Autumn in New England

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

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

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

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

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.