I just tried googling up seed with no success. You can buy smaller plants on ebay. A 5-inch tall seed grown plant is being auctioned starting at $50 (a fair deal in my opinion). Another two-inch tall plant is listed buy-it-now for $75!

Pachypodium namaquanum is among my favorite plants. I was lucky enough to buy an older 14-inch tall plant about ten years ago from the widow of a local grower. It was ridiculously underpotted and had no soil in the four-inch pot. It is now 19 inches tall in eight-inch pot. I thought I lost it last fall when overnight temperatures dropped suddenly from the mid-fifties to below freezing one night. It was fully leafed at the time, and promptly dropped all of them. I was afraid the growth point was damaged, but it resumed growth this Spring like nothing had happened. It has never flowered.

Good luck finding seed!

Brad

Thanks, Brad!
How wonderfully fortunate for your Pachy! Do you have pictures? I've emailed some people about seeds, but we'll just have to see how it goes lol.
What a relief that it was Okay after the frost. Maybe get a weather alert sent to your phone if it's supposed to be below 40 or something lol. That thing is a VERY valuable plant.
Do you think you'll pot up so it'll grow taller? (and maybe even flower for you sometime)

It's s been in that 6" pot for ten years? How often do you refresh the soil?

sneaky.....changed the size of the pot it's in and didn't tell me!

lati, now that you bring it up......I've seen more than several plants in flower (and their Stap-like purple flower colour is wondrous to behold) - these were all in Southern California. Nevertheless, no one AFAIK has ever reported seed horns, so maybe the fly is lacking in SouCal. Good luck on your seed search, but I hear good things about SilverHill Seed in South Africa - maybe they have them.

I don't know how, but I was able to see it Brad. Thank you!

Cactusmcharris, thanks for the direction.
Part of the reason I don't want a live plant is because aren't they poached from their native habitat?

I don't want to participate in that.
So....seeds are the way to go, right?

There are a few nurseries that will offer seed-grown P. namaquanums from time to time. I got mine on ebay from TeeDee Cacti, and it's very healthy. However, plants such as this will be around 2-3 inches tall, max. Cartbarnpro on ebay used to have some P. namaquanum seed on his store I think, but they're gone now. Maybe he'll have more come next flowering season?

They are poached, but if you see small ones such as Ben refers to, they're with little doubt not poached but grown from seed gathered somewhere. Strangely, though this one comes from the winter rainfall area, IME growing it in SouCal, and seeing it elsewhere there, it's the one Pachy that seems to stay in leaf the longest / in dormancy the least. Seeds are the way to go, but small plants aren't bad, either.

id still really like to get some seed. Even just maybe 3 seeds. But I did find some seedlings for 10.00.

I just checked ebay again. There is a great 5-inch seed grown plant from a reputable 100% positive feedback seller in Texas, bodombilly, who seems to be a serious grower/seller with lots of other good looking plants. There are no bids with 3 days remaining. Starting bid is $40. I would try to snatch this one while you can. The plant is several years old and has great form.

I have bought from bodombilly before (an E. colliculina, E. venifica, and a D. foetida) and I can vouch for the quality of his plants. Very well-grown.

Thanks for all of the diligent work, Brad!

And thanks for telling me your experience with that seller, Ben.

I'll watch it, see what happens between now and then. Everyday could bring news of something unexpected. But....I guess if you're expecting the news, then it wouldn't be expected....but I don't know whether it's good or bad, so that is decidedly unexpected.

That's a chunky beast on Ebay all right. The seller has some other very interesting plants for not too much (certainly less than many nurseries charge). That Euphorbia crest, those Alluaudias and relatives, The Myrtillocactuseseseses, oh my.

Wow, a variegated Sansevieria masoniana, 11 bids at 64.00 so far!

wowowow

Pachypodium namaquanum November 2010

(my notes say 16-inches above the eight-inch pot)

It currently stands 19-inches above the pot so it has grown 3-inches (7.5cm) in 5 years. The growth rate is supposed to be 1 - 1.5 cm/year. Looks like mine is right on track. That also implies the ebay plant I mentioned is at least 8 years old :-)

I'm glad you were finally able to get all the coding and stuff right for that post, Brad!

I guess I spoke too soon.

Well, not exactly. I had to upload directly from my computer, and for reasons that are not clear, when I edited the first picture post to add some info, the photo became a thumbnail. You can see the whole thing now. Posting the HTML code from PB doesn't seem to work. Perhaps I need to look at album privacy settings. I've got a few recent shots I'll share later.

Edit: OK, it seems to be displaying properly again. I feel like an idiot. My picture posting skills have deteriorated after three years of inactivity on this board, or something has changed since Houzz took over during my absence. I don't really use the photo bucket account much anymore, and I do not like Houzz terms of service regarding photos posted here. I'll figure something out soon so I can share more recent stuff without compromising my copyright.

I saw that photo last night when you tried to post it with BBcode [IMG][/IMG]

i just copied what it sent to my email. That broken link/code, and viewed the picture itself last night.

you have to use the html ref stuff for this board.

also, I only about a quarter of the way understand what I'm saying, I just do it.....

For the record, my plant was definitely not poached. The grower had died some years before and a bunch of other commercial growers were selling 8-10 of these tall plants for his widow at the SFSCS show in 2005. This group of commercial growers get quite angry whenever they see something in the show that looks too much like a habitat plant. I doubt very much they would have anything to do with distributing poached plants.

I think they were a batch of seed grown plants that were already more than a decade old in 2005. They were all in the same 3-4 inch square plastic pots and had not been transplanted or cared for in many years. When I did finally get brave enough to move it to the current 8-inch clay pot in 2009-2010, I found the mass of the plant had completely filled the container. There was no discernable soil left at all, just a cool square-shaped caudiciform root.

I tried to estimate its age: if you divide height by a growth rate at the high end of 1.5 cm/year, you have 47.5/1.5 = 31.7 years. My $50 seems cheap now. Wish I had bought the whole flat. :-/

And they are probably even older than that due to poor care, if the roots were that cramped, I can't say the plant on top had much else it could do but just sustain itself. Or maybe you can force height by cramping the caudex like that, it has to put its energy somewhere, right?

If I could get some seeds, maybe I could see if my hypothesis is accurate.

although, I'm sure you could try it with any slow growing Pachypodium. I limit it from other caudiciforms in that they may behave differently under stress.

Either way, you probably saved it from certain death.

Oh, found something interesting about your plant, Brad.

http://www.bihrmann.com/caudiciforms/subs/pac-nam-sub.asp

based on that, I believe you have the Namibian locality/subspecies.

not sure how botanical nomenclature experts feel about all that. You can see a difference due to many years of evolving in that geographical area, not just an example of "variation" as I'm pretty sure, if you were to take yours and plant it in South Africa, it would still grow as if it were living in Namibia.

comments?

Hey, thanks for that information, but I'm not sure how you conclude the populations are different in a scientific way. The Richtersveld region of South Africa is in Namaqualand, across the Orange river from where the ancient Namibians (Nama) were driven from their ancestral homeland by invaders from the North.

The legend of the 'half-men' is based on the Nama encountering the plant on the rocky barren mountains of Namaqualand after leaving their relatively lush homeland in Namibia. As some of the tribe looked back in tears across the Orange river to their homeland in Namibia, the Gods took pity on them and turned them into 'half-men' forever leaning North looking at their ancestral homeland.

I love that legend (I don't think I have any other plants with their own legend) and it implies the plant is not native to Namibia, but legends are stories, and evidence is evidence. I accept there may be populations on both sides of the Orange river (Namibia/S. Africa), but the photos on Bihrmann's Caudiciform site are not different enough to convince me they are different varieties or sub-species.

The Orange river is huge, and could easily represent a geographical barrier between populations, but the page you listed doesn't name the location in Namibia, or say that they are botanically distinct populations. It just says they are found in a small area near Richtersveld, but then goes on to list photos in left and right columns as South African and Namibian plants.

Since they are not large distances from each other, why do you think growth habit is so different? I don't see anything that couldn't be explained as natural variation in the same population. I agree my relatively young plant does look more like those in the Namibian column, but couldn't that be just a sampling error based on a few photos?

Is there more on this somewhere?

Brad

No idea, I haven't found search engines to be actually worth anything for almost ten years now. I got that link from someone here on a different post.

I would need a map, topographical as well as a climate/wet/dry seasonal comparisons over time. Any geologists around?

When growing Adenium, they say the harder you grow them, the fatter they are. The more stressed they are from tooich sun, not enough water, the plant reacts by getting fatter and storing more water than a skinnier version.

If the weather is better and the rainfall is greater in the Namibian area. I think these plants have been living there long enough to have the climate cause a divergence in their evolutionary trails.

You'd also need population maps of both flora and fauna to explain the variations you'll find (if any) after you have mapped the genes of the plants in question. And that's just habitat plants, to say nothing of plants in cultivation, what with the tricks humans have developed with brushes and cat whiskers.

So you actually need to write a grant proposal. Get crackin', yo!

Growing adeniums hard will give you compact plants. Fat is another matter.

I'm no good at grant proposals. And I don't think they'd care to hear from someone as uneducated as I am :)

sounds like a job for you two, I'll tag along though! How cool would that be........studying these wonders of nature in the place that molded and sculpted them to be the way they are today.

There's got to be a lot to feel out there.

thank you both for your input. It's hard to have discussions like this with anyone. "Does it have flowers?" "Oh, that prickly thing must be a cactus!"

anyway....thanks you guys *blush*

talking science makes me....shy. lol

I found a 3-4' specimen today. $100

It's showing where there was a time it wasn't getting what it needed (skinny growth in the middle of the trunk) but it was quite a site to see.

It was on a table, so hard to give an accurate estimate as to height. It may even be taller than that?

Didn't take a picture, but she invited me back to help her play in some dirt (aka free labor, but I really don't mind!) so maybe I'll be able to get a picture....or maybe it'll come home with me one day. It's hard being in a military family when deciding which plants will make it through a move. Which ones are worth it. This one would definitely be worth it.

Found pic, not mine. thought you guys would like it.

Do you have a link to the website?

Here it is Lati:

Xeric World Forum

it's on the 2nd posting from Mitsukurina.

Thank you.

welcome :: ))

Ah, they are grafted onto a lamerei.

yes. I don't understand why.

Because the species grows so slow and lamerei is a fast grower?....as well as having a stronger overall constitution, being harder to overwater is a possible advantage.

to my understanding a graft would not mean the scion would necessarily have the same rate of growth as the root stock. Isn't that why the scion eventually detaches?

We would have to ask someone else as I know probably less about it than you.

ok