The Payoff

Amorphophallus konjac: I've written about this species several times before. My dad gave me a few small corms in the spring of 2009, and growing those plants that summer is what really got me into gardening as a hobby. Four years later, I have a decent collection of strange aroids, including a few relatively rare species.

Also, four years later, I finally have an inflorescence from one of the plants my dad gave me. Last fall when I unpotted it, I noticed that the growing tip was unusually rounded (they normally are quite pointy), and that it expanded a little bit over the following couple of weeks. I made a mental note to keep an eye on it during the winter, and it's a good thing I did. If I'd stuck this plant in a box in the closet and forgotten about it until spring, things would have gotten cramped.

Seriously. The growth tip went from ~5cm to around a meter within the past few weeks. As the peduncle (floral stalk) shot up, the corm started to shrink and wrinkle, and I had to prop it up to keep it from toppling over.

Anyhow, here are a few pictures of the growth and blooming of my Amorphophallus konjac--

Not that I think it's likely that someone reading this blog cares much, but here's some rock information: The off-white rock just in front of the corm above is a chunk of granite pegmatite that I collected in Maine. It's a neat rock: very large crystals of quartz, microcline feldspar, and muscovite mica with several garnets here and there. Pegmatites form when igneous intrusions cool slowly, giving the minerals time to form very large crystals, sometimes up to several meters in length. The white thing to the right is wollastonite on a contact-metamorphosed dolomite. Wollastonite is a calcium-rich pyroxenoid (the cations in true pyroxenes are iron and magnesium; too much calcium changes the crystal structure); dolomite is a carbonate mineral that can (rarely) precipitate directly out of water, but usually forms when magnesium-rich water seeps through limestone and replaces half of the calcium ions in the crystal structure.

After the above shot was taken, I moved the plant into the downstairs bathroom and shut the door. It was just beginning to smell strange.

 This is a closeup of the spathe, just to illustrate how meaty it looks. I'm not sure how well the flies that naturally pollinate these plants can see, but they really go all-out here.

 

These two shots were taken two days apart. Above, you can see the fresh, unopened male flowers (creamy yellow). Below, they have opened up and released their pollen, while the female flowers underneath have become unreceptive. This prevents self-pollinization. If I had another one in bloom, I could have pollinated one of them and potentially gotten some berries later in the year.

About two days after I put the plant in the downstairs bathroom, the smell started to creep out into the hallway. It was enough to be annoying but it didn't spread over a large area and turning on the fan in the bathroom was enough to keep it from escaping. But then I went in there to take a few of these pictures, and realized I had underestimated how strongly it would smell. It is frequently described as smelling like rotting flesh, and this is largely accurate. Holding my nose right up to the inflorescence, however, I detected another odor--strange, a little unsettling, and hard to place. It's somewhere between musty old things in an attic and a vat of stagnant urine. Perhaps it's a musty old vat of stagnant urine sitting in an attic.

On leaving the room, I could no longer smell the plant, but I went to bed not long afterwards feeling a little queasy.

Still, I'm quite happy about this, for a couple of reasons: One, I'm proud that I accomplished something after working at it for four years. Two, it's pretty damn cool.

Pressing Onward

Amidst the chaos of studying sedimentary petrology (soon moving on to metamorphic---yay!), mechanics, biology, and trig and statistics as they relate to geology, and trying to figure out my schedule for fall, and beginning to research grad schools, and playing with cats, I occasionally find time to look after my plants. When last I posted, I had been suffering through a long, boring winter break and aching for something to do when I noticed that my Eastern skunk cabbage seedlings (Symplocarpus foetidus) were getting excited. This was wonderful news, as it gave me something to occupy me for the rest of my break, and led me in a slightly different direction: the skunk cabbages took up relatively little space under my new light setup, so I decided to start growing ornamental peppers as well.

Growing skunk cabbage has been interesting. Since there is almost no horticultural information available, I experimented with four different media, three of which (pine bark fines, 1/8" bark/gravel mix, and regular bagged potting soil) seemed to work out relatively alright. The fourth, just plain sphagnum moss, did not work out so well. It seemed to dry out very quickly, and I may have just needed to pay more attention to those two plants; however, an ideal medium should allow for some error, and the sphagnum moss did not, in this case.

Above, I said that three of the media were relatively alright. I use the world "relative" because there still have been some problems. After a few weeks under the lights, the leaves started to brown and die:

My best guess is that this is a nutrient deficiency that I neglected to take care of quickly enough, so a few weeks ago, I started giving them all-purpose plant food when I water. I didn't notice any signs of improvement until yesterday when I started poking around to see if one of them had formed any sort of storage organ during its short life, and I noticed a small leaf starting to poke up. It turns out that all three of them are doing the same thing, so the plan is to keep fertilizing and see how things turn out.

Occupying the rest of my growing shelf is another learning experience--ornamental peppers. During my life, I have grown very few plants from seed, and the ones I have grown from seed have had limited success. This experience has largely followed that pattern, but as with my baby Symplocarpus, there are signs of improvement. I had fantastic luck germinating seeds in three different ways, but the luck kept running out quickly. The trick, I learned, is to keep the new seedlings covered for a few days after they poke through so they don't dry out too quickly. It seems that once they get their first pair of true leaves, they are much more forgiving, but they are pretty fragile while they are relying on just their cotyledons.

 

 

 Now, after a series of irritating failures, I have a decent number of baby pepper plants. I'm growing several ornamental varieties (Calico, Black Pearl, Black Olive, Numex Twilight, and Sangria) and three edible varieties (Fish, Chocolate Mini Bell, and Red Mini Bell) which I'm also growing partially for their ornamental value, though I do love to eat peppers.

One final, very exciting botanical event is occurring at my house right now: my largest Amorphophallus konjac is getting ready to bloom.

The yellowish thing on the very top is the spadix, which holds the flowers, and the pinkish fleshy layer directly surrounding it is the spathe, a modified leaf that surrounds the spadix and draws attention to it. The entire structure is about 40 cm from the tip to the growth point on the corm, and it has grown about 20 cm in the past three days. I put it in the window for the picture, but its normal home is on my rock shelf next to my desk (what kind of geologist would I be without a rock collection?), and it's pretty wild to watch it develop, even over the course of a single day. At this point, the spathe is about to start unfurling and I will soon have to move the plant into our little-used downstairs bathroom so as not to funk up our home with the stench of rotting meat.

This is why I call my blog weird flowers.

Trying something new

I didn't anticipate how much school would interfere with keeping up with this blog. And on the occasional days that I did have free time and considered writing something in here, I didn't feel I had much to write about that was relevant to my original purpose for making this blog. It would be different if I had a more extensive plant collection, but I don't and I'm not particularly interested in having to take care of some ungodly number of plants all year long. So, considering that, I'm pretty content to have a relatively small collection of summer-only plants that I can more-or-less ignore for half the year. That's especially useful since school really does take up a lot of time.

And while I like not having to spend all winter caring for lots of plants, this week, I made a step towards being a legitimate indoor gardener. Back in November, I got eight Symplocarpus foetidus (eastern skunk cabbage) seedlings. These things grow like mad less than a mile from my house, so there's not a reason for me to try to grow them other than, pretty much, to see if I can. Since there is little to no information out there on growing these things in containers, it's sort of an experiment. Last year, I put three seedlings in a small plastic bin full of potting soil on my patio all winter. They survived the winter with no problem but once I separated and potted them, it didn't work out, probably due to gross negligence on my part--they were ignored for a day or two too long, and dried out. This year, I decided to try several different methods.

I divided up my seedlings and came up with four methods for growing them (if you've followed the numbers, that's two seedlings per method). The constants are that the bottoms of all the pots are lined with sphagnum moss and are in plastic containers into which I'll pour an inch or so of water. These are mucky wetland plants so that shouldn't be a problem, even in a container. So, two of the seedlings went into nothing but sphagnum moss, two into bagged potting soil, two into pine bark fines, and two into the 1/8" bark/pea gravel mix in which I grew all of my aroids over the summer. I watered the containers and left them on a shelf in a corner to just hang out for several months. A casual glance into that corner the other day revealed that, to my extremely unwarranted surprise, some of the seedlings were happy enough to leaf out.

Now, decent window space in my apartment is at a premium, and it seemed unfair of me to leave actively-growing plants in a shady corner, so I decided to look into lighting. It turned out to be much cheaper than I expected, and I set up my stinky little babies under two T8s in our computer room.

This one in the coarser bark/gravel mix is the tallest, but the other seedling in the same mix doesn't show any sign of leafing out at the moment. Both of the sphagnum seedlings are leafing out, and one of the pine fines seedlings is. However, neither of the bagged potting soil seedlings look terribly thrilled about life, and they both have fungus growing around them. You can also see that, while all of the other pots are moist, the bagged potting soil has already dried out. The other three options are working pretty well, and I think they all deserve some more investigation. If anyone out there wants to try their hand at Symplocarpus foetidus, let me know how it goes.

These plants are small, so now I've got a four-foot, lighted shelf with a lot of empty space on it. I think I'm going to try some small ornamental peppers...

That's me with Carah Faye, the lead singer from Shiny Toy Guns, after their show in Pittsburgh on Halloween. Just because it was awesome.

Beware of moose*

It's good to be home. And after two weeks away, it's great to walk onto my balcony and see everything looking so happy.

"Where did he go?" you may be asking yourself. Well, for the first time in my life, I ventured beyond the boundaries of the United States of America...all the way to Canada. We spent most of our time in Québec City and Les Îles de la Madeleine, an archipelago in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I don't speak the language in either of those places, but I got by with a lot of help from my Québécoise girlfriend.

Québec City viewed from Lévis

Montmorency Falls, several miles out of the city

Souris, Prince Edward Island, where we waited for the ferry to Les Îles. Beautiful red sand beaches.

The ocean.

I enjoyed the rocky beaches on the islands.

This dead whale washed up behind a café we were at.

From the top of the hill behind the house we stayed in...

...and sunset from the field out front.

Cool rock and sand formations on the beach.

After five days or so at Les Îles de la Madeleine, we got back took the ferry back to PEI, then drove to New Brunswick. The Motel 6 in Moncton is, to be completely honest, the nicest motel/hotel I've stayed in. New Brunswick is home to the Bay of Fundy, where the tidal variation is one of the two or three highest in the world.

Low tide in Hopewell, NB.

Forest of white birch in Hopewell.

At low tide, you can walk on the ocean floor. So we did.

 The next day, we had plenty of time to make the seven-hour trip back to Québec, so we made some stops along the way, including this one at Grand Falls, New Brunswick. I guess it's a lot grander and more watery when the dam is opened up, but I'm a geology student so rocks and gorgeous gorges are good enough for me.

Looking downstream--the dam and falls were behind me.

Subvertical strata, mineralized tension gashes, and folds--it doesn't get much better than that.

After spending another day in Québec tracking down gifts and souvenirs, it was time to go home. It was a wonderful trip, but after two weeks, I was ready to see my plants and my cats again. After all, how could I not miss this guy?

*I was a bit unnerved to see so many "moose crossing" signs on the highway, especially the ones with flashing lights and a picture of a moose walking into the side of a car. Hitting moose is a much more common problem than I had anticipated, which is why New Brunswick has lined many of their highways with tall fences. That doesn't stop them completely, however--Sam's dad once hit one there with an army vehicle.

Amorphofallacy

Damnit. This has happened before.

Last year, after spending two years admiring and longing to add a beautiful Amorphophallus henryi to my small collection, I went ahead and ordered a dormant corm from a guy (The Guy) on the internet. As it turns out, it ended up being A. albus, with a leaf like this:

and a petiole like this:

Not a bad plant to have, but not what I'd ordered and probably not something I would have bought anyway. So I spoke to The Guy and he apologized and promised to send me a henryi in the fall. That sounded good enough to me, and I was glad that I would finally get to grow this plant for which my heart had spent so much time pining.

Come October, The Guy emailed me and said he somehow had left his albus and his henryi corms unlabeled and would have to consult with an expert to get things sorted out. Worse things have happened to me, and I'm a pretty reasonable dude, so oh well.

Let's move on, way on, to the past few weeks. First, some of my A. konjacs started peering out of their nests, followed by my new replacement A. henryi, and last year's "A. henryi." This next picture is labeled "Amorphophallus henryi," as you may be able to make out. As of this morning (when I took these pictures), the leaf is just starting to come out. Cool, but beside the point, which is that this is the replacement I got last fall:

And as you may be able to see in this next one, the label has the word "henryi" crossed out. This is A. albus. And I believe the one above is, as well.

Imagine my disappointment at seeing how awfully similar these two look. A few minutes of internet research later reinforced my suspicion that once again, I again had not received Amorphophallus henryi. At this point, I was pretty irritated. To be fair, I think The Guy made a couple of honest mistakes, and I'm not going to slander him all over the internet.

But seriously, I was jonesing for a damn Amorphophallus henryi. So when I stumbled across one that someone else was selling, I went for it without much hesitation. And this time, I got what I wanted, and didn't have to wait some number of months for it to start growing so that I could make sure it was what it was supposed to be. One could argue that whatever it is is whatever it's supposed to be, which is correct in a philosophical sense; on the other hand, that wouldn't change the fact that the previous two "henryis" turned out not to be what I supposed they were. Anyway....

After much time spent agonizing over why bad things always happen to me (not really), I present Amorphophallus henryi:

May it provide me with many joyous years. And if this thing turns out not to be henryi (which I think is unlikely), I'll probably be even more irritated than I was this last time. I might even have to soothe myself with a beer.