If you search online for information about variegated plants, you’ll find plenty of blog posts offering to explain how variegation works and describing two or three different types. I’ve read lots of those posts, both when I was first learning, and more recently when I’ve wanted to explain things to other people. But they’ve never […]
Articles
An FAQ about plant growth regulators (PGRs), covering how and why they are used, and what effects they have on plants.
Two Tradescantia zebrina naming mysteries, solved with one neat reclassification.
Plant seller Horti recently added an AI “plant doctor” to their website. Within hours of testing, it was offering potentially fatal advice.
In the world of cultivated tradescantias, there are some plants which people refer to as “wild type”. This is a pretty ambiguous term that doesn’t do much to help identify plants – the best approach in these cases is to use cultivar names instead.
You might have noticed some ‘Purple Heart’ plants look different to others. That’s because there are actually two different types!
Sometimes this plant is labelled as Tradescantia × andersoniana ‘Blushing Bride’, and sometimes it’s labelled as Tradescantia fluminensis ‘Maiden’s Blush’. But these names actually refer to two completely different cultivars!
This article is a plain english rewrite of the ninth edition of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP), which is the set of rules about how cultivated plants are named. Because it’s simplified, some information has been left out. This version is aimed at people who are naming new plants, or who […]
Some people have suggested the plant has symptoms of a viral infection. Some have even gone as far as to claim that the plant should be quarantined or banned from sale for fear that it’s contagious. Others have grown the plant for years and report no evidence of the symptoms spreading to nearby plants.
This is a topic that causes a lot of confusion, so I wrote this summary on correct and incorrect names in Commelinaceae!