£13.00 – £20.00
Young rooted plant or 12cm cutting, Xaxim mounted, and bare-cutting.
This is a tropical shingle plant, typically found growing epiphytically up treebark in their natural rainforest environment. They make for outstanding background cover and will wind their way upwards, creating beautiful and dense areas of colour and texture.
Mounted cuttings will be attached on a 14cm xamim panel. Xaxim panels are compressed blocks of tree fern, sustainable New Zealander farms, that replicates the moist conditions of tropical bark. Great for establishing expansive backgrounds.
Marcgravia species can be a little tricky to maintain until they are fully established as their needs are quite specific. They should be closely observed for the first month and kept an eye on until they begin pushing out new growth. As shingle plants, they love attaching themselves to moist objects that they can use to grow up towards the light. If you use their natural environment of growing up damp tree bark in high-humidity tropical environments as a start-point, you should not go too far wrong.
If they are mounted, they can immediately be positioned in their growing enviornment and their panels should be kept moist. If they are unmounted, they should be placed on top of damp sphagnum moss and allowed to root into the moss. Chances of success can also be improved by pinning loose strands to areas of dampness within the, background to ensure the the full length of the plant can remain in contact with a source of moisture.
When stressed, these plants begin to drop leaves. This can occur for a variety of reasons, but in my experience is generally caused by too little humidity/moisture, or changes in their ambient humidity. Marcgravia also seems to hate water sitting on its leaves for periods of time, so care should be given to allow their leaves dry in-between spraying.
Please bare in mind, this can make them a bit tricky to keep in perfect condition in the transitions between postage and their new home environment and while leaf-dropping is not certain, it should be kept in mind. However, losses will be recovered when the plant is used to its environment and it will begin to push out new growth again at a good rate. Even a plant suffering from heavy die-off can be recovered when good conditions are returned!
