It was a surprising day in the plant room today. Not only did flowers just show up in bloom, I found enough rhizomes to stock a flower store!
This is Seemannia purpurascens. I've been waiting for such a long time and all of a sudden I was looking at the back of the terrarium that this has grown out of and *poof, I have a bud.
Apparently, they grow out of containers and off your shelf even with some judicious pruning. I think it's a quite handsome bud and I can't wait till it opens a little more!
The plant also makes cool rhizomes and ariel rhizomes. Worth the price of admission just to see the dark, dark foliage and all the fun stuff it produces! This was a total shock! I had a very, very scraggly plant that I recently staked and groomed and stuck in the back of a shelf with some larger Sinnigias.
Now, not only do the leaves look nice, the thing is in bloom! Yay!
I'm pretty pleased with this flower. I went online and couldn't find one that has the two tone colors like this one. I'm wondering if they start out two tone or I have an interesting one.
It might just get crossed with something to see if that two-tone color and multiple bloom will combine with a plant with large blooms. Compared to ones that have been grown outdoors, this is pretty tiny, but it's still in bloom and it counts!
I'm going to summer it out here in MN when the appropriate weather comes in another few months. This is a Nematanthus crassifolius that also sort of sneaked up on me with a flower. This one I knew about for a couple of weeks, but it's pretty exciting when you see it.The flowers are quite large and waxy looking and as you can sort of tell the flowers dangle down on about a four inch pedicle. I would bet a hummingbird might find this pretty exciting too!
These plants seem to take quite a long while to grow into something interesting. Also, while they don't want to be soaking wet, they also don't really want to be too dry either, or you will lose leaves. They do seem to root cuttings well though.
This is a Eucodonia 'Adele' being shown off by Winston, who is thoroughly disgusted with having to pose with a flower on his very manly head.
He prefers to be left to his napping undisturbed.
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This is a slice of Seemannia purpurascens. It's really fun to look at different plant materials under the microscope!
You will note that it's got the bright purple outer layer because the plant looks purple when you observe it.
The majority of the stuff in the middle is the pith. What I'm trying to find are the vascular bundles. 
This is a diagram that is copyrighted and property of Pearson Education Inc. I don't quite know how to site their work except to say that it is theirs and they are excellent.
You will observe that the phloem (food conducting ducts) and the xylem (water conducting ducts) are grouped in "bundles" around the outer rings of the stem. Let's see if we can see them in our unstained but pretty clear cross cutting of the Seemannia stem.
Moving from the outside to the very center, you see the outer hairs, then the pink outermost layer. It touches the yellow layer next and then we get to the what we're looking for. You see a darker thin yellowish line with some clearer bundles of stuff next. Hopefully, we've found vascular bundles of tissue.
Lastly comes the clear middle, or pith which functions mostly to support the stem.When I was looking at the outer surface of a leaf I was absolutely stunned to find that the hair are STRIPED! Look closely at some of the lower ones in the photo. It goes purple stripe, white, purple stripe, white, etc.
It's the completely unexpected and wonderful stuff that you find that really makes this fun!This is the leaf surface where the stripy hairs come from. You can sort of get the gist from the real-size view but it's the upper photo and the magnification that shows the very cool patterning in the 'hairs'. What on earth does this do to be advantageous for the plant? It must do something or it would be like this. I took the leaf pictured above and cut a thin slice through the petiole and leaf blade. The bigger lump over on the left is the petiole and you see thin leaf surface and secondary lumps where the veins got cut.
Note in the middle of the main leaf petiole you can see two lines of darker color... I'm thinking it is more vascular tissue like the main stem. This is the same bit of leaf magnified more. The lines in the middle show up better.
Anyway... pretty cool what's inside the gesneriads eh? Almost as cool as what we appreciate them for on the outside. I might have to slice up a flower from this Seemannia when it blooms and see what's inside it too.
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