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Re: Gunnera

Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2014 7:20 pm
by johnw
Probably because yours is not in very wet soil. They do the short stem thing here in a regular bed that does not have constant irrigation.

Re: Gunnera

Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 12:22 pm
by Alan_L
Are you leaving the plant alone now, or still taking divisions every year? It may be a maturity thing. (Just a guess since I can't grow this here)

Re: Gunnera

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2014 10:13 pm
by stevelau1911
The gunnera manicata died after I divided out too much and transplanted a remaining section so I went with gunner tinctoria which seems to be basically the same exact thing. I have never done any dividing off any of these yet.

This species has clearly upsized, each at least doubling in biomass from what they were at last year. The bulbs just keep getting bigger and bigger.

Leaves look like they are done for the year, but the size of the corms has definitely increased since the start of October as shown in the second picture.
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Image

Re: Gunnera

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2014 10:32 pm
by needmore
stevelau1911 wrote:The gunnera manicata died after I divided out too much and transplanted a remaining section so I went with gunner tinctoria which seems to be basically the same exact thing. I have never done any dividing off any of these yet.

This species has clearly upsized, each at least doubling in biomass from what they were at last year. The bulbs just keep getting bigger and bigger.

Leaves look like they are done for the year, but the size of the corms has definitely increased since the start of October as shown in the second picture.
Image
Image

Would you consider settling for rhubarb instead?

Re: Gunnera

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2014 10:40 pm
by stevelau1911
I would consider growing rhubarb too, but really want to see how big I can get this plant to grow.

When I had the gunnera manicata in the same bed as the blueberries, it achieved nearly 4ft diameter leaves at one point in time, and started dominating everything around it. Now I have mine under an apply tree, and pine trees so I really doubt they can out-grow their surroundings.

Re: Gunnera

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2014 12:16 pm
by Nicholas
needmore wrote: Would you consider settling for rhubarb instead?
Isn't that like settling for Arundo donax if you actually want bamboo ;-)

I've got a few gunnera seedlings that have just started to sprout from my local botanical gardens ( I pinched off some branches of the flower stem containing seeds)
Seeds I ordered through the net before were totally non-viable.

We'll see how that turns out. The plants are labelled as tinctoria but the flowers strongly suggest manicata.

To anyone trying to tell tinctoria (scabra) and manicata apart I find that this illustration http://www.plantillustrations.org/illus ... ion=199299 is pretty neat.

There are images on the net that show flower stalks that clearly look like those illustrations for tinctoria but many more that look like manicata or an intermediary form between the two.
It would be really interesting to know if hybridization between tinctoria and manicata is very common and hence there is a lot of difficulty and confusion in telling them apart.