hookeri pancakes

A month ago, when I came back from Japan, I was posting about some lithops that have grown too much becoming 'cucumber'-shaped, but there were also 'pancakes': plants growing flat and near to the ground showing the shape I value the most. This case is a bit extreme - the hookeri was trying to hide from the sun in the pumice. Now that the heat is long gone it is round and fat but still shaped perfectly.

gracili kids are growing

As previously mentioned, the cute young gracilidelineata from before are synchronously changing their clothes now. You can already see the new leaves through the small cleft if you look closely!

not quite done yet

It is gloomy-rainy with temperatures from 8 °C to -2 °C outside. While one of the salicolas has given up on its last flower, the yellow-edge-helmutii's flower buds are growing quickly. These plants are strange!

something to look forward to

No doubts about this one :)

getting ready for winter

It's cold and dark outside. Sunlight has become a rarity and the plants have had their last watering. They will move to my place in several days which is a 3hour drive from here, so that they'll need to be carefully packed and put in boxes. I'm a bit nervous, not only about the move but also because of the start of the new semester. I wonder if it's going to be different now, one year later. Probably not. Also, I do look forward to all the classes I chose.

I think you can see from the pictures how gloomy it is now. The salicolas that have been flowering so beautifully last month are bearing fruits (they are, aren't they? :) ). One of them decided to push another flower recently but it looks now like it has changed its mind after all. I felt bad about it being so late anyway because it has obviously missed all the action.

seed capsules or not

The reason why I'm not sure whether my pollination attempts worked or not is that some of the flowers I haven't touched at all seem to have developed fruits anyway. I didn't pay attention before only noticing that the remains of the fruits are empty and dried out several months later. This time I'm watching them closely, and they all do seem to get bigger without withering, even though there shouldn't be any seeds inside. Here are two examples: both dorotheae and 'ventergreen' didn't have any flowering partners of their kind this year. Allthough it looks like future seed capsules, they'll probably just dry out in time, won't they?

PS: thanks to Aiko :) who shared the link to British Cactus & Succulent Society sales page, I've purchased the 2nd edition of Lithops - Treasures of the Veld by Steven Hammer. I'm so happy to finally be able to have this book on my book shelf! It's perfect to look things up if you have questions. Also, in this edition there is a new chapter about some new taxa and cultivars with pictures, so don't wait until this one is out of print as well. ;)

yellow-edge-helmutii

I think these might be the last flowers this year. There are three more flower buds I can see, but they somehow stopped growing and with this weather I don't know if they'll develop all right.

Both yellow-edge-helmutii made it though, so that I can hope for seeds. :)

ventergreen

I've been meaning to show these plants for a while now. They are L. lesliei v. venteri 'Ventergreen' C001A, a cultivar variety developed by Y. Shimada, and were actually the reason I wanted to place an order. After seeing some pictures I really wanted to have the Ventergreens but they were nowhere to find. Having finally found them in Shimada's catalogue I could only afford three fairly young plants so here they are. The color is a dream - I don't think the pictures do justice to them - light creamy green, so different from other lesliei greenies, it reminds me of green tea soft ice cream. :) As you can see, one had a flower but not having a partner there won't be any seeds yet (maybe next year?).

fruits

I'm back and proud to present the 'Green Horn' future seed capsules. I'm not sure about the other plants I was trying to pollinate yet, but these two lesliei v. hornii have developed unmistakably big round and full fruits. It is my first success (third try) in this field so I'm very excited to see how it goes from now on. :)

(click on pictures for XXL)

some updates

I'm going to be away for a week. Tomorrow is Step 1 of moving back to my place. The plants will follow in Step 2 a couple of weeks later. It's going to be stressful but I'm looking forward to the new semester at the university. After all the moving around I long for routine in my life, some kind of stability, consistency. Striking roots would be really nice. :)

As for the plants, there are minor news like discovering that some of the young gracili are about to cast their skin. Or that this daikangyoku decided to flower out of it's smaller head a month after the bigger did (I really should take pictures of this). The flower might not open though, because it's gloomy all the time. This also means the pictures I take look just as gloomy. But no-sun worked wonders for all the badly wrinkled plants i.e. "pancakes", even one that I almost gave up on since it didn't show any response to water at all for a month and kept getting more and more wrinkles. Oh, and the misshapen hookeri had it's new leaves break through half way as expected. I think it's for the best.

To end this chaotic post here is the 8-headed otzeniana with a flower bud. See you in a week. :)

blushing lesliei

There are some color developments on the watermelon-lesliei. You see, two months ago the islands on its surface were green-yellow-ish - now they are yellow-orange, even partly red-ish. For me it is interesting because watching the plants throughout a year it looks like lithops tend to lose warm yellow-red pigments first when they grow becoming pale and more green in the fall, don't you think? Seems to be the other way around for this plant. Maybe something's wrong with it (checked the roots recently, they were ok). I'll keep you updated.