Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Some Pelargoniums in the Fall

Pelargonium multibracteatum Dalil Yemen form



Pelargonium candicans

Pelargonium candicans

Pelargonium aridum x quinquelobatum tetraploid

Pelargonium aridum x quinquelobatum tetraploid

Pelargonium aridum x quinquelobatum tetraploid with Petunia exerta

Pelargonium aridum x quinquelobatum tetraploid leaf
Pelargoniums are of course my favorite genus, and I am now growing several out in my gardens.  Pelargonium multibracteatum is a species from northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula.  It is variable and the form shown resembles P, quinquelobatum which inhabits a similar range and is also a variable species.  However P quinquelobatum flowers range from blue grey to greenish and yellowish, whereas multibracteatum is white to pink.  This one was collected in Dalil  Yemen some years ago and has made the rounds among pelargonium collectors.  I like it because it is easy to grow, flowers profusely and the leaves are nicely zoned.  It is easy to lift and grow indoors under lights as well.   It does not survive our winter cold but I wouldnt be surprised if it can self sow, certainly P. quinquelobatum has done that before in gardens of mine.
Pelargonium candicans comes from the Cape of South Africa and although it is primarily found in winter rainfall regions it adapts nicely to our climate and does self sow. It isn't very showy,although the silvery leaves are nice in a quiet sort of way.  
When I was doing my thesis research at Cornell I created a number of interspecific pelargonium hybrids via a modified embryo rescue procedure.  During this process it was not unusual for diploid species crosses to sometimes yield both diploid and tetraploid hybrid progeny.  The diploid hybrids are most often sterile but the tetraploids are often fully fertile and such was the case with the cross I made of aridum x quinquelobatum.  Its pink flowers are short lived, self pollinating in the same manner as P aridum does, to yield plenty of viable seeds.  The leaves are fairly attractive, larger than aridum but divided much as as aridum is, but also getting a dark zonal marking from the quinquelobatum parent.  Again it is not cold hardy but it is vigorous, easily lifted for winter if desired and in any case there is plenty of seed produced by even a single plant.  I sometimes like to use it in my classes as an example of a "species" I created, after all it is fully fertile and cannot backcross to either parent (which come from geographically far apart areas of Africa anyway so a natural hybrid between them would never happen in nature).  All it would need is a "home'' but I'd rather keep it in my garden and share it with other pelargonium collectors rather than set it loose in the wild and confuse a bunch of botanists in the future.

Crazy for Commelinids

Commelina virginica


Commelina virginica

Commelina sp ex Karen Petersen

Tinantia pringlei Berkeley form

Aneilema aequinoctiale

Aneilema aequinoctiale

Aneilema aequinoctiale

Commelina africana

Commelina africana
Found a few more recent photos from this fall, and it seems indeed that I do like commenilids, to the point that I grow several species.   I found my plant of Commelina virginica in coastal South Carolina but it has a much wider range.  It is a rather short upright growing plant and although the flowers are not bad looking, they are fleeting even by commelinid standards.   It remains to be seen how hardy it will be in my garden, while I am certain hardy ecotypes exist this plant didn't come from a very cold area so it remains to be seen how permanent it will be.  In any case I did collect seed, which is a tedious process for most commelinids except a couple which I will mention later on.  Basically one has to collect the dried bracts from which the flowers emerge, these will contain the oblong seed pods within.  Then one rubs the pods until the single seed, or occasionally two, is released.
Another blue flowered species is one that Karen Petersen collected seeds of, I think it came from Kenya.  It is more showy than our native species, and readily self sows into other pots near it and can withstand considerable drought.   Like all of them it propagates easily from cuttings or seeds.
I just posted about Tinantia pringlei only to find a photo confirming what I suspected, that yes indeed I do have the Berkeley form also growing in the backyard in a different garden than the Plant Delights form.  And as can be seen the leaves have markedly fewer spots than the PD form.  To some extent spotting depends on amount of sun too, so both genotype and exposure are factors in just how many/dark the leaf spots will be.  Like most of its family that I grow, it requires no particular attention and just seems to pop up here and there and take care of itself.  Should it have too many offspring as many of its kin are prone to doing, they are easily removed so that populations can be managed in the garden without too much trouble.
Aneilema aequinoctale is a vigorous tender perennial from South Africa and points north which will self sow for me.  It creates a spreading ground cover from which short panicles of yellow flowers emerge.  It is easy to harvest seed of this one, no messy bracts to sort through, just look out for the ripe small pods and rub them apart to get the round seeds within.  It thrives in warm weather and appears to prefer some shade and decently moist soil.
Commelina africana comes in several forms and indeed I collected seed of several different ones years ago in Botswana and South Africa. One form has persisted over the years, being an excellent self sower and profuse bloomer.   It does best at the edge of a garden, where it can trail out into the patio or onto the top of a stone wall.  To harvest seeds, the easiest thing to do is to lift the plant's branches that extend over the stone and look for the elongated seeds lying right under the plant.  They are easy to pick up and any that escape attention (and many will) become next year's plants.  It is perennial in nature but severe winter cold makes it a resowing annual here.  Its not by any means the most showy of plants, or even of its family, but I enjoy it, making sure it doesn't stray far from the areas I allow it to grow in.

Tinantia pringlei and a Rant About Deer






This is an interesting relative of Tradescantia that I have grown for many years.  The form I grew at the old house came from UC Berkeley and had less densely spotted leaves than the form shown in the photos and possibly is a bit hardier.  It certainly overwintered just fine when we lived in Tuckahoe and I think I have  a plant or two around here somewhere in the back yard.  If not I can always resurrect some from my refrigerator seed bank.  The form shown is a different collection that I got from Plant Delights Nursery.  It hasn't survived as a plant during the last two brutal winters, but it does resow rather generously and grows quickly.  It is pictured in one of the raised beds in the backyard, and by the end of summer is in full flower.
Pardon the u-posts, they are there to support mesh which keeps the deer away.  I started by enclosing certain beds, now I have built a fence of mesh around the entire back yard but I haven't removed some of the earlier fencing yet in case a deer does get in.  We don't have many deer here but they are present and the damage they can do is astounding.  My students know that I hate them, that I regard them as little more than hooved disease carrying rats.  The damage they inflict on the local flora is only exceeded by what our species has done, and we have favored the deer greatly by removing the wolves that were their main predator and by creating "edge" habitats which they prefer. They now have reached such numbers that people are killed or injured each year running into them with their cars, countless more victims have suffered or died from Lyme Disease, erlichiosis, babiosis, anaplasmosis, and Powassan virus (one third of victims die from it, fortunately it is rare so far) which are transmitted by ticks that live on deer.  But some folks may protest, well don't rodents carry ticks too?  But comparing a rodent with ticks to a deer with ticks is like comparing the passenger capacity of a tricycle to a 747 Jumbo Jet.  Plus rodents are easier to control.  There are also devices which can render the rodents free of ticks that can be placed in your yard, but there is no such thing for the monstrous hooved version. Meanwhile our woodlands are being stripped of the trilliums, ladyslipper orchids, and other spring wildflowers that the deer hunger after.  I remember seeing vast swathes of trilliums in Ithaca, NY each spring when I was a student in the woodlands not far from the Cornell University campus, but I have heard that such displays are a thing of the past due to a greatly increased deer population.  I think I saw one deer in the evening at the edge of the campus at night once in my 10 years there as a student, but during my last summer visit for a long weekend about 4 years ago I saw one on West Campus at 11 in the morning!  Clearly something has to be done about them, but in the meantime the best defense a gardener has is to build a fence to exclude or at least make life difficult for them.  In the front yard which they do have access to, I regularly spray Liquid Fence and plant mostly toxic or smelly plants that deer don't like.  I will also chase and throw things at them if I see them, the neighbors must wonder about that one.  I want my yard to be as unwelcoming as possible and in fact I think I may have changed their usual route through the neighborhood.  As it stands right now, the cars are their major "predator" in this area, with coyotes a distant second.  I know folks who live right near large parks or other tracks of woodlands who have large herds roam through their properties but there aren't any really large woodlands very close by and so they don't have too many places to hide during the day around here.  So between the cars and increasing houses in the area I think that conditions are less favorable for them so that their numbers are unlikely to get larger in my immediate neighborhood.  And that is a good thing.
Back to the Tinantia.  I have one plant that sowed itself into a pot with a small laeliocattaleya hybrid orchid in it and it survives the winters indoors growing in the bark with the orchid.  Outside self sown seedlings appear when the weather gets warm and rapidly grow to blooming size.  I have to thin some of them out to allow room for other plants but it is not a difficult task.  It would make a superb container plant as well on account of the foliage, and the flowers are nothing to sneeze at when it is in full bloom.

Cleome foliosa from Kunene Namibia



This is a wonderful yellow cleome with large bright yellow flowers.  I got the seed from Karen Petersen years ago when she collected seeds in Africa back in the early 90's after I gave her some quick lessons on how to collect seeds from plants.  This was, of course, well before the advent of paperwork now required to bring in seeds from other countries.  Some of the seeds were harvested a bit too early, and not all were of indigenous plants, but there were some great finds among them.  This is probably one of the best, it was labelled as coming from Kunene, which is a region in Nambia.  I have identified it as Cleome foliosa based on internet research. I have grown a couple of generations from my refrigerated seed and although they got off to a late start this year (I think I sowed the seed in the container in July) they did flower in late August and September when the weather was quite warm.   It comes from arid habitats so it figures that it would do best at the end of summer when we had a prolonged warm and dry spell.  The flowers are quite showy and open for a long period.  In fact in order to get more seeds I had to bring the entire (very heavy) container inside when frost threatened and kept it near a four tubed t5 light fixture under which I grow a lot of high light requiring plants like pelargonium species.  The cleomes leaned into the light but eventually died off as it got cooler in the basement as fall went on.  Nonetheless I was successful in getting the thin long pods to mature enough to yield many seeds for another generation of plants.  The seeds are rather small for a cleome but they have the same round shape shared by other species in the genus. My educated guess is that the next growing season will start early and be warmer than usual, so if I am correct I can start them early and if weather conditions are favorable get a lot more flowers and seeds from them than I did this year.  Another African cleome, C. hirta, resows abundantly for me so I have no need to plant any more of them, hopefully I can persuade C.  foliosa to do the same after next year.  Until then I collect all the seeds they produce to ensure I have enough to grow more plants (and maintain a seed store) so that I can afford to let them shed some seed directly into the ground to see if they can become resowing annuals here in NY.  If they don't resow, it is little trouble to collect seed and store it so I can enjoy those big golden flowers again.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Acer pentaphyllum, a Rare and Unusual Maple


Generally I am not a great fan of maples, perhaps because when we were at the old house that my folks owned I had to fight with the roots of Norway maples in some of my gardens.  They were quick to grow, and steal water from herbaceous plants, and sometimes they would even grow up into pots that were set upon the ground for the summer.   I detest Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) anyway, it is an aggressive invader of our forests and is uglier than the native Sugar Maple (A. saccharum) which does have colorful fall foliage.  I also don't really want large trees around my gardens in general, the root competition is too much for most of the plants I want to grow and I'd rather grow a lot of small things in a given space than one big thing.
I did see a plant at Western Hills north of San Francisco years ago that I first thought was one of the South African sumacs but on closer inspection it turned out to be Acer pentaphyllum,  I tried a couple of small seedlings at the old house but they did not survive.  So this year I got a decent sized plant from Forest Farm and it has grown well.  It remains to be seen if it will survive the winter, as I think there is little experience growing it outside of the West Coast.  It is very rare in nature, confined to a small area in one valley in western China.  The leaves do look suspiciously like marijuana but of course the latter is not a woody plant.  It is deciduous from what I can find out, but so far it still has foliage on it but it stopped growing when fall arrived.   I think it will make a nice bush or small tree in our yard should it survive the winter.  If it does well I may let it take the place of the brittle cedars nearby.  I keep them only because they offer some shade for potted plants that sit on a wall and on the ground on landscape fabric at the base of the same wall in summer.   Otherwise the cedars are not in the best of shape, they have been cabled to keep more branches from breaking, which I assume must have been a problem before we got this house.  

Osteospermum "Avalanche" Offspring



In my last post I wrote about getting seeds off of Osteospermum "Avalanche".  Evidently it crossed with one of the purple tender ones as I got this blue eyed offspring.  Only one other seed grew and produced a plant, and it appears to be identical to "Avalanche".  Seed set on any of them has been very sparse this year, since we had too frequent rain in early summer followed by hot and dry weather later on.   Reluctant seed setters such as these tend to prefer optimal conditions, which would be cool and sunny for a few weeks at a time.  Nonetheless should my blue eyed plant prove to be as hardy as "Avalanche" it would be a nice addition to gardens.  It is a good bloomer and held up well to whatever weather it had to endure.
Only the most vigorous of the three plants of "Avalanche" made it through last year's brutal winter, but it has regrown nicely and is quite robust right now, as we have had a very mild fall with about two hard frosts thus far.  I took cuttings of the blue eyed plant to overwinter indoors in case the plant outside fails to get through winter, but with the strong El Nino in place it is likely the winter will be mild and thus its chances of survival are good.   I planted other osteospermums near it and "Avalanche" including "Purple Mountain" and one from Forest Farm called "Lavender Mist".  Alas neither plant has been very robust, but they are alive and will probably get through winter.  In fact "Lavender Mist" looks identical to "Avalanche", I can detect nothing lavender about it.  I think FF has some labeling issues, I also got a Shasta Daisy from them that was supposed to be a very full double variety, it came out single so I trashed it.   Otherwise I have generally had good luck with FF.