Kalanchoe collection: K. marmorata flowering

 When we last saw this little fellow, Kalanchoe marmorata, back in May, he was a big, fleshy bedding plant with presence but not that Kalanchoe oomph. 

Guess what. It's flowering season, and he's showing normal Kalanchoe behavior. 

The flowers aren't open yet, but are forming. The plant has been repotted twice as it grew and eventually I had to stake them as the stems wanted to be "decumbent" as the literature has it, which is Latin for "they flop over."

The stakes show the height of it - the stakes are three feet long. The plant is just topping out at five feet (1.5 meters). 

I'm not sure what will happen next. The stems are not showing any signs of growing branches, and there are no offsets or plantlets, which is uncommon in Kalanchoe. Hopefully, there will be some way to cut it back after flowering and grow it again next year.  

Bonfire Night (short story)

 

Bonfire image created with https://creator.nightcafe.studio/ 

My writing class prompt this week was to write about Halloween. I did a Halloween story last year and I didn’t want to write about Halloween this year. We didn’t celebrate it growing up (although it’s taken off in the UK now). Our celebration was called Bonfire Night, November the 5^th.  People nowadays light bonfires in memory of Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. A human effigy, called a Guy, is placed on top of the bonfire. However, the tradition dates back to the Celtic feast of Samhain, when the veil between the spirit world and our world is thin.

Note: A Recce is a recreation area [play area for kids]. An allotment is a personal garden that is not attached to a house.

#

 

“Penny for the Guy,” Mark says hopefully.

The shopper turns and stares at the boys sitting on the flagstones in front of Woolworths. “Call that a Guy? It’s just trousers and a cardigan sewn on a pillow.”

“Ain’t got no money,” Andy explains. Andy’s body has begun the process of growing up. At eleven he’s almost a foot taller than the two ten-year-olds beside him.

“If you buy a Guy Fawkes mask for it, I’ll give you fifty pee.”

“Wor, fanks,” Andy says, catching the heavy coin.

“Bonfire night’s tonight,” she says. “Get a shift on.”

When she’s out of earshot, Andy says to Sid, “Nick a mask from Woolies. Save us a bob or two we can spend on fireworks.”

“I’m not nicking noffink,” Sid says. “Buy a mask, and me sister will sew a pillow for the head and put the mask on it and we’ll be laughin’.”

“He’ll burn good and proper,” Mark says.

“We need more wood for the bonfire,” Sid says. “I know an empty house with wooden floors.”

*

The bonfire is behind Mark’s house, in a Recce near the allotments.  There’s nothing nearby except clumps of Fireweed that sprang up after last year’s celebration. Sid’s mum has a shed in her allotment, and that’s where they keep the fireworks.

As Mark arrives with the last armful of floorboards, Sid and Andy are arguing. Sid’s refusing to put his new-found floorboards against the half-built cone.

“Me Dad said you shouldn’t actually build the bonfire until day of,” Sid was explaining. “We have to move it and pile the wood up again.”

“It’ll take too long,” Andy replies.

“Day of. Or it’s bad luck or sa’ink, I dunno. But me dad said…”

“Your dad’s dead,” Mark says.

Instantly, Sid’s eyes redden. “What’s that got to do wiv it? Being dead don’t make you wrong.”

Seeing the smaller kid about to cry, Andy switches sides. “Come on, Mark. Maybe Sid’s dad has a point.”

“Had,” Mark says, sotto voce.  Sid doesn’t notice.

“How far are we moving it?” Andy says.

“He just said ‘build it on the 5^th, not before,’” Sid says.

“Move it…what…six feet toward the house. That way we can use a pallet as the new base.”

Andy drops a wood pallet in the new spot. The kids grab the wood and start building a new cone.

“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” Sid suddenly shouts. “I caught me hand on a nail.”

“You should wear gloves,” Andy says from his lofty height.

Sid feels between the two planks. “It’s not a nail.” He reaches into the dark interior of the woodpile. Rolls something out.

“It’s a hedgehog,” Mark says.

“I can see that,” Sid says.

“It’s all in a spiked ball, like in a kid’s book.”

“I can see that,” Sid says.

“You have to take it home and feed it milk and bread,” Andy says.

“Why? I don’t think mummy and daddy hedgehog fed it milk and bread,” says Sid.

“Hedgehogs are mammals,” Mark says, knowledgeably. “They eat milk.”

“I’ll put it in a cardboard box in the shed,” Sid says. “Until the fires are all out and the smoke’s gone.”

“That’s what your dead dad meant, innit,” Mark says. “He meant don’t burn wood until you know what’s under it.”

Sid nods and resumes stacking floorboards on the new pile.

It’s getting dark. In two hours, Sid’s sister will bring out the Parkin and Bonfire Toffee. His Mum will open the box of fireworks and hand out sparklers to the little ones.

#

The House on the Hill Opposite is in Spooky Mode today

 Having given up lighting up at dawn, the house opposite was in full Halloween mode at dawn today. 

The House on the Hill Opposite

The House on the Hill Opposite That Lights Up at Dawn

 I normally feature The House on the Hill Opposite That Lights Up at Dawn during February, when it lights up at dawn to presage the coming of spring. 

Of course, it also lights up at dawn just before fall starts in earnest, in mid-October.  Many Ides of October are overcast here in So Cal and so the viewing isn't as good. It's been misty in the early morning for weeks, and just recently it rained for a solid day. (It started approximately an hour after I finished planting our mandatory drought-resistant plants, which replaced our lawn. Good luck with avoiding root rot, my little Kalanchoe friends!) 

But it cleared up on Monday, so today and yesterday were the days The House on the Hill Opposite That Lights Up at Dawn to presage the coming of Autumn. 

HOTHOTLUAD

HOTHOTLUAD

You can see from the telephoto shot that the debris around the house, the number of broken windows and the slope erosion are all getting worse. The upper floor is still poised to Light Up at Dawn, though and the last time we visited the property, it looked like the slab was in good condition.  May it continue to presage the autumn. (And spring.)

HOTHOTLUAD Today

Jimmy Page & Roy Harper - St Ives, UK 1984 (New Video)

Wonderful new video posted by Mark Zep on August 11, 2022 - in other words, on the anniversary of Led Zeppelin's appearance at Knebworth on August 11, 1979. 

Beautiful dual acoustic performance of Roy Harper's Same old Rock. Nice to see Jimmy Page playing well and looking healthier in this one. The audience must have been stoked to see the pair of them together. 

(Found via Mark Donohue's Heart of Markness podcast.)

Sir, I exist.

A Man Said to the Universe

BY STEPHEN CRANE

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

I first learned that poem under the name "sense of obligation," as that was the title of a 1961 Harry Harrison story serialized in Analog. The poem was quoted at the beginning of the text.

I was reminded of it when I saw the James Webb telescope pictures this week. Stephen Crane's universe replied to the man, albeit dismissively. The universe in these pictures does not pause to answer, not even to dismiss our concerns.

Here, the universe says to man, "I exist."

And that's all she wrote.

My story "Jump Jiving" is in Eldritch Science (short story, SF)

I'm pleased to let you know that my short story "Jump Jiving" is published in the Spring 2022 edition of Eldritch Science, the magazine of The National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F), edited by George Phillies. 

Singer Eric Barker knows Swing Revivals are inevitable, but infrequent. His Swing band skips decades at a time in Cryogenic Sleep. After an unprecedented 150 years, Eric wakes  to find there are no longer any Billboard music charts, no Variety, no streaming services, no vinyl. Who has paid for them to play in a world that doesn't buy music?

You can read a free PDF of Eldritch Science here. It's packed full of great stories - a bumper edition! "Jump Jiving" starts on page 45. 

The Guardian asks us if we need a new theory of evolution

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: If the headline poses a question, the answer is "no."

Although it's interesting, I'm not sure what this Guardian article is trying to achieve. If there's a problem with the theory of evolution known as the Modern Synthesis, it's that every time you criticize it, it adds your objection to itself as a complexity or wrinkle, so it's hard to falsify. It certainly isn't "wrong," though there are many ways you could look at it from a different angle and see a completely different emphasis, which some contemporary theorists do.

 
The article itself is harmless, waffling about some dusty corners of evolution that are fascinating, weird, and wonderful, but not in themselves threats to what most people know as "evolution."

What was really off-putting was the article starting out upfront with the Creationist's Gotcha: Where do eyes come from?

"The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection. You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls. This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers."

He goes on, "The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading. For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place."

And yes, it would be crude and misleading, but unless he went to school in 1859*, it isn't described that way. Professors do not postulate that some poor creature somewhere was born with a bad retina, poor lens, substandard optic nerves and rubbish rhodopsin, but over subsequent generations each of those things got better. What is taught, I hope, is that even very simple creatures can have light-sensitive pigments that allow them to sense whether they are in the dark or in the light, and every "innovation" thereafter exists in a living thing today or is clear in the fossil record. We can still see (sorry) single-celled animals with eye-spots, insects with compound eyes, octopuses with their right-way-up eyeballs, and vertebrates sporting the weird eye configuration humans have, with blood vessels and nerves on top of (and therefore obscuring) the retina.

Wikipedia has a discussion here. (And before anyone starts, Wikipedia's main problem these days is that it's not simple enough. It's certainly not that it's biased (at least in this case) or over-simplified.) If you want a more scholarly explanation, here's one, and here's another.

*Because that's the speculation Darwin himself engaged in back in 1859. It was rapidly improved upon.

Upside-down retina reference

Ants in my bioactive vivarium

 

Mrs. F being miserable in her temporary cage

Does anyone know any good ways to get rid of ants in a bioactive vivarium?

The vivarium is on a cart whose wheels are treated so that ants can't climb up them. There's a tablecloth velcroed around the cart to hide its utilitarian nature. A couple of nights ago, when the cart was on concrete, a blade of grass from the flower planter was long enough to touch the fabric. By morning the ants had made that tiny bridge into a thoroughfare and moved in. The ants are the ones with multiple queens that can set up a nest with just a few migrants. Obviously I've relocated the geckerino, trimmed the veg, and evicted the vast majority of ants but there are a few still in there.

Will Neem Oil work? So far it's lived up to its hype of killing every single thing I don't like while not harming a hair on the head (or leaf) of anything I actually cherish but I would not be at all surprised if that didn't hold for geckos.

My experience of ant baits and ant hotels has been that ants see them a mile off and never visit. But spray chemicals are spray chemicals. 

Mrs. F is a day gecko who eats baby foo and crested gecko food so I don't have to introduce crickets after treatment for weeks, or even months. 

But what kills ants?

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - When the Levee Breaks (Glastonbury 2022)

I don't have the main strength to go to festivals these days, but I sure appreciate the live feeds they have. 

This is the sort of performance I'd have given my eye teeth to have seen back in the day. Robert Plant doing Levee with a kind of Kashmir vibe. The audience don't seem to know what it is they have in front of them. 

Led Zeppelin - Live in Landover, MD (Feb. 10th, 1975) - 8mm film

I love the way new Led Zeppelin films and tapes continue to surface after all these years. Enjoy this slice of history. 

You all follow Heart of Markness, I hope? 

Mark Donohue's podcast plays selections from the new soundtapes as they arrive. Bookmark it!

Jackson's Chameleons hanging out

 Khachaturian (Mr K for short) is a Jackson's Chameleon. It's not his birthday. But behind him, being almost invisible, is his wife, Mrs K. She was one year old in April. It's not long since I saw her being born. (Jackson's are live-bearing; they don't lay eggs.) She's certainly grown into a big, bossy adult but it's the male of the species that has the spectacular looks. 

Mr and Mrs K here are enjoying the morning summer sunshine in So Cal. (They're not tropical lizards so they get put back into the shade before midday.)

Ms F at a few days old - well, it could be her. She was in a plastic tote with her brothers and sisters. 

Mr F the giant day gecko is 26 this month

 My Grandis Day Gecko - formerly known as a Geico Gecko - was 26 this month. At least, that's his observed birthday. His vet records show him as an adult in late 1996 and he was fully grown at least a few months before that, when I got him.  

Books generally say Phelsuma grandis lives around 13 years, but Mr F has beaten those odds. He's not exactly in prime condition, I have to admit. He's been blind for years and we hand feed him with fruit-based Crested Gecko food. (Day Geckos love fruit as well.) He seems to mostly enjoy life. His favorite things are warmth, sticking to vertical glass surfaces, hiding in bamboo tunnels and fruit-based gecko food. He had all of these things for his birthday party. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. F!

Mr F sitting on his bamboo hide-away

Hopwood Hall opening for tours

 Hopwood Hall.

According to the BBC, Hopwood Hall, built in the 1420s, is being restored by an American, Hopwood DePree.

I've forgotten what my part of the family's association is with Hopwood Hall - ISTR the name coming from service there, rather than being the owners - but I'm glad a Hopwood has come forward to restore it. It seems he thought it would be a fun thing to do, but found it intricate and tedious. Still, he's sticking with it. Part of it is opening for tours this month. Sadly, I'm where DePree is from - I'm near LA, he's back in Lancashire.

Last I heard the hall was full of monks or the RAF or something but I guess they went away and the roof started to fall in, as they do.

I might even buy his book.

Kalanchoe collection - update on K. millotii

Correspondent Kyle lets me know that the plant labeled K. millotii which I described here is most probably Kalanchoe x gildenhusii.  That's a hybrid of K. millotii and K. tomentosa, and explains why it's showing characteristics intermediate between the two. 

Here's the page on the International Crassulaceae Network with the deets. 

Mine was labeled (incorrectly) as K. millotii. Kyle says that this hybrid is often sold under the invalid name Kalanchoe 'Behartii'. 

Egrets

Egrets

I've had a few

But then again, too few to mention.

Birds on hay bales, near the Salton Sea. 

They may not be egrets. I'm no birder. 

On writing: The one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater vs aphantasia

A friend and I watched Dune recently.

“That’s not how I imagined Leto,” I said of Oscar Isaac.

“What do you mean, not how you imagined him?” he said.

“Not like the picture in my mind’s eye when I read the book,” I said.

After a few follow-up questions, I learned that he didn’t have a mind’s eye.

I assumed everyone experienced a book the same way. After a while, the words on the page disappear, and you’re watching people move around places and do things. As someone explained it online, "The words describe something, and you imagine it happening as you read. That's what reading a story is.”

But for 2% of readers, no movie plays in the mind. They have aphantasia, inability to visualize imagery. (Everyone has different levels of this ability – it’s a spectrum. Some people imagine it so perfectly, that they can even smell it. That’s hyperphantasia. I’m not going to go all Oliver Sacks on you. That’s it for the psychology.)

I thought at first they must not read enough to have learned the trick. Apparently not. In an experiment, people were fitted with goggles and presented with two images, one for each eye. The brain only sees one of them. If the person was first asked to imagine something, and then presented with one image resembling their mind’s eye picture, and in the other eye an unrelated picture, most people see the related picture. Those with aphantasia see either picture, with no correlation. There is no image “generated” by imagining something. (Dreams, which don’t involve the visual processing part of the brain, are not affected by aphantasia.)

Imagine a "a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater.”

Got it?

Some of you just saw their screen. The rest of us saw a purple monster eating people. (And a few pedants saw a monster eating purple people.)

This revelation made some difference to my writing habits. Why? Because writing involves simile and metaphor and there’s a basic assumption that readers can hold the images in their head and compare them.

(Not mine - I nicked it from Facebook.)

 
The first ever mention of the “mind’s eye” is in Cicero, where he explains what makes a good simile. An orator should not speak of “Charybdis” but of “a whirlpool,” because “the eyes of the mind are more easily directed to those objects which we have seen than to those of which we have only heard.” Good advice, I always thought – but what if a reader has no mind’s eye?

Carl Zimmer, writing in the New York Times, described it as “thinking only in radio.” In online conversations, I learned that those who saw head-movies as they read loved upfront descriptions, because they could furnish the room or plant the garden in their mind and commence watching. Those who heard only the radio quickly tired of description, which to them is a list presented for no good reason. They dropped any book that failed to focus on a character’s inner life (their relationships with people, emotions, and reactions).

As a reader and a writer, I love description. Setting the scene with a Charybdis or two, ensuring flowers are correct for the season, choice of silverware or plastic forks match the characters’ current circumstances…it all adds up. But some readers will never “see” it.

One writerly trick is to “storyboard” what you’re writing, either on paper as cartoons or in your imagination. I spend an hour working out the movements of say, a fight, because someone will certainly tell me if I’m wrong.

“If he’s standing between her and the window, against the light, how could she see the gleam of a knife in his hand?”

But I learned some readers are skipping descriptions. They just want to know WHY he has a knife. Maybe a little less choreography is warranted?

Another thing writers do is critique other writers’ stories. That means deliberately slowing down to catch typos, homonyms, and poor or confusing grammar. I’ve found that critical reading snaps the internal stream of pictures for me, and text becomes a series of ciphers to be decoded. Is that what aphantasics see?

I learned a lot from watching Dune with that friend. We don’t all have the same experience when we crack open a book. And the more I try to write a description that can have only one meaning, the more likely it is that 2% of readers will throw the book against a wall.

[Written for my writing class's end-of-term presentation]

Kalanchoe collection: new K. beharensis bush

 I said I was getting a new Kalanchoe - here it is. It's a dwarf K. beharensis. According to the label, it'll grow to about 3 feet (a meter) high and slightly less than that in spread. Mind you, according to the label, it's a "Fang". It clearly isn't a Fang - there are no under-leaf tubercles in sight. The previous owner has written 2020 on the label, and it's apparently over five years old. It's going to look a little small in a barrel close to the tree-form beharenses but its abundant curly foliage should more than make up for its size. 

Kalanchoe longiflora, Tugela Cliff Plant

 Last but not least, I have a Kalanchoe longiflora, a relatively common South African succulent that is grown for its spray of long-lasting flowers.  The one I got has not grown or divided much at all over the course of a year, nor has it flowered, but it's sitting there looking quite pretty. It's the red plant at the back, behind the K. fedtschenkoi.  (The tiny stalky ones are baby Pink Butterflies, which get everywhere.)

More information can be found here. 

(I say last but not least, but I'm getting a new plant tomorrow...possibly more to come!)

Kalanchoe marnieriana

 One unusual Kalanchoe is K. marnieriana. The leaves are rounder than usual, the stalks longer and thinner, and the plant grows roots along its length, allowing it to lie on the ground and creep across to new places to live. 

It was sold as a ground cover, in a flat. I grew it in a pot and wasn't impressed but this year it seems to have settled down and filled the pot nicely. It will get long and leggy (as Kalanchoes tend to do) but it's easy to cut it back and it starts again from the rootstock. 

One resource is Gardenia.net. 

Kalanchoe "John Bleck"

 One Kalanchoe I have looks like a K. diagremontiana but has a black border on the leaves. It was labeled "John Bleck".  I couldn't find much information on the web about it, but here is the nursery's description.  It seems John Bleck is or was a big cheese in the Santa Barbara Cactus & Succulent Society. His name is associated with several hybrids and articles on the Crassulaceae.

He made a very pretty plant. It did, however, do the Kalanchoe thing and get weedy, leggy and huge - about a meter and a half tall - flower, and then die back slowly. I cut the tops off and this nice thicket grew up within a few weeks. 

Although it doesn't grow rooted plantlets along the leaf margins while the leaves are on the plant, if the leaf falls in the soil before it dies, plantlets grown from it. Quite a few grew last year. (They're in a separate pot.) By the end of the year, I should have enough to make a beautiful display. 

Kalanchoe silhouette

 Here is a line-up of "classic" Kalanchoe shapes. 

Mother of Thousands----Mother of Millions----Pink Butterflies

All of these are young plants, less than a year old. The tiles are 25 cm in length.  See the individual posts for details. 

Kalanchoe Mother of Thousands, Mother of Millions and Pink Butterflies

I started collecting the Kalanchoes because I'd had a Mother of Thousands as a kid.  Once I started looking for them as an adult, I realized that commercial nurseries don't always know which Kalanchoe species they are selling.  There is apparently a lot of confusion over which of the stalky, leggy, classical Kalanchoes are which. 

Mother of Thousands is often said to be K. diagremontiana and you'll see it pictured as having broad, pale green leaves, for example here.  As far as I know, that appearance is more typical of K. laetivirens, which means "green all over."  Laetivirens is a hybrid of K. diagremontiana and K. laxiflora. 

I have another plant said to be K. diagremontiana which is most likely a different hybrid, Kalanchoe x houghtonii, which I wrote about earlier. 

Pictured below, my most-probably x laetivirens.

As you can see, the Mother of Thousands lives up to its name. It has literally dozens of plantlets growing along every mature leaf margin. These either fall off and root or, in my case, come off when I touch them to feel the irresistible detaching motion as they separate. (I've likened it to shelling peas in terms of tactile satisfaction.) The mother plant makes so many of these that they can become a nuisance or even invasive.  Best to keep them in pots and remove leaf debris before they root.

Mothers of Thousands look lovely at this age, but after a year or so, they become large and leggy. They don't regrow well if you cut them (at least mine didn't) but you can uproot them or cut them off at soil level, and believe me they'll have sufficient babies underneath to fill the area. It's not like you have to buy any new ones!

Mother of Millions is another species.  Mine was sold as K. tubiflora but it can also be seen on sale as K. delagoensis.  It's also often known as a Chandelier Plant. It's a classic Kalanchoe shape, a thick weedy stalk with beautiful leaves. In this case, the leaves are almost cylindrical with a furrow along the top, and a spray of plantlets at the very tip of the mature leaves. I think in a cage match between Mother of Thousands and Mother of Millions, Thousands would win in the number-of-plantlets competition. However, it's MoM that is designated as an invasive species - the plantlets escape and are hard to eradicate from your landscape. 

K. tubiflora is another one which will get tall and leggy. It's too small for six months, just right for three months and then a weed for the rest of its lifecycle. 

However, there's no doubt it's beautiful when seen from above. (Which is why it's pictured that way in for sale ads.)

One of my favorite Kalanchoes is Pink Butterflies. When I first started collecting these plants it seemed so rare and exotic. I eventually found one from a Chinese seller and weeks later obtained one through the post, thoroughly chemically treated before it had been allowed in the country. In its many days on a boat and trapped in customs, it had wilted to a sad stalk with a few collapsed leaves at the top and a dozen dried curls where the older leaves had been. 

But as I've said before, Kalanchoes are just sproinging with growth tissues. I put it in water for a few days then planted it and got a perfectly good Pink Butterflies out of it. Because it had lost lower leaves it was a bit stalky, so when I found a domestic seller, I bought three more. They rooted perfectly as well. In a few months the "Pink Butterflies" appeared - rows of pink plantlets along the margins of the leaves, lending the plant an eye-catching fringe. 

Unlike with Mother of Millions and Mother of Thousands, the plantlets don't have chlorophyll (or they'd be green). They fall off in the same quantities, but very few of them root and generate enough chlorophyll to start growing. My original four turned  into about eight or nine, all of which are slower growing than their parents. I'm fine with that. As I have said, the "classic" Kalanchoe look can turn into a tall, bolted weed surmounted with unimpressive flowers, so the little ones are fine by me. 

Pink Butterflies are also hybrids - Kalanchoe delagoensis x daigremontiana, our old friends.

Resources for growing these can be found on the web. I accessed Wikipedia (delagoensis), California Cactus Center (Pink Butterflies - this is a video), Gardening Know-How ,(delagoensis), Wikipedia (laetivirens).

Kalanchoe tomentosa "Panda Plant" and "Chocolate Soldier"

 K. tomentosa, the Panda Plant, is a pretty, furry, compact succulent that can be grown indoors or outside if you live in a warm area. (I'm in Southern California.)

The edges of the leaves have contrasting dark brown spots, making for a striking display plant. Mine have grown considerably but aren't bolting or putting down many plantlets. 

K. tomentosa also comes in a variety called "Chocolate Soldier". You can see one to the right of the Panda Plant below.  It's a bit lost in a pot outside but would make a lovely houseplant if you can get it enough light. Care for them is the same - they just have more of the dark coloring. 

You can find tips on K. tomentosa on the web. I looked at Gardening Know-How and World of Succulents.

Millot's Kalanchoe

 Kalanchoe millottii is a pale green, furry succulent that stays quite small.  It's the one nearest the camera in the photo below.  It has pleasing scalloped leaf edges and thick succulent leaves. So far it is making a good effort to form a little clump of plants. It's less than 25 cm tall. It hasn't flowered (in a year) and is showing no signs of bolting yet. 

On the other hand, the new leaves (to the upper left) are not the same shape. They resemble K. tomentosa. No idea if every specimen does this or if it's just mine. 

(Update: it's probably a hybrid between the two - see here for details. Thanks, correspondent Kyle.)

Important care tips for millotii can be found at World of Succulents. To which I'd add: don't get water on the felted leaves when it's sunny. You can see the leaf damage that results on the far leftmost leaf. 

(The other plants visible in the pot are K. beharensis Blue Slick and K. Marnieriana, about which more elsewhere.)

Kalanchoe collection: Fedtschenkoi "Lavender Scallops" and compacta

 There's a regularly-seen Kalanchoe called Lavender Scallops. Its pink-and-pale-green foliage makes for a pretty display in succulent gardens or in pots. It grows about 30 cm high and forms comely clumps. It pales (no pun intended) in comparison with its compact form. This tiny plant has the same leaves, but they remain upturned forming a scalloped cylinder. 

K. fedtschenkoi is on the left in this picture, with a rooted plantlet in the forefront center. I used to have a whole potful of them, but they grew a bit leggy over the course of a year so I started afresh. (Getting a bit leggy is a Kalanchoe trait.)

The "compacta" variety stays small. It doesn't bolt...that's what the compacta part means. This one is over a year old and is growing new stalks regularly, but remains about 10 cm high. I was startled when I got it in the mail, as it was so small. But that's how big it is. If you buy one, don't be fooled by the photos that show them as miniature towers. (If that ever happens, I'll let you know!)

(The other two plants in the top picture are K. longiflora and K. "Pink Butterflies". More on them elsewhere.)

Resources on K. fedtschenkoi can be found at Succulents and Sunshine and The Hosta Farm. 

Kalanchoe collection - the spoons. Copper, Silver and Grey Ghost.

 If you're in the right zones to grow Kalanchoes outside, a midsize beauty is Copper Spoons, Kalanchoe orgyalis. It's another furry plant, so it's sometimes known as Cinnamon Bear and rather less glamorously, the Shoe Leather Plant. 

It grows to about a meter, three feet, high and doesn't lose the lower leaves. (Well, it didn't until I let it get sunburned during a heatwave.) It's a striking plant that requires little care and unlike some Kalanchoes, doesn't go leggy and horrible at the end of the year. 

Copper Spoons

I bought a small one to fill in the gaps at the bottom of the larger Copper Spoons where I let it get burned in the hot sun. I think if you treat it well, the leaves normally last for years. 

This is such a lovely and long lasting plant that when I saw a variety of it called Grey Ghost, I immediately took it home with me. 

Grey Ghost looked ghostly and great for a few months and then turned into another Copper Spoons. I don't know if that always happens. There's no information on it I can find on the internet, but the nursery label was professionally done, not a handwritten guess. The plant is still a beauty. 

Grey Ghost

You can see that the lower leaves are still grey, but the top is distinctly cinnamon. This is a plant that has not read its own label.

Not closely related is the much more delicate Silver Spoons, Kalanchoe bracteata or Kalanchoe hildebrantii. 

Silver Spoons is the taller, more delicate plant to the right. It's a slow grower - this one is a year old. It's also the only Kalanchoe I've had that's been attacked by aphids. I have a 2" pot in the greenhouse with a young one but it's not exactly growing like Topsy.  One of its names, bracteata, either means 'bronzed' (nope) or 'bearing flowers on specialized leaves.' It's the second one - the bracts are the sites of new growth in this plant. All Kalanchoe seem to have a body part that's raring to grow new plants. 

Information on these plants can be found here:  Etsy Store, Succulents and Sunshine, 

Kalanchoe gastonis-bonnieri, "Donkey Ears"

One of the most spectacular Kalanchoes is K. gastonis-bonnieri. (Its name is as impressive as the plant.) Like a Mother of Thousands, it bears plantlets on its leaves. Not a whole row, like the mother, but one or two at the very tip. And the leaf itself is often over 25 cm long. They really do look like Donkey Ears, if donkeys had thick, green, hairless ears. 

My current ones are still babies, with small, rounded seedling leaves. Here's a picture of their mother, late last year, during flowering. 

Kalanchoe gastonis-bonnieri, Donkey Ears

Eight month old Donkey Ears

It took quite a bit of care to get the plantlets from the leaf tips to root in soil and start growing. It's worth it to have such a display plant at the end of the year. (You can buy them online but usually you'll get one of the small ones, so it will still take most of a year to get a grown specimen.)

I found further information on Donkey Ears at Plant Care Today.

Kalanchoe collection: humilis and marmorata

 I saw a Kalanchoe marmorata on sale and it sounded like a good idea at the time. It means "marbled" and the name gives the impression of a stately, expensive-looking plant. It turned out to be a bedding plant that I haven't found a way to display properly yet, so forgive the boring-looking presentation. 

Those tiles are a foot across, so you can see this a a large-leaved plant that would look good in a border. It's shown no sign of bolting or flowering yet, but Kalanchoes do tend to suddenly shoot upwards and ruin an arrangement. I'll let you know if it does. The marbling is a little dull, but again probably interesting en masse.  It's known as the Penwiper plant, or Penwipe. I have no idea why. 

Don't get water on the leaves! They're smooth but they'll still scar up if water dries on them. 

Scarred leaf of marmorata

Another plant was sold to me as a marmorata, but it never grew bigger than its 4" pot. Eventually it put out a spray of beautiful flowers that lasted for months. Of course, I didn't take a photo of the flowers and eventually I cut the plant back to bring out the plantlets. 

I'm sure it's a Kalanchoe humilis. Same marbled leaves, but about 15 cm shorter. 

I'm sorry I butchered you, little humilis. In a year or so I'll be able to separate the plantlets and hopefully get more sprays of lovely flowers. 

I got more information on humilis from Succulents and Sunshine, though they do call it a "large shrub".  I don't call a foot-tall plant a shrub, myself.  More information on marmorata can be found at World of Succulents. 

Shared the garden with insects today

 Spent the day in the yard. So did the insects. 

A Plague of Locust on the beans. These huge grasshoppers are a nuisance around here, mostly because they're too large for my Jackson's chameleons to eat. I need to get another giant Veiled male. They loved them. 

A butterfly which I am reliably told is a Black Swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes. It's on the beans too, but apparently it's after the carrots. It looked completely fresh and new, but I haven't seen any caterpillars on the carrots so far. 

More Kalanchoe beharensis - Blue Slick, Fang, Flag and Oak Leaf

 I wrote about my largest plants, K. beharensis here, the furry Felt Plant, some varieties of which grow to tree size. 

K beharensis Blue Slick rootstock regrown, with plantlets grown
from planted leaf

There are many varieties of beharensis on offer, including one which isn't furry at all, the strangely naked-mole-rat-feeling K beharensis "Blue Slick."  I think it may be K. beharensis var. subnuda. 

I bought one Blue Slick a couple of years ago, and when it lost its lower leaves I panicked. (I know now they usually lose the lower leaves.) I cut it up and planted the remaining leaves and the top separately and left the root+stalk in the pot.  Every last part of that plant regrew. It's Kalanchoe's superpower! 

The roots regenerated two good-looking branches bearing hairless leaves. Each leaf I planted grew a thicket of babies and the top rooted and grew a new plant. 

K beharensis Blue Slick plantlets - they have fur

The oddest thing is the leaves (which were, well, slick, not furry) grew furry babies. The new plants are almost a year old and have not lost their fur. It's possible that comes later but it's very odd. (Kalanchoe plants that reproduce by offshoots like this are clones. Their genetic material is identical to the parent plant. They don't just change varieties or hybridize like plants sometimes do when they produce seeds with other plants' pollen.)

Now I know that Blue Slick is going to grow huge like its cousin, I'll let it lose lower leaves and continue to grow. 

One thing to remember about the deeply-indented leaves, especially furry ones: don't leave drops of water on top of them while they're in the sun. It burns the leaves and the scar never heals over. 

I have another variety of K. beharensis called Fang. What appears to be the same thing was also sold to me under the variety name Flag. Both of these have the normal cupped, furry beharensis leaves but with canine-tooth-shaped protuberances on the underside. Since they carry their leaves tipped-up most of the time, it's possible to appreciate their striking looks even when they are quite small. 

Kalanchoe beharensis "Fang" (or "Flag"). 
The smaller plants are baby Mother of Thousands that fell off Mother.

Kalanchoe beharensis "Fang" in pot

The last variety I have of this species is one I think is marketed as "Oak Leaf". The one I bought just said it was a beharensis, but it grew into this beautiful specimen. I'm guessing that it's an Oak Leaf since the leaves look that way. It's growing quite large but I don't know if it'll reach the tree-level heights that some K beharensis varieties can. If I've identified it correctly, it's a hybrid, Kalanchoe beharensis with K. millotii. (There are similar varieties, for example those sold as "Silver Strand" (which never give information on variety or hybrid status). This certainly isn't yet "densely branched" so I may change my mind when I see what the flowers look like, if any.)

Kalanchoe beharensis "Oak Leaf " (probably). 
(K tomentosa behind and to the left, K hildebrantia behind.)

Webpages with resources for these plants include Gardenia.net, Plant Material and San Martino.