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> Anyway, good luck with your quest for information on blooming size, and the use of growth > retardant on giant species of Amorphophallus, though this aspect baffles me, I thought that > the whole 'point' of obtaining a giant species was for it to grow TALL/BIG!
Of course this is the "point"....
And yes, I can imagine that your are puzzled by my intention to keep the tall ones or in my case "one" short.
But living in cold Germany (approx. zone 6/7) without a big greenhouse, but with an Amorph. titanum, I have to think about future times (if I ever will manage to grow a titanum to a "critical" hight).
The options I have are not many:
- Giving away the plant after raising it to a petiole hihgt of about 2 m (I have a "wintergarden" of 2,3 m hight)? That would be a pitty...
- Building a big greenhouse? Unfortunately beyond my possibilities....
- Keeping it and forcing it to remain short in some way?
And the latter should be possible with growth retardants. Since I have found no reference on the effect of growth retardants on the petiole lenght of plants, I just sent out my question to the list. I think it should work, since for instance in Poinsettias not only internodes are shortened, but also the bract diameter is reduced by higher concentrations of growth retardants (Petiole length was not mentionend in the publication). Furthermore growth retardants are used also in tissue culture to grow plants/multiple shoot clusters in a very compact habitus.
Since there is no response (yet) from the aroid-L, it seem that no one has tried growth retardants on Amorphs.
An answer to my second question regarding the correlation between tuber size and petiole hight in Amorph. titanum could indicate when to start with the application of growth retardants. I still hope that someone has data on this, i.e. data on tuber weight and the hight of the petiole grown from this tuber. But maybe the number of titanums grown in botanical gardens etc, is too small to provide data sufficient for a statistical anylysis. However, even some observations might give an indication.
A last point on using growth retardants on the mentioned species would be that I hope that a treated plant would still increase its tuber size, even when its petiole is kept short. It might be possible to grow it to blooming size under home conditions.
Thanks for attention and still looking forward to any comment.
Good growing,
Bernhard.
Dollbergen, Germany
approx. zone 6/7
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