Why this beautiful, striped indoor plant is a fantastic choice for gardeners
For Valentine’s Day, I bought my wife a Tradescantia Nanouk, a highly popular indoor plant thanks to its leaves with white, pink, and green stripes.
A week later, she was still crowing about this beauty, which has been given the popular name of Fantasy Venice, invoking the striped shirts of gondoliers — except instead of showing just blue and white or red and white stripes as seen on gondolier shirts, Fantasy Venice has three different colored stripes which, in combination, do seem somewhat fantastical. You can find Tradescantia Nanouk for sale from a number of vendors at Etsy.
My wife’s enthusiasm for Fantasy Venice comes from the fact that, as a potted plant, it will obviously last longer than a vase of flowers and continue with a compelling color display for quite some time. It should be noted, however, that this plant, in the manner of variegated plants in general, must be exposed to a daily dose of bright light in order to keep its color. In other words, if you place Fantasy Venice as a centerpiece on your dining room table where the distance to the nearest window is more than a foot or two, the leaves will eventually fade to green.
Tradescantia is a member of the spiderwort family of plants. Spiderworts are so named because when their stems are cut, a viscous substance is secreted in threads which, upon drying, have the consistency of the silky threads of a spider web. “Wort” is an old English word meaning “plant,” derived from an even older Germanic word meaning “root.” More than a hundred plant families have “wort” as a suffix, such as liverwort, lungwort, and bladderwort.
The most well-known species of the Tradescantia genus is inch plant (Tradescantia zebrina) with burgundy and silver bands on its leaves. It is often seen in hanging baskets and is popular enough as an indoor plant. Yet Fantasy Venice and inch plant will never grow into the best versions of themselves as long as they are confined to containers. These two plants are simply not meant to trail out of pots or hang down from baskets suspended in the air. Confined to containers, their stems begin to elongate with gaps between the leaves. Yes, you can keep them somewhat symmetrical by consistently pruning off their shoot tips, but your quest to keep them compact will never allow them to grow more than a foot in height, and they will look unnaturally stunted as a result.
Fantasy Venice and inch plant are ground covers in the truest sense, rooting along their stems as they creep over the surface of the earth, creating a carpet of exquisite beauty as they grow in their tropical habitat. They are frost-sensitive, however, so unless they are growing in an interior courtyard or under trees where they are protected from the cold, they are likely to die in a cold snap. They will grow as a wonderful ground cover in the shade from now until November and cover an extensive area during that time but, before the weather gets cold, take cuttings that can easily be rooted indoors in fast-draining soil or, for that matter, in a glass of plain water.
White velvet (Tradescantia sillamontana), a Mexican native, is a highly drought-tolerant trailing spiderwort species that craves fast-draining soil and good light. Its hairy foliage insulates it from summer heat, it is not especially water-needy, and its tiny pink flowers are an unexpected bonus. Blue spiderwort (Commelina coelestis) is a tuberous perennial with unmatched turquoise flowers. It grows less than two feet tall and expands into a clump eighteen inches wide.
Tradescantias may look delicate but, under the right conditions, are incredibly durable. The oldest closed, plugged terrarium in the world was created in 1960 by David Latimer, who lives in a village in southern England. In 1960, he planted a few spiderwort seeds in some compost in a 10-gallon bottle. The bottle’s plug was pulled in 1972 to add a little water, but since then it has remained sealed. The plant entirely fills the bottle with its dead leaves eventually dropping to the soil at the bottom of the bottle where they decompose into minerals that are recycled into newly expanding foliage.
We would be remiss in leaving this subject without mentioning the common spiderwort (Commelina communis), generally categorized as a week. Although it is, at times, a bitter battle to remove it completely, I must confess to stopping and stepping back, every now and then, simply to admire the beauty of my rapacious ground cover foe.
Also known as Asiatic dayflower, since it is native to Southeast Asia and China and its blooms last but a single day, the floral splendor of this ground cover is evident from summer until fall. Unmolested by pests of any kind, its sole nemesis is freezing weather, which turns it to mush. The Asiatic dayflower is considered a weed because of its tendency to appear suddenly as an unwanted guest, unannounced and unplanted, in moist flower beds. You see a little piece of it growing and barely pay it any mind until, a few weeks later, it has smothered everything in the vicinity. It propagates itself from seeds, tubers and stem pieces which, if scattered over the surface of a planter bed, will root wherever their nodes — where leaves meet stems — touch the earth.
Yet a recent experiment with a dayflower fungus yielded a promising result when it comes to biological control of weeds. A researcher noticed that a certain dayflower species had foliage that was blighted with a leaf spot fungus. The infested leaves were taken into the laboratory where the fungus was extracted and cultured until a sufficient quantity was produced for spraying on the spreading dayflower. Through use of the fungal spray, significant containment of the dayflower was achieved.
Although this product is not yet available for commercial use, it is reasonable to assume that such products will be part of our future. Pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and microscopic worms (known as nematodes) that feed on leaves, roots, or seeds have also been introduced as biological control agents for certain weeds. Such micro-organisms have been used to control insect pests as well.
California native of the week: Coffeeberry (Frangula/Rhamnus californica) is one of the most shade-tolerant California native shrubs — although it can also grow in the sun as well. It will reach up to 15 feet in height, or stay as low as four feet, depending on the cultivar. It is a useful selection for a dense, evergreen hedge. Coffeeberry fruit — turning from green to pale yellow to red to purple to black — resembles that seen on coffee trees and its seeds even resemble coffee beans. However, whereas the fruit or berries from the tropical coffee tree have two seeds (which we call beans) per fruit, the California coffeeberry has three beans or seeds per fruit. Once it is established in the garden, coffeeberry requires no water other than winter rain. Its lifespan ranges from 100 to 200 years in its woodland and chaparral habitats.
If you have a Tradescantia tale to tell, please send it to Joshua@perfectplants.com. Your questions and comments, as well as gardening questions and gardening tips are always welcome.
Editor’s note: A photo of Tower of Jewels (Echium wildpretii) in last week’s column was attributed to me in error; the photo credit should have be San Marcos Growers (smgrowers.com).