21 Varieties . . .

We're going to have another African violet lesson today.  A hard lesson.

After sharing the blossom photos with you last week, I figured I should spend a little more time with the plants, so I started to disbud them all, one at a time, so I can still enjoy some blossoms for awhile to come..

Much to my great sadness, the beautiful K's Tipsy Spritzer (dark lavender blossom, darker smoky edge) that you saw in that previous post has gone to its Great Reward.

:-(

Why?

It suckered at the crown.

What does that mean?

Well, unless an African violet is a trailer - which is by its nature a multi-crowned plant - it's supposed to have a single crown.  We remove suckers that pop up so as not to damage the symmetry of the plant, and if you inadvertently leave one on a show plant and a judge finds it, the plant will not be judged.

I definitely have had suckers on many of my plants.  It happens particularly when a plant is stressed, which happens when you put it on a pre-show schedule, or keep it disbudded over a long period of time.  But you look for those - they generally happen somewhere on the neck of the plant or near the soil line.  You especially look right before show so that you've removed anything that shouldn't be there - like a sucker.  You pop it off and move on.

But when a plant suckers at the crown, it has, essentially, split into two plants and that's a different story altogether.

Let's take a look . . .

Here is a trailer you've seen before - there are a TON of crowns on this plant of Cajun's McKenna Trail.

This next photos is of a trailer called Lituanika.

As their descriptions state, they trail. In order to trail, they have to have multiple crowns.  This plant is very much a baby - obviously - and so far it's been a PITA.  It's growing really, really slowly.  So slowly that it showed no signs of trailing on its own.  So I pinched out its center leaves - its crown - to force it to sucker (i.e., trail).

Not all trailers need this "help" to trail.  Cajun's McKenna Trail trails wildly all on its own and it grows like a snowball :-) You can see that the main center crown has been pinched out and see the multiple new crowns on Lituanika starting in this photo.

And here is a single-crown standard violet.  One crown, in the center, where it's supposed to be.  This is Jersey Snow Flakes. 
 

 Here is another from a better angle - one you've seen before, Knight Rider.  See that center?  It's a single crown - three good size leaves with another set of three just starting there at about 10 and 2 o'clock.

And here is the crown of K's Tipsy Spritzer, which should be a single-crown plant and look very similar to the photo of Knight Rider, above.  It doesn't.  :-S

You can see that there are way too many leaves in that crown.  In fact, you can't really tell where the original crown actually is.  That's because it's splitting there and forming a second one.

There are a couple of options, but neither one of them is good:

1. You could try to figure out which one is the main one and pull off the other; but I think you can clearly see that that's very difficult to do.  And even if you could figure it out, the plant would never be properly centered afterward.  Plus, the removed crown will want to grow back - and it will bring friends along - even more crowns, the way a trailer does when you pinch out the center leaves to force it to trail (see the photo of Lituanika, above).  The crown is the active growing center of the plant - if you remove something there, it's going to come back.  In spades.
2. You would also think that you could start again and regrow a new plant from a leaf of this one, but this type of problem is usually a genetic issue, which means that taking a leaf of the plant will likely produce another that will also sucker at the crown - after months of care.  

To confirm my own knowledge, I checked with my friend, Joyce, who was a frequent guest on my former podcast and is a true expert.  She said, "toss it."  I knew she would, but still, I'm kinda bummed because I grew this one from leaf that was gifted to me by the hybridizer, and I've nurtured this plant for well over a year.  It was well on its way to becoming a show-worthy standard.

So it goes in the life of a show grower.

I'm down to 21 varieties.