Cryptocoryne pygmaea spathe
Cryptocoryne pygmaea is a relatively rarer Cryptocoryne species from Philippines. It is an easy plant to grow in emersed culture. I have been growing it my freshwater crypt set-up since April, 2009. I used 80% ADA Aquasoil Amazonia and 20% pure laterite as the substrate to grow this crypt.
C pygmaea gets its name due to the very small spathe compared to the size of the plant. At times the kettle can be completely buried in the substrate with just the limb of spathe visible above. The kettle of spathe in the above pictures was about half buried in the substrate. I had to slightly dig around base to expose the complete kettle.
Noticeable feature of the spathe was the rough inner surface of the limb. The spathe was about 3 cm in size. I wanted to slice open the kettle to take pictures of the male and female flowers but decided against it as the kettle appeared almost fused with the rosette.
If seen from the top the spathe is almost invisible with just the a small part of limb sticking out. I spotted the spathe developing about 3 weeks back. The spathe finally opened up last Saturday.
Spathe two days before opening.
Staurogyne sp. ‘Low Grow’ bloom.
10G “Mountains of the Monsoon”
Rotala rotundifolia
Rotala sp. ‘Nanjenshan’
E.cordifolius flower
Hydrocotyle sp
Nelumbo lutea (American lotus)
This guy was not so accomodating.
Cryptocoryne wendtii ‘Florida Sunset’ was introduced to the hobby by Florida Aquatic Nursery(FAN) in November of 2008 at the AGA convention. It was not until March,2009 that FAN started shipping out this plant to its distributors. C.wendtii ‘Florida Sunset’ is a variant of C.wendtii ‘Mi oya’. In emersed culture the leaves are brown with shades of pink and small amount of white.
C.wendtii ‘Florida Sunset’ is a easy plant to grow both emersed and submerged. It loses its variegated form underwater.This Cryptocoryne is extremely easy to flower. My plant send out a spathe approximately one month after it was planted in my emersed set-up and has been putting out spathes continuously since then.
The twisted yellow limb of the spathe is clearly visible in the picture above. This is not typical of a C. wendtii limb which is generally reddish brown. The deep brown collar is fairly pronounced.
A cross-section of the kettle shows a short spadix.
P.hydropeperoides growing in its natural habitat at Armand Bayou Nature Center, Pasadena , Texas.
ADA Mini-M
As Mike and team prepared for the presentation some of the people who had arrived early spent some time pouring over Aqua Journals and gazing at the relaxing aquascapes in the ADG confrence room.
Ghazanfar And John
Ghazanfar, Thanh and Dave
Mike was setting up a ADA 90P for this demonstration. He had decided to do a divided substrate set up with ADA Bright Sand in the front and AquaSoil Amazonia in the back.
John And Luis , helping Mike.
The finished scape.
Mary Beth excited about her prize.
Kevin trying to sell me some Anubias minima.
Valerie’s Lake House
Checking out crystal clear water at Aquarena Springs
John looks pretty excited.
Dave trying to grab some Fissiden fontanus.
The group headed further down the river where we spotted a lot of Hygrophila polysperma , Potamogeton illinoensis, Ceratopteris thalictroides and Ecihhornia crassipes. It was really disheartening to see the river choked with these introduced species.
