Do you have a pic of the leaves?

I have looked at every source I can think of. The more I look the more certain I am that this is a species of Ledebouria. Unfortunately, I cannot find it anywhere. The only thing I can suggest is that you send a photo to some South African native plant or bulb growers organisation to try and have it identified. I hope you let us know if you do find out what it is. Cheers, Dee.

I found this article about roses and drought: http://paulzimmermanroses.com/care/summer-care/should-you-water-your-roses-during-a-drought/ The roses in my personal garden haven’t been watered in over a decade. And that includes during a drought. but then I read this in our rose breeder's newsletter: http://www.ludwigsroses.co.za/newsletter/ The way trees drink Scientists who study forests say they’ve discovered something disturbing about the way prolonged drought affects trees. It has to do with the way trees drink. They don’t do it the way we do — they suck water up from the ground all the way to their leaves, through a bundle of channels in a part of the trunk called the xylem. The bundles are like blood vessels. When drought dries out the soil, a tree has to suck harder. And that can actually be dangerous, because sucking harder increases the risk of drawing air bubbles into the tree’s plumbing. Plant scientist Brendan Choat explains: “As drought stress increases, you have more and more gas accumulating in the plumbing system, until they can’t get any water up into the leaves. This is really bad news for the plant because this is like having an embolism in a human blood vessel.” Like a human embolism, the gas bubbles stop the flow of fluid. If that persists, it means thirst, starvation and eventually death. Choat is from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, a region that has seen years of record-breaking drought. He wondered: How much drought does it take before trees start choking on air bubbles? He and a team of researchers studied 226 species of trees around the world, including desert trees, rain forest trees and many others. They discovered that for most, it doesn’t take much drought at all. “So this is the key thing,” Choat says, “that it would only take a small shift in terms of the moisture environment, the temperature … to push these plants across the threshold.” The threshold between drinking and choking, that is. The reason there’s so little margin of error is that trees have to finely balance eating and drinking. To eat, they open holes in their leaves, called stomata, to absorb carbon dioxide. But the more they do that, the more they lose water by transpiration through the stomata. Lose too much, and they have to start sucking harder — and risk a deadly embolism. Choat’s research, in the journal Nature, shows that it doesn’t take much drought before trees start to self-destruct. But what about trees that have evolved to live in really hot, dry places? They’re sippers, not gulpers. Plant scientists like Bettina Engelbrecht figured they’d have a larger margin of safety before they choke. “Instead,” she says of Choat’s research, “we find, well, it’s all the same — everyone is right at the edge and has a very risky strategy.” Engelbrecht, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, studies rain forest trees. “Now, we have to worry about all of them,” she says. “We have to really deal with the problem at the global scale.” That’s because temperatures are rising around the globe. That makes drought more likely and more intense. Big droughts have hit southern Europe, Russia, Australia and the U.S. in recent years. The first 10 months of 2012 were the warmest ever in the continental U.S. Along with the heat came widespread drought, which still persists in the Southwest. Nathan McDowell, a plant scientist at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, actually puts trees under plastic to see how they deal with less water and more heat. He says trees are adaptable, up to a point. “Now we’re changing that climate range really fast,” he notes, “faster than any of the living plants here have experienced. So can they change fast enough to adapt to that? You know, the preponderance of evidence right now is saying that [at] lots of locations around the world, they’re not adapting fast enough.” When they don’t adapt, they stop growing. Beetles and other insects invade. If droughts last long enough, the forests just die, and get replaced with something else. Please help me to understand this Straw.... What I've noticed in the past with severe droughts myself is that once a plant has reached it's threshold no amount of water can make it grow and live again...and if it does, it is usually riddled with all kinds of fungal (and other) diseases and bad insects. How can not watering your roses during a drought be a good thing, as stated in the site on the top?

Appropriate pot size is determined by soil choice, not by current root or soil volume as compared to the volume of the pot one is bumping a plant up to. When using media that support no or very little perched water, there is no limit to how large a pot might be in comparison to existing pot size or root mass - you can pot a plug in a 10 gallon nursery can with no ill effects. When using media with excessive water retention, one must be very vigilant when it comes to increasing pot size to accommodate a root/soil mass that has become congested. For those that don't know, the term 'container capacity' refers to the volume of water retained in a container medium at the moment it has just stopped draining, subsequent to it having been watered to beyond saturation. It tells us how much water a medium holds against the force of gravity. How many holes there are in a pot has no bearing on how much water a medium retains at container capacity. If using identical pots and equal volumes of the same medium in those pots, the only difference being 1 pot has several large holes in the bottom and sides and the other 1 small hole in the bottom, the volume of water retained at container capacity will be the same in both pots at container capacity. A pot with many large holes will drain FASTER than a pot with a single small hole, but there is nothing significant to be gained when using the pot that drains to container capacity in 20 seconds vs the pot that takes 2 minutes. There might be a small difference in the amount of water that evaporates from the medium between waterings in pots that have multiple holes exposed to moving air, but that difference would be relatively inconsequential, based on the description. Al