Beautiful flowers are popping up all over here in the Twin Cities. I’ve been enjoying all of it, but there’s one species that’s got me puzzled. It looks like a member of the nightshade family, and it seems to like growing in weedy places on parking strips and drainage gardens. It’s all over the place.
What is this?
Foliage
Flowers
Fruits. Sorry it’s blurry.
Also, for your viewing enjoyment, here’s some milkweed and bee balm:
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Euphorbia obesa:
She’s a fat little beauty, ain’t she?
One of my labmates just gave this to me as a gift (somebody else has the same obsessions!). Euphorbia obesa is native to the great Karoo region of South Africa, where it is endangered. They do so well in cultivation, though, that there are now more of them in pots than there are out in the wild.
This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but the photos are going up now. The PBS plant sail is the annual fundraiser for the plant biology and horticulture grad students. The Phytograds raised over $1000!
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My little plantie has plantlets!
My plant is a Mother of Thousands (Kalanchoe daigremontiana), which I got as a freebie from the American Society of Plant Biologists meeting last August. It reproduces asexually by making baby plantlets on the edges of its leaves. Eventually, the baby plantlets will fall off and form new plants that are genetically identical to the original Mother of Thousands.
I got a lithops, I got a lithops, I got a lithops, hey, hey, hey, hey!
Lithops plants look like aliens because they’re adapted to one of the most extreme environments on the planet. They’re native to the Namibian Desert, which averages about 5mm of rain. Per year. These little guys survive entirely on the fogs that blow in off of the ocean sometimes.
I stumbled across my lithops at a plant sale fundraiser at grad school last week. As I’d only ever seen lithops at a botanical garden before, I didn’t know you could even buy and sell them. But then there they were, rows and rows of little 2″ pots of them on the table, right next to the cactus. Want.
I started quizzing the guy at the table. How do you take care of these? They were only four dollars each, but I didn’t want to kill one. Turns out they’re easy to take care of as long as you remember two things: don’t water them, and give them lots of light. Up here in Minnesota, I’m going to have to supplement them with an artificial plant light.
So I brought one home, and I’ll see how it goes. I feel a sort of kinship for the little guy. He’s a transplant from a very different part of the world, too.