The image below and to the right is the normal Norton’s Elaine ((AVSA Reg# 9673) 07/31/2006 (J.Norton)). Note the green leaf and listed in First Class(AVSA directory of all African violet cultivars) as medium green leaf coloration. As you can see the blooms are a chimera dark blue with white stripe bell-shaped blooms. As with numerous other observations I have had propagating chimera African violets, when I see a change in the leaf color, long before the bloom I know it will not bloom true. I have not yet had one single leaf change in color that did not produce a change in bloom. In Norton’s Elaine, the change from medium green leaf color to dark green leaf color has always resulted in dark blue (purple) blooms with loss of the chimera trait as below on the left-hand side. Click on the image to enlarge it.
8E Danse Macabre has always fascinated me, from the name of the plant to the various images you can find on the web and the variations of it. The above image is of a plant I acquired this past fall. To the best of my knowledge, 8E Danse Macabre is not registered with the AVSA as I cannot find it in their database called “First Class” (which contains over 19,000 unique African violets). But images can be found on “Google Images” and there is noticeable variation among the same cultivar. For example, if you click on Image#1 is the first 8E Danse Macabre I had ever seen and is probably one of the most striking in my opinion. I acquired a sucker of it about four years ago and as you can see below, the outcome in terms of bloom was nothing like the original “Image 1” or the image above.
Image #3 specifically has the nice white around the petal edges but also I am seeing (as is in my plant also ) more speckled purple fantasy on the bloom. Although all the plant bloom images I can find have the purple stripes in the center with pink coloration between them the variability appears to be in the amount of white margin along the edges and the degree if any of purple fantasy. Regardless, it is a most interesting plant in name and image. As always, you can click on the above images to enlarge.
A recent e-mail discussion and a conversation I had several weeks prior prompted me to post this. There is increasing interest in variegated foliage and there is confusion if the foliage is a chimera expression or the result of pure variegation and not a chimera expression. I think in many people’s minds one equals the other. But it does not.
Little Stinker Leaf Chimera
The above image is a large plant, almost 12 inches across. The variegation of the leaves is the consequence of a true chimera leaf situation. The below image is non-chimera variegation.
Variegated Leaf (non-chimeral)
So what is the difference? There are several sources. A rather technical explanation can be read and downloaded if interested by clicking here.
A second explanation (easier to follow) focuses ONLY on chimera variegation with some very nice illustrations that can be reviewed by clicking here.
Simply stated from reading both articles, all variegated plants are not chimeras. The determining factor is how the color pattern is controlled. IF the variegation is the result of gene expression that is positionally dependent instead of variegation that is dependent on the genetics of the multiple genotypes in the plant then the plant is NOT a chimera. You can determine which is your plant by taking a leaf cutting and see what the leaf colors look like while concurrently reproduce a second plant using typical stem propagation (apical meristem). If the leaf and stem plantlets you produce look the same it is not a chimera. If on the other hand, the leaf plantlets look different then the parent leaves and the stem plantlet produced plants identical to the parent, then your parent plant is a chimera leaf plant.
The above image is the of Mauna Loa (Eyerdom)06/23/1998 AVSA Reg # 5336. The flower is a single chimera light rose star with a dark red stripe. The Foliage is dark green with red on the underside of the leaf. The plant size at maturity is that of a standard African violet size plant. About 5 years ago I noticed one flower stem produced two blooms on the stalk where both blooms had 6 petals. This happens on occasion but African violets will usually produce 5 petals per bloom with some variation like an occasional 6 or a rare 4 petal bloom.
What I did when I saw the two 7 petal bloom was tissue culture the stalk with the intent of producing a plant that has Mauna Loa flowers made up of 6 petals on each flower bloom. That was the goal. So the next generation plant was about 70% 6 petal blooms with a few blooms with 7 petal blooms and a couple of blooms with the standard 5 petals. I kept going (selecting the stalks with the most petals and producing another plant. I believe it was on the 4th generation of pushing this concept that ALL the petals of all the blooms on the plant looked like this! (below image)
Mutation of Mauna Loa
Not only were there NO 6 or 7 petal blooms, but the standard 5 petals Mauna Loa were smaller and pointed petals that were the result of the petal folding around. Not very attractive to be sure. And every single bloom looks like the above. This is not what I wanted, but apparently, what I want and what nature is willing to provide is different and nature always wins. (Click on the images to enlarge).
A couple of months ago I posted about the possible sporting of a Yukako to a double sport (Leaf Chimera and a Flower Chimera). Both situations must be demonstrated individually. It is easier or perhaps quicker to determine if the plant is a leaf chimera then a flower chimera. To ascertain if the leaf is a chimera or not one just needs to take the leaf and insert the leaf stem into a soil media and keep it moist (see above).
Within 2 months plantlets were produced. You can see in the above image the parent (original chimera leaf cutting) with the bi-color leaf (chimera). The plantlets produced have a majority of leaves as seen in “B” that are dark in color. Fewer leaves “A” are light green colored. And there are NO plantlets with the same bicolored (chimera) leaves.
I was able to separate out 6 plantlets and as you can see this demonstrates clearly that none of the plantlets are demonstrating bi-colored leaves. This is what one would expect if the parent leaf was a true chimera. It cannot be replicated by a leaf-cutting propagation method, just as a flower chimera cannot be replicated from a leaf cutting propagation process. This proves the point that the parent plant did in fact sport to a leaf chimera. I repeated this experiment with several more chimera leaves from the parent plant and the outcomes were the same, producing a majority of dark green-leaved plants and a minority of the lighter leaved plants and no chimera leaf plants.
Now the next step which will take about 6-8 months and that is to demonstrate this bloom is a chimera (or not).
About six months ago I purchased my first leaf chimera African violet, “Little Stinker”. (I wonder about the back story on the unusual name). I must admit as my focus has been on chimera blooms, I have had no experience with leaf chimera African violets. As I propagated a few from this plant pulling off suckers, I have noticed ever so slight variations in leaf patterns between the parent and plantlet. It just so happens that in the January/February 2020 African Violet Magazine, on page 19, a question was submitted. Question–“Can leaf chimera plants change over time? I have seen plants of Harmony’s Little Stinker that look very different from each other.” The response was yes. That leaf chimeras can shift over time. In some ways but to a lesser impactful way, this happens with the blooms of chimera African violets. I posted about the bloom variation sometime ago. If interested click here.
Also not too long ago I had a small sucker of my Yukako mutate to form a plant with chimera leaves. It is not as symmetrical or as strikingly different as seen in Little Stinker but never the less they are chimera leaves. Click on any of the images to enlarge.
New Leaf Chimera African Violet Mutated From Yukako
I have been growing Yachiyo tabata for a while and it is generally a very stable chimera African violet, in that stem culture after stem culture I know the probability is very high that the plantlet that will be produced will be a representation of the parent plant. Below is a typical Yachito tabata. Some times it has six petals usually five.
What I find so interesting and appealing about these blooms is that every single bloom is different. Some have a pink and blue fantasy with few blue stripes, some have more and the patterns in each bloom on the same plant are different. Sort of like snowflakes. Each is different. The other day one of the plants I produced by a stem culture bloom surprised me in how it bloomed as is seen below.
Yachiyo tabata Sport
Note where the purple and pink fantasy colors occurred on the standard Yachiyo as compared to this one. Where it was pure white on the typical Yachiyo tabata we now have the purple and pink fantasy. And where that fantasy existed on the standard Yachiyo is now pure white. The patterns reverses position! I already put this stem into tissue culture and we will see what we can get from it. It should be noted on the flower stem that this bloom came from an initial bloom first appeared that was a mess. It looked a bit like this bloom and a bit like the standard. I put the plant on the side to discard. But before I could send it off to the mulch pile this bloom appeared. So I am not certain of the outcome but we will not know unless we try by culturing the stem and seeing what the blooms look like. We should have an outcome in about 9 months (August /September time frame).
Back in July of this year, I had a number of Humako Sweet’s that I had grown from flower stem via tissue culture but they were not blooming and the dark green leaves were turning reddish. In some cases, the reddish color was giving away to almost a transparency of the leaf. See leaf A as compared to leaf B below.
Humako Sweet Leaves – Click to Enlarge Image
Plants were not wilting but growth appeared slow. There was no visible sign of a fungus or insect infestation or even its presence. My attention then turned to perhaps a virus infection. Was it the ” Impatiens necrotic spot virus” or for that matter one of the others that impact African violets? But the one odd thing that stood out was the leaf color change was only impacting two different plant varieties. The leaves of Humako Sweet as shown above and the leaves of my Neptune Jewels which are a lighter green leaf illustrated below. Leaf C is what all the leaves were changing to on the Neptune Jewels while Leaf D is the normal color.
Neptune’s Jewels Leaves – Click to Enlarge Image
What was happening? Do I submit leaves to viral analysis? All the other plants appeared fine, although I admit glowing slower than normal.
It just so happened that I attended a local Gesneriad meeting. There was a taped presentation from the National Gesneriad Society. About 3/4 through the presentation they showed a plant whose leaves were reddish and parts almost transparent while other leaves turned yellowish. The presenter noted that at first viral infestation was expected but that in reality, the true root cause was the temperature of the room it was growing in was very cool. At that moment it all came together!
I grow my plants in the basement of my house. It was July and it was hot outside and the air conditioning was running. The basement had the ductwork running through the ceiling of the basement and there were a number of vent openings that would cool the basement that was naturally on the cool side. I immediately purchased a thermometer and noted that the temperature in the evening would get down to between 16-18 degrees centigrade.
I closed the vents in the basement from the air conditioner, and within a few days temperature was in the 22-25 degree centigrade range and has been maintained in that range. All the red and yellow leaf color changes have stopped forming on the younger leaves (which are all green now) and remain green as the leaves mature. Only on the older leaves is the issue seen. But as the older leaves die off, evidence of the problem is disappearing. So I guess Humako Sweek and a Neptune Jewels are good indicator plants when the growing area is getting too cool. Their leaves turn colors like trees in autumn.
Very recently I used a tissue culture method to propagate Neptunes Jewels. In the past, I was able to generate numerous plants all true to the parent as illustrated below. (Click on the images to enlarge them)
What was interesting is as the plants developed the true Neptune’s Jewels plants retained the green leaf pigment (top and bottom of the leaf. Two of the plant’s leaves developed darker green leaves with red underleaf pigment. I knew these two plants were going to bloom differently and they did. Below is the first plant with dark green leaves that bloomed. Note the change in leaf color that was the tip-off that the chimera had sported.
The First Sport of Neptunes Jewels
The second plant in the batch to sport also had dark green leaves with red underleaf pigment.
The Second Sport of Neptunes Jewels.
The bottom line is as you are propagating chimera African violets, the first very reliable clue that one of the plants will not be genetically true will be the observation that phenotypically the leaf color, shape or texture has changed.
As first discussed in my June 2019 post, a couple of my Yukako’s sported into what appears to be chimera leaves. Referring back to the image of June 1st you can see the dark green outer rims of the leaf and the lighter green inner section. See the image below.
Chimera Green Leaves
The above image was taken about 4 months ago and it was prior to and blooms developing. The initial blooms were very cupped and I really did not pay much attention assuming it would be a dark purple as I have seen before. The plant is bigger and the blooms are now more developed as this image was taken a few days prior to this posting. Click on the image below to enlarge it.
Sport of Yukako
Now if you closely examine the bloom it appears to be a chimera bloom.
Bloom of Chimera Leaf Sport of Yukako
Note the dark almost black petal edges (A) and the lighter purple center stripes (B). It does have that pinwheel look. The bottom petal which is not fully extended and pointing outward even has this coloration all be it not as pronounced. It will take time and a couple of generations (and years) to see if this is all genetically stable and truly a double chimera. Click on the images above to get a clearer and larger image.
As you see more and more new chimera African violets, many with large double blooms in a wide array of colors and shades (oftentimes not very stable between generations), I have come to notice that the old standards are seen less and less and increasingly more difficult to find. Kilauea is one of them. Hybridizer Eyerdom (Reg# 6808 1/15/1988) this vintage chimera plants is a perfect example of the “vintage” chimera African violets. Simple in bloom structure and pattern yet distinct and complex in that the patters like snowflakes vary from bloom to bloom.
Kilauea (bloom just opened) Click to enlarge
The above image is of a newly opened bloom of Kilauea. Below the bloom is several weeks old. This is one durable plant that appears very staple genetically. As mentioned above every single bloom is different.
Chimera African Violet Kilauea Bloom
It should be noted that the blooms of Kilauea are very 3 dimensional in that the bottom petal (as in the above picture) sticks out about 30 degrees from the rest of the bloom into a different plane. The two side petals are flat and 90 degrees to the ground and the two top petals are forward about 10 degrees. So how did I get this all in focus? I took 13 pictures and using “Helicon Focus 6” software overlayed them keeping only the focus parts of each image, then combining them resulting in the above image.
This month’s theme is “Not A Chimera”. Earlier this year I was looking to purchase Rob’s Mirriwinni. I found a site on eBay that was selling one. The picture on eBay of what the bloom looked like was correct but was a picture of the parent plant, not the plant for sale. I purchased the young plant. Well after a few months it bloomed. And bloomed some more and the below image is what ALL the blooms looked like.
Not Rob’s Mirriwinni
For reference (below), this is what the blooms should look like.
Rob’s Mirriwinni
I contacted (e-mailed) the seller and asked a simple question with choices. Was the plant I purchased propagated from a sucker, a stem or a leaf? The response was immediate and direct. The response read…” from a leaf cutting”. Well as we know you can NEVER, EVER produce any chimera from a leaf cutting. I will not be doing any further business with that propagator. And maybe I need to start asking the propagation method question before I place a bid.
Now regarding an unrelated plant, I saw (Vat Car Goroh). This plant caught my attention and I thought immediately, this must be a chimera. But it is not. It is a standard African violet. It is a beautiful plant with variegated leaves and many of the blooms look like this. I actually propagated this plant (below) by a leaf cutting.
In the process of doing tissue culture to produce some chimera African violets, I noticed an actively growing tissue callus on the stem. It produced a small plant. I knew it was not going to be a chimera as only plantlets produced in the apical meristem region will produce a true chimera African violet. But I was curious as to what the bloom would look like of this strongly growing plantlet coming out of this callus tissue. The plant bloomed and the image is above. What is so stunning to me, was this bloom is nearly identical to a sport of Neptune’s Jewels that formed in late 2015, which I liked but died before I could reproduce it. The size of the bloom is the same although the number of spots seems a bit less. This is actually the link to the post I made in 2016 when the original sport bloomed. Click Here
Well now I have the same question I had back then. 1) is it a chimera or not? So I will propagate this by both stem and leaf cutting. If it blooms as in the picture above from leaf and stem propagation, it is NOT a chimera. But if it blooms true only via stem propagation then it very well may be a new chimera. We shall see.
Yukako is an outstanding plant with its purple blooms and distinct green stripes. The leaves are medium green, plain to slightly quilted. Now that said below is a Yukako that I removed as a sucker from a nice mature plant blooming true. Initially, the leaves were standard and it looked like it would be a standard Yukako. Then I noticed the crow leaves it was producing was not standard for Yakako. In a few months, the below plant developed. Note the chimera leaves.
Yakako plant with mutated chimera leaves
The underside of the leaves shows the red edges associated with the dark green upper part or top of the leaves.
Underside of the chimera leaf
An interesting point to note is that at the base of the plant is growing the last original green leaf that was part of the non-chimera leaves prior to the mutation occurring.
At the time of the writing of this blog, early May, there was a bloom stalk forming. Now what I am very curious about is what will the bloom look like? Will it be a standard Yukako bloom? Will it be different but still a chimera bloom? Or will the flower structure revert back to a normal African violet? We will see. My prediction is that the bloom will, with a high probability, be different as I see this all the time with chimera African violets. The leaf is lighter green or darker green than the original chimera plant and the bloom characteristics change, usually losing the chimerism. But not always. ————–Just prior to posting the plant bloomed—————————————
Well, I am unsure if this is the bloom of a chimera. I suspect it is not but I do see darker purple stripes. If it is the result of chimerism remains to be seen. At this point propagation of leaves and flower stem will tell the story if this is leaf chimerism with bloom chimerism, or the bloom is not chimerism. I suspect the flowers are not. Results to follow.
