Sunday, January 2, 2011

Another cool sansevieria blooms!




I grew this plant, and several others, from leaf cuttings I got many years ago from the Botanic Garden in Pretoria, South Africa. It was a species collected in Venda, one of the old "homelands" of South Africa, right up near the border with Zimbabwe. In doing some internet research, it might be the same thing as something going around with the name S. hallii "Pink Bat", but I have no idea if the plants come from the same source as mine. It is a slow growing and small species, but not hard to cultivate, and it eventually it produces a rather robust rhizome. This year one of the plants at school finally flowered--and what a surprise--flowers that pop right out of the ground, something I have not seen in Sansevieria before. Some more internet sleuthing reveals a similar phenomena in S. fischeri (aka S. singularis), maybe that is what my plant is? The flowers were very attractive, and now there are berries forming right at ground level, helped, no doubt, by my efforts to self pollinate the flowers. I wonder what pollinates it, is it rodent or moth pollinated? The pink foliage is attractive and distinctive, and the pink shows up even better in bright sunlight.

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