Orchids have tricky reproduction cycles. I’ve previously written about the kinky things they do to the insects that pollinate them, but that’s just the beginning. Once their seeds are released, sometimes as much as a year later, they go on their own adventure.
Orchid seeds are incredibly tiny and very fragile. In the wild, they’d be carried by the wind into moss that grows in trees. The seeds cary no food of their own, so they’re entirely dependent on the environment they land in. If it’s not just right, the seedling won’t survive. They make up for this fragility by releasing a lot of seeds. A single orchid seed pod can contain half a million seeds.
This fragility also meant that orchids were almost impossible to reproduce outside of their native habitats. A hundred years ago, the germination rate for orchid seed was in single digits. The difficulty and rarity of them contributed to their allure.
But in the 1950s, a technique was invented to grow orchids from seed with a germination rate of 90% or more. Basically you sterilize a flask, add a growing medium, and place seeds inside. The sterile environment allows the seeds to grow without any danger of fungus contamination. This is known as “orchid flasking” and it’s the reason you can now buy a once-rare plant in a grocery store for a few bucks.
When I impregnated my Phalaenopsis, I looked into doing the flasking myself at home. It’s possible, but it’s pretty complicated, so I decided to send the seeds to an expert: Troy Meyers. They Meyers Conservatory in Washington is unique because they’ll flask your seeds for free if they’re a species (which mine weren’t, so I had to pay, but that’s fine) in order to discourage the taking of orchids from native habitats.
Using their instructions, I set my pods in paper towels (they suggested coffee filters but I didn’t have any) to let the pod dry and collect all the seeds.
After a week or so, there was a fine orange dust at the bottom of the paper cone. In that teaspoon of dust were hundreds of thousands of Phalaenopsis seeds.
I packaged up the seeds and mailed them off to Meyers. When they received them, they did an “assay” to review the seeds, and I got this report:
Seed is golden brown to the naked eye, and free flowing. Medium sized seeds are long-rice shaped, have one blunt end, and have moderately small sized elongated brownish-yellow embryos centrally located which are 3/4 the length of the seed.
They also included two photos: one with transmitted light and one with reflected light. According to the assay, 97% of the seeds appear to have good embryos – a good sign.
Now the seeds will be sterilized and flasked (they may have been already) and we’ll settle in for a long wait. It’ll be months before we can tell if they’re growing, and then a year or so before we’ve got anything resembling a seedling. But so far, so good!
You knew I couldn’t watch that Synandrospadix vermitoxicus bloom without doing a timelapse video of it, right? One photo every five minutes during daylight hours for 10 days. Enjoy.
Read this post for more information on this weird, wild, wonderful plant.
Fish do not sweat. They live in water. Sweating would be silly. But if fish did sweat, and they wore sweatpants for a month without washing, I know what they’d smell like: a Synandrospadix vermitoxicus bloom.
Synandrospadix is a monotypic genus, which means that there’s only one kind, and it’s the vermitoxicus species. They’re from warm, humid places like South America, which means its a strictly indoor plant here in San Francisco. Vermitoxicus means that it’s toxic to worms and possibly the rest of us, but that’s apparently a matter of debate among the botanically-minded. Either way, I’m not going to be eating it.
Like the rest of the Aroid family (Colocasia, Alocasia, Spathiphyllum), it has an inflorescence (aka “flower”) made of a spathe and spadix. Most Aroids have kind of plain blooms, but this one is just amazing. The spathe is a light green with dark green lines, and the spadix has dozens of spikes with little purple fists. Naturally, those are the boy parts. The girl parts are lower on the spadix and are green and white.
While it’s not as stinky as other members of the tribe (I’m looking at you, Amorphophallus), it’s definitely not a pleasant smell. Some online sources have described it as “rotten cabbage,” but I like my fish sweat description better because every time I walk by the plant I think, “Did I leave some fish in here? Oh, right.” The smell is there to attract pollinators to move pollen from the boy parts to the girl parts, but you can only really smell it if you get right in there and give it a sniff, which, of course, I did.
If you love weird plants, this one’s definitely on the list. And the best part is, it’s actually been very easy to grow. I got the plant last year. It went dormant around November and I let it dry out completely. I started watering it again in February and the first leaf began to emerge from the bulb after just a few days.
I love the plant because it’s just so weird looking. The lines on the spathe are also on the leaf stems, making it just fascinating to behold. It grows fast and intense and then takes a good long nap. I can relate to that.
We read the botanical web so you don’t have to. In this edition: big bugs back from extinction, power moss, garden therapy, a plan for an underground park in NYC, and an ignoble end to an ancient tree.
Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years “The story is simple: A bunch of black rats almost wiped out a bunch of gigantic bugs on a little island far, far away from most of us. A few dedicated scientists, passionate about biological diversity, risked their lives to keep the bugs going.” Their safe haven? A single bush.
The hidden power of moss “Scientists at Cambridge University are exhibiting a prototype table that demonstrates how biological fuel cells can harness energy from plants.” Someday I’d like to send email from a mossy (and moss-powered) laptop.
Can Gardening Help Troubled Minds Heal? “What scientists do know is that gardening reduces stress and calms the nerves. It decreases cortisol, a hormone that plays a role in stress response.” I used to joke that gardening is cheaper than therapy. Now I realize that it is therapy.
LowLine: An Underground Park on NYC's Lower East Side by Dan Barasch on Kickstarter “We want to transform an abandoned trolley terminal on the Lower East Side of Manhattan into the world’s first underground park. It will be a new kind of public space, using solar technology for natural illumination, and cutting edge design to capture and highlight a very special industrial space.” I want those newfangled lights in my house right now!
A lovely selection of tiny orchids are currently blooming in Plantgasm Gardens (aka my house). The flowers below are each smaller than a US dime.
On the left is Ludisia discolor, a “Jewel Orchid,” grown more to enjoy the leaves than the blooms, which you can’t see in this photo because the flower stalk grew so tall, but trust me they’re pretty.
On the right is Dendrobium kingianum which, in addition to being a micro-beauty, also has a sweet smell.
The larger my orchid collection grows, the more I appreciate the small ones.
I’ve been sewing seeds in the vegetable garden outside for a few weeks now – the winter stuff you can plant anytime in San Francisco: carrots, spinach, and lettuce – and one by one, the seedlings have been coming up and then disappearing after a few days, little craters left in their place.
I thought it might be birds, which I’ve seen go after seedlings before. Or maybe one of the four little dogs that live here had gone vegetarian. But, no. Today I found the culprit.
I was outside planting Rhubarb (a request from the wife) when I looked up and saw a large rat, casually munching my seedlings, not four feet from me. I froze for a moment, half horrified and half impressed by his brazenness. I swear he looked right at me with a “hey, what’s up?” look in his eye and just kept eating.
He ran off when I stepped toward him, but as soon as I walked away, he was right back there, devouring my future bounty. So, not especially confident that it would work, I grabbed a clear bucket I’d been using for mixing soil, walked over slowly, and brought it down on top of him. And, to my amazement, I’d captured a rat.
That’s about as far as I’d thought this through. As I watched him run in frightened circles in the bucket, digging at the soil with tiny worried hands, my heart sunk. I couldn’t end him. He was, after all, just appreciating my garden. But I couldn’t let him continue or I’d never get anything to grow. Clearly, a solution was required.
I put a potted plant on top of the bucket to keep it there, went in the house to grab the first flat thing I could find, and ran back outside with a cutting board. I slid the board under the bucket and scooped him up. I decided to take him to a nearby park and set him free. A change of venue would do us both good.
This was, I thought, a good idea. What was definitely not a good idea was deciding to show him to the wife before we left. I asked Heather if she’d like to see something cute. She said sure, but when I showed her a scared rat in a plastic bucket with a cutting board top, she screamed and ran to the other side of the room. I really did think he was cute, but then, I once had a rat as a pet. (His name was Lowell and he attended UC Santa Cruz longer than most underclassmen. Long story.)
As I was walking him up to the park, I bumped into a friend who asked why I was taking a rat for a walk. So I recounted the whole story and we sat there for a moment looking at him. He’d calmed down and was wiggling his whiskers and brushing the dirt off his face. I know he’s vermin, but you have to appreciate an animal that combs his own hair, even when trapped in a bucket. For a moment I wondered how our dogs would get along with a pet rat and if it’d be creepy to name him “Lowell Junior.” That’s when I realized I’d better finish this up before I got any more attached.
I set him free in the bushes beside the steps of Buena Vista Park. This may sound insane, but I really hope he’s okay. And that he can’t figure out how to get back to my vegetable garden from there.
Eight months after I said I Think I Impregnated My Phalaenopsis, the pod has finally opened. Sometime last night, the pod popped open, scattering tiny seeds on the leaves below.
Amazingly, even while making seeds, the plant is also in bud. This is one tough plant.
So what next? I’m going to send the seeds off to a lab for flasking. If it all works, I should have a flask full of babies in a year or so.
If nothing else, orchids are a great lesson in patience.
We read the botanical web so you don’t have to. In this edition: plants, old plants, and really old plants.
Wikipedia: Judean Date Palm Seeds of a 2,000-year-old, extinct date palm are discovered in Israel, sit in university storage for 40 years, then finally planted. One grows!
Extraordinary 298-Million-Year-Old Forest Discovered Under Chinese Coal Mine Or: 32,000 years? Hah! How about 298 million years? “During the Permian, which extends from 299 to 251 million years ago, there weren’t conifers or flowers. Plants reproduced like ferns, using spores, and the modern continents were still joined in a single mass of land called Pangaea.”
All the Time in the World “What a charred ancient tree can teach us about impermanence, deep time, and our place in the universe.” A bittersweet tale of The Senator, a tree that fell after 3,500 years.
Since my last post showed my back yard in the beginning of a project, I thought it would be nice to show off a greener spot this time.
That big, round bush is Geranium maderense. (Yes, really, it’s a Geranium, though it looks nothing like the usual suspects.) I snapped the inset photo back in November 2010 after I purchased it from a SF Botanical Garden sale. Today, it’s almost as tall as the Norfolk Island Pine beside it.
Geranium maderense is a biannual, which means it takes two years to complete its growth cycle, which means it should explode into tons of pink blooms in a few months. It’s also monocarpic, which means that when it does, that will signal the end of its life. Hopefully I’ll get to collect seeds and start the process over. For now, I’m loving its spiky leaves, red stems, and perfect half-circle shape.
When we bought our place a few years ago, the back yard was already really nice. There was a good watering system and lots of happy plants. So our first few years here, I just maintained it. I put in a plant here and there, but it’s a small yard, so I mostly planted stuff in containers.
I think it was the Potato Bush (Lycianthes rantonnei) that pushed me over the edge. It’s a shrub, technically, but it was huge, leggy, and ate up the entire back corner of the yard (which is one of the best spots, sun-wise, in a mostly shady yard). It was pretty enough, with small purple flowers that appeared throughout the year. But it was an aggressive beast, shading out everything under it, requiring frequent pruning. It took me a few years of trimming and muttering about it before I finally decided. It had to go.
Side story: The bush put out long, straight branches. After one pruning, I kept some of the nice branches to use as stakes. They sat under my deck for months before I finally used some to put up some netting in the vegetable garden. A few weeks into their stake duties, I noticed something: they were growing new leaves. The fuckers actually rooted. Tough dude.
Because I’m an idiot, I always forget to take “before” photos. So you’ll just have to imagine a bush that reached 20 feet tall, 15 feet wide, and sent branches up so high they eventually bent down just because of gravity. Also, I think he was a drinker.
First I cut all the branches off with a hand pruner. (This really put my new Felcos to the test, and I hate to say it, but they didn’t do well. I liked the Bahcos much more. If you want details, remind me to write a review.) Then I used a tree saw to cut off the thick stems, some of which were 2-3 inches wide. This filled three SF green bins, so it took a few weeks to get them all out. (No room for a mulch pile in our tiny yard.)
Then I unearthed the rootball using a combination of a shovel, a pickaxe, and manly grunting noises. When I finally got the thing out, it was 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep. It was important to get it out because I’ve heard this plant can be leveled and still come back. And I needed the space for the new plants, of course.
I’m especially proud that I did this all without destroying the soft, black plastic watering system, which I kept finding new sections of. When you work in a garden someone else set up, it’s always a surprise what you find just under the surface. I also found what I think was once a marble cutting board.
I shoveled out a garbage can’s worth of dirt. It’s mostly sand here (which explains a lot), leaving me with a helluva hole. I added two large bags of good soil (Sloat Bay Area Blend, which I love) and a bit of E. B. Stone Sure Start because I’m superstitious like that. I mixed it all in and tried to blend the natural soil in as best I could so it wouldn’t form a waterlogged pocket.
Now, finally, the fun part. Planting new things. See that huge concrete wall in the background? That’s why the previous gardener chose the Lycianthes. So whatever I plant, it needs to grow tall without going too wide to obscure the ugly wall.
In the back, I planted three Tree Dahlias (Dahlia imperialis), two purple-flowered and one white, all from the SF Botanical Garden where they grow, true to their name, like trees (20 feet tall or more in a single season). They’re incredible, but they are perennials, so I need something else to obscure the wall when they die back in winter.
In between the Tree Dahlias, I planted two Brugmansias (B. sanguinea ‘Inca Queen’ and B. vulcanicola). They’re evergreen, so they should do the job of hiding the wall all year. They also have amazing yellow/red flowers. They come from cool, cloudy mountain climates, so they should be a great fit for my back yard’s natural microclimate. We have another Brugmansia (fuzzy leaves, white flowers, not sure which species) that went from a small 6-inch pot to the size of a refrigerator in a year, so I’m feeling confident about Brugmansias in our yard.
Those are all the tall, wall-obscuring plants. Now I have an opportunity to plant in front of them. So I added a bunch of medium-sided Dahlia bulbs (‘Electric Light,’ ‘Purple Gem,’ ‘Avignon,’ and ‘Vancouver’) that my wife picked out at Sloat. I’ve never grown Dahlias before, so I’m excited to give it a go. I hear they need a lot of sun to bloom, so if they’re going to be happy anywhere in our yard, that’s the spot.
After weeks of weekend work, we’re left with … this.
I know, it doesn’t look like much now, but in a few months it should be packed with life. The groundcover (Lamiastrum) will make its way back in no time. And the Tree Dahlias already have growth spikes.
This has been a liberating experience. It’s the first corner of the yard I’ve really had my way with, and the experience has me looking at the rest of the yard with new eyes. Up next? I’ve never really been a fan of those Hydrangea….
Like the rest of the 
