Tiny cymbidium orchids bloom well indoors: Ask OSU Extension

by Michael Loos/Ohio State University Extension
Wednesday December 24, 2008, 8:00 AM

Q: Earlier this month, I was given a cymbidium orchid. How do I take care of it?

A: Many genera of orchids make great indoor houseplants. Cymbidium orchids are among the showiest. A well-grown plant can bloom for eight to 12 weeks indoors. I had one in my college dormitory room that lasted the entire winter quarter.

It is said that many orchids are unusually beautiful in bloom and unusually modest in leaf. Cymbidium are attractive all season. The leaves are long and strap-shaped. Texturally, they are a good foil to other houseplants. In bloom, cymbidium are spectacular. Up to 50 flowers per spike grace plants during their long blooming season.


If purchasing your own plant, look for miniature and ultraminiature, or teacup, cymbidium. These smaller selections are more easily grown in the house. They are more adaptable to the indoor household environment. While their larger cousins require cool temperatures, the smaller selections grow very well in the same conditions we like.

Bright light is imperative. Without it, cymbidium will languish. Keep plants moist, but not sodden. The growing medium should be very well drained. Fir bark, coir chips, and long-fibered sphagnum will allow the plant to be moist but well aerated. Place outside in late May, keep evenly moist and fertilize heavily in summer; reduce fertilization in August to help bud set and allow the plant to remain out of doors well into October. Cool night temperatures will initiate flower production. Bring the plant back indoors, keeping it at about 60 degrees Fahrenheit and in full sun. Your cymbidium should bloom any time between November and April, depending upon its background.

Q: I always wanted to grow bonsai. Where do I start?

A: Start with a good book. There are numerous, excellent books on the subject. The Internet can be a great tool. One thing to remember. There are many rules about bonsai. Learn them well; then learn the most effective ways to break them. Use the rules as guides to the art. There are few specimen trees that precisely follow the rules. They just had good artists assist in the shaping process.

Keep in mind that there are many people who are successful in growing bonsai. They each have something unique to add. People can be great resources, but do what works for you. Don't be afraid of failure. If you meet a bonsai grower who tells you he has never killed a tree, he's not telling you the truth.

After you have done some research, start with a medium-size tree or nursery plant. Tiny trees are difficult to keep alive. Large trees can be cost prohibitive. Most importantly, like everything else, just do it. "Practice makes perfect."

Q: My cat keeps eating the tinsel in my house. Will this harm him?

A: Antique tinsel will kill a pet or human. It can be distinguished by its heavy weight. It is made from lead and will be poisonous if ingested. Modern tinsel is plastic. It will not be toxic but can lead to bowel distress if consumed in quantity.

I would recommend that you remove the tinsel from the portion of the tree the cat can reach. This may be the entire tree or just the lower portion.

Q: My Boston fern seems to have exploded. There are leaves everywhere. What can I do?

A: Quietly dispatch it to the compost pile. Boston ferns are not indoor friendly in most houses. They require a cool, bright, humid and evenly moist growing environment to succeed indoors in winter. I can't grow them indoors either.

Call a master gardener for advice from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday and Thursday at 216-429-8235 or e-mail your questions to mgdiagnostics_cuya@ag.osu.edu anytime. Gardening information is also available here and here. Loos is the horticulture educator of the Ohio State University Extension, Cuyahoga County, 9127 Miles Ave., Cleveland OH 44105.

Steppingstones on the path to plant diversity

by Dulcy Mahar, Special to The Oregonian
Friday December 12, 2008, 3:21 PM

As promised, here's an oversimplified, unscientific "Classic Comics" version of how Northwest gardening, or at least plant selection, has changed during the past three decades. It started with the amazing discovery that there are plants other than rhododendrons.


1. We become Anglophiles: The first toe tip into a diverse plant world was influenced by English gardens with their cottage plants and borders. Petunias and marigolds were out; perennials were in. The Hardy Plant Society began importing English garden aristocrats such as Rosemary Verey and Christopher Lloyd to enchant (or corrupt) us. We were goners under their spell.

Signature plants: Old roses, lilies, lavender, iris, salvia, hardy geraniums, lady's mantle (Alchemilla) and all things soft and romantic.

2. Things look up: Then we began to want something more than a mere "flower garden." Soon we were inserting shrubs and small trees in among the perennials, all the while bemoaning the fact that we hadn't done that first. Taller plants got us to look skyward, and up went trellises and arbors draped with divine vines.

Signature plants: Clematis (an unabated lust); deciduous shrubs; and small ornamental trees such as Styrax, stewartia and the wedding cake dogwood (Cornus controversa 'Variegata').

3. We fall for foliage: Suddenly we were in foliage frenzy. Green was great, but red and gold leaves were hotter. Foliage also provided the new "in" element, texture. And it didn't need deadheading.

Signature plants: Coral flower (Heuchera), smoke bush (Cotinus), gold- and nearly black-leaved elderberries (Sambucus racemosa 'Sutherland Gold' and S. nigra), ninebark (Physocarpus) and ornamental grasses.

4. We get attitude: Was there any other place to go? Oh yes, we wanted what magazines described as "plants with attitude." These plants have strong presence and structure. If English cottage flowers were like cute Yorkies, the attitude plants were more like Afghan hounds.

Signature plants: Euphorbia, New Zealand flax (Phormium), yucca (even I, a former yucca scoffer, am softening), gunnera and that ornamental rhubarb (Rheum palmatum 'Atrosanguineum') that was on the cover of Thomas Hobbs' "Shocking Beauty." Didn't everyone want that?

5. Things heat up: Everyone rushed to name the new trend: tropicalisimo, pushing the envelope, zonal denial. At some point, this morphed from true tropicals, which had to be brought inside in winter, to semi-hardy perennials that might live over without protection and might not. We were willing to take the chance. Someone even declared ours a Mediterranean climate because of mild winters and dry summers. Still, it doesn't look like Capri outside.

Signature plants: Canna, Aeonium, flowering maple (Abutilon), angel's trumpet (Brugmansia), elephant's ear (Colocasia), kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos), Echeveria and the bananas I manage to kill every year.

6. Plant lust takes hold: A byproduct of the lust for new plants was the gravitation toward collections. For example, if you loved the new red-leaved Heuchera cultivars, you had to try all the gold and peach-leaved versions. We pursued new cultivars like the Holy Grail.

Signature plants: Podophyllum, Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema), fairy bells (Disporum), Smilacina, Cardiocrinum giganteum and anything that seems to have been hunted down in exotic corners of the world by our intrepid plant explorer Dan Hinkley.

7. Some go au naturel: Northwest gardeners with shady plots had always noticed our climate and surrounding greenery were hospitable to an Asian garden, but most didn't want to follow the rigid rules applied in true Japanese and Chinese gardens. Instead, they developed gardens that suggested Asian elements but also were comfortably Northwesty, elegant and easy to maintain. We called the look fusion.

Signature plants: Hydrangea, hosta, hardy fuchsia, hellebore, heavenly bamboo (Nandina), conifers, ferns and native ground covers.

Scientists explore nature’s designs: Physical chemist Joanna Aizenberg imitates structures found in nature

Abstract:
As a graduate student, Harvard physical chemist Joanna Aizenberg acquired a passionate curiosity about — of all things — sponges. She particularly liked the ones made of glass, whose apparent fragility belied the fact that they could withstand terrific pressure in the deep sea.

Sponges are now among the central artifacts in an emerging branch of science Aizenberg is helping to pioneer: biomimetics. That's the study of whatever nature does well — and how that may inspire better tools, materials, and processes.

Scientists explore nature’s designs: Physical chemist Joanna Aizenberg imitates structures found in nature
Cambridge, MA | Posted on December 7th, 2008
Aizenberg is particularly interested in how living organisms form robust and elegant inorganic structures. The glass fibers framing those deep-sea sponges, for instance, are stronger and more optically efficient than anything humankind can yet make.

She outlined the nature of her work in an abundantly illustrated lecture Nov. 19 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, "Connecting Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Architecture Through Biomimetics."

Aizenberg — a trained mathematician and chemist who earned a doctorate in the biology of materials — has the chops to connect all those disciplines. She is the Gordon McKay Professor of Materials Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she is a fellow this year.

To illustrate the kind of work done at her SEAS laboratory, Aizenberg focused on Venus' Flower Basket, a milky-looking undulant sponge shaped like a tapering tube. Though common in hobbyist's aquariums, it is native to the deep ocean, thriving in cold, crushing pressures a thousand feet below the surface.

For materials scientists like Aizenberg, Venus' Flower Basket is an intriguing package. At 500 million years old, it's very low on the evolutionary tree. But its layered superstructure of glass illustrates how strong nature makes things, and with what apparent ease.

The first commercially practical glass fibers were not invented until the 1930s, said Aizenberg, yet "sponges knew how to do it a half-billion years ago."

And they knew how to do it better, she pointed out. The glass fibers of Venus' Flower Basket are a hundred times stronger than the man-made version. Intricately layered, and reinforced with a still-mysterious glue, these glass fibers stop cracks fast.

The sponge also forms glass fibers at ambient temperatures and without any special steps. Man-made glass fibers require high temperatures — 2,000 degrees F — as well as chemical treatments in an expensive and energy-intensive "clean" lab.

Low temperatures also assure that the hollow centers of the sponge's glass fibers, though only 200 nanometers wide, are not deformed by intense heat.

Both man-made and sponge glass fibers "guide light," said Aizenberg, but nature does it better. Along the length of a sponge's glass fiber, spines multiply the efficiency of collecting light from nearby biophosphorescent organisms. "You can think of it as a Christmas tree," she said. "Not just the tip collects light."

Venus' Flower Basket illustrates nature's grasp of optics, said Aizenberg, but it also offers insight into architecture.

The resilient sponge is made of square cells reinforced by strutlike diagonal buttresses. In fact, a very modern principle of design and civil engineering, she said, "is present in this [cellular] structure."

But these robust structures are present on a nanoscale, mechanically stable because of layered hollow glass fibers a hundredth as wide as a human hair. If they could be replicated at that scale, the resulting man made materials would be all the stronger. This is a "rich system," said Aizenberg, and studying it may prompt the design of new materials.

The Venus' Flower Basket may even offer new ways of looking at human-scale architecture — lessons in how structures best respond to force, for instance. The sponge is attached to the ocean floor, an anchoring point where shifting currents exert the highest stresses. But the sponge has evolved a clever strategy, connecting itself to the seabed by a system of flexible fibers. This swaying glass structure, said an admiring Aizenberg, "can survive any pressure that you can imagine."

She has already used models from the sea to inspire invention. A few years ago, while with Bell Laboratories at Lucent Technologies, she helped prove that crystalline optical arrays on the arms of the brittle star, a relative of the starfish, focus light better than any man-made device.

Mimicking nature's strategy — in this case, fluid pigment transfer — led to patents and patent applications for a new generation of "tunable" lenses.

But Aizenberg wants to go beyond the lessons nature offers in efficient optics, robust construction, and resilient materials. She is exploring "biomineralization." That's the way nature uses organic catalysts to prompt inorganic materials to "grow" into lenses, glass fibers, and other useful structures.

In the aptly named Aizenberg Biomineralization and Biomimetics Lab at SEAS, researchers are looking into the "self-assembly" of inorganic materials the way nature might do it: efficiently and in ambient temperatures.

Vibrant witch hazel is a pretty cure-all for a winter woodland fairytale

By Chris Beardshaw
Last updated at 3:58 PM on 01st December 2008

As aftershave or cures for bites and bruises, potent witch hazel has a punchy zing. But the hamamelis plant is far from overpowering and it comes into its own at this time of year.
It belongs to the hamamelidaceae group, a broad range of shrubs and trees that include the autumn colouring parrotia, spring-flowering fothergilla and glowing autumn tints of liquidambar.
Closely related to hazel and rose, in early winter the hamamelis appears as a collection of stiff, broadly upright stems emerging from a single trunk.

In the wild, it can be found in sparse woodlands, scrub and clearings in the mountains of North America and Eastern Asia. This makes it ideal for garden borders, so long as it is sheltered by walls and hedges.
It needs lots of organic matter. Indeed, you can't apply too much well-rotted compost or leaf mould as this fibrous material mimics the dense soils of the wild, ensuring the fine and shallow roots of the plants have plenty of nutrients.
There are a glut of hamamelis plants for sale, but they are bred from only a handful of species.

Hamamelis mollis, the Chinese witch hazel, is widely available. It is a well-behaved, well-proportioned plant, which produces golden yellow blooms on bare branches from December until spring.
These flowers are a curious collection of thin petals bundled together along smooth stems. Each flower has four petals that are fancifully curled in bud, golden on the tip and dark maroon or russet in the heart.
Hamamelis mollis and its many cultivars are known for their sweet fragrance, which is triggered by sunshine. Best-known is goldcrest, a compact plant with scarlet-centred blooms. It is ideal in gardens where the vibrant floral displays are contrasted with a ground cover of lush evergreen ferns, snow-white cyclamen or smoky tinted helleborus orientalis hybrids.
The Japanese witch hazel, hamamelis japonica, is a more open shrub. It appears unkempt and is more suited to wild gardens and woodlands.
It, too, carries yellow blooms, but they are paler, with ruffled edges. The form sulphurea is sought after due to its zesty tones and long flowering period. The finest and most potent fragrance is from the H. mollis, and the hairy foliage of this plant helps distinguish it from the smooth surface of the Chinese forms.
These Eastern plants have been subject to many breeding programmes and one result is hamamelis x intermedia.
The form of this hybrid is more like the hamamelis mollis, as are the large, rounded leaves. Yet it is earlier flowering, flushing with blooms that have retained the much-loved scent, from early winter. Strangely, although neither parent displays petals in orange or red, the hybrid forms of H. X intermedia are particularly showy. If an opulent and rich shade is required, then all-gold is a favourite, but for rusty and copper tints try the tantalising H. Jalena. These combine nicely with drifts of snow-white galanthus.
Due to their smaller and more temperamental flowers, few of the American forms are available in nurseries. But, look out for Sandra, a cultivar which produces intense purple leaves in spring.
Also look out for hamamelis virginiana, which is found in the wild from Ontario to Florida. While it lacks the floral beauty of the Asian species, it is prized for its robust rootstocks and for providing witch hazel medicine, used to reduce swelling and bruising of the skin.
Considered to be some of the finest winter-flowering shrubs, the hamamelis are often over-looked when it comes to foliage displays, but in autumn they are resplendent in deep shades of yellow, orange and red — and often all three.
They are robust plants that rarely suffer from ailments. The most common is foliage bleeding, from lush green to chlorotic yellow. This is generally caused by excess lime in the soil — plants grow in acidic conditions in the wild.
In garden soils where lime is present, opt for the H. Intermedia cultivars, which perform even on a clay soil over lime.
These plants need minimal pruning — just the odd trimming out of dead wood or removal of crossing stems — to develop a handsome structure.
With their warming display and enticing scent, the hamamelis can transform the winter garden.
Enjoy Hamamelis jelena (witch hazel) — winner of the prestigious RHS Award of Garden Merit — bursting with red autumn foliage and elegant coppery orange flowers in early to mid-winter.
Perfect as part of an ever-changing shrub border. Grows to height of 4m (13ft). Buy one root-balled plant for £20.99. Free P& P on all orders.
Please send orders to: Daily Mail Offers, Dept MC163, PO Box 99, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 2SN.
Cheques should be made out to Daily Mail offers. Order online at plantoffers.com/MC163 or call 0845 155 8725 (quote MC163) for credit/debit card orders. Delivery to UK addresses only. Plants supplied as a root ball, dispatched from February 2009.
Please refer to classified section for full terms & conditions. Your contract for supply of goods is with Thompson & Morgan (YP) Ltd.