A. elephas

[Roy Herold]

Ray Stilwell writes:

>Elephas did as follows:
>
>  Source      Days   Radicle         No.      Leaves        Days
>  Tony         32       40%           21          0         over a year
>  Roy         286       32%            7          0         over a year
>

I am amazed at the difference in results between the seeds from Tony and
myself. In actuality, most of Tony's seeds were collected by me at Tianchi
Lake, and I gave them to him after I cleaned the first thousand or so and
tired of the exercise. We cleaned the seeds in the same water in the same
hotel in China, and they got carried around in the same truck until we flew
back to the US.

I planted my seeds in February using the conventional method, in soil in
pots. They germinated that spring (I have no idea of the exact number of
days-- probably two months), and formed little green tubers that are still
awaiting their chance to send up leaves. When they do, there should be a
glut of A. elephas on the market as never seen before.

I am pleased to report that the two A. elephas tubers I brought back seem
to form offsets, so this one should be fairly easy to propagate. The single
flower I got this spring wasn't too happy and did not set seed-- but it did
look like the pictures.

One note about the habitat of A. elephas: It was growing in an area that
was radically different from any other arisaemas we encountered in Yunnan,
and seemed to be quite selective about where it liked to grow. A.
consanguineum, for instance, grew everywhere and anywhere-- wet, dry, sun,
shade, you name it. A. elephas was in a narrow band about twenty feet from
the shore of Tianchi Lake, at 12,000 feet, in dense fir/rhododendron
forest, mixed with some sort of deciduous tree remininscent of a beech.The
ground was quite thick with leaf litter, and the arisaemas were growing in
that as opposed to soil. Go either direction (uphill, downhill) for ten
feet and they disappeared. This was as close to virgin, first-growth forest
as anything we encountered in Yunnan. The trees were huge, and many had
been cut just a couple of hundred yards away. By the time we got there on
October 19, there had obviously been heavy frosts, and the leaves had
nearly disappeared. If not for the red berries, I doubt if we could have
found them. There may have been a second species mixed in-- taller and more
resistant to frost, but I have no idea (yet) if this is truly the case.

Craig: am I correct in assuming that there weren't many A. elephas
donations to the seed exchange this year?

--Roy
(with a good six inches of snow on the frozen tundra)