A trip to the greenhouse brings enjoyment in spades

Nothing like a winter-like week to hasten a retreat from the garden. It’s now houseplant season.

Houseplant season lasts all year round; I just don’t pay mine the attention I should when the garden is in play. And besides, I don’t have an exciting collection.

The Christmas cactus — actually Thanksgiving cactus — has reliably flowered on time; my white Phalaenopsis orchid is never without flowers and I find the Norfolk Island pine rather boring. It continues to grow slowly, big enough now to pretend it’s a Christmas tree — come December, I might toss a little tinsel on it.

I do have a new houseplant that I am thrilled with: Senecio barbertonicus, a succulent. The common names aren’t that common — and no wonder, with monikers like Succulent Bush Senecio or Barberton Groundsel. I’m happy simply to call mine Senecio. It comes from the Latin name for old man because of the whitish grey, hairlike strands that appear on the calyx when the plant is in flower.

Senecio is a large genus of more than 1,000 species dispersed around the world. If you’ve memorized all of your botanical names, you’ll remember that Dusty Miller is Senecio cineraria. Many species are garden plants, while others are noxious weeds.

Mine was given the species name Barberton, for the gold rush town by that name in South Africa. The plant, no doubt already well known by Indigenous people, was discovered near there in 1898 by Ernest Edward Galpin, a botanist and local banker. I imagine he’d tell people he was off collecting plants when he might have been out looking for a place to bury his collection of gold nuggets.

I’ve yet to see my plant in flower. I’m more impressed with its growth. Succulents are hugely popular, and yet we tend to think of them as small plants. I bought it as a tiny, cute plant last February while seeking winter relief in a garden centre greenhouse, and gave it a place beside the show-off orchid in front of a southeast window. It started to grow right away, and after repotting it a couple of times, I moved it outdoors in spring, where it continued to grow and grow.

Because it’s only hardy to -4 C, I have it back inside now, where it’s pretending to be a houseplant, except it’s more like an odd-looking tree and is putting the Norfolk to shame — it will need that tinsel.

I say it’s odd-looking because of the form. Ever green, it has a thick, fleshy trunk and skinny, finger-length leaves. They grow all along the branches and they cluster like a starburst at the ends. The plant is now table height, and it looks to me like something that would have fed the dinosaurs. In the wild, it can grow to as much as a couple of metres.

Since they grow naturally among rocky outcrops in sandy soil, these plants are extremely drought tolerant. They need water, especially outdoors in summer, but the soil shouldn’t stay wet.

Give it a little fertilizer when it’s actively growing — but not too much or too often, or it will become leggy and the branches will flop.

I read that few pests would bother Senecio and it was fine outdoors, but after a week indoors, I spotted pesky aphids. After a few rinse and repeats with insecticidal soap, I have managed to rid the plants of them.

It seems happy enough now and I’m looking forward to seeing what this novel plant will do next summer — maybe it will flower. If it does, it will have fragrant, golden-yellow flower heads that are attractive to butterflies.

Flowers, Norfolk, you hear that?

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