An appalling plant

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!