Nymphoides aquatica

To: Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com
Subject: Nymphoides aquatica
From: trigg at jane_cs.waikato.ac.nz (Len Trigg)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 95 17:43:24
In-Reply-To: <199509121939.PAA31706 at looney_actwin.com> (from Aquatic-Plants-Owner at actwin_com) (at Tue, 12 Sep 1995 15:39:02 -0400)


I was just having a browse around the Krib, read the brief info
about propagating banana plants, and thought I'd share a recent
experience.

Around here banana plants aren't all that common.  I've seen them
for sale at a pet shop in Auckland for NZ$9.95 (~US$6) for
basically a (floating) leaf which has a few roots developing
a couple of inches beneath it.  A friend who isn't (currently)
successful with plants bought one, which did nothing except have
the leaf melt and grow a single pitiful submersed leaf.  At this
point he gave it to me.

We put it into my wife's tank and it started growing the
submersed form of leaf, and after half a dozen of these it
sent up its first floating leaf.  Not very large as floating
leaves go, it was only about 1.5in diameter.  Then during a
a waterchange/pruning my wife accidentally snipped the floating
leaf off.  Just to see what would happen, we left the floating
leaf with it's ~10in of trailing stem floating.  It started
to grow roots from the snipped end, and then began growing
submersed leaves from two points by the roots.  When big enough
we snipped these plants off and started them growing on their
own.

The moral of the story is, if a relatively small floating leaf
can produce two new plants, perhaps larger leaves could
repeatedly have developing plantlets separated, making for pretty
fast banana plant propagation.

Cheers,
	Len.
-- 
 Len Trigg ===================================================
 Comp Sci Grad   DoD#1334   trigg at cs_waikato.ac.nz             
 Waikato Uni     GPX250     http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~trigg          
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