Is a spathiphyllum flower with a double petal unsual and can it be reproduced to have all double flowers?

All of the flowers on my spathiphyllum have single petals except one that has just opened and it has two distinct petals of equal size. Can this be cloned or duplicated to produce a plant that will always flower with double petals?

Is a spathiphyllum flower with a double petal unsual and can it be reproduced to have all double flowers?
You can clone spathiphyllum. It is the way that most commercial growers are making new spathiphyllums these days. They use a method called "tissue culture", also known as "microcuttings".





You put a small piece of the parent plant tissue on sterile nutrient jelly.





I don't know about spathiphyllums specifically but I know that for other plants you can use stuff like moistened potting soil and you pin the little pieces of leaf to it. And then you cover the whole thing in a mini greenhouse (like a plastic bowl or plastic wrap).





The sterile nutrient jelly probably produces winners by inhibiting competing growths and disease. Some people even disinfect the piece of plant before they put it on the rooting medium. And successful growers probably even tailor make their nutrients to reflect the needs of spathiphyllum in particular.





If you don't get some kind of sterile nutrient jelly, then you could make your own by using agar. Agar is used for jellies and ice cram so you might find some at a store that sells supplies for those things. There are lots of suppliers online.





Add enough agar to water to make it like jello. generally agar acts just like jello/gelatin and you can add it in the same proportions as those recipes.





Then add some miracle grow or other fertilizer so that your solution will have a content of 2-2-2 or so. That means approximately equal amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium.





You can put in it canning jars (about $8 at walMart) and use a pressure cooker on low to sterilize the whole shebang. Takes 15 on low. or you can cover each jar with a couple layers of aluminum foil and put in a regular covered pot with enough water to be level with the amount of nutrient solution in each jar. med to low boil for 15 minutes. Let cool on the counter, maybe overnight. Maintain as sterile conditions as you can when putting on the micro-cuttings. Putting them right into the jars would probably work. and then you could use the jars for mini greenhouses. Either way. make sure there is good contact between the plant tissue and the growing medium.





They might need airing occassionally. But some growths do not%26lt;%26lt; so i'm not sure about spathiphyllums.





maybe a breeder would give you a few pointers.





I didn't see anything that refered to double flowered spathiphyllums so you might have a unique situation going on there. Since the plant only produced one flower out of many like that then, well, I don't know what to tell you there. maybe just try to get the cuttings from the leaves that seem to be feeding that flower. And it might be possible to get roots to grow from the flower stalk it's self. You could try "air layering" too.





Air layering is wrapping a rooting medium around a stalk (like moistened sphagum moss) and then covering that medium with something to prevent the medium from drying (like plastic wrap).





here is a link to tissue culture:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_tissu...





Even if the resulting plants do not exhibit the double flowers, they would still make decent candidates for interbreeding. Spathiphyllums can produce seed. Breed one to another and perhaps, eventually, one of those babies or grandbabies or cousins would display the recessive trait that cause the double flower; if indeed it is a recessive trait and not an enviromental factor. And even if it is an environmental factor, you might have bred a plant that is susceptible to that particular environmental factor%26lt;%26lt;which is canna neat in and of it's self. I mention that environmental factor thing just because I have heard about other species of plants exhibiting mutative appearances due to those type of factors.





grow on!



make up