The Variegated Thumb

I’m not actually suggesting a new holiday.  It’s just a clever name for my post.  Although I wouldn’t mind this being a holiday - I already celebrate it everyday.

[For those who are interested, I work on the research campus at the University of Oklahoma.  The research campus is made up of about six buildings built over the last 5 years.  These buildings are filled with academics, government groups and private companies (like the one I work for).  The anchor of the research campus is the National Weather Center.]

My office building (like the others on the campus) is a nice, new facility that has lots of plants in the hallways and office suites.  Plants are added for decoration, as well as to help purify air in the office environment.  This is a pretty trendy thing nowadays, and I guess it has been for quite a while.  What’s cool for me is that some of my favorite plants are those common plants kept as easy-care foliage plants (such as the Aglaonema pictured above).

All of the plants are in really nice, huge pots.  And the plants are grouped in twos or threes.  This is my favorite grouping.  I walk by it each morning on my way up the stairs.  The Philodendron is so cool.  I think I might have to ask one of the plant maintainers if I could get a cutting…

Other common plants in the office building are Dracaenas, Epipremnum ivies and large Bird of Paradise.  Here is a nice grouping of two Dracaenas in the hallway.

Of course, being the planty guy that I am, all of these great plants scattered throughout the building aren’t enough for me.  I have my own set of plants on my desk: Philodendron hederaceum (’Micans’), Polyscias scutellaria, Scindapsus pictus, Aglaonema sp.  I used to have a Philodendron ‘Brazil’ on my desk, but it got too large and had to be taken home.

The shield Aralia was a birthday gift the first year I started working here, so it’s now about 2 years old and has grown a lot.  I’ve heard that these plants are a little finicky and hard to keep.  No doubt it probably would not be as healthy as it is today if I wasn’t looking at it 5 days a week!  The office environment (and my constant watching eye) has apparently suited it well.

My Philodendron ‘Micans’ is starting to grow as rapidly as my Philodron ‘Brazil’ did.  It had to be taken home when our company moved and my desk space was reduced.  I really like it’s rate of growth, but I hope the ‘Micans’ can stick around a while longer.

In addition to all sorts of health benefits in the office space, plants just make me happy and my work space would be depressing without them.

Do you keep any plants in your workspace?  Or does anyone else in your office?

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Last week I posted a new photo album containing over 200 pictures of the Myriad Botanical Gardens in Oklahoma City.  I posted the album in pre-Christmas haste, without labeling any of them.  But now I have labeled the majority of the pictures.  So, if you haven’t seen them yet, or you already looked and want to know an ID of one of the plants, you can check them out here.

Last week in my Myriad Gardens post I just wrote about a couple of the highlights.  I wanted to give a little more information about the Gardens today.

The Myriad Botanical Gardens is a 17 acre colorfully landscaped plot in downtown Oklahoma City.  In the center is the Crystal Bridge Tropical Conservatory, which is a big tropical rainforest inside a cylindrical greenhouse on it’s side.  The big greenhouse hovers over a pond, giving it the name “The Crystal Bridge.”

The outdoor gardens are nice, but the real action is inside.  About 2/3 of the inside space is dedicated to a tropical rainforest collection, while the remaining 1/3 is dedicated to a dry tropical zone.  There is no physical boundary between the two collections, so I am partly surprised they coexist so well, sharing the same humid air with one another.  The dry zone is watered less frequently the entire year and is watered sparsely if at all during a certain dormant period of the year.

While many of the plants at the Myriad Gardens are those you would expect to see in a rain forest recreation, the Myriad Gardens has focused on a couple of specific plant groups.

Aroids

This is not one of the collections noted on the official website, but being an Aroid collector, I couldn’t help but notice how many plants were present from this family.  Maybe the website needs a little update.

The collection of Aroids from the genus Anthurium was astounding.  There are two types of Anthurium (in my mind): those with the very colorful blooms and ordinary foliage, and those with the really cool foliage but discrete blooms.  The Myriad Gardens had several color varieties of the first category.  I had never seen a pale purple Anthurium before and unfortunately I didn’t get a very good picture of it.

They also have a number of the unique foliage species of Anthuriums, including the King Anthurium (Anthurium veitchii).  Notice the size of the guard rail in comparison.

I also saw a cool shingler Aroid that I had never seen before.  This little climber was so appressed to the rock wall that the leaves were conforming to the contours of the rocks.

Really there were tons more Aroids that I noticed (and photographed) but I won’t waste any more space here.  If you’re interested, go to my photo album to see them.

Marantaceae (Prayer Plants)

This category was also not mentioned on the official website, but I noticed quite a few unique species from this family that I had never seen before, and several that I had.  Two particular varieties from the same species caught my attention.  I had seen the Stromanthe ‘Triostar’ before, but never this large.

I have not quite identified the other variety, but I think it is also from Stromanthe sanguinea.

Of course, there were also several very large Zebra Plants (Calathea zebrina), of which I have a small one of my own at home.  It was fun to see these plants waist high or higher.

Palms

According to their website, there are supposedly 100 species of palms in the Myriad Gardens.  If I had to count, I would probably tell you there were about 10.  The only palm I could correctly identify was the Coconut Palm (Cocos nucifera).  They also have the palm species which has some of the largest leaves in the world - the Bismarckia nobilis.

Cycads

The Myriad Gardens also has a nice collection of cycads scattered throughout their rainforest collection.  Cycads are pretty much the oldest plants on the planet, having shared time with dinosaurs.  They are often mistaken as palms and have similar characteristics, but are usually shorter.  I don’t know that I got any good pictures of the Cycads.

Gingers

Ah, one of my favorites!  The collection of gingers may just seem large, but not very diverse, whenever the plants are out of bloom.  But when they are in bloom, it is easier to see that the Myriad Gardens has a number of different species of Gingers.  These are beautiful, tall plants with very colorful blooms.  I am still waiting for my own personal shell ginger to bloom.  Maybe next summer.

One closely related plant to the family of gingers is the genus Heliconia.  Heliconias are commonly called “False Bird of Paradise” because of their resemblance to the Bird of Paradise inflorescence.  The Myriad Gardens had a couple of different Heliconias in their collection.

Bromeliads

No one would call this collection of bromeliads small.  And it seems they are always in bloom.  The botanical family Bromeliaceae contains the genera Aechmea (the most common Bromeliad), Ananas (which includes the Pineapple plant), Billbergia, Bromelia, Cryptanthus, Tillandsia (commonly called “Air plant”) and more than 50 others.  Many of the Bromeliads (Aechmeas, Ananas) are planted in the ground, while others (Tillandsia) are growing attached to trees or rock.  I didn’t take too many pictures of the bromeliads, but there are several in my photo album.

And here is a picture of just one of the many bromeliads in bloom.

Orchids

The Myriad Gardens actually has a fantastic display of orchids.  At one location there is a concentrated wall of orchids.  But elsewhere in the rain forest collection you can see them attached to trees and rocks and walls.  It is simply amazing how many orchids are in bloom at any one time.  More than 1200 of the orchids in the collection were bequeathed to the Gardens in 2002 by a local collector named Fred Strothmann.  My photo album has quite a few pictures of the orchid collection.  Even though I have had some experience raising orchids, I didn’t try to tackle identifying any of them.  I could tell a couple of the genera, but nothing beyond that.

Begonias

To be honest, I only noticed 3 or 4 begonias in the Gardens, but the website states that there are over 100 species present.  I’m not denying that they were there, because I was kind of being overstimulated by the place.  If I worked there everyday it would probably take a good month before my head stopped spinning each time I walked in the Gardens.  One particular (large) begonia did catch my eye, the Begonia ‘Black Taffeta.’

Euphorbias

Euphorbias are a bit of mystery to me.  Why?  Well, because the most common Euphorbia I know is Euphorbia pulcherrima - The Poinsettia.  Most of the other Euphorbias with which I am familiar all have spines and are what I would call in a very general sense - cacti.  Now I know that technically Euphorbias are not cacti, and I’m okay with that.  But what I don’t understand is what is the Poinsettia doing in the same genus as Euphorbia lactea?

The Myriad Gardens collection of Euphorbias resides in the dry tropical zone.  Do you know the difference between a cactus and a Euphorbia?  Euphorbias grow in the Eastern Hemisphere while cacti grown in the Western Hemisphere.  Both plant groupings are filled with succulent plants with thick stems that store a milky sap and require very little moisture in their natural environments.  The Myriad Gardens collection of Euphorbias contains 40 species and if I had to guess, I would have told you it contained more than that.  There are quite a few pictures of Euphorbias in my photo album.

My favorite Euphorbia in the building was probably Euphorbia punicea - The Jamaican Poinsettia tree.  Here is one picture and there are a couple more pictures in my photo album.

The Myriad Gardens are a really great place to visit, with a small admission for the time that you can spend inside (if you’re a plant lover).  If you haven’t yet clicked on any of the dozens of links I provided to my photo album, I suggest you do so now.  You can get a better feel for the wonderful collection on hand.

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Recently I sat down and brainstormed about all of the things I could write about on The Variegated Thumb.  One of the topics that came to mind was a sort of “field trip report.”  I have a list of places that I want to visit - be it a local nursery, botanical garden in a neighboring state, or something even more far-fetched.  I thought a report about my trip with some pictures and information would make a very appropriate blog post.  So I have plans to release a trip report about once a month.  [Other recurring topics I have planned are book reviews, plant finds, genera profiles, aquatic posts, and projects.]

My first trip report is unfortunately not from a trip I took myself, hence the word “virtual” in the title.  I’m going to have to live through pictures and some seeds that were brought back to me.  My parents just returned from a week-long cruise to the Caribbean.  They left from Fort Lauderdale, Florida and landed in Grand Turks, Tortola, St. Marten, and Half Moon Cay (Bahamas).

At one point on the trip my mom noticed some seeds hanging off of a plant and commented about it to my dad.  My dad, wearing cargo shorts, decided to carry a couple home in his pocket.  The seeds of two other mystery plants caught their attention on the trip and so now I have seeds from three unknown plants.

The Seeds of Mystery

The first seed is like a large nut.  It seems to have the most distinct appearance of the three seeds, so I  hoped someone would know what this one is.

The second seed is the pit of a small fruit.  The fruit was not much larger than the pit and was shriveled and brown when I first saw it.  I peeled it away easily and washed the seed by hand.  My mom remembers seeing a lot of Fiddle leaf fig trees (Ficus pandurata) on their trip and I suspect that the fruit that I removed from this pit might have been a fig.

The third seed was also inside of a fruit, but the fruit layer around the seed was much thinner in this case.  My mom remarked about how much this one looks like a large lemon seed.  I agree.

Identifying the Mystery Seeds

The only clues I had for determining the plants from which these seeds came is the appearance, their departure port location and the four cruise stops.

I posted the picture above to one of my favorite forums on the internet - the Name that Plant forum on GardenWeb.  That forum is sort of my Watson, if you will.  Within 20 minutes(!) I had already received a positive identification on the first seed.  The first seed seems to have come from a Christmas Palm (Veitchia merrillii).  I looked around and found some other pictures of these seeds, as well some important information - they are commonly planted in southern Florida.  The good news continues - apparently they are fairly easy to grow from seed and make decent container plants!

One down, two to go…

If you have any information on the remaining two seeds or think you might know what one of them is, please let me know.  I can try to germinate them, but I’m not sure how much luck I will have without knowing what they are.