Return to the South African Native Plants Forum
| Post a Follow-Up
protea dying?
| | |
Posted by weeddummie australia (My Page) on Sun, Jun 12, 05 at 4:29
| Dear garden lovers,
I have 3 protea neriifolia in separate locations on the garden bed. Two seem to be flowering healthily (it's winter where we are), while the other seem to be:
- having its leaves turn completely gray-ish/brown - and it seems it's actually dried out there :(
- a bit more horizontal than the others, even the flowers are growing sideways
- the stems where the leaves have turned all grey/brown, have stunted flowers, very small and all gray as well
- it rained heavily yesterday and I only noticed it being sickly looking this morning onwards (could this be related? but I don't remember looking at it properly for the past 2 weeks).
The other two plants have tiny dark spots on some of the leaves, other than that, they seem ok.
Could this be a kind of fungus/root rot? What should I do?
I've read up about pruning protea and using them as cut flowers - does anyone have tips about this? The only detailed stuff I could find on the web is in www.proteaflora.com.au so far...I was wondering how to dry them for display, but I guess I should worry about that after figuring out this problem first.
|
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: protea dying?
| | |
You probably did already, but check out the "Proteas" thread for references to sites finebushpeople.co.za, and Silverhill.
I went to the first one, just to find out what Proteas was ;o) It's an awesome website, a South African source, I bet they'd help. Just from poking around on it, I'll bet fungus, or some disturbance of the root system is the problem. Good luck!
Sandy |
RE: protea dying?
| | |
| Any chance that one got a splash of fertiliser? They're like a lot of Aussie natives for sensitivity. Stay out of the old wood if you're cutting for flowers. They're not too good at resprouting from old wood. But flower-cutting is a useful way of keeping them in trim and not too leggy. |
RE: protea dying?
| | |
| Sandy, It was interesting you mentioned root disturbance... The frosted fire protea passed on since (rest its poor soul...). And I'm not sure how to dispose it. I cut the main stem off, and found lots of black ants coming out from the ground where the main stem was. What does this sound like? Are ants staying in the root system/ground a bad sign? |
|
|
|
|
