Sport or mutation - plant loses stability and starts changing. Birthmarking is just a sign that the plant is in transition, the change is coming. WIll the sport eventually stabilize and settle into its new form - who knows. Sometimes you can pick the most stable one by putting the leaf down, growing the babies - picking the one that behaves, putting leaf down - etc. Sport that is essentially a baby originated from leaf coming from a stable plant is much more stable than the one that happened to a mature plant. So - we just do a selection - 99% of sports are not as good as the plant it came from. Interesting - but goes to the gift shelf. Most of the sporting mature plants are unstable. If the mutation is desirable - and I think the mottled blossom of Karin plant is quite rare - it is worth working on selecting the most stable one out of the several generations of restarts. I think it is really interesting. I.

Greenthumbz, those are gorgeous pics! I've heard that there are a couple of trees that are not native to North America but are used by significant numbers of native insects. 1) Malus/Crabapples - native, hybrid, or exotic, Douglas Tallamy's book stated that the leaf chemistry is so similar that North american insects will use all species. This certainly bears true in my experience. I've got lots of crabs, a few specimens and a crazy wild thicket full of them in back,and they are bird magnets, not just for the fruits in the fall but for the nectar and insects in spring and summer. 2) Picea abies/Norway spruce - don't have any personal experience, but was told this by an ornithology student at Cornell who was doing a study on the subject

Many were in trade for something else. Oddly the mason Congos produce much variations even from a particular variegated form. I am trying to induce heavier variegation on my larger yard long leafed MC's to produce more variegated pups. It's a tedious process of taking a leaf cut, root them and then as pups form, make another cut higher above the leaf (leaving the lower rooted portions with pups to fend on their own). Then rooting the upper portion of the leaf, getting pups and then recutting and so on. You'd be surprised how many offset are produced from a single leaf. I also have methods in inducing multiplication process with the use of human birth control pills to newly developing pups, which requires the damaging of the terminals, treating with this solution and watch as it proliferates with many many pups, many of which will be variegated to albino. This is just some of the processes to induce variegation in sansevierias.

Regular Brandywine Pink did great. It had some foliar symptoms of verticillium on the lower leaves, but no wilt (only one of the Brandy Boy F11s had some wilt, but not very much). No discernable viruses. It produced fine, and even in the heat, surprisingly. It got some big fruit. I saved seeds from the largest fruit. Brandy Boy F11 had more taste, though. I'm trying Brandywine Pink from those saved seeds again; we'll see if the taste improves this year. Brandy Boy sets fruits in the heat just fine, too, by the way. (Brandywine Pink, however, doesn't exactly have a reputation for its heat-setting ability; so, that's partly why I was surprised.) Note that Brandywine Pink was closer to the house, and the plants closer to the house seemed less bothered by Verticillium for some unknown reason.