Even if the small ones are years from flowering, you still get the interesting leaf.
If it’s calling out for Seymour, run.
I love plants but I have a black thumb. So I have a fake frailejon.
As a prequel to the post I wanted to make today, my amorphophallus produced a record of seven flowers in two containers last year, four of which were fertilized and produced berries. (No seeds have ever grown for me, but they look attractive while growing.)
(And the main post.)
I leave a layer of leaves on top of my amorphophallus containers every winter and remove them every spring whenever it crosses my mind to do it. Sometimes at the time I clear the leaves away flower stalks have already started growing, sometimes they haven’t. The single-digit cold snap this past Christmas was the lowest temperature I’ve had here since I started growing amorphophallus, and I had some concern that it might have killed the corms in the ground, given that the amorphophallus’s native range is more tropical.
When I happened to decide to move the leaves this week, not only were flower stalks already growing but they actually appeared two or three weeks sooner than usual. The cold snap didn’t harm them and having the rest of the winter especially warm was to their advantage. Only three flower stalks as opposed to the seven from last year, but that’s okay–each corm grows either a single leaf or a single flower on any given year, and there are more leaf years than flower years.
Note the deep holes in the early photos. Those were made by last year’s leaves and flowers. At the bottom of each is a corm waiting until around May (after the earlier flowers have had a chance to bloom) to put out a new leaf.
I dug down into the hole of the corm that produced the flower in my small container last year (photo of last year’s flower included) and found a healthy corm and a couple of offshoot pups that it had produced. The main corm is a few years old. The pups are maybe one or two, will produce leaves this year, and are years away from their first flowers.
This got me curious enough to look at all of the corms in my large container while they are all relatively dormant (even the flowering ones haven’t started putting out roots yet). I found nine large to relatively large corms and a few smaller ones.
All of my plants are ultimately derived from one dime-sized corm bought on Ebay in 2007–amorphallus pups like rabbits. The corms can eventually grow to over 10 pounds, and mostly consume themselves each year producing their leaf and rebuild again throughout the growing season. Everything dies back to the compact corm in the winter, and in the next year when it is ready to grow again, lots of slender new roots grow from the top of the corm (not the bottom) and spread outward and curve downward from there.
While I was impressed with size of the large corms (there was probably around 15x the plant mass in there compared to when I first planted in the container) I was actually surprised that didn’t find more pups–each year I have at least a couple of dozen of small leaves start growing spread across the container. I suppose those could grow directly from new roots that spread out during the summer, or possibly the deep freeze did kill the smallest pups. I know in a couple of months when the tiny ones usually start showing up
(The new photos are pretty bad, but they are the best I can get with the pretty bad camera on my new phone on a heavily overcast day.)
Nice ones, D_G! I’m somewhat randomly contributing a link to this recent article on international exotic carnivorous plant collection/poaching, mostly because I found it really fascinating and this seems like the least irrelevant place to put it.
I never expected to see so many Amorphophallus photos on the Dope.
Hopefully my two A. konjac survived the December deep freeze and grow (and flower?) for me this year.
Speaking of carnivorous plants, I found a couple different small pitcher plants locally and am giving them a try. When they get bigger maybe they’ll attract and devour the occasional stinkbugs that somehow managed to infiltrate our home this winter.
Another fairly recent piece about Nephentes.:
I have a happy little drosera capensis (“sundew”) predator plant in my kitchen window. It just started blooming about a week and a half ago.
For being exotic, it’s probably the easiest plant that I’ve had to take care of. There’s effectively no such thing as over watering it and you give it a little nugget of turtle food every week or so.
They say that the biggest issue that beginning gardeners have is giving too much attention to their plants. That works perfect for this guy because it’s closer to an animal than most plants are, and our instinct to nurture works well for it.
The amophophallus have produced five flower stalks this year, and are in full bloom and drawing flies (and the occasional bee). The smell is so strong that I get whiffs of it from inside the house.
Darren’s success with Amorphophallus should inspire us all.
Not sure if they really count as ‘exotic’, but I’ve a penchant for unusual edibles (although sometimes ‘unusual’ is just ‘not common here, where I live’).
This year, I’m growing:
- Capsicum flexuosum - a species of chilli that produces tiny, tomato-like fruits - the unusual thing is that the plant is supposedly frost tolerant to -15 Celsius
- Rubus Illecebrosus - a Japanese species of bramble that has large, raspberry-like fruits (supposedly the size of strawberries)
- Oyster Leaf (Mertensia maritima) - a coastal plant with leaves that supposedly taste like fresh oyster
- Okahijiki - Japanese ‘Land Seaweed’
- Haskap - a type of honeysuckle that produces edible berries - I planted this last year, but it looks like I’ll get some berries this year
- Saskatoon Berry - Amelanchier alnifolia - common in parts of Canada, almost unhead-of here - my plant is only about a foot tall, but it has flowered this year
- American Pawpaw - Asimina triloba - I have some fresh seeds that have been cold stratified and I am trying to germinate them - no sign yet…