I'll have to go outside to check if any of mine have blooms. One K. blossfeldiana Calandiva in the house still has a couple blooms hanging on.

Is this plant your K. delagonensis, Tiffany? Thy don't quite look the same as what I've seen. Do the leaves lower on the plant look different than those in this pic?
I like the hanging bells on all these types. =)

I could be wrong! I scavenged that plant from a parking lot in NOLA. That's what I was told it was on here, but I don't remember if you weighed-in on that or not. TY for saying something.

The lower leaves are much longer, fatter, kind of scoop-shaped, and the whole thing was cut at soil level and stuck in a pot coming inside recently.

Leaf:
{{gwi:691027}}

Whole:
{{gwi:691030}}

K. blossfeldiana buds:

This post was edited by purpleinopp on Sat, Nov 16, 13 at 17:00

I should've just gone out & looked! I believe yours is the same as mine...K. x houghtonii. My leaves at the top look the same. =) I also have buds on mine.

Have Kal 'Oak Leaf' out front getting ready to put out buds, but it will be a while before bloom time.

Remembered I have a pic of the mama plants in NOLA.

Here's the plant I took before I broke it off, in a crack in the parking lot. I don't steal plants but didn't consider that stealing. These things were all around in cracks & I assumed they are considered kind of a weed there.

The top.

Just noticed your comment, Rosemarie, TY! All of the plants around the pool of where we stayed were likely free, pass-along plants, like Cannas, elephant ears, sweet potato vines. Does K. x houghtonii fit this category? It didn't look like anything in the landscape was purchased, like a cultivar.

I don't know how you tell these things apart, I'm confused. When I look up Kalanchoe x houghtonii on USDA plants, it brings up K. delagoensis. Google searches of all 3 names is not helpful at all (except I saw some that have bright red babies at the leaf edges that I now need - pretty!)

If anyone can share some reliable pics showing the differences between these 3, or link to such, I would appreciate it! And are there other Kalanchoes that get confused in this mix?

Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council says:

"K. houghtonii was formally named in 2006, but has been known in cultivation for a long time. It is a hybrid of K. delagoensis and K. daigremontiana. It differs from K. daigremontiana by having deep red flowers instead of lighter “dusky rose” colored flowers.

"Because K. houghtonii was described so recently we have very poor data on its distribution, since populations of it were formerly referred to as K. daigremontiana."

http://www.se-eppc.org/wildlandweeds/fullpdf/WWSP12_FINAL.pdf

This post was edited by missingtheobvious on Mon, Nov 18, 13 at 11:33

TY, MTO! I don't understand if this is a purposely bred hybrid, or mutt created any time the 2 d-species Kals meet?

Are there enough blooms in the above pic to decide dark red or dusky rose? Not clear if the flower color is the only difference. Do the roundish leaves near the top help give it away in addition to the flower color? I've only had this around since April, so can't say what it 'usually' does yet. We will soon see what color its' flowers are though.

Here is a link that might be useful: fixed the link you posted, TY!

Sorry about the link, purple. Mine should work now too.

Oh, I'm not an expert! It's just that I was trying to make a list of all the different babies-on-leaves kalanchoes I could find for a post on the Name That Plant! forum ... and then I figured if I didn't save it in Word, I'd be sure to need it later. And this quotation, which I think I didn't put in the NTP post, I did keep in the Word doc.

I doubt it's possible to determine whether x houghtonii resulted from a deliberate or accidental cross.

If you have two stable varieties -- which the parent plants, diagremontiana and delagoensis, are -- then the hybrid of those two varieties will be the same every time daigremontiana and delagoensis cross and produce seed. So x houghtonii could pop up anywhere daigremontiana and delagoensis exist in proximity, and all the x houghtoniis would be the same.

When x houghtonii sheds its little plantlets, they of course contain the same genes as the plant they came from. However, note that x houghtonii -- a first-generation hybrid -- is not genetically stable. It has two copies of each gene -- one from each parent -- and some of those pairs differ.

So if x houghtonii produces seed -- either by self-pollination or by crossing with another x houghtonii plant -- the genes will almost certainly form a new hybrid.... Eventually natural selection weeds out some of the hybrids, but who knows how many different ones survive?

Here's Keith Mueller's explanation of the genetics of breeding tomatoes:
http://kdcomm.net/~tomato/gene/genes.html
Be sure to go on to the next page. He's talking about intentionally cross-breeding for a stable variety, so it's not quite the same as x houghtonii crossbreeding in the wild, but some of it may interest you.

Should be no problem with K. delagoensis; one of very few K. with ternate leaves (3 at each node), no petiole (sessile), leaves terete (cylindrical, not flat), a few plantlets at the leaf apex (none along the leaf margins). At least one Kalanchoe is very readily id'ed. Yale

TYVM Yale! Well-written & much appreciated.

Just a note for missingtheobvious, Houghton published, almost 75 years ago, a short paper explaining that he took pollen from K. delagoensis, and used K. daigremontiana as the recipient of the pollen to produce a hybrid, now called Kalanchoe x houghtonii. The three different plants named probably do not generally produce seeds but rely on plantlet production for reproduction. All in all, it is a really complicated business, but not a problem for Kalanchoe collectors. Yale

Thank you, mfyss.

Tiffany, the pix of your plant of the mother plant are puzzling me. I'll be back with some pix later. For now, let me say the mother plant looks like K. daigremontiana, whereas, your plant looks like something else! I was thinking it was K. x houghtonii, but the lower leaves make it seem to be another plant. I know my plant grow differently depending on where they are located (how much sun/water they receive).

As for Kalanchoe x houghtonii, it was created in the 1920's by A.D. Houghton & was known as Bryophyllum 'Houghton's Hybrid' until it was renamed. For a long while Kalanchoe & Bryophyllum were kept separate. They were combined in recent years.

K. x houghtonii does not have deep red blooms. Pix coming soon. They are a pinker color (leaning toward color of delagoensis parent flower color).

K. daigremontiana have leaves that curl up at the petiole, whereas, K. x houghtonii do not. The pic of the leaf in your hand looks like k. x houghtonii.

Okay, going back to the pic you have of the mother plant-where there are many plants in the pic,I believe I see 2 different plants. One looks like K. daigremontiana & the other like your plant, which I tentatively say is K. x houghtonii. The long, slender look of the upper leaves is throwing me. I'll have to go check some pix of plants I had that grew rather tall-to see what those leaves looked like.

Yale, Fabulous description of K. delagoensis!

Back in a bit!

TY, Rosemarie! I may have been under an incorrect assumption that the plants around the pool (Sat, Nov 16, 13 at 17:51,) and the piece I appropriated from a crack in the parking lot a few feet away were the exact same thing. If they are different, ignore that pic with the chair and flowers in it. The pic right under it is 'the' plant I broke/tore off and absconded with (on our way to a garden center, of course!) Apr. 2, this year.

It's had a hard-knock life, some time in the hot windows-up car that day, then laid on the front porch in the sun for a couple days. Then stuck in the ground unceremoniously. Once it started getting taller, I cut most of it off & sent it away in trade. It grew 2 new tops, which I soon broke off & stuck in pots. Then I moved the stump to another pot. About a month ago, I cut the first 2 plants off again & stuck them in pots coming inside. Everything was in full sun, all day all summer, until coming inside a few weeks ago. (This is why I don't have many big plants.)

On the topic of general Kal flowers, I have K. eriophylla that's making buds, I think? It's growing a white string well above the foliage rosette. K. blossfeldiana buds visible on most plants but the smallest, most recent cuttings. Anything that wants to bloom inside during winter is so cool! It's not like I'm in the snow, or even really cold here, but still. Flowers inside will always be a much appreciated novelty to me. Most fru-fru plants can't do it.

Okay, I'm back! Hard to decide which pix to use as examples. Want to show the variability of leaf shape, size, color...depending on its growing condition. Darker color leaves means it was in sun. Light green =in the shade. Some are long & skinny, others short & fat. Color of the blooms will look a bit different depending on in what sun the shot was taken. The blooms are not deep red.

ALL of the following pix are of Kalanchoe x houghtonii (previously Bryophyllum 'Houghton's Hybrid' -name from the 1930s...or sometimes listed as 'Hybrida'). A recently named cultivar (or sport?) of x houghtonii is 'Pink Butterflies', for which I've included 2 pix.

Click for larger view:

{{gwi:691037}} {{gwi:691039}} {{gwi:691041}}

{{gwi:691043}} {{gwi:691044}} {{gwi:691045}}

{{gwi:691046}} {{gwi:691047}}

{{gwi:691048}} {{gwi:691049}} {{gwi:691050}}

{{gwi:691051}} {{gwi:691053}}


{{gwi:691056}} {{gwi:691059}}

So, Tiffany...I believe you have Kalanchoe x houghtonii. I don't think many folks have the true Kalanchoe daigremontiana anymore. Most plants I've found online labeled as daigremontiana are really x houghtonii...so confusion is rampant!

Link plant of K. daigremontiana:
http://flowersathome.org/pic/02.12.2010_56.jpg
Note upturned lip of leaf at petiole.
Also see link below...showing a perfect leaf of same. People should not get these 2 confused if they look at the leaf.

Here is a link that might be useful:

This post was edited by rosemariero on Wed, Nov 20, 13 at 21:50

In spite of it being a plant I tried to exterminate for five years in my front garden in San Diego, that's a darn tootin' fine gallery, Ma'am. Thanks much for the wonderful reminders of a plant I'd like to think I used to know, forever.

Well, I'm just not sure... there's not a pic of... nah J/K! Wow, that's an awesome pictorial. TYVM, Rosemarie!

"Most plants I've found online labeled as daigremontiana are really x houghtonii...so confusion is rampant!" No doubt, I felt rampantly confused (among other things) a few times, lost in Kal pics.

So that's what the babies look like if one leaves them on. When I noticed some tiny plants around the mama, I pulled them up & took the rest of the babies off of the leaves & put them in pots for when somebody wants some. There's quite a demand for this plant. Almost every person I've offered it to in trade wanted some babies.

So, the red babies are a new cultivar? (Insert expletive of choice!)

I have general difficulties trying to NOT love all of the great weeds in the south, many of which are mythical novelties that can only survive in a pot, to those up north, though impossible to get to even try! Still hanging on to one little clump of spider plant, even though it took hours to dig a patch of it out of my Mom's yard. I keep saying folks in FL could make a living from just selling their weeds. DH is fixated on what I said about little pots of spiderwort Tradescantia selling for $5-$10 each when I lived in OH. "We've got $500 in weeds?" Just not logistically realistic - all of the digging, gas for a truck, like Kramer & Newman trying to make the 'recycle run' to another state profitable.

Is there a word for the curl at the petiole junction of the K. daigremontiana leaf?

K. x houghtonii buds progressing. Looks like she's gonna throw out blooms from some lower nodes too?:
{{gwi:691062}}

K. blossfeldiana:
{{gwi:691064}}

K. eriophylla:
{{gwi:691066}}

A photo of K. daigremontiana, which should be in bloom soon. This individual shows decussate leaf arrangement (leaves opposite at each node and at right angle to pair above (or below)). Petioles sort of clasp the stem, and result in a raised ring around the stem.

K. 'Pink Butterflies' (or K. 'Sparkler') has all those pink plantlets that are not supposed to develop into plants, but I have a couple that I am hoping will make it. The few survivors have white leaf margins and green centers but it will be a surprise if they live. Has anyone had success getting plants from the pink plantlets? Yale

It's shaped to hold water in each leaf, isn't it?

Since GW doesn't have a plant database, I use one on another site where this plant isn't listed. I filled out the form to add it and it was rejected, "This is not listed as an accepted species name in any of the major taxonomic databases."

Kalanchoe x houghtonii (did I spell it wrong, or otherwise screw it up?)

Is Bryophyllum a new name?

I'll be back in a while, but just jumping in to say that is the most current name. Sometimes, other sites are behind ~or the places they're using to check are behind.

Was it the all things plants forum?

Yes. I wasn't going to put pics of my plant at this point, but thought it should be in there. That's my fav site for a personal database of my plants.

Yes, I'm overrun in photos. :P Feel lucky I did not post them all! I'd have been here all day!

Hee hee, on your "weeds" & how others want so much when they can't have, Tiffany! Yes, you're RICH!
Your K. eriophylla will have cute pink blooms.
I've had blooms from lower nodes as well, on K. x houghtonii. I do not know the terminology for the leaf curl at the petiole.

The pink cultivar is not so new, but you don't see it much. I have not had any luck getting babies to grow, Yale. I wish you luck in that department. This makes it a non-weedy plant, but harder to share with others! I saw it listed as 'Pink Sparkler' before they figured the valid name to be 'Pink Butterflies'. Mine is gone. :( I hope your white-margined plant lives! I'd like to see it!

Very nice, clear shot & description of your K. daigremontiana, Yale.

TY, Rosemarie & LOL! I forgot to ask yesterday, is this Crassula 'Springtime' with the Kal?

I must have the one with pink babies. Now that I know about it, it's on my exchange thingie here.

No, that is Crassula perforata, in my SOS program. =)

OK, TY! I'd say put 'em on on SOS then, it looks fan-friggin-tastic!

Just a variety of K. daigremontiana? Leaves are certainly narrow, and the plant is very short compared to the one posted earlier.

And Rosemarie is right, as usual, with K. ' Pink Butterflies', as the correct name for the K. x. houghtonii cultivar.

Finally in a gravel bench with K. x houghtonii and K. daigremontiana growing together, there are hundreds of the former and just a couple of the latter. Yale

Wow, those ARE skinny leaves, Yale!

Also, (meant to say earlier) it's so nice to see the REAL K. daigremontiana, since it seems to be a rare thing as time goes by.

These buds finally opened...

A different angle.

That looks so interesting, like an upside down chandelier. :-)

No luck with the blossfeldiana this year, i think it isn't getting enough light. North window, probably needs at least some direct sunlight.

IKR! Is not one of the common names 'chandelier plant?' I try not to get too involved with common names, the 2+ botanical names most plants now have is more than enough.

Is more light for your plant not an option? I've showed my copy of this same plant before (on 11/16 in this post. 3 in a pot when repotted, gave Mom one.) Mom's pot has been brought inside my house for more refined care during its' special time. I found it soggy wet, knocked over, full of ants (Mom is really busy right now, give her a break!) The broken stems have been stuck back in the pot, look fine, what a cool plant! If the timing is right, I can take it back over for Christmas with flowers on it, or at least almost ready. These will be yellow. There should be time still if you have more light somewhere.

Speaking of ants, excuse the plastic bag. I really don't have any drip saucers and the pot next to Kal would NOT stop dripping outside after getting a drink. If left out there, ants could get in it in minutes, so on the plastic bag it went.

After googling, your are right chandelier plant is a common name for this kalachoe. I try to stay away from common names too, just because sometimes they bridge 2 or more completely different plants that have similar characteristics. Just look at the wikipedia page for "mock orange" for example. It lists 5 completely unrelated plants as possible "mock orange" plants.

I have only 1 place with more light, a WSW window, with about 6 hours of direct per day, but because of the size of the pot and the way the window is, there is no way to put it there. I might could, if i rigged something in the window sill and had no other plants(LOL). And its been in the low 30 during the day here so outside isn't an option.

I feel sure it has to be light related, plant is using almost no water, the new leave growth at the top is enlarged, and its losing some interior leaves.

I could do short night treatment starting in the spring when it goes back outside, i have a box made and everything that i was using because there was a large streetlight right near the windows its been in.

Oh that's a cool & smart idea!! I like your take-control attitude. Best of luck & I'll be curious to hear about it.

Speaking of large leaves, the leaves on this plant when we got it almost a year ago were 4-5 times as big as what you see in the pic earlier today. I pick at these plants a lot, have taken several rounds of stem cuttings from each, and am hopefully causing a bonsai reaction. I think they'll be ready this summer to be the 'trees' in a mini garden.

Mine are taking their sweet time about it! Noticed some K. fedtschenkoi with lots of buds too. Will have to remember to go take pix of those soon.

click for larger view:

{{gwi:691070}} {{gwi:691072}}

Very pretty! Yes, I would LOVE to see the other plants' flowers too!

Is there any significance to the anthers on my plant being yellow vs. the brown ones on yours?

Okay, I went out this morn & took pix of others (turned into 100 or so snaps-yikes).
Upon investigation, I believe it probably does not make a difference on the anthers. What I believe has happened is either age making them turn brown (as I found yellow on mine), or my dogs have knocked off pollen. Looking at a freshly opened bloom, they are yellow on mine. I will try to have a watchful eye over them as the rest open up, but the holidays are sure to throw a wrench in that plan! :D

New bloom-yellow
{{gwi:691077}}

Oh that makes perfect sense - pollen gone. TY so much for investigating! I'm sure our great Dane would love to knock some pollen around, he has some weird ideas about gardening, but he's outside so that's not a factor here. And wouldn't you know it, between yesterday's last check & just now, the pollen is gone from mine too (or just turned brown with age, both, doesn't matter.) The anthers are brown. Could have waited to observe this but didn't know yesterday & now it's in writing to inform whoever reads this thing this far. So the yellow/pollen only lasted 2-3 days (inside a house in AL.)