#pachypodium

[geopsych]

Said goodbye to the Madagascar palm (not a palm!) this week. It went to a good and loving home that can provide for it along with a few other plants I was ready to release. I just got too nervous every time Bridget got near those spines. Look at them! I know from experience how much they can hurt. It was over 3 feet tall not counting the pot. I got it upon the death of an elderly relative but it was very small then. I wish it many happy years ahead. In the wild they can grow to 30 or 40 feet high!

[kerynw]

Plant maintenance!

So, I have had a phone call to make all week and I have completed it successfully, but in the process of procrastination I took apart the plant area in my office, cleaned the corner up, and put all the plants back in after repotting a bunch of them. Top of the list were the Pachypodium seedlings I started a couple of years ago which were WAY too big for the two pots they were crowded into. They're now in the same size pots, but only one per container instead of three to five. I now have seven pots of them and I really hope I will eventually know people I can give them to, because they get big and they're annoying to repot because they have SPINES even when they're only a few inches tall. Not as bad as, say, cholla spines, but still annoying to deal with during repotting. Not pictured is the ten inch Pachypodium that lives upstairs.

Seeds were obtained, as always, from Growing Hope Shop on Etsy.

[wiley-treehouse-gardens]

Pachypodium rosulatum, Madagascar

[faguscarolinensis]

Pachypodium lamerei var. fiherense / Dwarf Madagascar Palm at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University in Durham, NC

[kaguma-yururi]

パキポディウム　恵比寿笑

[herpandherb]

Elephants Foot / Pachypodium

Not actually technically a cactus, since all cacti are from north or South America, and these are from Africa. It’s just convergent evolution, doing the same great idea twice.

[jillraggett]

Plant of the Day

Monday 1 January 2024

In the glasshouse corridor of Cambridge Botanic Garden, UK, the Pachypodium lamerei var. lamerei (Madagascar palm) produced large, white, fragrant flowers at the top of the plants. This succulent stemmed plant is covered with sharp spines and carries out photosynthesis through its trunk as well as the foliage. This species comes from the island of Madagascar.

Jill Raggett

[ruthbancroftgarden]

Pachypodium lamerei

Pachypodiums belong to the family Apocynaceae. This is the same family to which Plumeria (frangipani) belongs, and the similarity of their flowers is evident. Unlike plumerias, pachypodiums have bottle-like swollen trunks, often armed with spines. Pachpodium lamerei is one of the species native to Madagascar, off the coast of southern Africa in the Indian Ocean. The plant pictured is a shorter-than-usual form of P. lamerei that goes by the name of Pachpodium fiherense, though this is not a valid name.

-Brian