Determine first if you have the male or female plant of skinneri.

Do the anthers actually produce pollen, Nick? They look kind of vestigial in the pic. And is that two stigmas in one flower? I'm confused. You may need to dissect more flowers, this one could be an aberration, particularly if you didn't see a stigma in the first one you opened.

Your plant looks just like mine, which I *think* is a female. I've never actually taken it apart, though, so I'm not 100% sure what either a normal female or male flower should look like, except that they should not have fully functional stamens AND pistil. I've never heard of a perfect one.

Nick,

As Lisa said, yours appears to be a female - the female has an stigma and stamen. UD is unsure whether the female is self fertile, I tried to encourage mine to self pollinate but despite the berries getting nice and fat no seeds eventuated.

Rick

Here is a link that might be useful: UD article

The UD article doesn't really make clear why they call it a female if it has anthers and is perfect, but I guess that is what I have. I had a male flower last year and it had no stigma and matches the male drawing in the UD article.

I'll try and see if the anthers have pollen, it looks that way to me. The problem I have is that the entire gynoecium is full of nectar, more nectar later in the day than early in the day. By 1pm drops of nectar are dripping out of the flowers. I'm surprised the bees haven't shown up yet. I did let the flower dry for a while after taking the pictures and it sure looked like I would be able to get some pollen from the anthers. Lisa, the stigma is your typical 3 lobed affair. The picture seems to make it look like it has 2 stiles but I think you are just seeing two of the lobes. I'll look at one more closely tomorrow and maybe not cut the flower off so close to the petals.

Here is last year's male flowers, they are a bit different from the flowers I have this year on this other skinneri.

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Here are fresh pics of the stigma/female flower. Cross pollinating this is pretty easy.

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I guess it really is perfect. I got some self set seeds. The first berry I yanked off had two decent size, dark red seeds. Very few of the berries appear to have self set. I suppose that they could be natural hybrids but I had almost nothing in bloom last December when the skinneri was in bloom.

I talked to a guy in Miami who grew some skinneri from seeds. I never asked if they were self set or not but now I guess they were selfs.

Nick,

I tried unsuccessfully to get mine to self, the berries looked promising but produced no seeds.

Rick

From HEL: "A 2nd sp of Androlepis from S. Mex and Guat is monoecious, Leme and I will publish it, its been around for 20 years from Alfredo Lau via J.Anderson."

So maybe this is what I have?