Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Flowers guaranteed to give me nightmares

I went to move my container of Astelia nervosa 'Westland' the other day. This usually involves bending over with my face directly above the plant and lifting it up towards me. That’s about when I almost dropped it. Yikes! There were “things” coming out of the center of my plant! Creepy crawly things. Wait, no…actually those are just flowers (if you can call them that). I think these might be the ugliest flowers I’ve ever seen in my garden. I looked the plant up on the San Marcos Growers website to see what they had to say… “as with other Astelia the male and female flowers are on separate plants (Monecious), neither are showy and are usually down in the foliage.” “Not showy” is an understatement. I wonder if mine is a boy plant or a girl plant?

14 comments:

  1. Nice...sort of the chest bursters of the botanical world!

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  2. From the looks of the last photo I'd say a boy.... :)

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  3. Actually I think they're kinda cute. Better than those so-called flowers on my Carex morowii, anyway. If you only have one plant, I guess that means no hope of babies?

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  4. woah! that's so bizarre looking. I never cease to be amazed by the amount of variety in the plant kingdom and on the flip side, the strangely similar features that plants from different genera can have.

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  5. Interesting. I guess this means the plant is happy.

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  6. No biological babies, MulchMaid, but adoption is always a possibility.

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  7. Wendy stole my thought!

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  8. I vote for transgender...

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  9. They look covered with fungi. Just out of curiosity, once you can determine gender, are you planning to find it a mate?

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  10. Wendy, ha!

    Darla, ha to you too.

    MulchMaid, good comparison (the Carex).

    Ryan, bizarre indeed. After looking at them my husband said he felt like he needed to go wash his hands.

    Grace, good point.

    peter, but costly.

    Jess, isn't there a movie about that?

    ks, uhmmm....

    Bom, no mate. This plant hasn't been hardy for me here in zone 8 so only the lone containerized specimen.

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  11. Ha ha! Those flowers would creep me out, too. Good thing the rest of the plant is pretty.

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  12. Did you see the photo of the ugly dog in The Oregonian a while back? I would not have thought that a dog (or a flower) could be ugly-scary, as opposed to ugly-handsome, but apparently anything is possible.

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  13. hilarious. definitely one of the uglier flowers i've ever seen. I once reached down to pull a brown thing off my native ginger asarum caudatum and then realized that the brown thing was its flower. which has kind of grown on me since then. our astelia has never bloomed but now i'm kind of looking forward to it.

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  14. VW, have you ever seen the silver leafed variety? Stunning!

    ricki, ha!!!! Yes I did see that picture and it's exactly what these flowers look like!

    ryan, if you believe the San Marcos website then flowering may be kind of rare...

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