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A couple of generous waterings while in active growth with tomato fertiliser (high potash) will transform them, even if congested, even within two flowering seasons - poor this, excellent next.

Apply with a rose, as fine as you can find, as a lot can be absorbed through the leaves.

A once a year regime is wise.

I have no idea what it is, and am no fan at all of cultivated ones, although I do like some/most of the hardy small species. But that looks impressive, whatever it is.

Variegation is a reduced amount of chlorophyll, so variegated plants cannot photosynthesise as much as totally green ones, so they grow slower. In outdoor plants in particular, the lack of chlorophyll may also sometimes lead to scorching.
Slow growth is compensated for in some plants, especially cacti and succulents, by grafting, as the stock will photosythesise as normal. Indeed, a few varieties lack chlorophyll almost or absolutely entirely, so would never grow unless grafted.

Many plants (possibly all?) are variegated due to virus infection and there is lots of debate how deleterious the virus infection alone, is to plant growth etc.

A very few years ago, an exceedingly highly variegated Acanthus was introduced in the UK - "Tasmanian Angel" - leaves are/were almost entirely cream/pinkish-cream, just splashes of green. Even plants offered for sale were frequently scorched and the one that I bought, even though in a very shady position, with filtered light, never thrived. The orginal plant is a curio of no major use apart from making competant nurseries, lots of money, although plants offered as this name now, seem to carry far, far more chlorophyll.

Quote from: Uli on March 13, 2024, 02:14:09 PMThe spiraling of Albuca spiralis leaves very much depends on the growing conditions,

And clone, but there is usually some spiralling. With so many broadly similar albuca species, it would take a novice with the genus, most of a lifetime to determine if that is A. s. or not.

Commercial nursery A. s. will almost certainly be grown either geographically far enough south to maximise curl and minimise costs, or grown further north under lights that maximise curl.

Purple form of Crinum asiatica (asiaticum?)

I am almost as guilty as the rest, but hobby growers seem almost never to use the traditional methods used for bulking up bulb stocks.

A great deal, almost all in all probability, of increasing of commercial stocks is now done via tissue culture, but traditional methods were scooping, scoring, scaling and various forms of leaf cuttings. The traditional methods are not exactly fast, overall, but they can produce large numbers of small plants, fast.

Quote from: Wylie on March 02, 2024, 02:45:10 AMI have been wondering how I could arrange an exchange for a certain bulb I have that just produced offsets. It requires a different bulb that it not closely related to to produce seeds,

Unless you know where your bulb came from and that there are or should be other genetically different bulbs available, it often turns out that the very few plants of a species in cultivation, are the same clone.
Often, the only way to be certain that plants are different clones, is if they are seed-grown and/or seed is available.

I don't believe that the (millions upon millions of) snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) appearing in UK woodlands have ever been checked, but they very seldon set seed and this has been a cause of speculation that all are very closely related, perhaps the same clone, that was introduced hundreds/thousands of years ago.

The PBS webpage for the species is very helpful.

Pasithea | Pacific Bulb Society

It is an uncommon UK garden plant - it is offered by a few nurseries selling garden plants rather than ones meant for indoor cultivation.
It naturally grows acoss much of Chile from sea level to high elevations.

Phyo-sanitary regulations within Europe and N America appear to have been universally tightened and moves made to more stictly enforce them.
That being so, shipping anything outside of your free trade zone, without phyto-sanitary certification, is a considerable risk.

Anything found entering the UK from another country without a cert', will be seized and incinerated.

Quote from: Martin Bohnet on February 22, 2024, 03:28:21 AMMaculatum actually has no spots at all in vast areas of origin

Here in the UK maculatum can be found with all the patterns above. Varying amounts of brown spots (some look black at a distance), usually small, is common, plain leaves are by far the commonest.

Take a look at Wurmbea and Colchicum (Androcymbium) pictures here on PBS or on one of the large SA seed websites - Lifestyle, Seeds and All, or Silverhill. Their flowers vary enormously species, to species.

That said, the leaves look pure Iridaceae. Gladiolus?

It does look very much like maculatum, but italicum is so variable too.

Although maculatum can cover the ground well enough, it seldom makes significant tight clumps of leaves, whereas italicum normally does.

Probably maculatum.

More folly, I just cannot understand how such waste of resources gets financed, for little more than garnishes.
The last section says it all.

One of UK's 'most advanced' vertical farm opens (msn.com)

I'd love to see some costings to understand the "logic". Especially at today's (or last year's) cost of electricity - so high, along with the price of gas, that many growers across Europe left their greenhouses cold and empty winter-spring 2022-2023.

Maybe the lighting is at a low level compared to producing anything but young plants/seedlings, which this sort of "farming" does. Maybe the plants have no time to etiolate?
Maybe the fast growth of seedlings allows fast enough turn-around of the growing space that output is high enough to offset the vast cost of running the growing room?

OK, admission first.......

Do I beleive any of the many and various claims about (house-) plants absorbing anything significant from the air?
No.
But I will work through any claims that people make, unless insanely daft before I even get that far.

The problem with trying to rationalise anything involving something like household conditions, including damp, is that there is never information about how and why things are damp, for how long, or when. There are countless imponderables.
However -
As a very general rule, the dew point inside an "average" UK house, will generally be about 1-2C higher than outdoors. There will be "stagnant pockets" of air that may creap higher (or even stay lower) in RH, but for mould to be a problem, not just a "dark mark" in a small corner of the room, we must be talking the bulk of any room.

Mould requires 70+% RH to really get going. At a room temperature of 20C, the air will contain something around 15g of water per cubic metre at that RH.
So let's say we need to be around 50% RH to be at least reasonably clear of mould, and the room is 20 cubic metres - quite small. So around 20 x 15 x (50/70) = 214g of water will have to be removed.

That assumes no more ingress of moisture.

Think about it.

I grow lots of Sansevieria, all indoors, I don't notice desication of anything.

The driver for bio-tech is money/profit, not the origins of any species. There are only a small handful of crop species that provide the vast majority of human (and livestock) calories world-wide - in no particular order - wheat, rice, maize, potatoes. All the rest, such as manioc, sweet potato, barley, sorghum, plantains, millet, bread fruit and such, are really very small beer on a world scale. 
Apart from calories, probably the next most important crop (some would argue more important than starch sources) would be a major protein sorce - soy - and that originates from? East Asia. 
Without soy, the livestock industry world-wide would be a very, very pale shadow of what it is today.

One of the very first genetically engineered crops that I heard of was rice - so-called golden rice, which produces beta-carotene within the grain.

Research on that started in 1982 with the first field trials in 2004. There is (or was), enormous resistance to growing it, despite the trully, almost incomprehensibly, vast amount of defficiency-induced disease it would help avoid.