The Fairy Washboard Haworthia & its relatives

Succulentophile is giving way this week to Peter Bangayan’s article on the Fairy Washboard Haworthia. Peter is a photographer, collector, and member of the Cactus and Succulent Society of the Philippines.

One of the most commonly seen and grown haworthias in the Philippines is the Fairy Washboard Haworthia or Haworthia limifolia. This is usually one of the first succulent plants in any beginner’s collection. This plant originally comes from South Africa and has a wide range of distribution in the northeastern portion of the country. The plant is characterized by a low-growing rosette of succulent green leaves; the leaves have multiple raised ridges running across them, looking much like the rough surface of a washboard, hence the name "Fairy Washboard Haworthia." Another interesting haworthia and a close relative of H. limifolia is Haworthia koelmaniorum. This plant is quite rare in the wild and has a very limited area of distribution occurring only in a very small area north of South Africa. H. koelmaniorum has a rosette composed of dark, reddish-brown and green flat triangular leaves with a rough papillose surface and several translucent purplish veins running along the leaf surface. Some clones of this species can be quite beautiful.

H. limifolia and H. koelmaniorum are easy plants to grow although the latter is quite slow growing. The plants can grow in many different types of media. They can thrive in coco coir, sand and charcoal mixes, regular cactus compost mix of one-third garden soil, one-third compost and one-third sharp sand and even in pure leaf mold. As long as the medium is porous enough for water to drain through, growing the plants in them will present no problem at all. In fact, some plants can even grow in hard mineral soil. Being succulent plants from arid regions, a bright sunlight is necessary to grow beautiful, compact and colorful rosettes. H. limifolia and H. koelmaniorum are quite tolerable when it comes to watering, oftentimes though when the plants are over-watered, the leaves will grow fat and begin to crack and scar making the plant quite unsightly. Over-watering should be avoided because this can lead to bacterial and fungal rot.

A generous fertilization program using a dilute balanced fertilizer once every two weeks during the growing season (during warmer months) will greatly benefit the plants especially when they are grown in sterile medium such as a coco coir, sand and charcoal mix.

Healthy growing plants are hardly attacked by pests but two of the common insects that attack haworthias are the dreaded scale insects and mealy bugs. Mealy bugs are easy to control using insecticide soaps or any proprietary insecticides. Scale insects, which come in a number of forms, are much harder to control because most of them have a very tough, protective waxy scale and they cling to the leaf or stem surface tenaciously, and oftentimes hide between the leaf sheaves. Unless the insecticide is systemically applied these insects can be hard to get rid of. Heavily infested plants may be cleaned with a soapy solution using cotton buds and then sprayed with insecticide soap after removing as much of the scale insects as possible. But many of these insects will usually hide between the leaf sheaves and will definitely be impossible to remove by hand. The best way to deal with them is prevention. A healthy plant with a healthy root system grown in good sunlight will hardly get any pests.

Propagating H. limifolia is quite easy. Many forms of H. limifolia produce suckers or pups that can eventually be removed from the main plant when they are large enough and planted on their own. There are H. limifolia forms that do not or seldom produce pups and this is especially true for H. koelmaniorum in general so that these plants can only be propagated by either seed, leaf cuttings or by micropropagation in the laboratory.

Growing by seed is a very slow process and pollinating haworthia flowers can be very tricky. If seeds are available, plant them in a medium of 50-50 coco coir dust and sieved sand. Keep the medium moist but not soaking wet; if the seeds are viable they should germinate within two weeks’ time. The small seedlings are very delicate during this period and care should be taken to keep the medium moist at all times. After a month or two when the seedlings have produced two to three small leaves they can be watered with a very diluted, balanced liquid fertilizer. After about a year, when the plants begin to crowd out the seedling pot, they are ready for transplanting to individual pots or larger community pots.

To propagate from leaf cuttings, remove a healthy leaf from the plant and let the wounded portion of the cut form a hard callus. This can take from about a few days to a week depending on the size of the wound and the weather. Plant the leaf in a good medium and water as you would an adult plant. The leaf should produce roots within a few weeks; in about a few months’ time small plantlets should begin to emerge from the base of the leaf. When the plantlets grow large enough to handle, carefully remove them from the mother leaf and plant them individually.

There are many forms of H. limifolia and here are some of the varieties, many of which are not recognized by haworthia experts but are kept by collectors to distinguish them from each other.

H. limifolia v. limifolia is the "typical" form of the plant, dark green rosettes with leaves that have concolor, raised ridges. Sometimes the ridges may form broken lines. Plants can be quite variable though depending on the locality where they are collected from.

The variety H. limifolia v. gigantea is said to be able to potentially grow to about six to eight inches in diameter. Most plants have tubercules spread all over the leaf in contrast to the raised ridges of the typical H. limifolia. This plant variety seldom offsets so it is quite rare.

H. limifolia v. striata is a very beautiful variety of H. limifolia. Rather than having concolor ridges, the ridges are pearly white in contrast to the green of the leaves.

H.limifolia v. umbomboensis is a variety unlike the typical H. limifolia v. limifolia. They have a very light pale green color and the leaves are not as substantial as that of the H. limifolia v.limifolia. The leaves are also smooth and thinner.

H. limifolia v. glaucophylla is, as its varietal name suggests, glaucous blue in color. The color becomes more apparent when plants are grown in bright light conditions. This plant looks in between the H. limifolia v. limifolia and the v. umbomboensis. This variety was recognized just recently.

H. koelmaniorum v. koelmaniorum plants look like "little dark alligators," as one nursery in the United States described this plant. They have a very dark purplish red brown color when grown in good light but will tend towards greenish when grown in shade. This species is a slow grower but otherwise it is easy to grow. The leaf surfaces have a rough papillose texture reminiscent of alligator skin. The leaves of this species tend to collect dust and sand, which seem to stick to its surface and is the reason the plant blends itself with its surroundings in the wild.

H. koelmaniorum v. mcmurtryi was discovered during the early ‘80s. This plant has thicker, shorter and chunkier leaves than H. koelmaniorum v. koelmaniorum. Some forms have a more retuse leaf, almost looking like a windowed haworthia plant.

Although Haworthia limifolia is a very common plant in the Philippines, what is available comes from only one or two very prolific clones. The interesting thing about collecting H. limifolia is that many different forms exist, plants collected from different localities in the wild have differences sometimes subtle, and sometimes not, which makes it interesting for the collector. As for Haworthia koelmaniorum, variations between plants may not vary as much but there are some very beautiful clones with shiny reddish leaves and prominent tesselations.

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