Meditative Botanical Tour at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden — Ep 182

[Music] I'm Chad Husby I'm chief explorer at Fairchild tropical Botanic Garden and I'm gonna take you on a tour of the tropical plant conservatory in our garden where we have some extremely rare tropical plants and delicate plants that need some protection from cold and needs good butter we water them with reverse osmosis a very pure water like rain water and this is a very rare arid from Southeast Asia probably Borneo we aren't really sure exactly where it came from but it's we found it in the nursery in Thailand it's a home elemina that has this amazing variegation natural variegation pattern where they has dark green parts very light green and intermediates and gives it a great camouflage effect on the rainforest floor and even is flowering right now and it's an arid so it has flowers that have a spade this modified leaf that goes around the outside and the central part of the spadix which has a bunch of little tiny flowers on that column and all the air rides do something like that no matter how different their leaves may look all right and we have a whole bunch of other interesting diversity of plants here and another thing you see in addition to camouflage patterns on the rain forest floor or iridescent patterns this is a plant called map a neo which is a sedge from also from areas around Malaysia and Borneo that has this amazing blue color it's actually do two layers of silica on its leaves that reflect the light the way that it looks blue but if you were to grind up the leaves there would be no blue that would come out because it's not a pigments it's just the way the leaves reflect the light you have some other very beautiful plants from Southeast Asia here including this are dizzy ax which has makes a whole these wonderful clusters of tiny flowers that are just about to open up and many of them have very dark leaves and different leaf patterns and we have this as one species and we have two others here and this one has a few flowers that are coming out and these were all grown from individual leaves some plants you can take just a leaf and plant it and wait a few months and baby plants will grow up and this is one of those types of plants that you can do that so each one of these you could make a whole colony of new plants and this conservatory we're in was actually it's been here since 1968 and we have some interesting historic plants this is a very one that was collected by David Fairchild himself who the garden is named after he was a great plant explorer in the early part of the 20th century and this he collected on his expedition to the Southeast Asia the Philippines and the Spice Islands in Indonesia in 1939 in 1940 just before the beginning of World War two and this plants was from the Philippines and when its flowering it has these beautiful salmon colored bracts and that surround these little columns of flowers in the middle and so it's a puts on quite a spectacular show and and this has been growing here since you know the early forties it's pretty amazing you know so you collected in 1939 sent it over and then planted in the garden a few years later and it kind of illustrates a fascinating aspect of plants is that they don't really age like animals and like humans do so this plant has been we've just taken cuttings from it and been propagating it and they stood still grows like it was just collected yesterday and but it's but it was collected you know over 80 years ago so it's pretty amazing characteristic of plants that they if you take care of them they can live as long as you like they could potentially live forever and so most of the plants in here are flowering plants but we have some really ancient types of plants this is so legend L imagine if Iike from the Philippines that's actually grows by spores like ferns but it's even more ancient than a fern and these little structures on the end are cones that produce the spores and then it's a survival from really ancient times in the plant world and so has this beautiful branching pattern that's very unlike most other kinds of plants but it's very endangered in the wild but due to people who were propagating it it's now something that's being grown in various collections all over the world so it's so it's safe in horticulture and shows where the difference in individual gardener can make you can grow really rare plants and ensure its survival into the future we have some other really unusual plants growing hanging here this is a very strange cactus from the Brazilian Amazon and it's it's flats it actually looks like a tongue and it's growing up this board made of tree fur and fiber and it's strophe Oh cactus with the eye and they call it the moon flower because it only flowers one night a year and Margaret me who was a botanical illustrator at Q Botanic Gardens back in the 80s spent in 70s she spent it's about 20-some years trying to catch this in flower in in the Amazon so she would go back every year around the time when they flower and so after 20 years she still hadn't done it but then just a few years before she died she was successful and was able to catch it in flower and spend all my illustration the different stages of its flowering and so it's pretty amazing plants and amazing and she made some incredible beautiful illustration of this plant but fortunately because our colleagues at the Meurice lb botanic garden collected this in the 1970s and shared cuttings we all are able to grow and enjoy it now another very ancient plants in the conservatory here is this very very long one it's over six feet long like Marius Dalhousie honest it's a like a fight to like a pod like the Silesian Ella that looks quite different and it's the longest one of all the Lika pods that grow in the tropics and they're epiphytes rowing trees this is by far the longest and it's one of the hardest to grow and we're really pleased to have this a really great fern grower named Charles Alford was able to grow this successfully and propagate it and share it with us but one of the things it does as an ancient plant is it only branches from the tips it's called dichotomous branching so you get this very symmetrical pattern where there's a branch a split there and then another splits and then another split so it gets creates a very symmetrical even look to the plant and we have many other representatives of that group call it the like a fight line up along here these are very ancient plants they go back to the earliest days of vascular plants plants that are yet bigger than mosses in the in the world [Music] and another one of those very ancient plants that's is quite interesting is this Salah janella here that's got a color like chocolate it's from Ecuador and it's alleged Noah articulator and it comes in different color forms this is one of the darker forms it also comes in green and various in-between colors but once again that's showing this fan shape where the branches split by dividing at the end whereas the more modern plants the more recent flowering plants they will make branches everywhere a leaf joins the stem that can make another branch so you can get a much more complicated branching pattern whereas these make a very even fan shape now we're [Music] moving into another part of the conservatory that's a little cooler and it's actually only covered by a screen so it gives a little more air circulation so we things in here are things that don't need quite as much protection this is a really neat ginger it's a el pena Ragusa and it's from the island of Hainan in China and it naturally has these very wrinkled leaves and they're very velvety underneath it feels just like a velvet very pleasant and it has really spectacular flowers though it's not flowering at the moment but this was being grown by horticulturist for a long time before it was described by botanists so it was sometimes people gardeners bring interesting plants to the attention of those who then go on to give them a name and describe them and enter them officially into the list of all the world's plants [Music] and this fern that's growing in among it is from Taiwan and it's very unusual in that most ferns and most plants have leaves that just grow to a certain points and then they stop this fern done study of scandens which I grew from spore from Taiwan many years ago it has its individual leaves will can grow indefinitely and they behave more like a stem as you can see here they keep growing they expand their normal side parts and then they have are continuing and unfurl indefinitely in these a single leaf can get thirty feet long so we'll see how long they get in our conservatory eventually and we have this plant is called the Blue Ginger even though it isn't it isn't a ginger it's in a different family and it isn't quite blue it's more purple but interestingly enough in the plant kingdom true blue color is very rare and if any blue pigment so most pigments are purple or sometimes plants are blue like the one we saw the my opinion of it has a certain structure that causes the light to be reflected blue and we have another selection Ella that does that here this is an the peacock Moss they call its allege no ensenada which also is it actually doesn't have a blue pigment but it has these layers of wax that reflect light in certain ways and bend the light so it comes back and looks blue [Music] in this area is where we grow a lot of rare gingers and ginger relatives and many of them have wonderful patterns on their leaves and some of them have wonderful scents this ginger Zinjibar AI from Southeast Asia when you cut the leaves or the stems it smells just like licorice like anise and and then it's used in cooking in Southeast Asia a bit and it makes these very interesting flowering structures at the base they look like little honey combs and we also have some this is another ginger Burbage eeeh from Borneo that actually has leaves that have a certain year deaths of their own they kind of have a shiny reflecting character based on the layers of structures on the surface and the way the cells are configured and this amazing poem we have here is the double coconut it's actually produces the largest seed in the world it's from the Seychelles Islands and it makes these enormous fan leaves and this poem even though it's been growing here for about 20 years it still hasn't produced a trunk and we're eventually going to have to open the top of the conservatory to let it grow but the seed that produces in the seeded was grown from it's called the double coconut and it's it takes from 4 to 6 years to develop after it's been fertilized so everything about this palm is slow and magnificent and we're so happy to have one growing here it's a little sensitive for South Florida conditions but in this conservatory it's really been able to thrive and show how wonderfully large it can be but they only come in male and female so separate so we won't know for many years whether this is a male or a female we hope it's a female so we can then get pollen from another garden that will allow us to produce our own double coconuts here one day which would be the great dream it's the only place that's been done in the United States is in Hawaii and they got their pollen from Singapore so it's often botany and horticulture often an international collaborative and that endeavor so we you can do much more together than we can individually and we have yet another sewage Anila from Southeast Asia here this is that is iridescent blue that's the legend Ella will VIN Oei and it even has little bits of purple at the ends of the growing tips but once again it's the doodle the way the light is reflected there's no blue pigment in it [Music] and we have some interesting aquatic plants from the tropics here in these ponds and putting these little conifers from New Caledonia that they're doing two of them in this back ponds little they look a little bit like pine trees and they're but they're related to the Podocarpus which is fairly well known it's relatives but these are some of the only aquatic conifers evergreens that trees that produce cones most of them don't like to be anywhere near water these grow in rivers and on the island of New Caledonia and the South Pacific and and make have this remarkable natural bonsai pattern if they go into a really nice small trees and New Caledonia is this Island that's full of very strange plants it has all these very wonderful tropical conifers and it's kind of almost like a land that time forgot in the South Pacific so we're glad to have some of these really rare plants from there and we also have some wonderful air rides here this one with wonderful depressions in its leaves the corrugated leaves this is anthurium vgi which is from south america and is one of the most famous air rides and has been for a long time because it's got such wonderful texture to it please and we also have another kind of contrasting air ride right next to it with big arrow shaped leaves that's cerdos firma Johnstone II I and that one will actually grow right in the water so that and 30 and VG is groves and trees naturally high in the air with a lot of air circulation and their rides can also grow with their feet sitting with their roots sitting right and water so they're an extremely diverse group of plants we also have a very unusual representative of another really ancient group of plants the cycads which are plants that produce seeds not spores but they don't produce flowers this is Bo ne a-- and it's um it has leaves that are a lot like aford they don't look like what normal cycads look like because they're several earth they're three times Penates so they're divided each of these is divided three times so it's divided once and then twice and then three times and they only grow in Australia and they're only two species in this whole genus so we're really happy to have one of them represented here and we also have really spectacular another Sailaja nellis allege Anila picta is from vietnam and has these amazing contrasting weaves between the whites and the green gives to the striped appearance [Music] it's the only Solano there's such a dramatic contrast in its leaves and behind we have another really spectacular leaf pattern that's growing up the wall here two of them actually the really lacquered leaves are piper or not I'm from from in dunya with the region around Indonesia and as it's kind of pinking whitish pink veins likes to climb trees it's in the same genus as the plant that produces edible pepper but this one does not produce pepper and then growing next to it is a about wynia which is in the bean family this is a vining one which has a wonderful white lighter colored and underneath the leaves are beautiful purple some plants have leaves that move and this is it's often called Nick dinasty like night movements and this plant is getting pretty much getting ready to go to sleep because in a couple hours those leaves will fold and it will look like a quite a different plant so you won't be able to see the they'll actually go like this and you won't be able to see the purple underneath anymore [Music] I do that every night [Music] [Music] and another plant with some amazing leaf texture is this plant that's in the tomato and potato genus the solanum and we're not sure what the species is yet this is from Ecuador and the leaves have these purple hairs that are extremely velvety as you turn it you can really see the purple is the light that shot reflex from those hairs whereas the leaf underneath is a dark dark green [Music] then the plant we brought in from Southeast Asia from some of the nurseries there is this Dracena Stardust which has this amazing pattern of lighter colored spots among the green was made by a legendary horticulturist in Indonesia Gregory humbly who hybridized a couple of wild Recinos one of which had really good spotting on its leaves and one of which had really big leaves and this hybrid has the best of both parents and it's produced a spectacular plant with great coloration [Music] [Music] and we're very excited about this plant is a schefflera which the same genus is the some of the most popular houseplants Scheffel that are very easy to grow the chef's leras but this is this one from southern Thailand is actually very hard to grow and very very rare in cultivation but we're excited to be actually producing some fruits for the first time after growing it for about four years so we're harvesting those and trying to make more because this is a very very slow and difficult plant to grow so we're gonna try to have more so we can share with other gardens and other people who enjoy plants but the leaves are very have a very corrugated texture and they're very thick and a lot of hairs on them it's a really dramatic leaves on this schefflera fairly new addition to the conservatory here is this beautiful little plant this is a sim aruba glauca it's only found on Puerto Rico and it's a beautiful small tree that grows around long rivers there and it produces these wonderful flowers very early in its life and these really shiny leaves and this one may someday have potential as a new house plant because it seems to have just the right proportions and it can do well in shade and has nice waxy leaves which probably means it can take some lower humidity it was introduced by dr. Allen Mero who used to work at the US Department of Agriculture plant introduction station down the road where David Fairchild used to work so they've done a lot of work bringing in these wonderful new plants to cultivation and just above it is this plant this is a gym verse DGI which is a tree with enormous ly long leaves that grows in New Guinea and they grow a few of them in Hawaii and they shared fruits with us at Waimea Arboretum and we're hoping to have quite a spectacular specimen in a few years it's already pretty spectacular and the new leaves come out and they droop down almost vertically from the end of that to show you an interesting fern here this is a dye plays ium species from southern Thailand and that it's quite lovely and a big fern but one of the neat things it does is it makes baby ferns on its leaves and each of these little tiny ferns is a clone it's an exact copy of the parents and has roots and can fall off or be removed and make a bunch of new new ferns so this whole leaf is producing a little colony of the ferns now that it's touch the ground so this can produce and this can reproduce by spores it has very nice spore patterns under the leaves which would create variation genetic variation through sexual reproduction and then it can reproduce asexually by cloning itself with these baby fern what's that grow directly from its leaves it's very flexible plants and this is a interesting begonia from leave this is from South America and it's begonia solely mutata and its name has to do with the fact that the leaves will change their color under different lighting conditions so apparently that if you if you weigh something something on top of half of the leaf for for a half hour an hour that part of the leaf will get lighter colored because a little chloroplasts that do the photosynthesis will move to the sides of the cell and change the color of the leaf another very strange plant phenomenon we have on exhibit here are these ant ferns from Southeast Asia like an op Duras they're a fern that has a symbiotic relationship with ants and they have these stems these rhizomes that look something like coral and they have hollow areas and the ants are able to live in them we don't have the ants that are associated with them moving here so they don't have the ants and then they can live without them but in the wild the ants protect the ferns and they also help fertilize them by bringing various things that they feed on that decompose around the fern and give it some extra food so it's a very interesting way for a fern to live in association with insects this is another ant friend here with a different kind of rhizome a flatter one two different species and we not only have plants that are that have vascular tissue the ones that will grow big like we're all used to the trees and the plants like this the much softer ones but we also have some bryophytes which are like the mosses and liverworts and this is a very special one from South Asia it's a mark anteus trim on the eye and it's what makes it really look neat is the fact that it has this dark line in the center of of its little foul eye here which are the stem like structures aren't really stems but because bryophytes don't have the the tissue that will conduct water higher like ferns have that kind of tissue that will make that allows them to grow taller they tend to only grow very low and unless they're an incredibly human humid environments and but also they only branch by dichotomizing like the ancient vascular plants so they make these beautiful patterns and have some interesting representatives of a group of plants from Southeast Asia the Med Noah's that have really beautiful and just known for their really beautiful clusters of flowers that hang down they tend to grow grow up in trees or on rocks in nature and we've tried to simulate that here and and actually they've been a kind of plant that's really been discovered for horticulture and and as houseplants recently and in fact in Europe and especially in the Netherlands they're actually doing a lot of hybridizing of them and a lot of developing of new forms this is one of the species but there are all kinds of new exciting hybrids with different flower colors and different leaf forms and different habits coming out of different sound nurseries so we're really excited about having more of those on display and a very unusual plants one of many they have a lot of kind of specialize in unusual plants here this is stego Lepus which grows just like a fan it grows it's extremely flat so you extremely wide and the leaves are pressed together very tightly but when it flowers it produces these little structures that are kind of that are very spiky and way and you know very three-dimensional and when these first come out they're actually covered with a clear mucus that lubricates them for pushing their way through the these really tightly pressed leaf bases so it's a very interesting adaptation growing folded so tightly but then having these very different kinds of flowers this is from Ecuador there's a relative of this that grows the tapu ease of Venezuela these rock islands in Venezuela that actually is iridescent blue also has the layers on the leaves that bend and reflect the light so it comes back blue so we're hoping one day to be able to grow that one a few of the plants we grow are mainly grown for conservation and this one is an example of that this is a plant that very recently went extinct in its home of Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria and 2017 there were only a few trees left it's called solanum and so folium it's a relative of potatoes and tomatoes and it has flowers that are very similar to potato and tomato flowers but it's a small tree or shrub and this was actually growing here at Fairchild until 2005 when it was destroyed by the two hurricanes that hit us that year but fortunately a horticulturist graduate student from the University of Connecticut had taken cuttings before that for his research and brought them up to the University and they have had this growing in their collection for teaching ever since and when it was discovered that these were all destroyed in hurricane maria people in Puerto Rico were very excited the botanist there to know that it was still alive in the collection up in Connecticut of all places and they since sent us back some plants that were rooted from cuttings so we can also keep it here and we're going to share with many other gardens so that hopefully this species will not go extinct and it shows what you know just a couple of people caring about the plant can do they can actually save it from extinction because for this plant to survive one person had to care enough to propagate it from the wild plants in Puerto Rico to take a few cuttings and then somebody else had to be interested in it and propagated take some cuttings up to another place in this case Connecticut because it was just it was killed both in Puerto Rico and in Florida and survived thinking now can be returned to Florida and Puerto Rico and many other places and hopefully will never be lost to the world so shows what work we can do by growing plants and doing something as simple as taking or cutting it's very you don't always have to be doing things on a large scale sometimes very modest efforts can produce very very big results and this as I mentioned this area has a very pure water because of the water and South Florida has a lot of dissolved limestone calcium carbonate in it and that makes it hard for us to grow certain plants like carnivorous plants and plants that require a lot of acidity but in here we use very pure filtered water reverse osmosis water that has a lower pH more acidic and doesn't have any of the calcium in it so we can grow some of the plants that need those conditions like these are tropical rhododendrons from the mountains there and they are supporting some of the most spectacular carnivorous plants than the pen fees and the pitcher plants the tropical pitcher plants and which have leaves that do three things these are the leaves that are just the new leaves they have and a tendril on the end that will wrap around some sort of support structure that the winged part in the back does photosynthesis so it does photosynthesis it wraps around and then when it's got support and is wrapped around it will make a picture so the pictures here are a bit old they have made new pictures this year but those are what they use to trap insects because they grow in habitats with very few nutrients so what they do is they lure insects into those structures that hold fluid that hold water and enzymes and when the insects drown and decompose and they absorb the nitrogen phosphorus potassium and other nutrients that were held in insects tissues and we have some other dramatic examples like these much larger ones down here that are better better condition and they come in all shapes and sizes throughout Southeast Asia and they're very characteristic of habitats that have not a lot of not a lot of natural fertilizer in the soil so they're busy capturing the fertilizer from other areas because often the insects move from other areas that are more fertile so they're taking advantage of the fact that these animals insects in this case can move and actually bring more nutrients to them when they can't one of the things plants do is move so plants take advantage of the partnership with animals in this case for fertilizer in other cases for pollination is the most common and they even partner with other creatures like fungi for their roots to help them absorb other nutrients from the soil so plants rely on lots of different partnerships and they even animals of course will eat plant fruits and disperse their seeds so plants have all these different partnerships for overcoming their being immobile so we can take advantage of all these creatures that are mobile and we also are growing number of orchids here which are one of the biggest groups in the plant kingdom at the moment they aren't in flower but they do flower periodically and all different shapes and sizes and one of the most interesting orchids just for the way it grows I'll bring you some the ghost orchid so it's growing in this on this plaque here and and almost it has just a little bit of stem and but it's mostly roots you really don't see the stem and it wraps around trees and there very few species in the South Florida there's one species in South Florida and a few in the Caribbean islands that all do this and so all that you see are these roots you don't see any leaves and there's a hidden stem and then periodically this amazing flower just comes looks like it comes out of nowhere like a ghost a beautiful white flower and that's where it gets its name from so most orchids have leaves that you can see but this one is probably one of the most cryptic of all it's just you have to really work T's and see it there so there are many many ways to be a plan good lesson from all this and speaking of many ways we're all familiar with a rose what a rose looks like this is a plant that's called a Siam rose it's a ginger at lindara corner eye but actually the structure that looks like a rose in this case is actually are actually not flowers they're actually modified leaves that's are colored and arranged a lot like a flower but actually flowers emerge the flowers are gone right now but the flowers emerge from between those red structures and they're very short lives but the modified leaves last for weeks and often months and so you've got this is much longer lasting than an actual rose but it's another way that they advertise they're much more diminutive flowers whereas an actual rose is actually a flower so this is many times appearances can be deceiving in the plant world most of the poems were familiar with we think of big tree like plants or sometimes the medium-sized plants we grow indoors but palms come in all sorts of sizes and this is a little a koala try a fella from Southeast Asia and this is its mature size so this would make a really good little plants in the pots though they're fairly sensitive to dry air and whatnots but and it's actually flowered this is the old flower stock and has made seeds but so it's naturally miniature palm and it's growing right next to a plant with fantastic leaves this is actually another kind of ginger in the genus CAFO clemmy's and many gingers just have fairly green leaves but this one has these really dark leaves on the surface with glossy red underneath and then eventually this one isn't flowering right now but it will make little flowers from from the base this isn't the ginger you can you can eat but it's um it's a huge group of plants in both the Americas and Southeast Asia and many of which are really ornamental many of which are good for for eating which are good for food [Music] [Music] very interesting plants here that's actually a begonia hybrid that actually has some really needs unusual asymmetrical leaf patterns here so begonias come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors can provide good contrast with other plants show you this interesting palm over here you know most of the poems we're familiar with have leaves that are divided that look like kind of feathery they have divided into sections this is a Johanna's Tasmania from also from Southeast Asia as famous for having weaves that are one-piece and the leaves can get much bigger than this and hopefully they will but they never split they're just this one big beautiful fan and interestingly enough though that all palm leaves begin as one piece and when they're when they're folded in the bud but then those that are that leaves like this palm above me that actually are divided into segments they actually rip apart and they actually tear apart and they unfold whereas this Johanna's Tasmania does not do that so it stays in just like it was in the bud there's one piece it just unfolds and then there's a very fairly similar looking plant beside it what looks like a palm and is also pleaded along its length but it's actually a whole different family the cyclin they see the cycle ants they call them the Panama hat palm sometimes because one of the members is used for making the famous panama hats but these are very important group and the American tropics they're not they're only found in the Americas and they look just like palms to those who aren't familiar with this unusual group but then when they flower they make flowers that look like white spaghetti coming out of them the flowers can often have quite remarkable fragrances too whereas palm flowers and are all very small and fairly inconspicuous so they can be many many of them it just goes to show you many times you can walk in the forest and just look at the leaves and it may be a little misleading so it's good to know some bought me to figure out whether the plants appearance is actually a good indication of whether it actually is actual identity gives there are many plants that like to grow in really wet places and so we have a little waterfall here that's how we grow some of those sorts of plants on this is little a melamine a little steroid that grows on the edges of streams and in southern Thailand they're gonna Garrett seems to be adapting pretty well to these conditions we have an interesting fern that we're doing up here that actually has its ass plenty and prolong gait and the interesting thing it does is it makes little baby ferns from the ends of its leaves so this leaf has already made another fern here and then that fern has made another friend and they can form a chain all over the rock here so it's a very interesting once again these are all clones so many plants can clone themselves make identity make identical copies and cover fairly large surfaces that way because plants are all about growth they basically they can't move with muscles and whatnot like like animals can but they can move by growing so this is a plant that's actually in some sense mobile growing up the wall here is a very pretty spectacular plants from the Asian tropics also its phrasing Edea which is a fairly little-known group of plants that are related to the pan dads and these phrasing ideas may have potential as house plants many of them seem to be fairly easy to grow they grow in low-light conditions in the forest and that waxy leaves so they may actually be something we could grow some sort of support structure in their houses they're pretty they give a whole different different look than most other plants it's good for those of us who like to be adventurous and what we go another of these cycads that we talked about earlier the bow enniaa on the other side this is another one it actually looks a lot like a firm but it's a plant that produces seeds and it's very ancient it's two rather zania URI phylidia from Mexico that has some of the largest leaflets of any cycad and arch over here and kind of blend with the other tropical foliage but they're really survivors of the more ancient time aving reach back before the dinosaurs like some of the other plants in here as well and as with the face and Edea back there it's there are a lot of tropical plants that make good use of vertical space so this is a sin DAP suspect us here that it's an Arab that is a great climber and has amazing patterns on its leaves most most of the leaves are silvery and then with little green patches and can climb very tall in the trees and so it takes advantage of trees in the forest as a support structure so it doesn't have to make its own supports to climb up and reach the light higher in the canopy and we have a similar synapses that's growing up the ceiling here so they don't need to have trees to climb on they can climb on walls and even ceilings so this one is growing all over the wall and is even grown up the seedling of the ceiling and it was headed for the exit and then decided against it and it's heading back so I can't even grow vertically and their roots have an actual adhesive that allows them to stick to the ceiling or stick to walls or stick to tree trunks so they're very many orchids do that too there actually are able they have a biological glue that will hold them in place so as long as you can get them when we propagate them we usually use something like fish line or something or twist ties to tie them on until their roots can actually get secured and then they're very good at holding themselves up yeah I'd like to show you this very beautiful palm it's a little bit mysterious this is a a version of what's called the sealing wax palm Sergio snackies grows in tropical Asia and this one is called the Theodora Buehler palm that was named after a lady who was growing it here in South Florida and the typical type has it has a solid red stem whereas this one has these beautiful e-street stems this is an older one that's you can still see the rainbow colors but on the younger stems the color is really dramatic so it just has the rainbow streaking all up the stem and we're working to propagate this so we can try it outside because it's supposed to be able to grow throughout sides as well as inside but we need to make sure we have a well backed up before we experiment so fortunately it it reproduces clonally so it makes many stems in the same clump and then you can take off pieces and root them mangrove and elsewhere and have copies all over so it's a one of these amazing abilities of plants to copy themselves so plants for cloning themselves long before we were trying to use cloning in biotechnology one of the amazing ability of plants and in fact plants plant cells have the ability to keep dividing an infinite amount of times an indefinite amount of times whereas our human cells only have a lifespan of a certain number of divisions and it's only cancer cells that can divide unlimited amount of times but plants are able to take advantage of being able to not have it's in their cell division and they don't really have to worry about cancer and so it's plants are pretty amazing they just keep growing [Music] and this is a very very interesting plants here that most we've seen plants before that were pleated in the longitudinal direction pleated along their length that this one is a sigh clamp that I chrono PGM from South America it's one of the few plants that's actually is pleated in two perpendicular directions so longitudinally and then it has these ripples that go horizontally along the leaf so weave creates a really fairly mesmerizing pattern in the leaf just like it was made of ripples in the water or something that we're crossing each other and this is a very rare plants from New Caledonia and the South Pacific that we shared with us by Atlanta Botanical Gardens five Ailanthus species but it was it's only found in a very limited area and it was received from a nursery that was working on conservation in plants on that Island so by growing these and several Botanic Gardens were helping to preserve a really rare plants that's only found in a very very limited area so if something happens to it in its native habitat we'll be able to return the plant to New Caledonia someday so it's a big responsibility that many botanical gardens and many gardeners have who grow really rare and special plants like that and Botanical Gardens also we do a lot of introduction of new plants and many of these plants we've been talking about they're very new to cultivation this one is it's also very very new it's a we call them palm grasses which are neither palms or grasses they're in the genus kekulé ago but the ones that were in cultivation here for many years were just green they looked like this structure but all green this one was shared with us by a nursery in Thailand and it has this metallic purple above and that darker purple underneath and we've had many international visitors visitors recently for the International arid Society show and many of our colleagues from other botanic gardens and other nurseries have been asking us to share baby plants of this because it makes they clone themselves very well and so we've been sharing this with our colleagues and looking forward to being able to make this available to many more people to enjoy in tropical gardens and it might even be something that could be work as a house plant someday that's pretty good the exciting we have an interesting this is a cycad here from Central America Samy oblique WA and cycads actually shown a couple other examples earlier they're really ancient plants they don't make flowers but they do produce these cones that then they come in male and female so this is a female plant making a female cone and throwing beside it is a male plant that this it's cone is long gone but it did produce a cone and the pollen from that cone was used the pollen from this plant which is making another new pollen cone right now actually a couple of them the older pollen cones produce pollen that we pollinated this female cone with and we have a little little ribbon around it to mark that it was pollinated and then we're waiting it takes usually a few months for the seeds to develop if the pollination was successful and we do this by hand and many cycads are really critically endangered it's the most endangered major group of plants and so it's really important to reproduce them and then share the show the seeds with other botanical gardens and with other growers of tropical plants so that they never become extinct because they're very slow growing and very slow to reproduce so they take a lot of patience [Music] I'm very rare J'son area'd we brought back from Southeast Asia that has some pretty amazing leaf texture and very corrugated large leaves but then at the base it produces these wonderful clusters of white flowers this is kind of near the end of its flower of its flowering cycle but it produces these flowers for quite a few weeks and it's got another set coming along so it's a really spectacular tropical plant that's fairly new to cultivation and it's growing next to an interesting selection Ella this thing this ancient plant that's crawling along the soil here and this is starting to change to silver because it's evening and this particular species does something very strange it changes from green during the day to silver at night and it's due to the one chloroplasts the structure that contains the green pigment chlorophyll that it uses to photosynthesize and during the day that chloroplast is flattens along the bottom of the cell and so you see the green that chlorophyll reflects but at nights the chloroplast turns into a small ball and allows most of the light to pass through the cell and therefore it just reflects this silvery color that's based on the empty space in the cell so it's a every night it does this color change and no one knows why so we're hoping someone will take up the challenge to start studying this someday because there are so many of these amazing phenomena on the plant kingdom that people have not yet figured out how to explain and there's still a tremendous amount of science and discovery to to be done and you have another amazing example of leaf texture here this is a piper once again related to the plant that makes our edible pepper that plant has the edible pepper plant it has really flat glossy dark green leaves but this is another relative of it's from Asia that has leaves that not only have this really dramatic texture where they've got the folding along the veins but then it's all covered with hairs so it really has a bold appearance and most likely the plants that have these very deep folds and the leaves it helps the leaves be stiffer a little more resilience and the hairs may help to protect from excess sunlight they may help to conserve water by keeping the air around the leaf a little more still they're less less air movement which reduces the evaporation so that's one of the reasons why they think this plant may may have these kinds of hairs all over and other similar plants right above it is something very strange this is actually a branch from a conifer from a what's normally a tree are Ikaria subu lava from New Caledonia and but an interesting thing that happens in some plants is even though all the cells in a plant have the same DNA and they all are capable of in theory the same things yet DNA sometimes gets turned on and off in different parts of a plant during the plant's lifetime and so this is a branch that's rooted we rooted it our colleagues at the land botanical garden rooted it and so it's so it's growing and it's rooted but it keeps growing as a branch so it keeps growing horizontally and there people have done this with these these tropical conifers rooted their branches and just let them grow for 10 15 sometimes 50 years and they just keep growing horizontally they never forget they were originally a branch and you can see it's making it actually got injured on this side but it's still growing horizontally like a branch and so it's kind of an eternal branch and yet on rare occasions something switches in in one of the branches and it will actually grow vertical again and we grew one one of these our car is that did that and no one's really sure what controls that what will make certain plants are very difficult to reproduce from cuttings because it's difficult to make them grow naturally again they'll just kind of either grow horizontally or they'll grow kind of in various contorted fashions and this is one of the most extreme just growing horizontally and when it does these you will sometimes make branches that the branches will also be horizontal branches so you can make a tree into a hanging basket plant which is pretty remarkable [Music] you

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

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Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, plants, houseplants, indoor plants, garden, gardening, house plants, houseplant care, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Fairchild Botanic Garden, Fairchild, Fairchild greenhouse, Botanical Garden, Botany, Botanical Garden Tour, Fairchild Botanical Garden Tour, glasshouse tour, greenhouse tour, glasshouse

Id: 9Bc0Frcnc1I

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020