[aroid-l] A good year for Arum

From: "Petra Schmidt" petra at plantdelights.com> on 2003.04.29 at 19:11:15(10143) It's been a good spring for arums in bloom here (elongatum, euxinum, orientale, balansanum, dioscorides, italicum) but it's been a gruesome sight in cutting off the spathe to witness the carnage of pollinators in the base of the spathe...what wild parties they must have down there! I've learned to literally shake out the inflorescence while out of doors before taking the inflorescence back inside to my desk...still, some hang on and come crawling out like drunken sailors when the spathe is removed, but most feature molding corpses in 10 insect-bodies-deep layers. On the other hand, the shapes and colors of the pistillodes/staminodes are rather nice, like underwater sea creatures...the mysteries of what lies inside the arum spathe tube... Petra +More Petra Schmidt Research Manager Juniper Level Botanic Gardens @ Plant Delights Nursery 9241 Sauls Road Raleigh, NC 27603-9326 USA petra@plantdelights.com www.plantdelights.com

Note: this is a very old post, so no reply function is available.