Tropicals & Tender Perennials: OT- Baseball bat Sanseveiria, 0 by Kaelkitty

Kaelkitty wrote:
Hi All,
I know this thread is off topic, but it made me want to share my experiences. I have bloomed only two different kinds of my Sansevierias, despite nearly 40 years as a succulent plant nut! - Sansevieria parva and Sansevieria trifasciata. The Sanseveierias are usually considered to be one of the more difficult kinds of succulent to bloom. This is because they are related to the Agave's, so each rosette will only bloom once in it's lifetime. Don't worry about loosing your plant though, because in my experience blooming seems to trigger a lot of offset production, and the original one may well take 2 or 3 years to finish dying out in any case, by which time the new offsets will be very well established. S. parva though, is a blooming fool compared to most Sans, possibly because it is a very fast grower. My large clump of S. parva has now flowered every year for 4 years running and it is currently sporting 3 berries. Given the number of flower spikes it actually produced, that was lousy pollination though - next year I am going round with a brush! Not that I need any more S. parva plants (did I mention how fast it grows?) but it would be good practice for me to grow some from seed to see how they do, in case I am ever lucky enough to have flowers and seeds on some of my rarer ones.

I am envious that some of you have flowered S. cylindrica though, as this is a slow one and at least for me, it has displayed an annoying tendency to rot at the roots. I purchased a beautiful single cylindrica plant several years ago, which rotted to such an extent that it was reduced to separate leaves, which spent over 12 months sitting around in damp sand and have only just now started to produce new offsets at the base. I will close by showing you a close up of one of my S. parva berries - this photo was taken about 2 months ago, and the berries are now bright orange and nearly ripe enough to pick, as they are beginning to soften.

TTFN, Kaelkitty.

Edited to add, stupid thumbnail photo has cut the head off! To see the berry you will have to enlarge it, OK.
Edited again to fix spelling error


This message was edited Apr 12, 2009 6:58 PM