African Violets

My pink-flowered variegated NOID African violet from a plant society sale in Baton Rouge, LA. I’ve owned and created multiples of this plant since approximately 2010. (January 2023 edit: I believe it might be ‘Precious Pink’.)

We all know I keep a large number of plants. Some genera never do well for me; others do well pretty much across the board, and then there are those that can be hit or miss. African violets, or Saintpaulia spp., are in the last category for me. (I know some of that is due to my unwillingness to adapt my own tending processes - I’m not super into wick watering, for instance, and I often top-water which can easily result in crown rot.) The first AV I remember keeping well enough to be notable is a NOID I picked up from a plant society sale in Baton Rouge, LA, around 2010. It’s a variegated dusty-pink-and-green standard AV, with pink flowers. It’s my most tried-and-true and therefore my favorite. (January 2023 edit: I believe it might be ‘Precious Pink’.)

The same pink-flowered variegated NOID African violet pictured above, but a few months later after it upped its variegation intensity. Variegation is dependent on environmental factors including fertilization, light levels, soil type and age, and so on. (January 2023 edit: I believe it might be ‘Precious Pink’.)

After this NOID variegated standard was clearly sticking around, I bought a couple other standard green-leafed types from grocery stores. Either quickly or slowly, those all passed away. Time ticked onward.

I picked up a cute miniature AV with blue-violet flowers from Family Tree Nursery in Kansas City, and it seemed to be doing OK. I tried out a couple Primulina species, a very close relative in the Gesneriad family - one died quickly but the other thrived for a time, but then ended up deteriorating as well. I bought a gorgeous lime-flowering dark-green-ruffled-leaf standard and another AV I can’t remember well from the KC Gesneriad Society that both quickly went downhill. The mini kept doing all right, so I was up to two AVs that seemed to be able to handle the care and setup I provided. Time continued to pass.

The blue-flowered mini from Family Tree Nursery in Kansas City.

I attended another KC Gesneriad Society sale. I was a bit wary given all the other deaths, but figured I’d try a few more out. I bought one AV with a beautiful set of flowers already growing that flowered but then croaked pretty soon thereafter, a cupped-leaf and a “girl-leaf” mini AV, and a trailing Russian hybrid called ‘Zimniy Tsvetok‘ (I distinctly remember a society member trying to persuade me it wasn’t worth getting, but I liked the look of it so I went ahead anyway) as well as a few Episcia species (another relative in the Gesneriad family). I also picked up another miniature, this time with a sort of white/yellow/pink variegation, from Family Tree Nursery. Around this time I also branched out into Sinningia species (yet another Gesneriad), and had middling levels of success and failure there too.

My girl-leaf mini that’s doing the best of its clones and even proffered a couple flowers recently!

The “girl-leaf” mini AV began to fall apart, but some harvested leaves managed to grow pups. Those plants have matured into their own issues, and I’d categorize this plant as just barely managing to stay afloat in my AV collection. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s eventually - or even rather soon - another goner. However, the most stable girl-leaf mini has just begun to bloom, which is a positive turn! It has put off a couple of light pink flowers.

The cupped-leaf mini has also continually struggled, though I’d say it seems to have stabilized a bit more than the girl-leaf mini has even though I don’t think I’ve seen it flower yet (or if I have, it was sufficiently long ago for my memory to fail me). I didn’t take a photo of it for this post as I was documenting the rest, due to a combination of its currently underwhelming stature and lack of flowers. All the Episcias have done just fine, though I have learned I dislike how often they have to be restarted in order to look nice. However, they do make good gifts since I am forced to propagate them so frequently!

The variegated mini that’s getting relatively large but which I believe has yet to flower for me.

The variegated mini has been doing better, and I have one plant of it that is actually looking pretty adult though I’ve yet to see it flower either. The first and mother to all of my blue-violet-flowering minis had a very weird crown situation set in, but it had been so prolific and stable in pupping beforehand that I have several replacement plants solidly in the ranks. I think it’s nearing the tried-and-true category, though I’ll still need a couple more years to be sure.

My RS ‘Zimniy Tsvetok’ trailing violet, which is one of my current favorites but seems to have peaks and valleys in vitality and has yet to propagate successfully.

However, the real surprise for me is the RS ‘Zimniy Tsvetok’ trailing violet. It took a while to settle in when I brought it home, and it was touch-and-go for a time. Then it started to flourish, and it did very well for over a year, but eventually its leaves began to bleach and I thought it might not be salvageable. I pulled it out from its fluorescent light stand, repotted it, and put it in a shaded southern window (an oxymoron, I know) in an attempt at rehab. Its color slowly restored and it started growing again. It is now my biggest AV and - at least currently - my most consistent flowerer. The one propagation I’ve tried of it hasn’t done well at all, which does worry me in an “heirs and spares” sense, but the main clump (it’s a trailer, so it’s the only one in my collection that is meant to have multiple heads) is beautiful.

So at present, I keep six varieties of AV. Three are doing well: the tried-and-true NOID variegated AV from Baton Rouge, the blue-violet-flowering mini from Family Tree Nursery, and the RS ‘Zimniy Tsvetok’ trailing violet from the KC Gesneriad Society sale. Three are in various stages of surviving: the girl-leaf mini and the cupped-leaf mini (not pictured) from the KC Gesneriad Society sale, and the variegated mini from Family Tree Nursery. We’ll see how it continues to go!

Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby Part II

If you haven’t read my blog post titled “Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby,” I recommend you do that first, as this is a follow-up!

To recap: plants, notably the Philodendron ‘Pink Congo,’ that have been gassed (or occasionally painted) with ethylene to induce a temporary discoloration that may appear to unsuspecting buyers as a permanent variegation have begun to enter the houseplant trade. At the time of my first post, ‘Pink Congo’ was the only affected type I could list with specificity, but I mentioned that others were out there.

This spring, I’ve so far noticed two more pop up on one of the Facebook groups for houseplants - and this time, they’re both succulents. The first is Crassula ‘Buddha’s Temple’ and the second is Sinocrassula yunnanensis. Here are a couple screenshots I took of the plants for sale - in the second picture, it’s the middle row of plants that are impacted. Both were advertised as being Korean imports.

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With the Crassula ‘Buddha’s Temple,’ people challenged the seller who initially defended these plants as untreated, natural variegation, but then a day later returned and admitted that upon follow-up, her importer confirmed that they were fakes. However, at least when I saw it, the Sinocrassula yunnanensis sales post made by a different seller hadn’t attracted any questions or consternation.

To me, both plants look really unnatural and kind of diseased or wrong, but then again I am deep in the hobby and know what plants ought to look like - I also think painted succulents and dyed and fake flowers look bad, so clearly my taste isn’t everyone’s as those treatments do have a ready audience in more amateur growers! I do wholeheartedly believe that any altered plant - whether it be gassed with ethylene, painted, dyed, glued with false flowers, etc. - should come with a clear label that lays out what has been done, the lifespan of the manipulation, and the impact to the health of the plant.

Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby

There have always been scandals in the world of houseplants. Big box stores selling dyed and painted plants, cacti and succulents with dried and dyed strawflowers glued on, injected orchid spikes (spoiler - there are no naturally blue Phalaenopsis), doomed plants in glass baubles, and glued-down top dressing are some common ones. Though more specialized nurseries tend not to commit those no-nos, many do sell tinted tillandsia and single Hoya kerrii leaves without stem cuttings that will never grow without any disclaimers. Some online sellers will purposefully mislabel or sell inert seeds or parts of a plant for propagation that will never be able to grow as well, relying on time, relative cost, and the ever-present risk inherent in attempting to grow seeds or propagate to erase any blame. And now there’s a new scandal rocking the houseplant world, the full scope is still in the process of being uncovered!

Let me first set the stage. If you, like me, have been in the houseplant hobby for decades, you might have noticed that it’s become quite the fad lately. There were (and still are!) some good online forums and blogs fifteen years ago, but recently I’ve witnessed the rise of “plantubers” aka YouTube stars who do surprisingly well discussing plants, Facebook groups, and - though I’m not that active on the platform - I’ve heard tell of Instagram plant influencers, aka plantfluencers. The rise of these various social media houseplant stars and societies has helped shape what is the must-have plant and drives demand for large swathes of new hobbyists. For whatever reason, right now monstera, philodendron, rarer pothos, and calathea are all hot commodities but the variegated and atypically colored ones are by far the most sought after. I actually don’t grow any of those types of plants aside from a small Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ at the moment; I had an early experience killing a calathea and have never felt called to try again, pothos to me seem common as dirt so while I don’t mind them I also don’t prioritize them, and while I like philodendrons including monstera a lot, they’re often large plants and I’d prefer to be able to have ten or twenty plants in the space where one philodendron might live. My Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ is a pretty plant though; its new growth comes in reddish orange and then over time it ages to a green. I think it cost either $3 or $4 because I bought it as a baby.

My Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ plunked behind several other plants on my outside shade table this summer.

I have joined or been added to quite a few of the Facebook plant groups over the years, and many are for buying and selling. I’ve always found most of the pricing on Facebook for plants to be overly high, so I think I’ve only purchased maybe three plants total from such listings. It turns out that even bearing that in mind, I was still apparently only in the more reasonably priced groups until a few weeks ago. At that time, I was invited to join two “plant purge” Facebook groups. The biggest is nuts, though I dislike the format and atmosphere of both. These groups structure their sales to be very small quantity buy-now-or-you-miss-it opportunities and build up excitement by dangling the most coveted plants ahead of time without prices and then “opening up” the sale hours to days later. This very intentionally is not meant to encourage calm research and reflection but rather hype, panic, and instant gratification; it’s basically gambling. People are buying individual plants for hundreds of dollars, regularly, in a flurry of adrenaline and a heady sense of exclusivity that rarely is accurate. Enter Philodendron ‘Pink Princess.’ It’s a variegated philodendron that has the same general shape, growth, size, and habit as my ‘Prince of Orange’ but it has green-base leaves with splashes of pink and sometimes cream variegation. It used to be sold for approximately the same price point as other philodendrons - typically somewhere between $6-20 per plant depending on size and store. Its explosion in popularity due to plant influencers means it now typically costs between $100-300 per plant, and that’s when you can find one at all. Pink is a very “in” coloration for the Instagram and Youtube plant crowd.

You now have the backstory. Recently a newcomer variegated philodendron arrived on the scene: Philodendron ‘Pink Congo’. (Newcomers do arrive sometimes - there are hybridizers and tissue culture cloners that introduce interesting new plants to the industry.) ‘Pink Congo’ was positioned and understood to be much like my ‘Prince of Orange’ in its growth habit but with pink leaves instead of orange. However, photos of ‘Pink Congo’ differed from ‘Prince of Orange.’ There were just dark green outer leaves and bright pink inner leaves. A few pictures appeared to show a different type of transition, where green patches started developing on some of the older pink leaves as opposed to the slow and total hue change on the entire leaf as per ‘Prince of Orange.'

From what I’ve read, people started paying $70-100 for ‘Pink Congo’ - mostly on these rabid Facebook groups but also occasionally on nursery websites, Instagram, eBay, and Etsy - and prices escalated from there. Then a knowledgeable hobbyist dropped a bomb on Facebook - the ‘Pink Congo’ was a fake and he had source material from an Indian vendor to prove it. He showed that the pink central leaf coloration was a temporary reaction to being gassed by ethylene and the plant would revert back to its standard green coloration in several months to a year or two and never grow more pink again. The base plant would typically sell in a $4-20 range.

Apparently some houseplant sellers knew it all along and were fine with it. Others didn’t, and decided to eat their own loss in having purchased the plants for resale so as not to lose credibility and trust. Many continue to sell them but added vaguely worded disclaimers that can be easily misinterpreted to give false hope. Meanwhile, a lot of buyers are upset that they dropped triple digits on temporary variegation, but some claim they don’t mind and plan to continue to buy ‘Pink Congo.’ A few have shared a belief that the scandal itself is the hoax, and that if anyone’s plant is reverting that it’s just an unstable variegation rather than a systemic fake.

And that’s the current scandal!

Wait… I did say it was still unfolding, so what’s that about? Apparently, philodendrons are not going to be the only ethylene-treated plants coming out of the import market! (Dun dun dun!) As far as I know, no one’s listed any other implicated plant varieties with specificity yet, but it’s a new ploy to be aware of across the hobby. I don’t know what other plants’ responses to being gassed with ethylene might look like, so any very unusual and new coloration might warrant a critical eye these days.