Tuesday, August 10, 2010

One thing leads to another


I hadn't planned on doing a blog posting today, but one thing led to another and here I am, blogging about something that wasn't even on my mind as recently as three hours ago. Where to begin? Easy - pictured below is a Syngonium. This is what I didn't know three hours ago. Up until that point it had the rather lengthy common name of "Pam's old pot plant which got too big and so we planted it out in the shady back part of the garden where it has thrived but sorry we don't know its name." Syngonium sums it all up much more succinctly, I think you'll all agree.

Traa daa, our Syngonium, accompanied by three blind mice disguised as mushrooms.

This is what cleared up the plant name thing. Its original label, discovered in a big pile of plant labels in my shed, while I was looking for a completely different label. See what I mean about one thing leading to another?

By the way, if you look carefully at the label above you'd notice that the plant on the label is variegated, but the leaf in the opening photo on this posting isn't. Our Syngonium is doing what all (or at least, many) variegated plants seem to end up doing – they proceed to also grow some unvariegated, fully green leaves. From what I understand variegation is a not a dominant gene in plants. So, if you don't cut off the 'normal' fully green leaves, slowly but surely the variegated leaves will be outnumbered, and after several years it will be a plain, unvariegated plant.

And so, in another sense altogether, one thing (a variegated plant) leads to another (a non-variegated plant).

In fact, this innocent little dig around my dusty plant label pile in my shed also gave me another idea for a blog topic that I'll try to make sense of soon, so one thing has led to another, which then led to another. I love a good meaningless set of tangents – it feels like I'm dreaming!






4 comments:

Chandramouli S said...

Such are the ways of life, isn't it? We look for something and we're surprise with something that's most unlikely to be found. Well, I love heart shaped leaves and I guess variegated would have been better though.

Helen/patientgardener said...

Glad its not just me that has no idea what some of their plants are. I spent all winter nurturing a pot in the g'house which I thought contained a certain new acquisition only to discover when I looked at labels etc that I had already planted said acquisition out and the only thing in the protected pot were vine weevils!

Jamie said...

Hi Chandramouli, great to hear from you again.

And I agree, Helen, there are several things in my garden whose name I don't know. It's just nice to finally find out!

Shivangni said...

Seems like this is one plant I know something about, I had 6 varieties of this but am left with only 4 thanks to frost and snails.

I have a pink leaved one, whose colour fades as it ages, this year I discovered that it sprouts better coloured leaves if cuttings are planted so am planning to replant it each spring