I picked up this plant earlier in the week, and it was a store NOID, and I am guessing R paradoxa. Your thoughts on its species and care appreciated.
New Rhipsalis?
Dog, It does not look like R. paradoxa to me. While the stem basic structure looks similar, the paradoxa's I have seen have all had longer stems before branching. Also the alternating stem structure looks a bit different to me, somewhat distorted from paradoxa. There are several Rhips that look similar to paradoxa. There is one rhip that looks almost identical, but has thinner stems. I can look up the name if interested, but I don't think the pic is of that one either. Rhips are so hard to id as they can morph their form to match their environment or sometimes just for the fun of it.
I would not try to assign an ID to it based on pictures or opinions on Daves as you would almost certainly be wrong in high probability unless the plant was very unique in some way. If you get a wrong ID and share cuttings, you will help to further confuse the rhip name space which doesn't help any of us. Still, its nice to speculate and you could always say "paradoxa like" rhipsalis. I don't mean to be a killjoy, but names are important to me as it helps me understand what I have.
I understand your concerns about bad IDing. I am going to call it R aff paradoxa for the time being, and lets see if I can get flowers off this one.
I just enjoy the NOID game, and tossed this one out. And I record names with the method I used to name it. I am learning that Schlumbergia are particularily evil.
Dog, I think rhips may actually be worse, as they can change their stem forms according to age and conditions. Juvenile seedlings all look pretty similar, (sort oflike small barel cacti) until they size up. Anyway, if you google rhips you'll find discussions about how hard they are to ID. I think very little recent formal work has been done with them either, and the few greenhouse operations that specialize disagree on what is what.
Several of mine are blooming at the present time. I find that they will bloom for me when I bring them inside after they have been kept dry and chilled a bit. Then most of them go under artificial light for longer periods of time (light time) than outside. Right now my pilocarpa, trigona and a form of capilliformis (probably mophead) are in flower. I may try some cross pollination and see what happens.
Anyway, if you are a collector, do you want to try to swap some cuttings or seeds sometime?
I have a strange collection of Epiphyllum, Schulmbergia and Rhipsalis, which I am increasing as time money and space allows. Of the rhips and their allies I have the one in question salicornioides and 2 gaertneri hybrids.
I tried the Easter cacti for a while back before I got the Christmas cactus bug, but did not have much success with them. Probably my care routines did not match their needs. Got rid of my Christmas cacti a couple of years back in favor of rhipsalis. I have about a dozen named ones and a few unnamed. My paradoxa was farmed out to an associated last winter for hosting because it had become too big for my house. He works in a school and had large windows available. Turns out he was not a good host and killed it somehow. The plant was in a 3" hanging pot, but had become several feet long and really filled out the pot. I missed it this past summer, as it was one of my original rhipsalis and I was quite fond of it.
You can get a lot of interesting cuttings relatively inexpensively from Bob Foley or Laura of Salisbury, both can be found in watchdog, but I would only order in the spring as my experience with them is that they can be a little slow. Understandable when maintaining large collections. Glasshouse Works advertises a large rhip collection as well, but I have not seen many of them show up for sale. I've been disappointed at cutting size from them but they do also have some interesting ones.
Here is a link to a paradoxa photo that shows the lankiness of the plant that I did not see in your photo above. The site is a good reference to some of the rhipsalis species, but does not show many of the hybrids that are now floating around. There's a good chance that your plant may be a hybrid. If it is paradoxa, it should get much longer stems over time.
http://cactiguide.com/cactus/?genus=Rhipsalis&species=paradoxa
The initial plant is certainly similar, but getting far more light than this one did in the store where I got it, "The Indoor Sun Shop" in Seattle, which has a history of having some very nice rare plants for sale mostly succulent Euphorbias. but orchids and bromeliads along with some Epi cactus including the one I picked up. The new owner is just not the same as the previous.
My plant is very lanky all it seems to be able to do is hang vertically. Stems are no more than 1/2 to 3/4" wide with aerial roots at the nodes. The shot is lousy it was shot from my 3.2 MP Blackberry, not my 10.1 camera which needed a charge.
What I picked up on was that the stems seem to have 3 "segments" (ie picrust shifts if I can call them that), then the stem seems to make a node and shift directions slightly for 3 more "segments". That shift of direction is not something I saw with the paradoxa I had. I don't see how that could be an artifact of growth conditions as I see it repeated, as well os on multiple stems. Other than that, it does look like paradoxa-like stems.
Paradoxa reminds me of how I visualize the propagation of an electromagnetic wave. The electric filed collapses creating a magnetic field in a different direction, then the magnetic field collapses generating the electric field oriented in a different direction, etc.
krowten, that last description just gave me a headache.... :)
Lilli, At least I didn't try to describe quark chromodynamics and how it relates to photino mediated graviton propagation! Trust me, much much worse....
you are too funny!