Dried Leaves

Some dried leaves do not leave.

On most horticultural sites, you get pictures of beautiful flowers and handsome plants. Here at Sinningia and Friends, you get... dead leaves!

A few years ago, I started noticing that some sinningia leaves defied tradition. Instead of disintegrating at the end of their cycle, the leaves of Sinningia defoliata dried up but remained intact (although fragile).  I now have leaves up to five years old which have not decayed. At first I attributed this durability to the waxiness of the leaves, which protected them from normal decay.

Now I have noticed the same effect in two other species, which do not have especially waxy leaves: Sinningia stapelioides and Sinningia tuberosa.

The picture above shows

• four leaves of S. defoliata (top row)
• one leaf of S. tuberosa (bottom row, left end)
• three leaves of S. stapelioides (formerly "Pancas") (remainder of bottom row)

These species can produce unifoliate plants, that have just one leaf at at time. On this page, you can see a picture of them (all three with one leaf each, along with another species S. helioana.