Hi everyone.

Cyrille - A few years back I bought a supposedly tissue cultured plant
of Alc. imperialis Rubra from our local Bunnings (Yes, surprisingly it did have
a name tag on it).

It produced several small grass pups while it was still young which I
planted and five eventually grew to reasonable size plants (about 12" across).

The main plant grew and grew until it was too large for my
garden so I gave it to a friend and at this stage it's about four feet across,
but still only has what I would describe as smokey/green coloured leaves with just the faintest hint of rubra colouring on the very tip of the leaves.

My thoughts were either the plant was wrongly named; or
somewhere during the tissue culturing process the genes have been muddled up
causing it to lose the rubra colouring; or maybe it's a "sport", and
as I have little experience with this genera
I don't know the answer.

The thing is that one of the five grass pups that grew is a
different colour from the other four and during the winter months took on a
definite rubra colouring very similar to that of your plant, (See top Pic.) however
now that summer is here that colour has changed back to more of an unattractive
dirty greenish colour (See middle Pic.).

Although faded, there is still one leaf showing a hint of
what the winter colouring was like (See Bottom Pic.).

Is it possible that something similar is what has happened
to the plant you show in your pictures and as the seasons change it will lose its colour as well?

All the best, Nev.

Hi Nev, thank you so much for your response. You certainly make an excellent point and I will keep an eye on it. All my other Imperialis have lost quite a bit of colour this season except for this one. I'll monitor it and see if it changes in a few months.

Thank you.

-Cyrille.

Cyrille,

Alcantarea Purple Skotak often displays nice colour like that when young, I'd like to see some of your other Alcs and seedlings if you have time to put some photos up.

Cheers,

Rick

Thanks Rick, it's starting to make more and more sense, as I did collect grass pups from one of my purple cabbages a few years back, and she's about the right age. I've posted a few photos of my other Alcs. in the other thread.

Here's something people might find interesting, when collecting grass pups, sometimes they just snap and it seems like they are lost...but I somehow came up with the idea of letting them "dry" for three to four weeks (still misting the leaves), and then plant them in a very draining mix, usually 50% volcanic rock and 50% perlite, and they just soldier on. Sometimes I've actually been too lazy to do the drying/misting thing and planted them directly in Mum's pot (100% volcanic rock) and they didn't seem to be bothered. One time, a snapped pup was so...snapped that i could see right through the cup, well, it still grew!

My best damaged alcantarea success story was when i had wild pigs coming at night when I was away and they chewed a fairly advanced Alcantarea, to the point where it seemed I only had a few leaves left attached together.. I didn't despair, i let the whole thing dry up a bit and put it in pot in rock, ...after a few months the plant grew itself back by shooting another plant out of its "remains", not a grass up, a full plant, I couldn't believe it.

They are very though plants.

-Cyrille