Deja vu all over again. I think Lisa had a good thread going on just this.

Here is a link that might be useful: albopictum

I paid big bucks for it. I'm just wondering what it is. Maybe a cultivar of burle marxii

Bryan, did you get yours from Tropiflora? Read the link that Nick posted above. Yours looks pretty much like mine, which I got IDed by Harry Luther as a form of burle-marxii. I too purchased it as albopictum. I got it from Michael's but he said that he had got it from Tropiflora, and that it was part of a batch of odd seedlings they got in that later turned out to be misidentified. Apparently they got a lot of feedback from disgruntled customers about that one. It's still a nice plant though, and much easier to grow than the usual form of burle-marxii.

Since then I have gotten the real albopictum from him, so I'm happy about that. Still waiting for a bloom on that one, but it appears that the white ring may just be white scurf rather than an absence of pigment, so my dreams of making a white-ringed xNeophytum may prove fairly illusive.

yes Lisa thats where I got it from. You said Michael has it or Tropiflora? I haven't had any trouble growing burle marxii. I grow it in full sun fertilize and water almost every day during the summer. I keep the mix lite.

Bryan, I had asked Michael if he had an O. albopictum. At first he said he didn't have any pups available at the moment, but then he emailed me back to say he'd found another source. That's the nice thing about Michael, if he has a good working relationship with you he'll often try to hunt down special items you're looking for that he may not have on his list. I don't know of too many other sellers who would do that! At any rate, I didn't think anything more about it until it bloomed, at which point I sent him a photo and asked where he had got it. He told me the source was Tropiflora and that he had heard there had been a fair amount of customer feedback that some of the plants from that batch were not as advertised. Not necessarily their fault either, as they buy in a lot from other suppliers throughout the world and often sell it before they've had a chance to bloom it out themselves. They just have to trust that what they're getting is what their suppliers say it is. In this case, it wasn't.

I wasn't complaining, though. I actually ended up sending him back a pup of it so that he could propagate it too, since it's much faster growing and freer-pupping than either of the other burle-marxii clones that he has. It's not that b-m is so difficult to grow, it's just very slow, especially b-m v. b-m, of which this is apparently a cultivar. O. b-m v. seabrae is still my favorite of the bunch, but this one has definite commercial potential if it can be propagated more quickly.

Bryan, Lisa, et. al.

It took quite a while for me to sort through this confusion to my own satisfaction, with assistance from a number of people, incl. Lisa, Michael Kiehl and the folks at TF. My conclusion now, after having grown and flowered three separate clones of the original "albopictum" batch released in 2006, as well as "good" veg.-propagated albopictum and burle-marxii v. b-m is that there appear to be two main groups of plants mixed up here that can be separated when at flowering size. The very glossy leafed, intensely red-centered plants that grow to about 16" in diameter appear to be amoenum or a ? hybrid. The scurfy plants with red-orange centers appear to be either albopictum x b-m var. b-m or, as in Lisa's case, nice clones of b-m var. b-m. Both of the latter plants are heavily dusted with trchomes throughour their lives and are far less gracile in appearance than the "amoenum" type plants which have very narrow recurved leaves. I am not sure how the confusion occurred up there, but some albos at TF were almost certainly open-pollinated by some agent up there that had visited a sib species prior to stopping by the albo flowers and another batch of seedlings of other Raio-de-Sol/sunburst type orthophytums also appears to have blended into the offering.

Lisa...my albo division is distinctly glaucous with reddish blotches and well dusted with trchomes when young...it has about the same build and vigor but very different color than b-m var. b-m.

Ciao,

J

Jay, your albo sounds different than mine. Here is the photo Michael sent me of his plant in bloom:

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The pup he sent me is the one front and center below. Not glaucous at all at this stage, unless you count the underside of the leaf. In the rear to its left is b-m v. seabrae. To the right is a pup of the erroneously IDed b-m v. b-m received earlier, which is a somewhat softer, more flexible plant than the others, and definitely more scurfy.

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