Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Anemone wilt


Something's going on.

One of the pots of fall anemones has started to decline. At first, I thought I had neglected to water it well. Leaves would wilt, randomly, three, five at a time. So I watered. Well. But it's still happening. If I didn't know better I'd say it had been poisoned, overfed with blue crystals, or peed on.

The Frenchman swears he had nothing to do with it. The cat studies his toes when I ask (his own toes, not the Frenchman's).

Is there such a thing as anemone wilt?

I have moved the mushroom log which had been leaning up against the pot; perhaps something leaked from the mushroom log? But what? Log juice? The glue to seal in the shitake spores? I doubt it. 

I could find nothing visible burrowing in the soil. 

The lower leaves of one lily sharing the pot also turned crispy brown.

Hm. This is where the pork tonnato landed all those weeks ago, in The Flying Pork Incident. They remained undetected for many days and turned awfully stinky. Bad bacteria?


The other anemones, three feet away,  are doing wonderfully. They are tropical. And! They are pushing up new flower spikes. Remember, I wondered if they might, with feeding?


To confuse matters farther, the sick anemone is still making new leaves. But then one of those curls up and wilts, too...

I don't know.

12 comments:

  1. Oh, how very sad. I adore my anemones. Their oak-leaf shaped leaves give my garden a strong border all summer long. And then their white and fuschia blooms give it a much needed lift when everything else is dying off. I have noticed that like everything else, mine are flowering earlier this year.

    The hyperlink to my name should take you to my own garden ode. I do hope you figure out why yours are wilting. Let us know!

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  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anemone_diseases

    I wonder if one of these diseases is the one your plant has?

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  3. Is it a soggy wilted leaf or a dried up wilted leaf? Does it look like there's some kind of little mite or bug (tiny) that has burrowed in? Seems like if it was something in the soil the whole plant would suffer. The mysteries of Mother Nature!

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  4. Judith - I'd love to have a whole border of anemones.

    Thanks, Sara :-)

    Barbara - dried, not soggy...

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  5. Long story short (well, shorter), for many years I grew plain old regular garden variety impatience, in a contained cement flower box attached to my house, and they thrived. I got new plants every year, watered them, gave them Miracle Grow and pretty much forgot about them (except for water). The plants grew huge, like bushes.

    And then, one year, several wilted days after I planted them. Thinking a squirrel had disturbed them, I replanted, only to have the same thing happen. Eventually, almost all of the plants withered. The next year, same thing happened. I replaced the soil. Same thing happened. I replaced the soil again. I let the box lie fallow. I tried planting different flowers. And then, I gave up. I don't plant flowers in that box anymore. I have hosta growing in the ground next to the box and it has flourished. It remains a mystery to me.

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  6. Marie,

    Wilt not due to drought always makes me think root rot and Anemones are susceptible to all the biggies. In the greenhouse, we'd put our hand over the top, tip the pot upside down, and check the roots, but I assume your pot is too big to do that. Hmmm. Plants in a neighboring pot being fine could support this theory since it points away from something environmental.

    I'd lay off the fert - blue crystals or other - and decrease the water as much as the plants can stand then cross my fingers.

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  7. Thanks, Paul. Don't worry, I went to rehab for the blue crystals :-)

    I may dig it up and have a look. Leaves continue to crisp up after going limp.

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  8. Hi Marie,
    One other thing to consider is a perched water table in your pot. If the growing medium has become compacted, the bottom 4 inches of the pot may be holding water and drowning the roots. This would explain why some of the plant is healthy. You can test this theory by inserting a toothpick through the drain hole of the pot. If water comes out, then it's PWT for sure.

    Best of luck to a fellow urban container gardener.

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  9. Hi, I'm interested how things resolved for you Marie, 3 years later I have the same problem with my potted anemones, leaves wilt and dry, I removed those leaves, new growth comes up and dies :( I'm so sad, and want to save my plants, also (my potted kornus cousa wilted, it is near anemones. )

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    Replies
    1. Such a sad news :( I did what I could to save mine, removed the bad leaves, and moved the pots, I think they are going to make it, there is new growth and it's not wilting.

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  10. Verticillium wilt ?

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