The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Indoor fave does great outdoors
For Valentine’s Day, I bought my wife a Tradescantia Nanouk, a highly popular indoor plant, thanks to its leaves with white, pink and green stripes.
A week later, she was still crowing about this beauty, which has been given the popular name of Fantasy Venice, invoking the striped shirts of gondoliers — except instead of showing just blue and white or red and white stripes as seen on gondolier shirts, Fantasy Venice has three colored stripes which, in combination, do seem somewhat fantastical. You can buy Tradescantia Nanouk from a number of vendors at Etsy.
My wife’s enthusiasm for Fantasy Venice comes from the fact that, as a potted plant, it will obviously last longer than a vase of flowers and continue with a compelling color display for quite some time. It should be noted, however, that this plant, in the manner of variegated plants in general, must be exposed to a daily dose of bright light in order to keep its color. In other words, if you place Fantasy Venice as a centerpiece on your dining room table where the distance to the nearest window is more than a foot or two, the leaves will eventually fade to green.
Tradescantia is a member of the spiderwort family. Spiderworts are so named because when their stems are cut, a viscous substance is secreted in threads that, upon drying, have the consistency of the silky threads of a spider web. “Wort” is an old English word meaning “plant,” derived from an even older Germanic word meaning “root.” More than 100 plant families have “wort” as a suffix, such as liverwort, lungwort and bladderwort.
The best-known species of the Tradescantia genus is inch plant (Tradescantia zebrina), with burgundy and silver bands on its leaves. It is often seen in hanging baskets and is popular enough as an indoor plant. Yet Fantasy Venice and inch plant will never grow into the best versions of themselves as long as they are confined to containers. These two plants are simply not meant to trail out of pots or hang down from baskets suspended in the air. Confined to containers, their stems begin to elongate, with gaps between the leaves. Yes, you can keep them somewhat symmetrical by consistently pruning off their shoot tips, but your quest to keep them compact will never allow them to grow more than a foot in height, and they will look unnaturally stunted as a result.
Fantasy Venice and inch plant are ground covers in the truest sense, rooting along their stems as they creep over the surface of
the earth, creating a carpet of exquisite beauty as they grow in their tropical habitat. They are frost-sensitive, however, so unless they are growing in an interior courtyard or under trees where they are protected from the cold, they are likely to die in a cold snap. They will grow as a wonderful ground cover in the shade from now until November and cover an extensive area during that time but, before the weather gets cold, take cuttings that can easily be rooted indoors in fast-draining soil or, for that matter, in a glass of plain water.
White velvet (Tradescantia sillamontana), a Mexican native, is a highly drought-tolerant trailing spiderwort species that
craves fast-draining soil and good light. Its hairy foliage insulates it from summer heat, it is not especially water-needy, and its tiny pink flowers are an unexpected bonus. Blue spiderwort (Commelina coelestis) is a tuberous perennial with unmatched turquoise flowers. It grows less than 2 feet tall and expands into a clump 18 inches wide.
Tradescantias may look delicate but, under the right conditions, are incredibly durable. The oldest closed, plugged terrarium in the world was created in 1960 by David Latimer, who lives in a village in southern England. In 1960, he planted a few spiderwort seeds in some compost in a 10-gallon bottle.
The bottle’s plug was pulled in 1972 to add a little water, but since then it has remained sealed. The plant entirely fills the bottle, with its dead leaves eventually dropping to the soil at the bottom of the bottle where they decompose into minerals that are recycled into newly expanding foliage.
We would be remiss in leaving this subject without mentioning the common spiderwort (Commelina communis), generally categorized as a weed. Although it is, at times, a bitter battle to remove it completely, I must confess to stopping and stepping back, every now and then, simply to admire the beauty of my rapacious ground cover foe.
Also known as Asiatic dayflower, since it is native to Southeast Asia and China and its blooms last but a single day, this ground cover’s floral splendor is evident from summer until fall. Unmolested by pests of any kind, its sole nemesis is freezing weather, which turns it to mush. The Asiatic dayflower is considered a weed because of its tendency to appear suddenly as an unwanted guest, unannounced and unplanted, in moist flower beds. You see a little piece of it growing and barely pay it any mind until, a few weeks later, it has smothered everything in the vicinity. It propagates itself from seeds, tubers and stem pieces, which, if scattered over the surface of a planter bed, will root wherever their nodes — where leaves meet stems — touch the earth.
Yet a recent experiment with a dayflower fungus yielded a promising result when it comes to biological control of weeds. A researcher noticed that a certain dayflower species had foliage that was blighted with a leaf spot fungus. The infested leaves were taken into the laboratory, where the fungus was extracted and cultured until a sufficient quantity was produced for spraying on the spreading dayflower. Through use of the fungal spray, significant containment of the dayflower was achieved.
Although this product is not yet available for commercial use, it is reasonable to assume that such products will be part of our future. Pathogenic bacteria, viruses and microscopic worms (known as nematodes) that feed on leaves, roots or seeds have also been introduced as biological control agents for certain weeds. Such micro-organisms have been used to control insect pests as well.
EDITOR’S NOTE >> A credit on a photo of tower of jewels (Echium wildpretii) in last week’s column should have been San Marcos Growers.