Phaedranassa

Rimmer deVries rdevries@comcast.net
Wed, 13 Apr 2016 07:14:23 PDT
I have grown several Phaedranassa from seed and I have had the most difficult time matching the given seed names with the name descriptions. 
without locality information is seems almost impossible to distinguish these plants using the wiki. 

Most of the red and green phaendranassa (PP cinerea, dubia glauciflora, tunguraguae) seem to be somewhat glaucous, some from the same seed pod seem more glaucous than others.  
P. dubia has glaucous flower stems but the back of the leave are not glaucous.  
They all seem to have some yellow on the flowers, but some forms of P dubia start as yellow and green buds with the yellow being replaced with red as the bud mature and by the time the flower opens the yellow is almost gone.  
also some from the same seed batch flower with leaves present and some flower without leaves present, or with leaves fading.  

for Phaedranassa dubia is seems the non glaucous light green leaves, glaucous flower stems, pink filaments, and yellow end tip margins of the tepals are key and 
some P. dubia buds start as 50:50 yellow and green with the yellow being replaced with red as the bud matures and by the time the flower opens the yellow is almost gone.
 but in other P dubia, this color change is not the case.
 
for Phaedranassa cinerea it seems the white filaments is the key. 
all the plants i have grown from seed from BX 347 - Oct 2013 have glaucous leaf petioles and somewhat glaucous underside to the dark green leaves (darker than P dubia) one bloomed so far with white filaments and selfing with microwaved and fresh pollen resulted in many seed pods which were just distributed in BX 396.  The seed pods /fruit is darker green that fruit on P dubia.  Seeds in cup of tap water at 55-60F did not germinate for over 30 days until the cup placed near a heater ~ 65F.

Phaedranassa tunguraguae -what i can see from the descriptions, is it appears the most distinguished feature is the upright tall pedicels, white staminal filaments and a paler carman- pink flower color and somewhat glaucous underside the leaves and flower stems.  is the correct?

I grew 6 seed from BX 365 - April 2013 that were labelled as Phaedranassa tunguraguae.  
A bulb fly destroyed one in 2014, one plant bloomed in April 2015 with leaves present, 3 plants bloomed in March- April 2016, 2 bloomed without leaves and one bloomed with leaves present. and the runt is still too small to bloom.
these plants have solid glaucous scapes about 45cm tall, medium green leaves with glaucous to barely glaucous wax to the underside of the leaves and glaucous pedicels. The flowers are 50mm long and start as red/ green buds with a bit of yellow between the colors and the color fields did not change much when the buds matured as mostly carmine red; however, the filaments are pale pink and the ends of the tepals have a light green- yellow margin like the description for P dubia.  Microwave polled from self, pollen from P dubia from Telos, P. dubia from Imbabura, Ecuador, with buds that start as yellow/ green and mature as red /green and Phaedranassa cinerea from BX 347 with white filaments did not result in seed pods. However pollen from sister seedlings from BX 365 appears to be forming seed pods.  

is this truly Phaedranassa tunguraguae, Phaedranassa dubia or a hybrid of these two?

does anyone have any insight or experience identifying Phaedranssaa without locality information? or are these red/ green/ yellow flowered plants all variations of the same thing at various states of evolution separated by mountains?


Rimmer
SE Michigan US







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