The Variegated Thumb

I just finished a plethora of changes to the blog.  Look around!  I have made a separate page that includes links to my photo albums, so that they are easily accessible, even after the respective blog post is older and hidden somewhere in the dusty archives.  Hopefully there will be a new photo album about once a month.  Also, you should be able to find old posts more easily, as I have categorized and tagged all of my them.  The Tag cloud in the sidebar shows the relative frequency of tags in my posts.  You’ll notice that “aglaonemas” is the most prevalent.  If you click on it, you’ll find all of the blog posts I have written that are tagged with “aglaonemas,” which happens to be 7 right now.

I’ve started a list of “Links of Interest.”  Of course there are many more websites that I frequent.  I will probably be adding to this list quite a bit over the next couple of weeks.

Everything seems to be working correctly, but let me know if you notice any problems.

Enjoy!

I have been hesitant to write on my plant blog about my bad experiences or flat out failures in raising plants.  I felt that someone who has a plant blog needs to appear to know what they are doing.  But I guess we are all experimenting and I don’t think PETP (People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants) will come after me if I share some of my more trying moments with my friend, Kingdom Plantae.

I live in zone 7A.  This region can get pretty cold during the winter – dropping to around 0 degrees Fahrenheit on occasion.  Needless to say, tropical plants must be brought indoors.  Unfortunately, I don’t (yet) have a greenhouse and my house is not well-suited to keeping hoards of plants over the winter.  My window space is limited and I have some beautiful large trees in my yard which pretty effectively scatter a lot of sunlight before it can make it in the window.  So, I’m limited on where I can put plants in the house over the winter.  It’s a bit of a struggle to keep everything alive until it gets warm again and I can put all my plants back out for some fresh air, circulation, real rain and warm sunshine.  I really should experiment with artificial lighting, but I only this year put most of my plants in one concentrated place where this would be effective.

Anyway, in this little house of mine, live myself, my wife, 2 aquariums with plants and fish, approximately a hundred plants – and 2 dogs.  Those last 2 inhabitants add yet another restriction to where I can place my plants indoors (and outside as well).

I was reading a blog post about Zamioculcas zamiifolia today at Plants are the Strangest People.  [PATSP is an excellent and entertaining blog, so you should check it out.]  In the post, the writer says that ‘ZZ plants’ rarely do anything and they don’t require any grooming since dead leaves are so rare.  I was just thinking about how this plant is nearly indestructible – and yet, I have a couple of dead leaves on my plant.  I felt kind of embarrassed at first, thinking I might be the only person in history who has had trouble keeping a ‘ZZ plant’ – although I’m sure that’s not true.  Then I remembered why my ‘ZZ plant’ has its brown leaves.

And that, my friends, leads us to “the Pee-Wee effect.”  My two canine daughters are a 70ish pound Boxer named Pippa and a 15ish pound Boston Terrier named Pee-Wee.

Pippa and Pee-Wee playing when Pee-Wee was a newborn puppy

Both of our pups been known to chomp a leaf from time to time, but Pippa is usually more trust-worthy than the younger, hyper and erratic Pee-Wee.  My wife and I affectionately refer to Pee-Wee as “the pig” [really it is affection], because of her little round, pink belly and her common snorting noises.  Most of Pippa’s attacks came when she was younger and less mature.

My ZZ plant’s browning leaves were most likely brought on by an assault by Pee-Wee.  There are some little perforations in the affected leaves that could only have been made by the little pig.  If it had been Pippa, there wouldn’t be a plant left.  She destroys all evidence.

Anyway, the “effect” of Pee-Wee’s random plant chewing is almost always that I lose the affected leaves.  I usually don’t do anything after she has messed with one of my plants, hoping that the plant will remain healthy and just have some new features.  I probably should just immediately snip off the affected leaves, though.

Pippa in front of the Christmas tree

Pee-Wee driving the boat

Pee-Wee pretending to be incapable of any wrongdoing

Other plants that Pee-Wee has attacked include my Aglaonema ‘Maria’, a bromeliad, a pineapple plant (which is also a bromeliad), a coconut palm, and a gerbera daisy.  She actually managed to eat the bromeliad and pineapple plant, but she only damaged a couple of leaves on the other plants.  This summer, the pig ripped a leaf (with attached stem) off of my Monstera deliciosa ‘Borsigiana’ and left it lying on the back porch.  I stuck the leaf in water (about 4 inches across with a 10 inch stem) and was surprised to see two fleshy roots appear within a week or so.  So, in one case (and one case only) Pee-Wee has actually helped me propagate a plant.

This year, I have managed to move all plants out of their reach.  I built a small shelf in the extra bathroom in the house where some more plants can get some bright, indirect light.  And I bought a shelf to put in the laundry room, loaded it down with plants and put a baby gate in front of everything on the floor.  The main bathroom in the house, however, has a number of reachable plants on the floor.  So I have to make sure to keep that door closed whenever I leave the house.  Otherwise, I will be sure to come home to some disappointment.

Last week I made a stop into a book store and spent some time looking at every title in the gardening section.  One book I stumbled upon, caught my fancy.  It was right up my alley – and also discounted because it was used.  [Who would return this book?]

The book is Gardener’s Latin: A Lexicon by Bill Neal.  It is a dictionary of words used in plant taxonomy.  It is a very informative book (in the classical dictionary sense), as well as having some entertaining  sidenotes and stories about plants.  Being a collector of books, plants and plant books, I naturally bought this book.

The book primarily contains common species names (the second name in a binomial scientific name).  In a general sense, the first name (Genus) is a noun and the second name (species) is an adjective.  In the simplest case, a plant name translated to English is something like “skinny grass” or “blue canna.”  Of course, the more distinctly desciptive a name can be, the better.  Most of the names help describe the appearance of the plant.  Other names describe the smell of the plant, the uses of the plant or even the location of the plant.  Some of the names seem pretty obvious, and you don’t need to know latin to know that filamentosa means “filament-like.”  I was surprised to find that a number of the names were in reference to other plant names.  For instance, agavoides means “Like the Agaves.”

Words that end in -flora deal with the bloom of the plant, while words that end in -phyllum or -folia/-folium deal with the foliage or leaves of the plant.  Words that end with -cladia/-cladium deal with the branch of the plant. Not surprisingly, words ending in -petalum deal with the petal of the plant.

There is an online dictionary of latin plant names here.

Here is a random collection of vocabulary that is somewhat common for describing Aroids – although not always in name.

cordate/cordatum – heart-shaped
fenestrations – holes
hemiepiphyte – a plant that can start in the soil and grow up a tree trunk, or start on a tree and grow to the surface where it roots in soil
pinnate – divided
palmatum – shaped like a human hand (ex/ Japanese maple = Acer palmatum)
pinnatifid – palm (as in palm tree) shapedscototrophism -condition where a plant seeks dark rather than light, presumably to find the trunk of a tree which can be climbed

You can see the book here. By the way, LibraryThing.com is a really cool site.