Episode 115: living stones aka Lithops

A dish of living stones at Abbey Brook Cactus Nursery. Photograph: Jane Perrone

Transcript

Episode 115

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Jane: Hello, ooh, blimey, I've got a bit of a frog in my throat, let's try that again. Hello! Welcome to On The Ledge Podcast. In this week's show we're looking at living stones aka Lithops, and I answer a question about plants for bathrooms with no natural light.

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Jane: Thank you Leah for becoming a Patreon of On The Ledge, yes, Leah, you are now a Ledge-end. And thanks Amy_Lou_Who who left a lovely review on Apple podcast for the show. I had a bit of bad news this week and it really cheered me up to hear your kinds words about the show. One of the things you said is that "wondering at our natural world together with fellow listeners is one of the highlights of my week". That's so nice to hear, thank you Amy_Lou_Who and if you want to leave a review for On The Ledge, go ahead and treat yourself, your pod app of choice hopefully will have a review option, so that's a great way of letting others know what you think of the show. If you have a twitter account but you're sick of the fighting and the politics then you need house plant hour in your life. The next one is happening on November 5th, 2019 at 9pm GMT, that's UK time, please join me for an hour of chatting about our plants. You can follow me @JanePerrone there's also @HousePlantHour and throughout we use the #HouseplantHour so you can follow everything and I'd love to see you there, come and say hi.

I travelled to the Peak District recently and visited Sally Williams' wonderful Peperomia collection and she suggested that I popped into see Jill and Brian Fearn of Abbey Brook Cactus Nursery near Matlock, who are the holders of another very different national collection of Lithops, aka living stones. Abbey Brook was the first commercial nursery in the world to declare in 1963 that it wouldn't deal in field collected material, so they were very ahead of their time in terms of awareness of environmental issues surrounding cacti and succulents. It was an absolute delight to chat to Brian and Jill about these plants and answer some of your questions about their care, because I know it's a plant that a lot of people have a lot of questions about and I hope they will be answered in this episode. Brian really is an authority on these plants, the nursery has been going for more than 60 years and Brian has been studying Lithops since he was a student of botany at Sheffield University and in fact Brian showed me his Master's degree thesis awarded by Sheffield University in 1969 entitled the Taxonomy and Phytogeography of the Genus Lithops. As you'll hear, Brian and Jill were absolutely delightful interviewees and despite the fact that Brian's eye sight is going, he's still as sharp as a tack and full of information about these fascinating plants. So come with me as we enter one of the glass houses at Abbey Brook.

Jane: Oh wow. I'm already in absolute heaven. I'm recording, don't worry.

Jill: Have you got some cacti?

Jane: I have got some cacti, nothing at all like this. I probably have about 25 cacti and only one Lithops.

Brian: What I said to Jill, I've always wanted a big one.

Jill: And this is it, I know.

Jane: Wow, that is a large golden barrel.

Brian: 2.1 metres in circumference.

Jane: I'll just butt in here to say we had to pass some amazing plants to get to the Lithops collection including this huge golden barrel cactus. Once we did get there the first thing that I spied was an incredible display of mixed Lithops in a bowl.

Jane: That's gorgeous, I'm just going to describe this for the listeners. We've got here this lovely large terracotta pan filled with Lithops and it looks like a painting almost... how many different species or cultivars have you got in there?

Brian: Probably about 40 or 50, I've forgotten now, it's won first prize in two national shows now, the shows are every four years. That was 2016 and 2012 that I won first prize with that bowl. It's been on television this year.

Jill: That was the one that was exhibited in the RHS show at Chatsworth.

Jane: You do have to look twice, this is brilliant illustration of why they're called stone plants, you do have to look twice because there are some stones in there that look very much like Lithops.

Brian: You can walk on these plants because you don't know that they're there. They're just like that, you're walking on the pebbles and they're not, they're plants.

Jane: That's a lovely way of displaying them because it's really showing off... you can look from one to another and see the different characteristics and colours and it really does look stunning. Do they ever grow like this in nature, where you'll see one species next to another?

Brian: No, one site might be the size of a tennis court and that's it.

Jill: That's one species.

Brian: You might have to go 50km to find another. There's 200,000 sq miles in South Africa where these grow. The number of sites, when I was working on them, there were 246, there are now over 500. That's in 40 years and we've found another 200-odd in the last 40 years and they're still finding them.

Jill: Brian had never been to South Africa, all the years he'd worked on this. I said to him: "When I retire, we're going." This was 2006. Fortunately, there was a conference that year in South Africa in Calitzdorp, so we went to the conference and they'd organised a pre-conference trip round Namibia, winding your way south from Windhoek right down to Cape Town.

Brian: Six weeks we spent and I was giving a paper at the conference as well on Lithops.

Jane: You must have been in heaven that whole time?

Brian: Oh yes.

Jane: I bet you were just in your element enjoying the plants?

Jill: I remember the first time you saw Lithops, it was amazing, wasn't it? I almost gave up hope of ever finding any after that because they were literally underground and you've got dust on top of them. The only way you could tell they were there would be a little outline, a little crack and that showed you where the plant was and somebody would blow the dust off.

Brian: We were in the dry season.

Jane: That must have been a really special trip.

Jill: It was.

Jane: We've got as far as the eye can see, almost, it's Lithops.

Brian: From, I think, 400 sites there's some, and there isn't a field collector plant there, they've all been grown from seed, I've grown the whole lot from seed.

Jane: When I told my listeners that I was coming to see you and ask them for their questions about Lithops the thing that came up over and over and over again was watering. Some people have been told they should never water their Lithops, some people have worried they're overwatering, can you give us chapter and verse on how to water these plants successfully?

Brian: You water them from the end of March or April until the end of September. Absolutely no water at all during the winter. In habitat, they grow virtually within sight of the sea and up to, I think it was, 6,000 feet, in altitude and the ones near the sea in Namibia, they don't get any rain, it's just sea fogs, so those are the most difficult ones to grow. We water these once a week all through the summer and they get a fair amount of water.

Jane: Do you water them from the top?

Brian: Top! Water them from the top and they get nutrients but not very much and they exist.

Jane: And they're sitting on a bed of sand. So obviously any stray moisture is being whipped right away. So if somebody was growing this as a plant indoors, presumably that's one thing to be aware of, is that water isn't being allowed to pool underneath and sit there?

Jill: Absolutely, you can plant them up in decorative bowls and they look really nice, but I always recommend that people put a good inch of gravel at the bottom of the bowl.

Jane: What's the potting mix?

Brian: Sandy mix, they're not fussy.

Jill: About 50% sand, it's a more sandy mix than we use for most others.

Jane: So 50/50 perhaps sandy mix and some potting compost. If somebody is starting off a collection and wants to grow Lithops are there any starter species or cultivars that are super easy, that people should start with?

Brian: Those that come from say, Johannesburg, for sure, this is eastern parts of South Africa, because that's a higher rainfall area, they can stand extra water. It's the ones from Namibia, at the other end, where you've got to be careful. What's that one?

Jill: That's Fulviceps.

Brian: Fulviceps

Jill: A better example, there.

Jane: Oh yes, look at that, I'm just going to consult the label Lithops aucampiae f. kuruman - that's quite a big one isn't it? That's conker size, almost.

Brian: It forms a big clump.

Jane: The form of these, what's the evolutionary reason, can you explain why these plants look... as my nine year old son would say, "Mum, they look a bit like a bum." What's the evolutionary explanation for how they look?

Brian: It's two leaves attached to a root, that's basically all these are. The growing point is at the base of the two leaves which produces either the flowers or a new growth. They produce a new pair of leaves every year.

Jill; Or nearly every year.

Brian: It should be every year.

Jane: Does that appear so it clumps out?

Brian: It clumps out, they're so economical that all the water in the old leaves are absorbed by the new pair of leaves coming through, so it's not wasted.

Jane: So that's coming through the centre?

Brian: Yes.

Jane: I've occasionally seen people on Facebook asking what's happening to my Lithops, it's going all weird, so the explanation is it's just growing?

Jill: There's an old leaf, it's just like dry skin.

Jane: Very economical as you say, it's all that brown stuff, that's the old leaf being sloughed away.

Brian: Yes, and the nutrients out of that are absorbed.

Jane: Taken back in, nothing wasted, that's very clever.

Brian: Nobody's explained to me...

Jill: How they do it.

Brian: Yes, because they've got to reverse the water flow in the xylem material, which is normally only one way.

Jill: The other thing is, they shrink into the ground in the dry season and they've got contractile roots, the roots actually pull them down.

Brian: In other words, when the compost is wet, they can't do that if it's dry and solid. The contractile roots will act during the end of the wet season.

Jill: They've got these spiral rings of xylem inside the vessels and that's how they do it, it's like a spring.

Jane: So in the winter when you're not watering these plants, should you be concerned if they start shrivelling slightly, is there anything to worry about?

Jill: You could mist them, some people do just spray them a bit. Actually, Brian doesn't give them enough water, I think, so I go around watering them when he's not there.

Jane: Presumably they're so tough that they'll bounce back?

Jill: You have to be careful, you obviously don't give them very much, just a little shower as it were.

Jane: What I love about these plants, although they all in one sense look the same, the variety in different shades of grey and terracotta and brown and green and cream is so beautiful and then you've also got the flowers as well.

Brian: The colours, it's not like a chameleon, the plant can't change its colour, what it's done is evolve the colour by producing a range of colours in habitat and the ones that don't match are picked out by rodents or birds or what have you. So eventually you get a relatively uniform basic colour in any particular habitat that matches its surroundings.

Jill: These sort of things, you think green, they'll match the grass. No, they don't grow in grass, but they grow in green rocks.

Jane: This one, Helmutii that's a lovely one. Again, some of them are relatively large and then there are some teeny, tiny ones. I don't know if that gets much bigger than that, a Hallii, but even in your selection there are some very small ones.

Jill: Verruculosa is a small one and these are quite small as well, they stay fairly small.

Jane: The flowers, do they appear at a particular time of year?

Brian: Autumn, they're just starting to flower, there's one group that starts in July but the majority of them it's September in the UK, it's September/October.

Jill: In South Africa it's April/May.

Brian: Because the seasons are reversed.

Jane: Those flowers, are they bursting out around for a very short amount of time just for pollination and then they disappear just to keep the plant incognito?

Brian: They're in flower for probably a week.

Jill: An individual flower lasts for a week.

Brian: Often, it's really the only time when people have found the plants.

Jane: Of course, because they're actually visible for once.

Brian: Yes, there was a lady in Namibia, she had a farm covering 20,000 hectares, that's a big farm, that supported only 100 head of cattle, but she got one Lithops locality she found, it took her four years to find the next one and she just happened to be in the right place at the right time when things were in flower, so you could see it.

Jane: You've got to be in it for the long game, if you're studying these plants in their wild environment I imagine you've got to be incredibly patient and persistent.

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Jane: We'll be back with more Lithops chat shortly but, first, a little detour into the inner sanctum of my brain. I've been thinking about emojis a lot recently and the fact that the emojis that we, as plenty people, have at our disposal are just not good enough. So I've been cooking up a plan with my able assistant Kelly Westlake to put this right. I had a chat with Kelly earlier this week to discuss our first steps and we quickly realised that getting a new planty emoji made might be more difficult than we initially thought.

Jane: Kelly, hello, welcome to On The Ledge.

Kelly: Hello.

Jane: This is wonderful to actually have you on the show, you're working away in the background sending out message to listeners and doing all kinds of useful stuff for me, so it's really nice to hear your voice on the show. Let's talk a little bit about this crazy idea that I've had. This is the thing I do, isn't it, I have crazy ideas and then expect somebody else to help me make them happen.

Kelly: You do.

Jane: I think as all good podcasts do, I think this came from listening to a podcast about emojis and the emojis that don't exist. It occurred to me that plant emojis, as somebody who uses them quite a lot, we haven't got many choices out there. I roped you into doing some research about how we can get a particular plant emoji onto our smart phones. Can you reveal to the listeners what that emoji is?

Kelly: Well, have we already decided on the plant itself? Obviously it's going to be some form of houseplant, are you going to go with what we've been talking about, or are we going to put it out to a vote?

Jane: I think there's only one choice, well, there's possibly two choices, I think the options are a Monstera leaf, which is so iconic, I think that's got to be up there, the other one I did think about was maybe a venus fly trap, but I think the Monstera would be more widely used. What we should say, is one would like to think that this was an easy thing and you could say: "Please can we have a Monstera emoji?" and it would happen, but I've got you to do some digging into this as to how we might go about finding out more information about this, but it's not that straight forward is it, from what we've found so far?

Kelly: No it is not that simple and it is quite a laborious, drawn-out process. It's a lot of fun, I imagine, on the way though. This could take a good couple of years to come to fruition, that's if we ever got that far because people are proposing all the time and not everybody gets through. It's very official, there's a proper proposal process and it has to go to what's known as the Unicode Consortium in the Bay Area in California and they meet four times a year to consider proposals which can be made by absolutely anyone anywhere in the world. They do submit proposals internally, I think there are something like seven multinationals on the panel including, as you might imagine, huge tech giants - we're talking Adobe, we're talking IBM, the likes of those companies. Anyone else, anywhere in the world, if you've got an idea, you can submit but they do put you through your paces, they do make you jump through hoops and you really do have to justify your cause.

Jane: So what are we going to need to make this happen? I guess we're going to need, first of all, a reason why Monstera leaf should be on there, I think that's fairly obvious to anyone who listens to this podcast, it's something that we want to have a shorthand for. In fact, I've been writing all these Patreon cards for my Patreon subscribers. I guess I'm out of the habit, and I apologise in advance for my horrendous handwriting, I've been writing things and then almost wanting to do an emoji and then realise I'm handwriting something and realising that's not going to work, how digital have I got?

The argument for the Monstera emoji is that it's something that would be very well used by lots of plant people, it's very distinctive, and we all know what it looks like. The other thing that we might need, though, Kelly, is somebody to actually design the emoji. I'm thinking that this is going to be okay because I think we've got lots of listeners with graphic design skills, fingers crossed, because you or me, what's your drawing skills like?

Kelly: Terrible, unfortunately, I wish it were otherwise! We would have to submit quite decent artwork because sometimes proposals fall down because of the quality, or lack thereof, of the imagery that's submitted with the proposal. It has to be pretty good. It's often advised that it looks like other imagery out there -- so, Apple imagery, Google imagery, it has that clean feel about it. I think some people have submitted clunky, clip art-type artwork in the past. It doesn't do you any favours.

Jane: So we need somebody to help us out with that side of things. The other thing we need is people to come up with very cogent arguments about why this needs to be an emoji, perhaps we need, once we get further down the line, a really good list of: "A Monstera emoji would change my life..." users backing us up with that information. This is something we need to move forward, I'm sorry that I've landed you with this two year mission, Kelly, but hopefully, it will be something we can follow along with and it'll be interesting to see how this whole process works. Maybe we should put vote out to listeners to tell us if they like the idea of going with Monstera or if they think there's some other leaf or carnivorous plant that is more deserving.

Kelly: Something to bear in mind is that it can't be too specific, but it also can't be too vague, which is a fine balance to strike. It also has to have universality. Whatever image we go for will have to be recognised all over the world.

Jane: Let's have a little a consultation, maybe on the Facebook group, and see what listeners think about this, hopefully they'll agree with us that Monstera is a good one to go for, or perhaps we'll be swayed by a venus fly trap argument. I think this is a good place to start and let's see where it takes us, we could be in California in two years' time, talking to Unicode.

Kelly: It is a nice thought.

Jane: So there you go! We are on the road to getting a new emoji added to the, rather too brief, list of plant emojis out there. We want to know what emoji that should be, so please pop along to my On The Ledge Facebook page, House Plant Fans of On The Ledge, where I'll be garnering your opinions or if you're not on Facebook just drop me a line to with your vote. Should we go for a Monstera leaf, a venus fly trap or something else entirely? And we'll be keeping you posted on our progress. Indeed, if you are a graphic designer or maybe you work at Unicode, who knows, then give me a shout and you can get on board with this special On The Ledge mission.

Now, let's head back to Abbey Brook where I've got a few more questions about Lithops.

Jane: How easy are these to grow from seeds? Every year on the podcast I have a sew along event, where I encourage to people to sew seeds and lots of people choose cacti and succulent seeds to sew and lots of people choose Lithops with varying results, some people have had great success, others not so much. Is there any advice?

Brian: You sew the seeds on the surface.

Jane: Are they tiny, are they very small?

Jill: They are like dust, a lot of them.

Brian: Some are like dust and others are a little bit bigger, a millimetre. There's 15,000 seeds in a cubic centimetre is the dust.

Jane: Oh my gosh.

Jill: You don't have to sneeze when you open a packet.

Brian: Sew the seeds on the surface, don't cover them with compost because they need light for germination, so you can't do it in the airing cupboard as it were. They'll germinate within two or three weeks. Don't try to transplant them until they're at least twelve months old. You can sew the seed in the Spring, you can also sew it in the Autumn. De Boer in Holland, he used to sew his in the Autumn and he used to keep them going for eighteen months and then transplanted them after they were eighteen months old in the second year.

Jane: In a way that's quite good, because when I find when you're growing certain plants, you sew them and then you've got 50 plants to prick out two months later and you've got nowhere to put them.

Brian: No, no, no.

Jane: At least with Lithops they can sit there doing their own thing without you having to worry.

Jill: I'll go and find some seedlings for you.

Jane: That would be interesting. Are there any favourites here, Brian? That you're just drawn to?

Brian: Fulviceps is nice.

Jane: Fulviceps let's have a look. Oh, yes, this is Fulviceps there's a few different Fulviceps here, it's very pretty with the yellow flower.

Brian: They've got flower buds coming up and they've got big spots on the top and nice colours.

Jane: Do the flower colour vary from species to species? These yellow, I see some white here.

Brian: They're yellow or white, usually the green ones are white flowered and all the other brown ones are yellow flowered, but that's as a general rule.

Jane: I love this Dorothea, it's a very pale grey green and then somebody has painted on with a paintbrush dark red and dark grey, that's incredible, in an amazing vein pattern, that's my favourite so far. Every one of them, I can imagine it being a mindfulness exercise just staring at one of these pots for half-an-hour, that would be very relaxing. We're walking further down to look at more and again there's just so much variation between the different species, do you find that when people come and look at your collection, what are the most common things that people say? Are people surprised they're even plants?

Brian: Yes, well, when the bowl had been at the show at Chatsworth, Jill said a lady was looking at the plant and she parked her handbag on the bowl, she didn't realise there were any plants there.

Jane: It's good they're tough then. They weren't bothered?

Brian: As I say you can walk on these plants and not damage them because they're usually just a little bit below the surface.

Jane: This is one thing I did want to ask, the Lithops I was given, I repotted because I was worried that the potting mix was not ideal but I was a bit nervous about the height at which I should plant them, whether I should bury them right up to the top surface or whether I should leave them a little bit proud? Does it vary from species to species with how you treat them in that regard?

Brian: Normally, you don't bury the plants. If you just put the compost just a little bit above where the join is between the leaf and the root and you can put some more top dressing on. The plant with its stomata, it gives you the clue, there's no stomata at all on the top surface. The top surface often is dark because the light hasn't reflected, it's gone straight into the plant because there is a window at the top. The photosynthetic tissue, there's none at the top at all, aligning the inside of the leaf and all the cells in the centre of the plant are colourless, so light passes straight through and it's photosynthetic from the inside rather than from the outside, so when it's buried in the ground, it'll still work. The stomata, again, no stomata on the top surface at all, there's stomata in the groove, an there's stomata in a ring around the outside. CAM plants - the stomata open at night and are closed during the day.

Jane: Well we love a bit of CAM on On The Ledge podcast as regular listeners will know, I love being able to say 'Crassulacean acid metabolism' it makes me sound so clever, but it's all so fascinating the way that these plants are adapting to deal with the harsh conditions they live in and that's a brilliant explanation. So, presumably for that reason, I don't want to bury them too deep because then I would be burying the stomata? The contractile roots as well, they might move up and down off their own accord anyway?

Brian: Yes.

Jane: We've got these seedlings here, presumably when you're sowing this seeds, the spacing of those seedlings are suggesting you're sewing very, very thinly. How do you achieve thin sewing when the seeds are so small, do you cut the seeds with sand or are you just careful?

Jill: Just careful.

Brian: Just careful.

Jane: They're beautiful, they're so cute.

Brian: The other thing is, your seeds are probably measured in numbers and you can judge the size of where you're going to put it. If you've got 100 seeds, a pot that size for 100 seeds is fine because they're going to remain in there for 12 months minimum.

Jill: We put 60 seeds in our seed packets that we sell to the public. It's about a cup full.

Brian: Some of them, like these you see, have got a proper window.

Jane: Yes, that is more like the Fenestraria isn't it? The window is very obvious on those ones. That's Olivaceawhich is olive coloured, which is nice, and they look a bit like olives, the shape.

Jill: It is a very olive green. The plants look slightly different colours when you see them in habitat because they're much more baked. Even in habitat if you see a plant underneath another plant or a bush, it looks much brighter in colour than the one that's out in full sun. It gets really, really hot because the rocks that they're in they absorb the heat as well. You can't touch them sometimes on a hot day.

Jane: Wow, they're that hot?

Brian: Yes, that hot.

Jane: What an incredible plant, that is just mind-blowing that they can survive that temperature.

Brian: Probably 50C or 60C.

Jane: What's going to kill these plants? It's not baking heat, it's going to be somebody leaving them on a shady windowsill in the wrong potting mix and watering them too much?

Jill: I had to laugh, I had a phone call one morning, we get all sorts of nice phone calls from customers. This guy, he was complaining a bit and he said: "I bought some of those Lithops plants from you a few weeks ago, they're not growing, they're not doing anything?" So we talked a bit about them and I said to him: "Where did you put them? Did you put them on a windowsill?" He said: "No, they're on a book case." I said: "Are they near to light?" "Oh, yes." I just had a sudden thought and I said to him: "You did plant them, did you?" "Oh! do you have to plant them?"

Jane: Ah! Okay, that's where you're going wrong. I guess some people think, because they're called stone plants, they literally are like stones and are just going to sit there.

Jill: Yes, they look like pebbles and just put them in a dish with the rest of your decorative pebbles.

Jane: At least you put him right.

Jill: I did.

Jane: What about pests with these? Are they mealybug magnets or any problems like that?

Brian: It's Baboons.

Jill: Oh, you mean in the wild? We haven't got many baboons in the garden.

Jane: I think I'm okay for baboons, I don't think that'll be a problem in my green house.

Brian: It's that sort of thing in habitat.

Jill: And goats nibble them.

Brian: Yes, goats, they chew the top off.

Jill: We get mice.

Jane: In a baboon and goat-free environment... I guess there's not much even for mealybug, there's not much for them to go for is there?

Brian: There's a pair of leaves.

Jill: We do get a bit of...

Brian: There are some mouse traps by the way.

Jane: I can imagine, I've got mice in my shed.

Jill: I've put that one out of the way because I nearly caught my finger in it.

Jane: Mice are an issue.

Jill: They eat plants, seeds, they like the Lophophoras the best, they love the Lophophoras.

Brian: These are all arranged in alphabetical order from one end to the other, rather than site wise.

Jane: That would be complicated, I imagine?

Brian: Yes, everything by the way is double labelled, if somebody comes along and takes all the labels out, there's always another one in the pot.

Jane: That's very good and I guess when you've got a national collection that's the kind of doubling up that you need to do.

Brian: Learned from long practice.

Jane: Tell me about pot size with these, you've got them in various size pots, are they plants that like to be nicely root-bound and not really bothered about being repotted particularly often?

Brian: These haven't been done for ten years.

Jane: They're very low maintenance all round, by the sound of it, do they like a colder spell in the winter?

Brian: About 5C.

Jane: If I was growing them in my house, would I be moving them to an unheated porch then, or somewhere where they can get that lower temperature or would they be okay at 20C all year?

Brian: No, that's too high.

Jane: Too high, okay, so if we've got them in a normal living room, an unheated room is a good choice come winter?

Brian: Yes, light levels are not that important in the winter.

Jane: So you don't have to worry about...

Brian: You move them somewhere, light levels are very important in the growing season, it's got to be high light.

Jane: Say you've got put them in a lower light situation, you've got a plant that's growing in your house and in the winter you want to move it to an unheated room, do you have to be careful with exposure to light again, do they get a bit soft in the winter? Are they not bothered?

Brian: No.

Jane: I've had that with cacti where they've moved them from one place to another.

Brian: They've probably still got the old pair of leaves and there's a new pair coming through in the late winter, early spring. You just have to abide by those sort of things.

Jane: Well, I'm delighted to see this glorious collection that's stretching in both directions a long way out in this impressive glass house full of other amazing cactus treasures, I'm going to end it here on Lithops but I'm going to continue wandering around but this is where it stops.

Jane: Well, that was great fun meeting Brian and Jill and learning loads about Lithops. If you want to see some of the things that we talked about and that incredible Lithops bowl, then do go to my show notes at janeperrone.com for a good look. Now it's time for Question of the Week.

Jane: This week, Julie wants to know about plants for bathrooms with no windows. She's lucky enough to have two bathrooms but neither of them has any natural light coming in and she wants to put plants in them, so she's wondering what she can do that will work? The obvious answer would be, I'm afraid you can't have plants, but I think there are some ways round this problem.

For a start, is your bathroom really completely free of natural light? If you leave the door open most of the time, and there's light from another room coming into that room, you may find that there is some light in that room. It maybe that you just want to have a few different plants that you swap in and out of the bathroom, leaving each one there for say a month or two and then swapping them out and moving them somewhere else around the house, so they don't suffer in the long term from lack of light. The kind of things that you might be looking at for this purpose might be something like the ZZ Plant, there is a story I read once about somebody who put one of these plants, the Zamioculcas zamiifolia into a cupboard for six months and got it out and it had no light and it looked exactly the same, so this is a very tough plant that would probably be fine. If you want to have a few Zamioculcas that you switch in and out, that would probably be a good way of dealing with it. You could also have something like a Saxifraga stolonifera that would probably be fine for a shortish while, a couple of months in there with not a lot of light. The great thing about that plant is that you can propagate it really easily, so that you could end up with quite a few different plants that serve their time in your dark bathroom.

If you want to expand the range of the plants that you've got in there, I think you're going to need to look at a grow light option. Bathrooms, well that can be a little bit difficult if you've got a lamp fitting, a wall lamp fitting or something in there that you can put a daylight LED bulb into. It doesn't necessarily have to be an official grow light, because even an LED daylight bulb will offer some of the right spectrum for plants to grow. Ideally an official grow light would, if you live in a place where you can get to an IKEA that sells the VÄXER range of grow lights, then you can try those, they're white, so you don't end up with your bathroom looking like a cannabis grow room.

You can also get your hands on LED grow lights which are charged by either power packs or laptops, or plugs with a USB socket. So that might be another way to got if you can have some of those on your plants and recharge them when necessary, that way, you've got a more mobile set up. I did have a look around on the internet and found some nice pictures of shelves with grow lights, strips of grow lights along the bottom of the shelf, so that the shelf below is lit up. That would be a really nice choice for a bathroom, you may need to get an electrician in to get that set up nicely to make it safe for your bathroom, but that is a really nice option. I'll put a link to a couple of those pictures in the show notes.

Do bear in mind though if you are going to try to grow plants in a bathroom with no natural light, you are going to need to leave those lights on roughly about twelve hours a day, just so those plants get their fill and get to photosynthesise, so if you're just switching the light on and off to go into the bathroom that's probably not going to be enough for the plants. It's easier if you can put things on a timer and then the lights switch off and on automatically. I've got a timer for my grow lights here in my office, it's a really old-fashioned one, it's got a circular dial, you push in the times where you want the light to come on and when you want it come off and it's very, very straight forward but it works really, really well - I find the ones with loads of buttons that you have to programme endlessly to be a bit of a nightmare - but get a timer and add that to your grow light set up and that will make life a hell of a lot easier for you. If you have some money to throw at the problem, you could turn to a company like SolTechSolutions which has a track system for grow lights which you can have on your ceiling and that would look lovely and also give the proper light that your plants needed. That one does come with a wall timer so you don't have to worry about turning them on and off, again, I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

I've also come across a few plant hangers that actually double as lights. There's a light bulb above, then a hanging section below where you can add your plants, so if you put a grow light bulb into one of those you could successfully grow something in the bathroom that way.

So in summary, I think it's entirely possible to have a lovely plant filled bathroom without any window being present but you are going to have to work at it a little bit and come up with some solutions and fixes. Depending on your budget that might mean something quite simple like the old switcheroo or investing in some serious grow light kit. But I hope that's provided some inspiration Julie, if you've got a question for On The Ledge drop me a line to

[music]

Jane: That's it for this week's show, I'll be back next Friday, but for now do remember to take care of yourself as well as your plants. Bye!

[music]

Jane: The music you heard in this week's episode was Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, An Instrument the Boy Called Happy Day, Gokarna by Samuel Corwin,and Quasi Motion by Kevin Macleod. All tracks are licensed under Creative Commons. See my website for details.

Subscribe to On The Ledge via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Player FM, Stitcher, Overcast, RadioPublic and YouTube.

Living stones or Lithops are fascinating plants - tiny, tough and very beautiful. I visited Abbey Brook Cactus Nursery in the Peak District of the UK to see the National Collection of Lithops species, and learn more about these curious succulents from owners Brian and Gill Fearn.

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Lithops olivacea. Photograph: Jane Perrone

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L. rucschiorum. Photograph: Jane Perrone

Lithops care tips

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Jane Perrone, Brian and Gill Fearn with the huge golden barrel cactus mentioned at the start of the interview. Photograph: Kash Prashad.

• When it comes to watering, just because they look like stones doesn’t mean they can be treated like them! Lithops like a decent slug of water once a week in the growing season, and can be watered from the top. But in winter they should be kept almost completely dry, perhaps being misted if they start to shrivel excessively.

• Their nutrient needs are minimal so an occasional weak feed with cactus and succulent feed occasionally during the growing season will be fine.

• The native home of Lithops is southern Africa, where they live hugging the ground as nigh-on invisible plants, making them hard to spot for the the baboons and goats that like to feast on them!

• Easy species for beginners are the Lithops that come from eastern parts of the Cape that are easiest to grow as they will tolerate more water - try L. aucampiae.

• They will be happy to be more or less potbound so may only need repotting every few years, but when you do repot, choose a 50/50 mix of sand/grit and houseplant compost. At Abbey Brook, pots of Lithops are kept on a tray of sand to further aid drainage.

• Lithops have contractile roots so will raise or lower themselves to suit the conditions, but start off by planting them just slightly proud of the soil’s surface.

• During the winter, Lithops are best in an unheated or at least very cool room. During summer they will take as much sun and heat as you can throw at them!

• Lithops come in a range of colours, to match the stones around which they grow: making them very hard to spot for those who study them in the wild!

• Lithops seeds can be sown in autumn or spring and they need light to germinate, so do not cover them. The seeds are tiny - think dust - so they need careful sowing onto cactus potting soil. Cover with clear plastic or glass, and remove once germination has occurred which can take a few weeks.

• Provided you sow them thinly, you should be able to leave them in situ for 12-18 months before pricking out. If you are looking for Lithops seed in the UK, Chiltern Seeds offers a mixed pack sourced from Abbey Brook. For more on growing houseplants from seed, check out On The Ledge’s Sowalong series.

• The tops of some Lithops feature a leaf window, a see-through layer that sunlight passes through so photosynthesis happens inside the leaf and the plant is protected from the harsh sunlight.

• My favourite of all of the nursery’s many species was L. dorotheae.

Brian Fearn with his Lithops collection at Abbey Brook Cactus Nursery. Photograph: Kash Prashad.

My plant emoji mission…

If you’re like me, you’ll have wondered why there’s such a limited range of planty emojis available. There’s the cactus 🌵the hibiscus 🌺 and the palm of course 🌴(and whatever this is?! 🎍) but why isn’t there a Monstera emoji? That split leaf would look so distinctive as an emoji! So Kelly Westlake, my assistant on On The Ledge, and I are on a mission to figure out how we can get an officially-approved emoji added to the list. I got inspired by this episode of the podcast 99% Invisible - have a listen to find out more about the lengthy process of applying to Unicode for emoji approval.

And head over to Facebook to have your say on what we’d like to put forward for digital immortalisation as an emoji - or drop me an email (especially if you are a graphic designer willing to help on this project!)

SolTech Solutions’ Highland™ Track Light System.

Question of the week

Julie wants to know if there are any plants that will grow in a bathroom with no windows. Assuming that there’s some natural light coming in through a door, it is entirely possible to grow some plants successfully, but it’s probably advisable to switch plants in and out every couple of months so they get a chance to revive. Zamioculcas zamiifolia and Saxifraga stolonifera would both be suitable for this purpose.

If you can put daylight LED bulbs or growlight bulbs into existing light fittings, that will help extend the range of plants you can grow, but they will ideally need to be set on a timer to come on for about 12 hours a day.

You can also get growlights that are powered by a USB connection so you can charge them elsewhere and bring them into the bathroom to give your plants a boost.

If you are good with DIY or able to hire an electrician, your options extend even further: space-saving shelves featuring LED growlight strips would work really well, or you can install a growlight lighting track like this one from SolTechSolutions in the US. Or, to add a single plant, try a lit hanger like this.

Want to ask me a question? Email ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. The more information you can include, the better - pictures of your plant, details of your location and how long you have had the plant are always useful to help solve your issue!

HOW TO SUPPORT ON THE LEDGE

Contributions from On The Ledge listeners help to pay for all the things that have made the show possible over the last few years: equipment, travel expenses, editing, admin support and transcription.

Want to make a one-off donation? You can do that through my ko-fi.com page, or via Paypal.

Want to make a regular donation? Join the On The Ledge community on Patreon! Whether you can only spare a dollar or a pound, or want to make a bigger commitment, there’s something for you: see all the tiers and sign up for Patreon here.

• The Crazy Plant Person tier just gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of supporting the show you love.

• The Ledge End tier gives you access to two extra episodes a month, known as An Extra Leaf, as well as ad-free versions of the main podcast on weeks where there’s a paid advertising spot, and access to occasional patron-only Zoom sessions.

• My Superfan tier earns you a personal greeting from me in the mail including a limited edition postcard, as well as ad-free episodes.

If you like the idea of supporting On The Ledge on a regular basis but don't know what Patreon's all about, check out the FAQ here: if you still have questions, leave a comment or email me - ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. If you're already supporting others via Patreon, just click here to set up your rewards!

If you prefer to support the show in other ways, please do go and rate and review On The Ledge on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen. It's lovely to read your kind comments, and it really helps new listeners to find the show. You can also tweet or post about the show on social media - use #OnTheLedgePodcast so I’ll pick up on it!

CREDITS

This week's show featured the tracks Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, An Instrument the Boy Called Happy Day Gorkana by Samuel Corwin  and Quasi Motion by Kevin Macleod. All tracks are licensed under Creative Commons.

Logo design by Jacqueline Colley.