Some plants can appal you by the way they suddenly die, no matter how careful and attentive you are as a gardener (in my part of the world just by saying the word 'brown boronia' I could set many gardeners' heads nodding in ready agreement). Other plants appal by the alternative means – by how easily, far too easily, they grow, spread and colonise areas where you don't want them to be. Yes, I'm talking weeds here but mostly I want to blog about a special class of weeds – the ones I actually pay money for and now regret ever buying. Such as this one. Kalanchoe daigremontianum syn. Bryophyllum daigremontianum, otherwise named (as I only discovered while Googling this afternoon) 'Mother of Thousands' or 'Mother of Millions'. It's a native of Madagascar. I had heard it said and written many times that 'mother of millions' was an appalling weed, but I had never seen the whole plant, only a couple of photos of its flowers.
Here's another cohort of weedettes ready to colonise unsuspecting succulent pots below. Another common name for this chap is Mexican Hat Plant, and that's an appropriate one, too. Those little dark 'hats' poking out the side, looking like so many little ears, soon drop off the mother plant and sprout wherever they land. And the germination rate is super-high – about nine in ten of them seem to make it to planthood. 
I do distinctly remember saying something to the effect of "wow, that's interesting" when Pammy wandered over with the pot in her hand at a gardening festival up in the Blue Mountains – but she bought it! It was only a couple of dollars and we're suckers for unusual succulents, so if she didn't buy it I probably would have done so later in the day.
The plant's ability to drop baby plants is prodigious. Virtually every other potted succulent in my succulent collection had several baby 'mother of millions' plants coming up. And I still keep finding them. Yes, I'm planning to get rid of this anti-social plant soon, but Pammy asked me to at least let it flower once, so she could see what they looked like. And so I've removed the pot to our paved pergola area, where the plant can no longer bother the other succulents. These babies are at the base of the 'mother' pot, and that's a pretty typical infestation.
I have to confess that I was more than a bit slow on the uptake about this plant's dangers. So when the very first baby plant came up I cheerfully, foolishly, rashly, idiotically potted it up, thinking 'freebie!'. Just two weeks, and a thousand babies later, I came to my senses.
As soon as I saw the flowers I went "oh oh" and recognised them, and this morning headed for Google to confirm my worst suspicions. We had actually paid money (not much, mind you) for one of the most notorious weeds going. For the record, this is the tubular, dusky pink, quite uninteresting flower which Pammy has been waiting for. Ho hum, I say!
Getting quite desperate, I tried some early morning backlighting on the flowers. Still it's still just an uneasy mixture of horror and 'ho hum'. So you live and learn when buying cheap plants at a gardener's fair. You never know what you'll get. Buying mother of millions is a bit embarrassing and annoying, but it's not half as bad as bringing home a baby Triffid, so I ought to keep it all in perspective and just put it down to experience!
4 comments:
Good luck with getting rid of it. BTW, you probably should ring Blue Mountains Council to tell them that a local is selling this weed at whatever fete you went to. Or the fete organisers. Yours looks like a hybrid form from here; is it?
Might be. I think there are several different species of Bryophyllum, all of which have the common name of Mother of Millions. So it's probably an uncommon species, which explains the odd looks.
And it was bought at the Garden Gnome day at Glenbrook on the Australia Day weekend. The guy selling the plant was a backyarder probably. When I got it home and unpotted it, he had used an inch of potting mix on top and the rest was the dodgiest mix of garden soil and bits of chopped up white foam broccoli box! He presumably laughed all the way to the bank, or didn't even know what he had.
Oh man, dude... I went to a shop-local event thing the other weekend and bought some plants--a pregnant onion, a prayer plant, and some begonias. I actually bought the pregnant onion because it had three or four little Kalanchoe babies on top of the soil from the older plant next to it on the table. I would never have bought Kalanchoe itself, but if it's a freebie with another plant... Well, I put them in a separate pot and they're rooting nicely. I plan on keeping them separate. I have heard too many horror stories not to treat them with respect, but I need to learn the lesson for myself before deciding not to keep the guys!
I had fun time with mother of thousand. I also found that they don't grow well in wet soggy soil.
It happened to rain everyday for past 2 weeks and all them rotted and died. I have few which I kept them at the balcony garden and its well controlled.
They can grow without water for weeks, very beautiful to place them as small containers by the kitchen side.
The good news about this plant is that if you do get burned while cooking or scalded, you can crush these leaves and place them immediately, the burning sensation goes away immediately.
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