aloes, echeverias and mesembs. The climate is warm enough that what would be houseplants in Connecticut stay outside year round. On plots of open ground around street trees near the inn someone had even planted Brugmansia (Angel’s Trumpet), which I usually think of as a true tropical plant.

Matt at Nandaimon, a gate near Todaiji, Nara Park

I also visited Kyoto and Nara, both former capitals of Japan that are famous for their ancient shrines, temples and gardens. Some of the most beautiful scenery, I thought, was at Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion, at the base of the mountains on the eastern side of Kyoto. Moss gardening is a specialty at the Silver Pavilion, and there was even a display showing which mosses were considered weeds, and which were carefully nurtured. Nara was wonderful as well, with a central park that includes numerous historic sites, including Todaiji, a Buddhist temple that is the largest wooden structure in the world. Nara Park is also home to a large number of more or less tame deer, which have the run of the place and will follow visitors around looking for handouts.

Hill east of Ginkakuji, mid-October, with maple foliage (Acer palmatum) starting to change color.

All in all, I had a fantastic time during my two weeks in Nippon. I would love to go back sometime to explore more in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara, and maybe try to get further afield. Until then, I'm slowly putting together a longer and nerdier chronicle of the trip at my Japanese 2-D culture blog, Moetic Justice.

Talk in Philadelphia

2008-11-07T17:33:00.004-05:00

Eriospermum armianum (Ruscaceae), from west of Springbok, Northern Cape, South Africa. Single leaf with club-shaped outgrowths called enations arising from its surface.

I'm going to be giving a presentation on "Winter Growing Geophytes of South Africa" to the Philadelphia Cactus and Succulent Society this Sunday, November 9. The meeting will be from 11-3:00 at the Fairmount Park greenhouses, and my talk itself will likely take an hour or so, starting around 1:00. It should be fun; the PCSS is one of the largest and most active groups of its kind in the country; I was a little overwhelmed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience when I gave a talk on Conophytum in Philly last year.

The presentation will be a basic introduction to what is a huge subject; a lowball estimate of the number of winter growing tuber and bulb species in South Africa, from the Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs, is around 1500. I'll talk about cultivation, the ecology of the plants in the field, and a little bit about morphology and anatomy, while showing slides of a somewhat scattershot sampling of Cape bulb diversity. The genus Eriospermum will be overrepresented, because I like eriospermums and have a bunch of photos of them, but I'll touch on the usual suspects too, like the Amaryllidaceae (Amaryllis family) and Hyacinthaceae (Hyacinth family), as well as some possibly unfamiliar dicot geophytes, like the tuberous Pelargonium species (Geraniaceae - Geranium family).

Century Plant in Bloom

2008-09-26T16:53:00.004-04:00

We have a relatively rare botanical event going on in the University of Connecticut greenhouses right now: an Agave, or Century Plant, is in bloom. This plant is probably Agave filifera ssp. schidigera, a native of Mexico, but I'm not entirely certain of the identification. The plant has been in the greenhouse at least since the staff started keeping careful records in 1985, and its origins are uncertain. It's got an impressive inflorescence, at any rate, about 12 feet high, with hundreds of greenish flowers opening sequentially from the bottom to the top. The flowers literally drip nectar, and have an odd vegetable smell, sort of like steamed artichokes.

This is the first time this plant has bloomed in its 23 plus years, but "Century Plant" is clearly an exaggeration. Agave plants are monocarpic, which means that the plants cease growth and die shortly after flowering and setting seed. Many Agave species produce vegetative offsets or runners, though, so only the individual rosette that sends up an inflorescence croaks, while a ring of clones around it survive. Our Agave filifera hasn't produced any offsets yet, so it may be gone for good after putting on its show. I'm attempting to self-pollinate it, but it isn't always possible to set seeds with only one plant.

Century Plant blooms are fairly rare in northern greenhouses: at UConn, we keep about 20 agaves, and have had only this single flowering in the past 10 years. In warmer, drier parts of the country, Century Plants--especially Agave americana--are grown as bedding plants, and flowerings are commonplace in suburban gardens and highway plantings.

Conophytum minusculum: The Minuscule Cone Plant

2008-09-23T16:35:00.003-04:00

Conophytum minusculum in September, still in summer mode apart from the flowers. These plants are an informal cultivar named “Roseum” with particularly intense floral coloration, derived from material collected by plant explorer Frank Horwood.

Mid-September is the peak season for Conophytum flowers, and for a brief interlude my collection looks something like a very small version of the poppy fields in Oz. Cono flowers tend to be incongruously gaudy compared to the compact, often camouflaged vegetative portions of the plants. The flower/leaf mismatch is particularly extreme in Conophytum minusculum, which has succulent leaf pairs the size of match heads, which sport violet to dayglow pink flowers easily five times as large.

Conophytum minusculum hails from the southwestern parts of the range of the genus in South Africa, which means it is adapted to a relatively mild Mediterranean climate, rather than hard desert. The plants grow in crevices and among mosses and lichens on sandstone outcrops, in a scrubby vegetation type peculiar to the Cape region called fynbos. Fynbos occurs on sites with poor, acidic soil and winter rainfall. Fynbos is subject to fires every decade or two, though it seems unlikely that the rocky, barren niches that Conophytum plants favor ever burn directly.

Conophytum minusculum is a definite cool-season grower, and tends to be even more strict about seasonality that other conos. Although the plants flower in the early autumn, the new leaves often don’t take up water and emerge from their summer sheaths until it really gets cold and dreary in November or December. In cultivation, I water the plants more than usual for winter growing South African succulents, enough to keep the soil evenly moist from flowering, through the fall and winter, up until the point where the leaves yellow and dry up for the summer dormancy in April. The plants need as much sun as possible in winter. During the warmer months, I keep my C. minusculum pots in partial shade, and do not water except for a light misting every few days. Summer misting should be just enough to barely moisten the surface layers of soil, which prevents possible losses from sunburn.

The soils where C. minusculum grows in the wild are particularly thin and low in mineral nutrients, and under glass the plants do well in shallow pots, with a gritty, impoverished soil mix. If I were really on top of things, I’d water them with rainwater, though the tap water here in eastern Connecticut seems to be sufficiently clean and low in salts. The plants are well suited to cultivation in New England; famous succulent growers in the Southwest have trouble getting C. minusculum and its relatives to thrive, because of their relatively hot, dry weather and hard, salty water. But the plants thrive here in Swamp Yankee country.

Conophytum minusculum is mostly propagated by cuttings, which establish easily in fall or winter. Seed is hardly ever available: the flowers aren’t easy to pollinate, and even successful pollination tends to result in only small numbers of seeds.

Eastern Cactus Conference Mop-up

2008-08-18T16:54:00.011-04:00

Ernst van Jaarsveld and the gang judge the Gasteria class (Ernst, literally, wrote the book on the genus).

First off, I have to thank everyone at the Cactus and Succulent Society of Massachusetts for organizing such a superb convention. They really outdid themselves, and I think everyone who attended had a wonderful time. There was one scheduling SNAFU that I noticed, but it seemed to be strictly the hotel's fault, and in any case all the affected events were accommodated the next day, with a pizza lunch thrown in to compensate for the delay.

The quality of plants at the show was outstanding, as was the quality of the plants for sale from the vendors. Somehow, my pot of Burger's Onions (pictured in the header of this blog) managed to take best in division for the succulents other than cacti, which was gratifying. The CSSM club table offered a wide selection of mesembs and haworthias, in perfect shape after being shipped in from the Sphaeroid Institute in California. The banquet was, well, hotel banquet food, but the company was excellent. The auction, which ran until nearly midnight after the banquet, was pretty spirited for a recession year, and it was nice to see some of the more obscure succulents, like Conophytum, inspire bidding wars.

For me, at least, it is the lectures that really make the convention. I missed out on a couple of talks because of conflicts: I regret not seeing Dennis Cathcart's presentation on succulent bromeliads, a subject on which I could use a refresher course, and I hear that Jerry Barad gave a fascinating talk on the early history of the New York Cactus and Succulent Society. I did catch and enjoy Fred Kattermann's talk about Chilean cacti, and two presentations by Panayoti Kelaidis about cold hardy succulents, one dealing with the cultivation of native plants in the arid Southwest, and the other a travelogue of Panayoti's botanical explorations at high altitude in Southern Africa. Mark Dimmitt's slide show about Northern Mexico included some spectacular photography, as well as a lot of solid information about the ecology of the various drought-adapted vegetation types in that part of the world.

Steve Hammer gave two talks. The first, "Snow White and the Seven Hundred Dwarfs," was an overview of the more compact mesembs, including a number of small--in terms of number of species and plant size--genera like Psammophora (which has sticky leaves that catch a protective coating of sand) that usually don't get much love from growers. At his second talk, Steve spoke about hybrid Haworthia, the economics of horticultural fads, and what he thinks of as the futility of keeping track of the pedigree of cultivars. All the while he passed around examples from his haw collection, many of which could no doubt finance a mortgage payment if sacrificed to EBay. As far as I know, all the plants made it back to lectern by the end of the talk, without a leaf missing. Steve's talks are rather similar to his writing: wide ranging but coherent, with a literary quality that is sometimes nearly Twainian, and peppered with allusions to everything from the King James Bible to Brittney Spears.

The most fascinating presentations of the weekend, for me at least, came from Ernst van Jaarsveld, curator of the conservatory at Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, who was flown in from South Africa by a coalition of American cactus clubs; he was off to Denver after the Eastern Convention. Other speakers may have been more eloquent--Ernst's first language is Afrikaans--or had prettier photos or fancier PowerPoint presentations, but at Ernst's talks, more than the others, I felt that I was learning about things in the natural world that I wasn't aware of before, and in fact hadn't remotely suspected. There is, for example, a succulent grass that grows around Alexander Bay at the border between South Africa and Namibia. Dregeochloa pumila looks like a Peperomia or some such poking out of the sand, but it's in the same family as your lawn. I hardly would have believed it before seeing the images. And no, Dregeochloa is not in cultivation, though Kirstenbosch is trying to acquire material. Also riveting for me was Ernst's accounts of a trip to Dolphin Head in Namibia to see Jensenobotrya lossowiana, Jensen's Grape, at one of its two known localities. I had known the basics of the Jensenobotrya story before, but it was something else entirely to hear a first hand account of its nearly inaccessible habitat on a spire of rock jutting into the icy South Atlantic, surrounded to the east by a sea of shifting dunes, and to see new images of individual plants, seemingly unchanged from their appearance in black and white photographs from 30 years ago. Fortunately for those who couldn't attend the convention, Ernst has written about Jensenobotrya online, at http://www.plantzafrica.com/planthij/jensenloss.htm.

My own talks, one on Conophytum and one on why the names of plants sometimes change in response to new information from modern evolutionary biology, seemed to go over reasonably well. A solid majority of the audience had their eyes propped open whenever I checked, anyway.

Steve Hammer, with a very expensive lump of vegetable matter.

16th Eastern Cactus Conference - First Day

2008-08-16T07:25:00.003-04:00

The Cactus Con is going swimmingly, so far. Yesterday was mostly taken up by settling in and dinner at a fair-to-middling Chinese restaurant called Hong Kong ("Hong & Kong" on the menu), but there were some presentations, too. Chris Allen and Glen Lord gave a demonstration on succulent bonsai, with Chris describing cultivation techniques (from the point of view of a Conophytum grower, he waters and fertilizes the bejeezus out of his caudiciforms, at least in summer, though you can't argue with his results). Meanwhile, Glen, a grower at Bonsai West, talked about how to shear the resulting masses of vegetation.

Then, Fred Kattermann of New Jersey talked about Copiapoa, a genus of globular cacti from the extreme deserts on the coast of Chile. Fred had some really amazing photographs of the little guys clinging to rocks, sinking into clay and leaning out of the sun in habitat. Finally, Matt Mattus of the CSSM gave a charming presentation on a typical yearly cycle of growing Oxalis, Nerine, Clivia and other South African geophytes in his greenhouse.

Here are some photos from the show setup, which I should get back to...

Glen Lord, Steve Hammer, Ernst van Jaarsveld and Abby Rorer discuss plants for the show.

Show setup in progress. Judging theoretically starts in one hour.

Good stuff for sale at the CSSM table, courtesy of the Sphaeroid Institute.

The sale area.

Some of the plants assembled for the auction tonight.

One Week To Go

2008-08-08T18:42:00.004-04:00

Next friday, the 16th Eastern Cactus and Succulent Conference starts off a weekend of desert plant-induced nirvana in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, with vendors, social events, auctions, a judged show and presentations by noted succulent plant experts from around the globe. I'll be giving two talks, as well. Every succulent plant enthusiast in the area should try to attend; the speakers list--which includes Steve Hammer from California and Ernst van Jaarsveld from Cape Town, South Africa--is reason enough to be there, and is easily the equal of what you'd get in a national convention.

The preliminary schedule of events is shaping up like this:

Friday - August 15th
4:00 PM Glen Lord / Chris Allen - Succulent Bonsai
5:00 PM Fred Kattermann - The Genus Copiapoa
6:00 PM Matt Mattus - South African Bulbs
7:30 PM Welcome Social
Saturday - August 16th
8:30 Affiliates Meeting
9:00 AM Dennis Cathcart - Succulent Terrestrial & Lithophytic Bromeliads
10:00 AM Jerry Barad - Travelogue or Stapeliads
1:00 AM Ernst van Jaarsveld - Gasterias
12:00 PM Lunch
1:00 PM Fred Kattermann - The Cacti of Chile
2:00 PM Steve Hammer - Mesembs
3:00 PM Matt Opel - Conophytum
4:00 PM Panayoti Kelaidis - Succulents on Skis
5:15 PM Mark Dimmitt - C&S of Northern Mexico
7:00 PM Banquet social/cocktails
7:30 PM Banquet
9:00 PM Specimen Plant Auction
Sunday - August 17th
8:00 AM Breakfast Social
9:00 AM Panayoti Kelaidis - Hardy C&S in Denver OR C&S of the Rockies
10:00 AM Mark Dimmitt - Adeniums
11:00 AM Panel Discussion - the gang
12:00 PM Lunch
1:00 PM Steve Hammer - Haworthias
2:00 PM Matt Opel - Nomenclature & Evolution
3:00 PM Ernst van Jaarsveld - Glories of the Veld
4:00 PM Conclusion ceremony
5:00 PM Conference ends
Monday - August 18th
9:00 AM Optional tour to Boston

My first talk will be on Conophytum, a fairly speciose (almost wrote "specious") genus of compact leaf succulents from the winter-rainfall regions of South Africa. It's quite a diverse group, and includes a number of species of "living stone"--plants that are camouflaged like the local geology--as well as taxa that are specialized for growth on mossy rocks, some that are subterranean, and even a few dwarf shrubs. I'll discuss the plants as they grow in habitat, as well as how to keep them going under glass. Conos are my area of specialization and the subject of my dissertation, but I have to say that with Steve and Ernst in the audience, I'll feel a bit like a punk kid MBA giving a talk on running a successful computer company, with Bill Gates sitting in the front row.

My second talk, on Nomenclature and Evolution, will be experimental; I've never presented anything similar before. I'll talk a bit about how plants receive their scientific names, about species concepts, and about how biologists investigate the evolutionary history of plant groups. But the meat of the presentation will be a series of case studies of situations where modern findings about the evolutionary relationships of succulent plants have forced changes that strike many hobbyists as gratuitously confusing. I will consider shocking consolidations in the mesembs, for example, and investigate the mysterious disappearance of the Asclepiadaceae (milkweed family), former home of the succulent stapeliads. Yeah, it'll probably be a good time for a Dunkin' Donuts run. I'll try to include some pretty plant photos to break up the hypnotic parade of phylogenetic trees, anyway.

Dactylopsis digitata ssp. littlewoodii (center), now sometimes considered part of the genus Phyllobolus or Mesembryanthemum. The plant in flower is Argyroderma cf. testiculare. This is a photo from July 2004, taken in a quartz field near Bitterfontein, in the northern Knersvlakte, Western Cape, South Africa.

Myrothamnus: an African Resurrection Plant

2008-08-01T16:13:00.004-04:00

Resurrection plants—or plants that are poikilohydric, in biology-speak—are found growing in seasonally arid sites all over the world. One local Connecticut example is Rock Polypody (Polypodium virginianum), a woodland fern confined to thin to nonexistent soils, often on top of glacial erratic boulders, where it gets very dry very soon after rain. Whereas succulent plants hold onto stored water to survive drought, resurrection plants lose water readily and simply shrivel up when the going gets tough. However, they have the remarkable ability to rehydrate themselves, restart their metabolism and resume growth when moisture is available again. During a drought, a resurrection plant like Rock Polypody will get to the point where it is as crunchy as 10 year old rosemary from your spice rack, yet retain the capacity to spring back to life with the first rain.

A. Dry and seemingly expired Myrothamnus flabellifolius.

The majority of resurrection plants are mosses, ferns and other spore-bearing plants, but there are a couple of flowering plants that are poikilohydric, including Myrothamnus, which is apparently the only woody shrub that has the ability to resurrect. There are two species in the genus: Myrothamnus flabellifolius from arid mountains in Sub-Saharan Africa, and M. moschatus from Madagascar. These two species have a taxonomic family all to themselves: the Myrothamnaceae. A couple of years ago, I obtained a packet of seed of M. flabellifolius from Silverhill Seeds, and now have a good crop of plants to experiment with.

Myrothamnus seeds are tiny, so I planted them in a pot of loose peat moss and perlite mix, right on the surface. The plants come primarily from summer-rainfall areas, so spring is probably the best time of year to get them started. Germination is easy and quick in a seed pot kept in a moist, well-lit location.

Seedlings should be kept moist, in a sunny spot with good air circulation. Initial growth is slow, but as is the case with many plants, growth accelerates as the seedlings gain some size, and in two or three years Myrothamnus can become respectably shrubby. I’ve tried the plants in several types of soils, and they do fine in a range of mixes, with probably the best results achieved in the same airy, acidic mix I used for starting the seeds. Regular applications of dilute, water-soluble fertilizer (e.g., 20-20-20 at half the recommended strength, every 2-3 weeks) seem to be beneficial. The plants do best in full sun.

It’s generally not a great idea to try to test the abilities of resurrection plants in cultivation: they tend to wind up permanently dead if they are dried out too often, or possibly if they are dried out in the wrong way (weather, water quality, soil, and root run are probably quite different in a pot and in the wild, and affect the way dehydration occurs). It’s safest just to keep the plants growing, and as far as I know none actually require the growth –> pseudo-death –> resurrection cycle in order to stay healthy. Still, it’s tempting to play around with desiccating and reviving the little guys, and since I’ve wound up with quite a few Myrothamnus plants, I recently decided to experiment.

Left out in a sunny, dry greenhouse with no watering, my test Myrothamnus was thoroughly dry after about four days. The pleated leaves fold up and turn almost black as they dehydrate, and the plants look pretty sad when the process is complete. I let the plant sit out in the sun for two weeks before taking pity on it and breaking out the watering can. Overnight, the lower leaves expanded and turned green, and in subsequent days a wave of reviving shoots moved up the plant from the base to the apex. A few branch tips had not resurrected several days later, but even these perked up during an afternoon outside in a gentle rain. More extensive studies have shown that Myrothamnus can stay dry for six months with no ill effects, and still recover after nine months, although leaves are lost (Farrant & Kruger 2001). Dry plants give up the ghost for good only after a year baking in the sun. All of this raises an interesting possibility for the desert plant enthusiast with limited winter growing space: you should be able to grow Myrothamnus plants outside all summer, dry them off and toss them into the back of a closet for the winter, and revive them in spring.

B. The same plant as image A., a week after watering.

I've had some minor problems with insect pests on Myrothamnus. Mealybugs and aphids have recently been getting into the plants, so I have experimented with a new type of organic pest control, unfortunately applicable only to poikilohydric crops: let everything stay bone dry for a couple of weeks. It seems to have worked: resurrection plants spring back to life with a little water after an artificial drought; mealybugs not so much. As a bonus, some weeds in the Myrothamnus pots also croaked.

Literature:
Farrant, J.M. & L.A. Kruger 2001. Longevity of dry Myrothamnus flabellifolius in simulated field conditions. Plant Growth Regulation 35: 109-120.

Amorphophallus Postscript, July 22

2008-07-22T16:37:00.002-04:00

Two weeks after flowering, the Titan Arum is not looking so titanic any more. Actually, the stem that supported the inflorescence is still green and solid, even if the rest has collapsed. If the female florets had been pollinated and fruit was set, that stem would stick around for months, with a developing cluster of berries on top. Since we didn't try to do any pollinating, I expect everything apart from the underground corm to deteriorate in short order.

Check out the newly expanded leaf on the young A. titanum plant to the right of the former bloom. This was that skinny shoot that was poking up to the left of the bloom in many of the earlier photos.

Amorphophallus Postscript, July 12

2008-07-12T16:31:00.003-04:00

[Double entendre redacted]

Today was apparently the day for the spadix to lose turgor. That's just four days after opening, and two days after the pollen was shed. Corpse Flowers deteriorate rapidly after they open, which is sort of a shame, since word about a bloom usually gets out to the general public only when it actually opens, and so by the time many people get around to visiting, the inflorescence is already in poor shape. For instance, the biggest crowds came to see this bloom on Wednesday, in the late morning and afternoon, by which time the spathe was pretty well closed up. The short duration of the flowering period does add to the mystique of the Titan Arum, I suppose.

Corpse Flower Finale

2008-07-10T15:47:00.004-04:00

This year's Titan Arum is pretty much done. The spathe is starting to wither, and the spadix is pock-marked with the small pits and bumps that develop when the bloom is spent. Since the inflorescence was not pollinated, the whole aboveground structure will wither away within a few weeks, leaving a tuber that will stay dormant below the soil surface for a couple of months to a year, before sending up a leaf. If we had acquired pollen from another Corpse Flower and applied it to the female florets on the first night, a cluster of red berries containing seeds would have developed.

Just visible on the lower left side of the spathe in the photo above is a hole I cut into the side of the structure, to expose the male a female florets at the base of the spadix for visitors to see. Here's what the interior looked like yesterday afternoon (the day after opening):

The yellow bumps on top are the male florets, and the reddish flask-shaped structures below are the female florets. Pollen hasn't been shed yet, and the females are receptive on the first night, so that self-pollination is unlikely. And that's really the whole point of the giant, stinky flower: it draws in pollinators from a wide area, and some of the insects bring in pollen from other Corpse Flowers, so that the plant can produce seed that isn't inbred.

Today (two days after opening), the same flowers look like the image below:
The stringy, powdery stuff coming from the male flowers is the pollen. I've heard that in the wild, insects tend to get trapped inside of the inflorescence early on, but have an easier time escaping when the bloom starts to wilt, after the pollen has been shed. With a bit of luck, the pollen-covered sweat bees and carrion beetles will not have learned their lesson, and will be lured to another, freshly-opened Corpse Flower somewhere else in the jungle.

--
That's probably just about it for the Corpse Flower commentary here at Burger's Onion, though I may post a picture or two of the inflorescence's disintegration. Otherwise, plan on a return to the usual schedule of short articles, mostly about funny little South African desert plants, about one per month.

Amorphophallus Update, July 9

2008-07-09T08:39:00.000-04:00

8:30 this morning.

The Corpse Flower is going down hill fast: the spathe is closing up, and while there is still a pretty funky smell about it, the odor is not nearly as gag-inducing as it was late last night. I stuck around until a little before 1:00 AM, at which point the visitors stopped coming. Up on the ladder, you could feel a current of steamy, fetid air coming off the top of the spadix. I couldn't actually see the evil vapors this time, but on one of the UConn flowers last year, several people reported a visible pale, steamy current drifting off the top of the spadix, around 2:00 in the morning.

We'll be open normal hours (8-4:00) today and the rest of the week. Local TV station Fox 61 had good coverage of the event last night, and NBC 30 had a crew out this morning, for a segment that will appear on their 11:00 AM news.

Titan Arum, 11 PM

2008-07-08T22:50:00.000-04:00

The Corpse Flower is fully open, and the smell is easily detectable throughout the greenhouse complex, and even outside, in spite of the vents being closed. Sulfurous, overcooked cabbage notes predominate, like the facilities at a rustic campground at the end of August, but there are definite fishy undertones, unpleasantly reminiscent of canned tuna.

In some A. titanum plants, the spathe really opens wide and reflexes, but all three times that this individual has flowered the spathe has been more upright and funnel-shaped. There is quite a bit of variation in this species, even among the subset of plants in botanical gardens. The color of the spathe and the spadix can also vary quite a bit from plant to plant; for example, there are yellow spadices, as with both mature plants at UConn, and also dark purple ones, like this fellow at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington.

There's still a steady stream of students, faculty, families and plant enthusiasts coming through the greenhouse. Doors will be open for another hour or so, or you can stop by tomorrow morning and watch the bloom close. It's unlikely that it will open again, and by the end of the week it will probably have collapsed.

Titan Arum in bloom: part 2

2008-07-08T20:24:00.000-04:00

Amorphophallus titanum plant #5, nearing fully open at 8:30 PM. The smell is tolerable, so far. The odor comes in waves, and sometimes it is hardly detectable. It's quite pungent at other times; enough to make you gag if you get close and inhale at the wrong time.

A view of the interior, though you can't quite see the individual male and female flowers (they're hidden under a bulge in the base of the spadix). Note the pale spot of variegation on the spadix.

UConn Biology Central Services professional; do not attempt.

Ray and Cherie C. on right. Ravi C. taking a break from the lab on left.

Connecticut people who can't make it in person, check out the TV news tonight. Fox 61 has already shot some footage, and some of the other stations are supposed to do live reports at 10:00 or 11:00.

Amorphophallus titanum in bloom tonight!

2008-07-08T15:55:00.000-04:00

As of around 3:00 PM, the spathe started to show signs of pulling away from the spadix. Now it's official: the Corpse Flower is on for tonight. Those of you who are interested in seeing it in person have about eight hours to get to 75 N. Eagleville Rd., Storrs, Ct, 06269, U.S.A. (park in any student or faculty lot, since it's after hours, and make your way around behind the building to the greenhouses). We'll be open to the public until midnight (maybe later, but I promise nothing). Admission is free; B.Y.O. organic vapor respirator.

The greenhouse will be open normal hours tomorrow (8:00-4:00), but you will need to get here tonight if you want the full effect. The photograph here is current: it's early in the process of opening now, and there isn't much smell yet. It will probably be as open as it is going to get around midnight. Any time after 9:00 or 10:00 PM, and you will see the inflorescence in fine form, and be able to inhale as much of the perfume as you can stomach.

Amorphophallus Update, July 8

2008-07-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

70.5 inches (179 cm) tall, 1.5 inches taller than yesterday.

Something I hadn't really thought about, until a visitor to the greenhouse during the 2004 Corpse Flower event pointed it out, is that the inflorescences of Amorphophallus are asymmetrical, and can be either right or left handed. That is to say, the spathe wraps around the axis of the bloom, and at the seam either overlaps itself towards the right side (viewer's right, as seen in this photo), or overlaps itself towards the left side. All of the Corpse Flower blooms at UConn (four of them, from two individuals) have been right handed, but left handed blooms do occur, as well. For example, the Smith College 2005 inflorescence and this one at Kew were left handed.

Inspection of the Amorphophallus bulbifer flowers that I posted a photo of last week shows one right handed and one left handed plant in the same pot. These inflorescences are borne on separate corms, but the corms are almost certainly clones of each other, and genetically identical (A. bulbifer reproduces prolifically from offsets, and bulbils that grow from the leaves). So it is likely that handedness is not determined genetically, for at least some Amorphophallus species. I wonder if plants can switch back and forth from year to year? In any event, handedness in Amorphophallus inflorescences seems to be a morphological oddity of little or no biological significance; development proceeds either one way or the other, and there's no functional difference in the end.

Some other instances of handedness in asymmetrical flowers are important for pollination biology. For example, in enantiostylous (Amorphophallus is "enantiospathous" ^_^) flowers, handedness differences probably function to prevent self pollination and encourage outcrossing.

Amorphophallus Update, July 7

2008-07-07T16:03:00.000-04:00

69 inches (175 cm) tall, one inch taller than yesterday.

Looks like there won't be any further action from the Corpse Flower today, so my predicted date for the big event is no good. It could be any day now, though, so watch this space.

One of this plant's siblings that I mentioned in an earlier post, the corm that went to Smith College, is going to flower this summer. Check out their web page; they even have a webcam set up.

Amorphophallus Update, July 6

2008-07-06T13:58:00.000-04:00

68 inches (173 cm), 1 inch taller than yesterday.

You would think that you'd need access to an institutional-scale tropical greenhouse to raise your own Amorphophallus titanum to flowering. You'd probably be right. Seedlings or small plants from tissue culture are not all that hard to come by, and seem to go for about $50 to $100. The Huntington has had them for sale in the past, for example, and caveat emptors can usually scare up some offers on EBay (OMG Ultra Rair!!11! HUGE bulbz!). But, getting a mail order seedling up to mature size is not a trivial matter. I've known a number of enthusiastic windowsill growers and hobby greenhouse owners who have tried raising their own Titan, but have yet to hear of any big stinky blooms in someone's living room. One of the smallest facilities that I'm aware of that has succeeded is just the next town over from me in Willimantic, Ct, at Eastern Connecticut State University, where Prof. Ross Koning maintains a modestly-sized hoop house style greenhouse. Fevzi Zeren of New Jersey seems to have succeeded in coaxing a flower from a specimen grown under lights in a basement (one assumes a big basement, and the sort of light setup that earns you periodic visits from the constabulary), though he apparently started with a nearly mature corm.

Corpse Flowers aren't too difficult to please, given a warm, humid, brightly-lit space of sufficient size. Space is usually going to be the limiting factor for a plant with individual leaves 15 feet across and more than one story tall. Other than that, we use a rich, well-drained soilless potting mix, with a bit of lime added, and feed fairly heavily with ~~human blood~~ a balanced water-soluble fertilizer. Ideally, temperatures shouldn't drop below 65 F (18 C), and humidity should stay above 50-60%, though I know for sure that conditions become less tropical than that on a regular basis here at the somewhat antiquated UConn biology greenhouses. The soil should be kept evenly moist at all times, even when the corm is dormant, and the pot should be as big as is practical (the pot for the plant at UConn is cramped, but it's the largest size that can be moved through our doors if need be). The plants need bright light, but leaves can scorch in direct, unfiltered sun. The growth of the plants seems to be only very loosely tied to the seasons: they can have leaves and be actively growing at any time of the year. At least in botanical gardens in temperate climates, though, there seems to be a strong tendency for flowers to bloom in early summer.

Amorphophallus Update, July 5

2008-07-05T11:51:00.001-04:00

Titan Arum at 67 inches (170 cm) tall, two inches taller than yesterday. UConn EEB greenhouse manager Clint Morse for scale.

This individual plant started life as a seed in 1994, from a batch of seed that was collected in the wild in Sumatra by the late James R. Symon, and distributed to various botanical gardens. UConn originally had eight plants [see correction by Clint Morse in the comments], but given space limitations, and the fact that the leaves of Amorphophallus titanum get to be 15 or 20 feet across, all but two plants got donated to other universities (UC Santa Barbara, Washington State U. Pullman, Wellesley, Smith, Duke and Harvard all received UConn Corpse Flowers).

Plant #5, the one still here at UConn about to flower again, first bloomed in July of 2004, at not quite ten years of age, which seems to be about the average time from seed to maturity for this species under glass. Plant #5 flowered again in May 2007, and our other Corpse Flower from 1994 (#3, which has always been a bit of a runt), first flowered in June 2007. Number 3 is the plant with the leaf that's lurking in the background of the photos of the bud, though you can't see it very well in today's image; it's behaving properly and sending up foliage in between blooms. I'd expect #3 to flower again in early 2010. I have no idea when #5 is going to bloom next, after two consecutive flowers.

What's it for?

2008-07-04T15:34:00.000-04:00

Amorphophallus titanum, immature inflorescence, with a leaf from a young plant of the same species emerging at right.

I've been giving greenhouse tours to all sorts of groups for quite a few years now, and on more than one occasion--usually prompted by some plant that is completely outside of normal experience, like the Corpse Flower pictured here--a student or garden club member has asked, in these exact words: "But, what's it for?" That's a fairly open ended metaphysical question, but I think that the answer that people are looking for is something practical and immediate, like: "Local people in Sumatra use the leaves for umbrellas." Of course, it isn't really true that anyone uses Amorphophallus titanum to keep out of the rain, as far as I know.

In the absence of known utility for humans, I imagine that it would still be reasonably satisfying for the questioner to hear that, say, elephants eat the leaves, or at least that pretty butterflies visit the flowers. But again, I don't think that anything like that is true of A. titanum: as with other members of the genus, the leaves of the Corpse Flower are probably loaded with calcium oxalate crystals and other toxins. The flowers, famously, broadcast a putrid stench that does not attract charismatic pollinators like butterflies. Even the carrion insects that are drawn by the smell of decay are hapless dupes who receive no obvious benefit from their visit: the blooms merely produce a rotten smell, and yield nothing that a carrion beetle or sweat bee could actually lay eggs in or eat.

It's a safe bet that innumerable bacteria, fungi, mites, nematodes and other tiny organisms do live in association with a Corpse Flower growing in the rain forest. But a tour group is--rightly--not going to be satisfied by: "Well, if it's like other plants that have been studied, there are microbes that live around the roots, feeding on secretions of the root cap. But nobody has ever studied the rhizosphere flora of this species, and probably nobody ever will, unless evidence turns up that something unusual is going on with it. Which it probably won't. Evidence, that is. So yeah, errr, I guess, um, nobody knows for sure." The cute way to answer the "what's it for?" question would be to say "It brings in paying visitors and increases web traffic!" But even if there were an appealing, straightforward, practical purpose for the Corpse Flower (the tubers of related species are edible when suitably processed, for example, and there's no reason to expect that A. titanum would be any different, if it could be cultivated on a large scale), such an answer would be superficial at best, and probably a bit of a dodge, too.

There is a much deeper answer to the question of what the Corpse Flower is for, an answer that yields real insights and productive, testable ideas about why the plant has such peculiar characteristics. It's the answer that Darwin and Wallace gave to the world 150 years ago, almost to the day, for living things in general, not just A. titanum. It's just not tremendously satisfying to the average greenhouse tour-goer. For that matter, because of the workings of human psychology, it probably doesn't have much in the way of purely visceral appeal as an explanation to anyone, even the scientists who have formulated it. But whatever the answer lacks in terms of surface emotional satisfaction, it more than makes up for in pure utility for those who have studied the questions. Because, as far as anyone can tell, Darwin's answer is correct.

The metabolic processes that synthesize the chemicals that give A. titanum blooms their foul odor, the metabolic short circuit that generates the heat to volatilize those chemicals, the tall but thriftily constructed spadix from which the odor wafts into the sultry night air; these and a million other characteristics are what allowed the ancestors of the plant in the University greenhouse to germinate, to grow, to out-compete other plants, to resist herbivores and disease, to exchange pollen, to set and disperse seed. These adaptations permitted the ancestors of our A. titanum, now marooned in Connecticut, to survive and reproduce, century after century, in a teeming rain forest where the competition and the environment were always changing, slowly but inexorably.

What's the Corpse Flower for? It is for making more Corpse Flowers.

Amorphophallus Update, Independence Day '08

2008-07-04T15:16:00.000-04:00

65 inches (165 cm), a mere 1.5 inches taller than yesterday.

The Corpse Flower is looking like it's just about ready to do its thing. However,the fact that the spathe hasn't noticeably unfurled compared to its state yesterday, at this point in the middle of the afternoon, indicates that the inflorescence probably won't open up today.

Amorphophallus Update, July 3

2008-07-03T16:05:00.000-04:00

63.5 inches (161 cm), two inches taller than yesterday. Note the flowering Amorphophallus bulbifer plants at the base of the Titan.

The Corpse Flower is getting pretty close to opening; it wouldn't particularly surprise me if it popped for Independence Day. In the closeup of the edge of the spathe at left, you can see that the coloration is getting more intense, and also that the frills are relatively loosely appressed to the spadix, compared to a few days ago. In previous years, the first sure sign that an A. titanum bloom was going to open was a more definite pulling away of the spathe, in the early to mid-afternoon before the flowering. In the closeup, you might also notice some grayish patches on the inflorescence, which is damage from thrips. We've seen this in past flowers, and while it's annoying, the level of damage hasn't been such that we've wanted to risk spraying. Usually, thrips in the UConn greenhouses are knocked down pretty quickly in warmer weather by a predatory insect, Orius, but the orii seem to be slacking off this year.

The greenhouse will be open to the public through the holiday weekend for Titan Arum viewing, until the flowering is finished. Hours are listed on the EEB Greenhouse website. On the day the bloom opens, whenever that is, we'll hang around to let people in at least until midnight. The greenhouses are located behind the Torrey Life Science building, which is 75 North Eagleville Rd, Storrs, Ct 06269.

Amorphophallus Update, July 2

2008-07-02T12:23:00.001-04:00

61.5 inches (156 cm), two inches taller than yesterday.

There was a nasty smell in the greenhouses this morning, and I was momentarily worried that the Titan had decided to flower last night, and that I had missed it. A bit of hunting turned up the real source, though: several plants of Amorphophallus bulbifer were in bloom. These plants are much smaller than A. titanum, with blooms only about eight inches tall, but they give off a penetrating odor of outhouse, overcooked cabbage and dead animal that is actually fairly close to the smell of the Corpse Flower, qualitatively if not quantitatively. In the A. bulbifer photo below, you can make out the female florets (globose structures at the very base of the spadix, inflorescence on the right) and the male florets (pale fuzzy zone directly above the female florets).

Amorphophallus bulbifer.

The blooms of different Amorphophallus species produce quite a variety of odors. Amorphophallus titanum, A. bulbifer and A. prainii are sulfurous and cabbagey, while A. konjac and A. paeonifolius have a more straightforward dead-rat-in-the-wall smell. Amorphophallus odoratus has a funny, almost artificial smell, sort of like deodorant. These odors attract various sorts of insect pollinators, often flies or other carrion feeders, who are tricked into thinking they've found a meal. In its native Sumatra, the primary pollinators of A. titanum are apparently sweat bees.

Amorphophallus Update, July 1

2008-07-01T12:21:00.000-04:00

59.5 inches (151 cm) tall this morning, which is three inches taller than yesterday.

Aside from a slowdown in the rate of growth, another indication that flowering is not far off in A. titanum is the development of reddish coloration on the inside (adaxial side) of the spathe. In the closeup photo, you can see some purple/red coloration where the frills at the edge of the spathe have curled over. I first noticed a little color in the spathe yesterday, and it's more obvious today. Things are looking good for a bloom early next week.

The spathe, by the way, is an often petal-like leaf that subtends the rest of the inflorescence in members of the Araceae (the Jack-in-the-Pulpit or aroid family), to which Amorphophallus belongs. As with other aroids, the "flower" of the Corpse Flower is really a highly modified flowering shoot, or inflorescence, comprising the spathe, a modified stem called the spadix (the part that puts the phallus in Amorphophallus), and numerous small male and female flowers hidden inside the spathe at the base of the spadix. The spathe/spadix structure in A. titanum does look very much like a single flower, and functions like a single flower to attract pollinators, so even a plant morphology nerd like myself doesn't have too many issues with just calling the thing a flower. If you want to get technical about it, though, A. titanum has the largest compact flower-like inflorescence in the plant kingdom. The largest simple blooms occur in a totally unrelated genus of Southeast Asian carrion flowers: Rafflesia.

Amorphophallus Update, June 30

2008-06-30T15:54:00.000-04:00

The Corpse Flower has reached 56.5 (144 cm) inches tall, which is an increase of 6.5 inches since Saturday (the last time anyone checked). So, growth is holding steady at a little over three inches per day. That's probably going to be the maximum rate of growth for this bloom, and I'm guessing that growth will taper off in the next day or so. Larger plants have been reported to sustain growth rates around 8 inches (20 cm) per day.

Typically, the growth of A. titanum inflorescences reaches a peak, holds steady for a few days, then decelerates until flowering, with the flower opening about a week after the growth rate starts to decline. So, the smart money is still on Monday, July 7. The blooms open in late afternoon, and reach their peak stinkiness in the wee hours of the next morning. Our past flowers have lasted less than a day in prime condition, with pollen being shed from the male florets and the bloom starting to fold up the day after opening.

Readers in Connecticut might want to check out the local news on NBC 30 tonight: a camera crew was around the greenhouse today, filming the Titan Arum and other points of interest for a segment on things to do at UConn over the summer.

Amorphophallus Update, June 28

2008-06-28T16:36:00.001-04:00

Yesterday's growth was 3.5 inches, so the bud is now 50 inches (127 cm) high.

Amorphophallus Update, June 27

2008-06-27T16:18:00.000-04:00

The Titan Arum put on another 3.5 inches, and now stands at 46.5 inches (118 cm) tall.

The smaller, darker bud emerging from the pot just to the left of the pot with the flowering shoot is another A. titanum. It's an immature plant, about eight years old from seed, with a tuber about the size of a cantaloupe. It's nowhere near flowering size, and that bud will undoubtedly expand into a leaf, over the course of the next couple of weeks. The two big plants at UConn are from wild collected seed started in 1994, and first blooming in 2004; the little guy is from seed produced in cultivation at UCSB, on a plant that was a sibling of our mature plants, which began its life here at UConn before heading for the Sunshine State.

Amorphophallus Update, June 26

2008-06-26T16:10:00.000-04:00

The Corpse Flower is starting to enter the realm of "alarmingly large," at 43 inches (109 cm) tall, which is 3.5 inches taller than yesterday. Four inches per day is about the maximum growth rate we've seen on these things at UConn.

Amorphophallus Update, June 25

2008-06-25T16:31:00.001-04:00

The Corpse Flower grew another 2.5 inches yesterday, and is now 39.5 inches (100 cm) tall. It will probably just about double in height over the next couple of weeks. Since the flowers are borne without foliage (i.e., the leaves are "hysteranthous"), most of that floral mass is coming from stored carbohydrates in the underground corm. Given the history of this plant, those carbohydrates were synthesized way back in summer 2006, the last time the plant had a leaf.

Actually, there isn't quite as much biomass in an A. titanum inflorescence as you might guess. The whole structure is quite spongy, with a lot of air spaces, and the spadix (the central pointy bit) is nearly hollow. Also, this species does grow roots when flowering, so some of the water content of the inflorescence is undoubtedly fresh from the soil. Other Amorphophallus species, like A. konjac, flower when rootless, so even the water in the bloom must be taken from stored reserves.

Amorphophallus Update June 24

2008-06-24T16:02:00.001-04:00

The bud is 37 inches (94 cm) tall today, or two inches taller than yesterday.

The speckled green sprout behind and to the left of the flower bud is our other mature specimen of Amorphophallus titanum. That plant is behaving normally, sending up a foliage leaf to photosynthesize, after flowering last year. Corpse flowers only produce one leaf at a time, at least as adults: the speckled "trunk" is really a petiole (leaf stalk), bearing a leaf blade dissected into numerous leaflets. The whole thing will collapse into mush when the plant next goes dormant; the only part of the plant that persists long term is the underground corm.

UConn Corpse Flower Redux

2008-06-23T16:07:00.000-04:00

Corpse Flower at the UConn Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Greenhouses. Note lens cap on pot rim for scale.

It's official: the larger of the two mature Amorphophallus titanum plants here at the University of Connecticut is going to flower again, after last stinking up the joint Mother's Day weekend 2007. Normally, it takes about three years for a Titan Arum to rebloom. In the usual post-floral sequence, the inflorescence sets any seeds that it is going to set, then withers away, leaving a dormant corm underground. The corm sits for a number of months, then sends up a titanic leaf, which lasts about a year and a half. Then the plant enters another dormant phase before finally flowering again. The plant in the photo was totally dormant for 13 months, and then started sending up what turns out to be a second flower, without an intervening vegetative phase. This is seriously peculiar behavior, and as far as I can tell the first time that two flowers in a row have been observed in an individual of this species.

The corm of this plant weighed 92 pounds after it bloomed in 2007, and no doubt quite a bit more than that before it produced a nearly six foot inflorescence. Possibly, re-flowering is normal--if seldom observed in cultivation--for large Corpse Flowers that do not set seed the first time around (we didn't even try to pollinate it last year, because of worries that producing seed would use up too much of the plant's reserves. Apparently, it still has plenty of reserves). In any case, it will be interesting to see how this year's flowering event plays out.

As of this morning, the inflorescence was 35 inches (90 cm) from soil level to tip. Based on past blooms here at UConn, I'd expect it to open in about two weeks (ca. July 7). Stay tuned for more updates.

Curly Bulbs in Springtime

2008-06-04T07:46:00.000-04:00

Cyrtanthus species with leaves and fruit, May 2008.

The arid and semi-arid portions of South Africa are home to a tremendous diversity of succulent plants, and also—though it isn’t as widely appreciated—a very diverse flora of geophytes (bulbs and tuberous plants with underground storage organs). Manning, Goldblatt and Snijman, in The Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs (Timber Press, 2002) estimate that there are about 1200 species of geophytes just in the zone of winter rainfall centered around Cape Town. I cultivate a small collection of South African geophytes, and this is generally a pretty dull time of year in that corner of the greenhouse: most are winter growers, and by this point in late spring the winter growers have crashed. There won’t be any sign of life from pots of Lachenalia, Massonia and Cape Eriospermum species until September or October.

A few South African bulbs that I grow come from the eastern parts of the country, where rainfall tends to be heaviest in summer, and these provide a nice change of pace from the brown leaves and withered flowers that dominate the rest of the bulb collection. Possibly the nicest summer bulb I have is the little Cyrtanthus with corkscrew leaves pictured here. I started these plants from seed from Silverhill Seeds, a source that specializes in the flora of South Africa. The material came labeled as Cyrtanthus helicatus, but that doesn’t seem to be a legitimate name.
There are about 57 species of Cyrtanthus, a genus in the amaryllis family (Amaryllidaceae), native to a wide range of habitat types in Sub-Saharan Africa. The species from Silverhill is one from a seasonally dry, summer-rainfall area, and it is leafless and inactive all winter. During the cooler months, the bulbs don’t receive any water at all. It blooms in April, before leaves emerge, with just a single white, amaryllis-like flower per plant, so far as I’ve seen. The leaves always seem to be produced two per bulb per season, giving the plants an amusing double helix look. While the leaves are green, I water the plants whenever the soil surface shows signs of drying out, so that moisture is always available to the roots. Even with diligent watering, the bulbs tend to go dormant before midsummer.

This year, I managed to cross-pollinate several of the Cyrtanthus plants, and the fat seedpods in the photograph are the result. I’ll probably plant the seed as soon as it ripens, since seed of plants in the amaryllis family is often short lived. (Dry, black, papery seeds of the type seen in Cyrtanthus are usually much more forgiving about storage time than the fleshy seeds of some other amaryllids, but better safe than sorry.) At least under my conditions, Cyrtanthus is quick to germinate, but with an awfully long wait for seedlings to reach maturity, even if maturity only means a bulb the size of an olive. I wouldn’t expect the new seedlings to flower before 2013 or so.