SHOULD WE TRY TO FIND NAMES FOR OUR NO NAME PLANTS?

By Nancy Robitaille

Trading plants can be enjoyable but what happens when the plant you receive is
NOT true to description.?

I bought a gorgeous bi-color plant that looked so pretty it just had to come home
with me. I forgot I had bought it at one of our hardware stores and several months 
later I was admiring it’s bloom and forgetting it was a No Name, discovered there
was no name tag on it. 

That was maddening so I started looking at plants of that color to try to discover
its name thinking it would make a great show plant. 

Well I found its name on FC2 and put it on the pot. Then just recently I 
noticed two plants in bloom that looked very similar. 

On closer inspection I found a great bit of difference. 

The real plant is MELODIE KIMI. Her description included the fact 
that it is single while this NO NAME plant had quite a few semi-doubles

Then I looked closely at the color. One was a purplish hue and the other leaned 
toward fuchsia, yet apart they looked very similar.

That was not all. The plant from the hardware store had light to medium 
green foliage while MELODIE KIMI had a darker medium green.

The point is, it would have been so easy to accept this plant as another MELODIE 
KIMI going by the picture on FC2 had I not already had the plant to compare it 
with. Yes, the NO NAME plant looked enough like the picture on FC2 for me 
to prepare it for show. 

But compared to a real plant of MELODIE KIMI in my collection inspecting it 
in natural light, it proved not to be the same.

Be very careful when comparing your NO NAME plants with pictures. It may or 
may not be the same plant. And trading of leaves with a plant you have named
could cause problems down the line.