Sunday, May 16, 2010

Anubias leaves’ vernation

My article “These mysterious leaves…” was published in the German magazine “Aqua Planta” №4/2009. In this article I touched upon some observations of Anubias leaves’ vernation. There are two possible directions of the convolute vernation: with right or left Archimedean spiral. More than that every individual bush has the same direction from leaf to leaf. The inflorescence’s spatha is rolled up similar to the leaflet. And it is important to mention that the offsets which have been received by the division of the rhizome have the same direction of the vernation, as the maternal plant has. But not so long ago it becomes known that there are several exceptions to this rule. So, Vladimir Surkov from Samara found out that on his bush of Anubias barteri “Coffeifolia” the main and side growing points formed the leaves with different vernation. Also Sergey Gerasimov from Kiev marks those hybrid seedlings from the same cross breeding have different vernation


A. barteri var. nana 'Golden' has convolute vernation along left Archimedean spiral (if we look from the end of the leaf):


Different directions of the leaf formation by vegetative relatives of Anubias barteri ‘Coffeifolia’:


Hybrid seeds from one and the same parents have different direction of vernation:


The author of this note: Dmitry Loginov.

The author used info from the next Web page: http://www.tropica.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=17816

Translated from Russian by Julia Niklyaeva and Alexander Grigorov

Photos: Sergey Gerasimov and Vladimir Surkov.