Tradescantia (Spiderwort, Wandering Jew) on balcony & in kitchen

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Tradescantia (Spiderwort, Wandering Jew) on balcony & in kitchen

I have a number of Tradescantia (Spiderwort, Wandering Jew) plants on our balcony & in our kitchen, not to mention one that has been in our living room for many years now.

I have T.zebrina & T.fluminensis. The first one I have had for as long as we have lived in this flat (16 years now) & have had many plants growing on top of the fridge in the kitchen which have trailed down its side.

I have just noticed that in the caption on this photo the “2” has become separated from “1st”! The caption should read “21st June 2017”!

Just last year I planted up one pot with cuttings of T.fluminensis. It joined the other 4 or 5 pots of T.zebrina on top of the fridge but really hasn’t done as well as the others.

T.fluminensis has small deep green shiny leaves with a purple underside, outside it produces lots of tiny, white flowers. T.zebrina has greyish stripes on silver-green leaves with a purple reverse to them.

T.zebrina has never flowered for me since growing it in the UK. When I used to grow it in Spain it never failed to produce delightful magenta-pink flowers. T. fluminensis has never flowered indoors for me (I never grew this one in Spain, only T.zebrina (I’ve just discovered that the variegated green/white form is also T.fluminensis but Variegata!)

The green one, T.fluminensis, came to me by accident. My daughter had bought me a Venus Flytrap plant for my birthday. On her way to our place she also bought a bottle of cologne water. Unbeknown to her at the time, while she was on the bus to here, the cap on the bottle came off! The poor plant got soaked in cologne water! In spite of what I tried to do to try to save it the poor plant died after a few days. On the day I went to throw it away I noticed a small green leaf at the base of the dead Venus Flytrap. Thinking that the plant might be recovering I decided not to throw it away but await developments. Within a couple of weeks, it was pretty obvious that the plant that was growing was NOT the Venus Flytrap recovering but a green leafed trailing plant!!!

That’s the story of how T.fluminensis came to end up in my hands!

As T.fluminensis flowers out on the balcony but not indoors I thought I would experiment with T.zebrina by growing it out on the balcony alongside T.fluminensis. I put pots of cuttings on the shelving on the balcony in a place I knew would get full sunshine (whenever there might be any during our notoriously fickle UK summers), in the hope I might see some flowers after 16 years. To my disappointment, neither of the two pots of plants produced any flowers!!! When I grew T.zebrina in Spain, indoors, never outdoors, it never ceased to flower!

Just today I put the two plants you see in the photos above both together in a bigger pot & took it into the kitchen.

Then I took out a pot of T.zebrina that wasn’t doing at all well & put this pot in its place. Seeing the plants that have been on the balcony all summer alongside those that have never been outside of the kitchen shows up a great deal of difference: the ones I put up today have much thicker leaves, they are darker & have bigger leaves. As you might expect the distance between leaves is shorter as well.

Finally, I took the T.fluminensis from the balcony into the kitchen & put it on top of the cupboard nearest the window so it will get plenty of light.

Since being back in the UK I haven’t grown any of the T.fluminensis ‘Variegata’ (White & green striped leaves) but I used to have lots of it in Spain. It used to produce lots of lovely 3 petalled flowers all summer long!

Nor do I have any plants of T.pallida, a purple leafed form with thick purple leaves & bright pink flowers. The stems are rather hairy (if memory serves me!)

• 12 Oct, 2017
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