Plant Blindness

There has been some research floating into my mailbox lately about "Plant Blindness." This is a new term for me but the concept is not.

I know that I am hyper aware of plants which makes me the ultimate plant geek. But the idea that some people don’t ‘see’ plants was brought home to me in a recent conversation I had with a guy who is a rock climber and a fisherman. We were talking about an area where I had been looking for wildflowers and he was explaining how to find this creek which was the perfect fishing spot for trout.

I asked if there were many wildflowers around, knowing that there would be flowers anywhere that there was running water.
He paused, "I don’t know."
"Oh," I said, but was thinking "Are you KIDDING me??? You crushed them with every step you took along that creek!" That sentiment must have shown in my face because his next comment was, "It must be hard for a plant expert like you to hear something like that."

It was and it inspires me to do more outreach to teach children to ‘see’ plants. Children as natural observers, are the place to start fixing the blindness.

Plants don’t have the appeal of animals - deer, eagle, chipmunks, even porcupines. Elk, I just learned, are the major tourist attraction in Estes Park, CO, even more than being the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park.

People worry about the polar bears but few give a thought to the disease and insect die-off happening to the evergreen trees across the Colorado mountains until all you can see are the large stands of dead pine, spruce and fir trees that now blanket the hillsides of our forested land. Ack!!

This is my plan. I have a really fun project that I taught lots of students as my daughters were growing up. It is simply using pinto beans at different stages of germination and taking them apart so the kids can see how germination works.

Everyone starts with a dried bean and over the course of the discussion, I give out about 5 beans to each child. Each of the five beans is slightly farther along in its germination and shows: the developing root, then tiny leaves, bigger leaves and roots, the leaves as they start to turn green, and then finally a seed with the root and leaves emerging. Then I send them home with a dried bean seed so they can grow it themselves.

Emerging leaves from a germinating bean.

This is totally a science fair project but so appealing because each child has their own seeds to dismantle, to study, and to contemplate - and to show off to me!

It is a project that ALWAYS engages the students, can be taught to almost any age kid and can be as simple or complex as the class needs - drawings, technical terms, problem-solving questions.

Now that I'm not teaching full time, I have talked with a couple of teacher friends and they are happy to have me come in and do this project with their students in the spring.

Cut flowers for winter

In winter, I like to buy cut flowers at the grocery store. I try to find the ones on sale, though you have to look carefully at the blossoms and judge their age. My favorite grocery store flower is alstroemeria, which is the longest lasting cut flower I know. Carnations are my second favorite and some of the colors reward me with the clove-like scent.

This is a bouquet of sale alstroemeria that I bought just after their sell-by date. It is now going on the 3rd week at my house. They came home with 18” stems and I have repeatedly cut their stems and given them fresh water. They are shorter but still lovely.

As soon as you get them home, pull off any leaves that might go under water in the vase, and cut off about 2”-3” of their stems with a sharp tool. I keep clippers in my kitchen drawer, but a sharp knife works, too. Then put them immediately into warmish water at least ½ way up their stems. Leave them there for a couple of hours and then arrange them in a vase.

By cutting the stems, you open up the vascular tubes (think drinking straws) that allow the flower to pull water up the stem. These tubes are TEENY and close up pretty quickly with the debris that grows in the vase water. So cut the stems every couple of days and give the flowers clean water.

This is the fresh cut end of a head of leaf lettuce. The white dots around the outside are the vascular tubes. Note the brown dots on the cut-leaf stem to the left. These are sealed vascular tubes that won't let water through.

Sometimes, cut flowers come with flower food. I will use a bit of that - maybe a teaspoon in a vase. Since it often clouds the water or leaves sediment on the bottom, I don’t use the whole package. The key to longevity though, is to cut the stems and reopen the tubes.

All the chrysanthemum varieties respond well to this treatment, but they will drop petals and wilt faster than the other two kinds of flowers. Other grocery store flowers seem to respond well to the packaged flower food.

I have found that roses are the most difficult to keep from wilting. My theory is that cut roses don’t pull water up the stem as successfully as other flowers. If you cut the stems pretty short, maybe 6”, roses do better. But that goes against the “long stemmed roses” view that folks have. Some recommendations also suggest crushing the woody stem – but that crushes the vascular tubes, so I don’t see that as a usable solution.

Other ideas include cutting upward from the base of the stem, again with a sharp pair of pruners. This, plus cutting the stem at an angle instead of straight across, gives more surface area for water absorption, so I can appreciate the validity of these practices.

There are the theories of adding soda pop, aspirin and who knows what else to the water. I haven’t experimented with any of these. Additives in water could be beneficial for some types of cut flowers.
But for those of us with a bouquet from the grocery store, clean water and fresh cut stems are the most important steps in long-lasting flowers.

Summer greens in winter

I miss summer green in the non-gardening months, even though I have lots of houseplants. One of my favorite, inexpensive green additions is a bunch of parsley in a vase. With it still in a bundle, I wash it (since I do eat it in salads), and fill my vase with fresh water. Then I remove the rubber band, cut the stems and pop them into the vase.

Presto!

Leaf lettuce also makes a satisfying ‘bouquet’ that you can harvest for salads.

Amaryllis Part 3 - Keeping an amaryllis after blooming

Amaryllis are easy bulbs to save for reflowering if you are interested in trying.

As your blossoms start to wilt, remove each dying flower with a sharp knife or clippers. Cut it off close to the stem, being careful not to damage the other blooms. The cut will ooze for a while, but this isn’t anything to worry about. 

Wilted amaryllis photo by Liz West under CC.

When all the blossoms are wilted, you need to cut back the flowering stem to about 2-4” tall, but don’t cut any of the leaves. As with tulips, daffodils and other bulbs, the leaves make food that is stored in the bulb before it goes dormant. As I said in an earlier post, this is like a bear eating and storing energy, so it can survive a long sleep. 

The cut flower stem will ooze sap for a while and will turn brownish all the way to the bulb over a couple of weeks. This is normal. While it is green, it will continue to make food like the leaves.

Treat the leaf-only plant as any other house plant at this point. Put it in a bright, preferably sunny, window. Water it when the top 1” is dry and use a dilute water-based fertilizer at about ½ strength.

If you have a garden, you can plant the bulb in the ground when there is NO danger of frosts – maybe early summer. Harden it off, meaning ease it into being outside, by keeping it in a mostly shady location for a few days and gradually giving it more sun. It will not take our intense sun without damage to the leaves, so plant it where it will be mostly shaded from noon onward. If you don’t have a garden, you can move the pot outdoors but again, not in full sun here in the west.

In either case, water it deeply every so often because the roots are deep, not close to the surface like petunias or even most perennials.

In the fall or after the first frost has damaged the leaves, carefully dig it up, loosen and remove all the soil. Cut off the leaves just at the top of the bulb and bring it inside. Let it dry out for a day or two. If you have kept it as a houseplant, stop watering it in the fall, and cut the leaves off when they have died.

Store the bulbs in the dark in a cool place, like your basement (but not your refrigerator, since it is too cold) for about 2 ½ months. The bulbs need this long storage at a cool temperature of 50-55° for about 10 weeks in order to bloom again.
 
After that time, repot the bulbs or bring the potted bulbs back into the light and start again. If your bulb sends up only leaves and doesn’t rebloom, it’s likely that it didn’t manage to store enough food reserves in its bulb. Another possibility is that the cold storage period wasn’t long enough, so make sure you give it the full 2 ½ months at about 50-55°.

Good luck, and let me know how your bulbs do!