Not According to Schedule                                                             Trevor Wray        

The dreaded letters NAS on your show entry happens to us all at some time. Naturally the more experienced the grower the more the rest of us fall about laughing. The picture of a nice pot full of Espostoopsis dybowskii (left) illustrates a point and not just that it is a devil to spell. Zooming into the high resolution image shows that there are small differences between the spination on each stem, especially that some of those fine centrals are red, orange or yellow. The Judge will similarly inspect the plant and when it is detected that the stems are from different seedlings the letters NAS will promptly appear on the show card. Each pot in a show should hold only one plant, so no weeds either. It is a pity because such clusters of seedlings grow on to make attractive plants, especially to beginners. If you want to show such plants you need to tease the separate stems apart and grow them on. However they may take some while to offset and never be as attractive as the original.

Incidentally the name Espostoopsis means like an Espostoa and is said Esposto - opsis. I always have an urge to pronounce it Espo - stoop - sis. (I also have to be careful with the ‘var. superbum’ that is frequent in garden plants.) The specific name dybowskii is for Jean Dybowski (1855-1928) a topographical engineer in Bahia, Brazil, but I expect you knew that.

Trev

Beginners and the general public are often intrigued by cristate, (or crested), plants.

At our displays and shows we are able to explain how they form, but the question generally arises; ‘Do they flower?’

The answer is simply; ‘Of course they do.’

The picture here shows a cristate plant of Mammillaria laui var. dasyacantha in Jeff Capel’s collection. This attractive species is very floriferous. Normal plants flower in a circle round the growing point. Here the flowers are either side along the growing line.

Trev

A prickly affair? The subtitle as you can see was ‘my life with hedgehogs’ so nothing to do with our lovely pricklies. (except in the Greek derived name as noted in Roland’s piece on Echinopsis plants on page-14!

However while I was there I was able to drop a very strong hint about ‘The Field Guide to Fynbos’ and ‘Proteas’. Luckily Santa bought me both and now all I have to do is identify the 2000 plants I saw in South Africa. I bet that ‘A Prickly Affair - my life with hedgehogs’ might have been a good read as well.