February 2018 – Fleur-de-Blog

In New Zealand, ants do it. In Belize, wasps do it. In California and Florida, honey bees do it. In Mexico, bats do it. In Australia, hover flies do it. But in February, in Central Pennsylvania, how do you pollinate an avocado tree?

Actually, the question Irmgard asked was if I knew anyone who had successfully pollinated a single avocado tree. I could have answered “No” and left it at that but Irmgard is a bicycling and gardening buddy. Besides, I need to exercise my brain—and resources.

The question, via email, came after Irmgard read my Atrium Tales blog.

I suspect most of you have grown an avocado plant from an avocado pit. You stick three toothpicks in the pit and suspend it over a glass of water. It either roots or rots, sometimes both.

Irmgard describes herself as belonging to the “don’t throw it, grow it” school. She is most definitely not from the “grow it and forget about it” school. Her avocado tree is nearing 15 years old and for the past three years it has bloomed every February. The tree hasn’t set a single fruit.

I sent the avocado pollination question to two Master Gardening friends, Chris and Ruth, who teach a plant propagation class. They replied with links for articles and YouTube clips. In truth, there is no simple answer to the questions of sex and the single avocado tree.

Irmgard’s Avocado Flowers

Avocados, you see, are unique to the plant world. An avocado flower opens first as a female. Then, she closes for the night. On day 2, that same flower reopens as a male. Talk about a pronoun problem.

This complex flowering system is influenced by the variety of avocado tree. The avocado family is broken into two groups: A-type and B-type. Those types have different schedules as to when they open as female, close, and then reopen as male. Ambient temperature can also affect pollination, but I’m not going there.

These details get really confusing, and chances are, if you grew an avocado tree from a pit you don’t know what variety of avocado pit you started with anyway. Then, add this highly disheartening statistic: An avocado tree has roughly a million flowers but only 1 in 1,000 flowers will actually set fruit.

So I’ve got a proposition to make. Next February, we will open the atrium to anyone who has a single, teen-age avocado tree. Bring your flowering tree for a few weeks of meeting and mingling. We can turn on the fans (for a little wind pollination). Perhaps I’ll buy a carton of ladybugs to assist with insect pollination. (I’m sure my mom would never agree to the bees, wasps, or flies–and the little brown bat that visited last year isn’t invited back). Then, we can all sit around a wait for fruit set.

Never again will I complain about the cost of a bag of avocados at Wegmans. Laurie Lynch.

Written on Slate: “It is not the one who plants or the one who waters who is at the center of this process, but God who makes things grow.” –1 Corinthians 3:7

Another: “I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia.” –Barbra Striesand

And Another: “And perfect happiness? Man, that’s a…the pool is about 92 degrees, the Jacuzzi is about 102, and an avocado farm.” Jamie Foxx

The Last Word…by Emily Dickinson:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

Palm When was the last time you dined on African violets? Or made a casserole with oxalis bulbs? (Don’t, they’re poisonous.) For the most part, my motto is: If you can’t eat it, why grow it?

Then I moved in with my mother seven years ago. Decades before that, my parents enclosed a patio and installed skylights and planting beds filled with tropicals. The atrium grew into a glorious year-round dining area. That said, I’ve never been passionate about houseplants.

The atrium once housed a 14-foot ornamental Ficus. My best memory of that tree is when my parents decorated it for Christmas with white sand dollars tied to the branches with red ribbons. It was our family’s Isle of Palm tree, the South Carolina sea island where I lived after college, and where we collected the sand dollars. My mom’s worst memory of the Ficus, not that she has many memories anymore, is when it dropped one of its hard, ornamental fruits on the head of the then-Penn State University President during a supposed-to-be elegant dinner. My mother decided the Ficus had worn out its welcome in our atrium.

She replaced it with a palm tree. The palm was well behaved in the early years. As it matured, its fronds started getting tangled in the Casablanca fans—thump, thump, thump. Out came the loppers. Now the palm fans are poking into the skylights. Are retractable skylights next or is it time for another major tree replacement?

Lower to the ground, and much lower maintenance, are my mother’s orchids. Every year for my mother’s December birthday she receives a potted orchid from her college roommate and lifetime friend, Trig. Orchids can be temperamental, but not in the atrium. The room must mimic their beloved rainforest ecosystem.

One year we gave my dad a dwarf banana tree. Imagine reaching from the breakfast table to pick a banana. The plant grew to about 2 feet and sprouted leaves swarming with weevils, aphids, mealybugs, and mites. My mom put her horticultural foot down before the plant had a chance to fruit. “It’s got to go.” It went—into the compost pile.

Since I’ve moved back I have cautiously transformed the tropical paradise into a somewhat edible jungle room.

It should be a great place to overwinter tender herbs. The pot of lemon verbena and chocolate mint was doing well until two chowhounds (a Golden Retriever and a Chocolate lab) stripped the branches bare.

Before the dogs arrived for a weekend visit, the basil “Pesto Perpetuo” proved not to be perpetual for me. It went from a multi-stemmed, green-and-white bushy culinary herb in September to three or four crispy twigs, with a dying cluster of variegated leaves on top by December. At the same time, Rosemary croaked. She never makes it much past Christmas, no matter what her breeding.

This winter the Meyer lemon is filled with teardrop white buds that burst into white stars with golden crown centers. Their fragrance in February is what heaven must smell like. Even if we never see more than one or two lemons reach maturity that small shrub is a success story. The guava tree keeps growing, dropping leaves, and leafing out again, but no flowers, no fruit. Perhaps it needs a mate.

February Rhubarb

Then, there is the rhubarb. Last spring I potted up a rhubarb plant to see how it would do in a large planter. The leaves were showy and attractive. By early winter, the plant died back to the ground, as rhubarbs do. I had forgotten it, but then noticed the non-weatherproof ceramic pot sitting on the patio. I tried to move it into the garage so it wouldn’t crack, but the pot didn’t budge—frost had sealed it to the bricks. A few days later, we had a brief thaw. Time for action. I moved the pot into the atrium. Within days, I was forcing rhubarb.

Surprisingly, my February heartthrob is not an edible. It is strictly “for pretty”, starting out as the feathered foliage tail of a turkey in a florist’s Thanksgiving arrangement a few years ago. After the holiday, I placed the plant with colorful “turkey” foliage, pot and all, in one of the atrium planters.

It grew. And grew. A year or two later, I decided to renovate the planter, adding compost and aerating the soil. When I got to the mystery plant, I decided to free it from its pot and sink it into a hole in the ground.

Within days it dropped its rainbow-colored leaves. First the bottom, then, moving upward, they fell to the ground and it started looking like a Dr. Seuss umbrella tree. The few leaves that remained—drooped. Not knowing what else to do, I watered it well, whispered a few apologetic words, and resigned myself to its demise.

Wonder of wonders, it pulled out of its slump, pushed out new growth, and made an amazing recovery.

Friends came over for a Master Gardener meeting. As we gathered in the atrium, Yvonne looked at the mystery, miracle plant and said, “Oh, a croton.”

I nodded and quickly scribbled down the name. Thank goodness for houseplant-savvy friends.

Colorful Croton

After the meeting, I looked up croton. Its formal botanical name is Codiaeum variegatum, member of the Euphorbia family. Euphorbias are known to have a milky sap that drips out if you break a stem or leaf. Warning to visiting dogs: Eating croton leaves could cause indigestion…or worse. The plant is native to India and Malaysia. And, get this, according to experts it “resents root disturbance and may drop leaves.”

Our plant has reds and blacks and greens, and golds and oranges too, with striking veins of contrasting colors. It has passed the 3-foot mark, headed toward 4. In Florida, where it is an outdoor, perennial evergreen shrub, it can grow to10 feet. In February, when you need to indulge your soul in a feast of color, there is nothing like the large, leathery leaves of a tropical croton. Laurie Lynch

Exploring Plants: I recently finished a book that opened a whole new chapter to me—that of the plant craze in 1700s England. I knew a little about Philadelphia’s plant collecting John Bartram and Swede Carl Linnaeus, Father of Taxonomy, but in The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf you get to meet them as people, as well as a handful of British botanists I knew nothing about, such as Peter Collinson and Phillip Miller. These gardeners spurred the horticultural craze around the world. North American seeds and cuttings were packed into boxes and shipped from Philadelphia to London, and soon sea-going vessels were fitted out with chambers to hold pots of plants discovered in Australia, China, and South America. Even Captain Cook, Captain Bligh, and mutinous crews figure into this fascinating history.

Written on Slate: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Marcus Tullius Cicero