The News from South Philly

Hippeastrum striatum, doing something stupid

Hippeastrum striatum is my Christmas bloomer, putting on quite a show from mid-December through late January. After that, it's supposed to rest, although it's an evergreen. So I'd been watering it sparingly in anticipation of a possible modest re-bloom in July or August.

Instead I got...this. I went into Roy's office to give its green occupants a little drink and was immediately struck by a flash of orange at soil level, where no orange should be. Plus, it's a mere three and a half months since it last bloomed. So what's going on? It could be a disease, it could be a pest that made its life miserable, or it could just be One Of Those Things.

Whatever. I cut off the anthers, put them in a centrifuge tube, and popped it in the freezer. Just in case Mandonii gets a hankering to bloom... I don't have the Really Good Desiccant, but a frost-free freezer is a bit of a desiccant itself, isn't it? The centrifuge tube (open) is in a container full of silica gel. I will close up the tube in a couple of days and hope for the best.

Not my actual plant but this is what all the fuss is about

I paid cash money for two immature H. mandonii more than seven years ago -- spring of 2012, to be precise. A couple years later, the bulbs, still immature, rotted -- but by then they had thrown off some offsets that were healthy, so I potted them up.

More years passed and I have lately been casting a wrathful eye on these plants. They're a species hippeastrum and famously fickle in the bloom department. I was on the fence about whether I should deaccession them now or give them one more year.

I guess one of them heard me.


Hippastrum mandonii, such a tease...

I understand that these are seed-grown, which may mean that they are self-fertile. Or they may not be. I also read dark mutterings that some of the bulbs from this grower turn out to not look like a proper mandonii. Certainly this bud has the proper coloration -- whether it has the shape remains to be seen.

This was going to be the year, I told myself, that I didn't do any propagation. Pffffft. There will be an attempt at selfing and some saving of pollen to try with H. striatum when it blooms next, and also on the reliable old Hippeastrum 2006-2 that appears to be fertile with EVERYTHING.

All the more reason to be ruthless with the remaining juveniles etc. I need room for new precious babies.

H. striatum pod stopped growing a couple days ago. This morning I thought I noticed that it was deflating. However, the hippeastrum that cross-bred with it so successfully last year has two buds showing, whee!

Do you remember last year, when one of my favorites failed to root so I chopped the bulb (a practice called "chipping") in little bits and put them in moistened vermiculite in a dark cabinet?

Seems to have worked. I have three bulbs the size of shooter marbles. I removed them from their plastic cups yesterday and potted them up. They have LOTS of roots!

Outdoors, all the hippeastrum have greened up deliciously. They looked a bit pallid and wan when I first took them out -- the shock of the sunlight, I think. A couple weeks of lovely rain water and they're looking quite perky, as opposed to peaky. I did serious triage on the batch of seedlings known as Babymax because they share a birthday with our great-grandson. I kept eight: one for Sara, one for Margaret (daughter-in-law), one for Pam (Sara's mother) -- assuming any of them want them -- and the rest for me. The rest of them will get potted up and placed in a shady place this weekend, since the temps are supposed to go up to the high 80s.

The hippeastrum our son Roy brought us in March appears to be diseased with the dreaded Hippeastrum mosaic virus. I have it quarantined in the living room and will attempt a heat-treatment later this summer. Also, I will disinfect that entire part of the living room before re-introducing any plants. That virus is supposed to be highly contagious, fatal, and incurable, but some folks think a heat-treatment will work, and it worked for some other hippeastrums when I tried it around 2011. We'll see...

Sharing windowsill space with 2006-3 (that being the name of the chipped bulbs) are sprouting seeds of 2006-2 x Striatum. When the sprouts show a leaf I move them to a shallow container to grow their first roots. They'll get planted on in plastic pots this fall and so it goes...

YAY for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which has a lending library. I suspect that my long relationship with the library director (they're a member of PACSCL) helped as the books don't usually circulate and wouldn't at all if they weren't the second of two sets. I now have the two volumes of On the Eaves of the World, Reginald Farrer's light-hearted account of the first year of his two-year collecting trip on the China-Tibet border, on summer loan. Not due back till August.

I had been reading a pdf of the book on my netbook. Turned sideways, it's not a bad substitute for a real book. I can slouch on the sofa and balance it on my stomach like a real book, and don't need to hold the weighty thing upright. Still, there's nothing like a real book. So I'm more than halfway through Volume One and loving it all.

The book is absolutely hilarious. Farrer is so pleased with the country, the flora, the comic-opera aspects of dealing with the natives and the brigands! This book was written before World War I. His book on the second year of his expedition (which I believe was 1913) wasn't written until he'd spent some sobering time visiting three World War I fronts and writing about his experiences for the propaganda office. Thus, this second book, The Rainbow Bridge, is reputed to be more somber. It was published posthumously; whether he would have lightened the tone had he lived I don't know.

I have The Rainbow Bridge in a $.99 Kindle edition but wanted to read them in sequence...

My own decidedly nonmimpish Leontopodium / Edelweiss / Flannel Flower seedlings are coming along nicely and will be ready to be potted on into market packs in a couple weeks. Have a look:



Today will be a day for indoor and outdoor gardening. My herbs and peppers need to be potted on to market packs now and set out to harden off in a day or so. Some things that have been hardening off should go into their various containers. If I am so moved, I will also start work on all the hippeastrum seedlings that need to be triaged. I need to decommission my upstairs growlights, at least temporarily, in a couple weeks to make way for the nuptial springerle I have promised my niece. Getting the seedlings potted on will be a step in the right direction.

My one and only successful hippeastrum cross, 2006-3 x striatum, yielded a bumper crop of seeds from the one pod -- 74 of them. As an experiment, I floated 20 of them the day of harvest and another 20 two days later. I am holding the remaining 34 in reserve in case the germination is less than wonderful. I'm also hoping that by next weekend I can send the adult hippeastrums to hippeastrum summer camp. Some of them are on the folding table we use for our back yard seating area, so they are flies in the ointment of progress.

I caught another mouse last night, maybe two. I say maybe because the trap is missing! I heard some odd noises last night and suspect a desperately wounded mouse dragged himself and the trap under the refrigerator, to die a horrible death. Roy and I will move the fridge later today. Poor thing. The one I definitely caught was a juvenile. I had bad luck re-baiting the trap and caught my finger twice but all I did was cause some bleeding from broken blood vessels -- no hematoma, no swelling, no pain after the initial misery, just discoloration. (EDITED TO ADD: I moved the fridge and it was indeed a baby mouse, hind foot and tail caught in the trap, very much alive and crying, with his little chest going in and out almost faster than I could see. I felt very bad for him and for a mad moment thought about putting him in an aquarium with wood chips and feeding him cheese. But The Scamp was, finally, intensely interested. If he'd caught the mousie fair and square I would have let him have his way. But he hadn't, so I dropped the poor guy in the toilet. He swam frantically, and I flushed quickly, and flushed again. Probably as merciful a death as any other I could give him, short of chloroform. Still... but I'll still set another trap tonight.)

We have paid the man to paint the masonry at ground level outside our house, and also the vestibule. The vestibule is finished. The masonry has been scraped and primed and then it rained and rained and rained. He is hoping to finish today.

The papilio that my daughter-in-law gave me in 2012 divided in three last year; this year one of the three bulbs rotted from the top. I hope the other two will be okay. It gave me one seed pod in 2012, so it will live on after a fashion even if the other two keel over.


That other hippeastrum that I thought I'd saved fell out of its pot. Lovely green leaves but no roots. I am planning to try cutting a slice off the basal plate, cutting back its leaves, soaking it in fungicide, and leaving in the back house to cool off in a dark place. At least it birthed a lot of seeds before collapsing.

That hippeastrum at death's door (2006-3)? I did what the nice man told me and look at this:

I think it's going to be all right. Maybe no bloom next year, but all right.

In prior years, I had at maximum two pods ripening. This year I have thirteen (give or take a couple). So far, no pod that has ripened appears to have produced infertile seeds, as in the year that I crossed Appleblossom and Gervase.

It's going to be hard to keep them all straight! As an aide memoire, I put tags on all the pod stems, indicating pod and pollen parents. I also took photos of all the parents. So I can do photojournals of all the classes. This will be of particular interest to pondhopper and halfmoon_mollie, who will be playing along at home with their own little hippeastrum factories, once I've sent the seeds.

So here we go. Click the images to view larger versions

2015A: Pod parent 2011A3 (left), pollen parent 2009-1 (right)



2015B: Pod parent 2011A2 (left), pollen parent Gervase (right)



2015C: Pod parent 2011A2 (left), pollen parent not sure but probably 2011A1 (right)



2015D: Pod parent 2011A5(left), pollen parent Gervase (right)



2015E: Pod parent 2011A5 (left), pollen parent 2011A4 (right)



2015F: Pod parent 2011A4 (left), pollen parent Gervase (right)



2015G: Pod parent 2011A4 (left), pollen parent 2011A5 (right)



2015H: Pod parent 2006A2 (left), pollen parent 2011A4 (right)



2015I: Pod parent 2006A2 (left), pollen parent Gervase (right)



2015J: Pod parent 2011A5; pollen parent Gervase (small pod, few seeds, may be duds)



2015K: Pod parent 2006A3 (left), pollen parent 2011A5 (right)



2015L, 2015M, and 2015N: Pod parent 2006A3 (left), pollen parent Gervase (right)



2015O: Pod parent 2006A3 (left), pollen parent 2011A4 (right)



2015P: Pod parent 2006A2 (left), pollen parent 2013A1 (right)




I think I may have a fertile pod with that early bloomer from the Class of 2013 as pollen parent, but it's awfully small.

Did I say a thousand images? Pffft. I shot 3,000 frames on Friday and Saturday alone. I'll be editing these suckers till the cows come home.

Not to mention the metadata. Descriptions and tags. Fortunately there's a metadata dingus in Photoshop and I'm mulling over my vocabulary for tagging photos this year. It will be fun, even though it will take me the rest of the month.

Meanwhile, I gots flowers! on my own window sill! H. 'gervase' is outdoing itself this year. No courtesy cut....I'm narcissistic that way!









I love the mutability of this one -- four entirely different coloration patterns on one scape.