Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Random plant event: Spathiphyllum seedlings

The Spathiphyllum seedlings are just full of surprises, it turns out. Only 14 months old, and two of them have decided to bloom already:

Spathiphyllum seedling number 7.

Spathiphyllum seedling number 16.

Another thing that's surprising about this is that at the moment, some of the peace lily seedlings are in 3-inch (7.5 cm) pots, and some of them are in 4-inch (10 cm) pots, and both of the ones that bloomed are in 3-inch pots.

The conventional wisdom about peace lilies is that they are more likely to bloom if potbound, but I'd always assumed that that was some kind of error, on the grounds that 1) they don't seem to have that much problem blooming if they're not potbound either, assuming that they're mature, healthy plants, and 2) there are no pots in nature, so why should the plants care one way or the other about being potbound. And those still seem like perfectly valid arguments to me, but even so: the ones I left in small pots are blooming, and the ones I moved to bigger pots are not.

So perhaps there's something to the conventional wisdom after all?


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe just moving them into a bigger pot was enough to reset the bloom clock? I've always been doubtful about the root bound lore. Unless it's provoking a last gasp survival trigger, it really doesn't make logical sense to me.

Texas Anona

Anonymous said...

So I guess it's chic to grow this one?
Per: http://shine.yahoo.com/at-home/9-super-chic-house-plants-220200584.html

Texas Anon

mr_subjunctive said...

Texas Anon:

I don't know about that. There are some nice plants on that list (Ficus lyrata is, in my opinion, criminally underrated), but if I had a dollar for every time I've seen a plant described as chic, trendy, fashionable, hot, contemporary, or stylish, I . . . would have a lot of dollars. It's rarely true in any kind of objective sense, and claims of trendiness are almost always accompanied by plant-care advice which is questionable when not blatantly wrong.