I like the smell of dragons blood incense but I don't want to buy it if it's from an endangered species.
In before someone makes a joke about it being from real mythical dragons
I like the smell of dragons blood incense but I don't want to buy it if it's from an endangered species.
In before someone makes a joke about it being from real mythical dragons
Dragon's Blood is a resin produced by a pretty large variety of species in a few genera, but is mostly cultivated from a handful of species in Dracaena and Calamus (formerly Daemonorops)
While historically the endangered Dracaena cinnabari and Dracaena draco were somewhat common sources in the incense trade of antiquity, today the majority is from rattan palms like Calamus rotang or less commonly (although seemingly more commonly in marketing) from Calamus draco which are extremely common and widespread across Asia, Africa, and Australia. The likelihood of getting something from an endangered source is slim to none.
(As always, happy to answer further taxonomy and botany questions, especially if this isn't a sufficient answer)
I would love more botanyposting
My biggest barrier to botanyposting is not knowing what people want to know about.
I want to know how to remember all the damn terminology
I'm genuinely terrible at it, I constantly have to play a game of "Let's Ask The Internet" and find out which of the like 50 genera in asteracea something is because I can't remember shit when it comes to taxonomy. I'm pretty good with botanical phenotypes and phylogeny.
I want to know why over watering a succulent kills it, and why it happens so quickly. I've heard you're almost not supposed to water it, but after ignoring one I was gifted it started to look bad then died after I watered it.
And I'm not talking a deluge, just enough to get the soil moist.
You don't even really want the soil to be moist with succulent plants. Their roots are incredibly effective at soaking up water like a sponge, and their stems (and leaves, if they have them) are like balloons. Just like balloons, they burst if overfilled.
Plants don't really pull in water with intention, so they're not going to take only the amount they need. If you've overwatered a succulent you can't just leave it in the pot and hope the water dries up. It's just gonna keep soaking it up and damaging itself so you need to remove it from the pot and get the soggy soil off of its roots. You'll wanna do this maybe every couple of weeks or so.
These plants have evolved to need little water given incredibly sparingly. For little baby ones, an eyedropper of water might even be too much. The trick is to soak the water but make sure that it all gets soaked up ordries really quickly, within a couple of hours at most. The soil should be pretty gritty and a bit loose. Not like you'd see for regular plants.
I don't really understand these dudes. Succulents are wack. They're not even all in the same family, they're just a bunch of random plants from different families that all evolved to do the same wild shit. If you have a lot of trouble with them like I do, try air plants instead.
You're actually supposed to give succulents thorough, infrequent watering. The roots die back when it's dry and then they grow new ones to absorb water when it arrives. There needs to be enough water to make it worth the energy investment to grow new roots. These roots are susceptible to rot, so the soil needs to dry out quickly to control soil bacteria and fungi. If the soil is kept moist, the microbes take over, eat the roots, and kill the plant.
I think this is what happened. There's no recovering it is there?
It depends on the species and how dead it's looking. If this happened recently, you could try to pull off some of the more alive-looking leaves or pups and try to root them. If it's a columnar cactus, you can cut off the top and see if the rot has reached all the way up. If the tissue looks healthy, you can leave the cut top out somewhere sunny until it calluses over, then plant it.
Wow botany can be fucking metal sometimes.
You wanna talk about literal metal botany, check out the hyperaccumulator Pycnandra acuminata native to Kanaky. It grows in this super nickel-rich soil and it produces this gorgeous turquoise latex that's 25% nickel citrate by dry weight.
Hyperaccumulators are really interesting and could be super important for bioremediation efforts in coming years.