Five baby plants: what just arrived at the nursery
Alocasia Black Velvet Pink Albo, Frydek Variegata, Infernalis, Begonia Rex Fireworks, Monstera Thai Constellation. Five young plants to settle in: what I expect from each, and which ones worry me most.
Five young plants have arrived to be settled in. I am writing them up one by one with what I expect, so that in a few months we can come back and see whether I was right.
Alocasia Black Velvet Pink Albo
The dark velvet leaf with pink variegation is about the most photogenic thing going at the moment, and you pay for it accordingly. What I expect is slow growth and a complicated relationship with water: Black Velvets have a rhizome that rots at the slightest excuse. The pink variegation is also unstable, and can come out more or less marked with each new leaf, which is something a buyer should be told beforehand and not after. I keep it in a very open substrate and water it less than instinct suggests.
Alocasia Frydek Variegata
The green Frydek is a relatively easy plant; the variegated one is another story, because the white areas do not photosynthesise and the plant has less engine for the same number of leaves. I expect to have to keep it in more light than usual and to see the odd leaf come out too white and have to be sacrificed. It is the plant I expect to get most wrong.
Alocasia Infernalis
This is the most interesting of the group: dark leaves with metallic reflections turning towards purple. On paper it is less delicate than the other two and stays small, which makes it suited to anyone short of space. I expect it to be the happy surprise of the batch.
Begonia Rex Fireworks
Rex begonias are the opposite of Alocasia: they forgive a lot on water and are generous when propagated from a leaf, but they go dormant if the temperature drops and can frighten anyone not expecting it. Fireworks has a silver-purple colouring that shifts a good deal with the light in person. I expect to raise leaf plantlets from it by the end of summer.
Monstera Thai Constellation
The best known and the least delicate, but also the one people have the most mistaken expectations about. It grows slowly, wants plenty of light to keep its variegation, and the variegation itself is not inherited predictably. It is tough and long-lived: I think of it more as an investment of patience than an impulse buy.
Which ones I fear
In order: Frydek Variegata, Black Velvet Pink Albo, and then the rest some way behind. The common denominator is variegation: less chlorophyll means less margin for error on everything else.
The protocol for all of them is the same first ten days I have already written about, with one addition: I keep them away from the mother plants until I am sure they have brought no guests. Two weeks of quarantine cost far less than a spider mite infestation in the cabinet.