Spider Plant Flowering Experiment

A year or so ago, Lucy's mum kindly gave us a pot of three spider plants. I'd not had one before and had never seen them flower, so decided to find out how to get ours to flower.

The spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) hails from tropical and Southern Africa and was first formally described by the celebrated Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg as Anthericum comosum in 1794; after being moved around in a taxonomic version of musical chairs, it eventually ended up in the genus, Chlorophytum in 1862. Chlorophytum comosum has a small selection of popular variegated cultivars.
Ours, I think being C. comosum 'Vittatum'.

As our house isn't gifted with those magical windowsills that are described on many 'house plant' labels, I decided that when summer came around, I'd move our spider plant into the porch. The porch is South facing, small and is mainly made of windows - an ideal location for a plant of tropical regions. I knew that I'd done something right with the thin, dull leaves suddenly became lush and thick with a vivid green colouration. I left it spend a month or so in the porch and then started splitting its time in between the porch and its rightful place in our living room.

By October I had the first sign that something was occurring. In the centre of the photo to the left, you can see that a short shoot has begun to grow. From then on I kept the plant in the living room as I didn't want it to spend resources on growing more leaves, but instead to concentrate on the shoot.
 

The shoot became quite long reaching around 30 cm. Spaced along the stem were groups of two or three flower buds. There didn't seem to be any order to the flowering along the stem, but each flower last for a day. At the end of the stem was a group of leaves, what would become a plantlet. The stem, which as you can see in this photograph is strong enough to hold itself in the air, eventually droops down. This is presumably so that in its native habitat the plantlet would be touching soil and would then begin to root. As it happens the plantlet became quite strong, so I dipped it into some rooting compound and planted it when I re-potted the spider plants. In any case, we can see that this stem is not only for sexual reproduction, but also asexual reproduction - why settle for one if you can have both!

As you can see in the photograph above, the flower of the spider plant is lovely to look at. It has six white-ish tepals that can be quite transparent. Moving inwards, there are a group of stamens that surround a single style. The seeds develop in a capsule, as can be seen in the photograph below. This photograph shows the end of the stem, or long branched inflorescence, along with some flower buds and a flower that has just gone over.

In conclusion, as the flowers only last a single day, even with three plants throwing out a flowering stems each, there are very few flowers. If it weren't for the leaves which provide year round interest, I doubt it would have been so successful as a house plant. I don't think I'll encourage it to flower again as the plant just becomes too big and too messy. When I came to re-pot the plants, I found very little else other than thick fleshy roots. I have reduced the pot to two adult plants (severely pruned) and one of the plantlets (dipped in rooting compound for good measure). However, it was an interesting experiment as I've not grown a plant that has a long branched inflorescence before, especially on that doubles as a stolon.

As I like to do, I had a look at some parts of the flower under the microscope. So, I'll sign off and leave you with those! If you have any questions or thoughts, please use the comment form below.

Here's the anther, which is located at the end of the filament.
In the plants I have, the anther is yellow/orange,
but I have seen photos of spider plants with white anthers;
presumably a different cultivar.

In this micrograph, I have cut open the capsule to reveal
the developing ovules. Given some more time these would be seeds.

Finally, here is a micrograph of some spider plant pollen.