Kitchen Garden Forum

My wife has a Strelitzia (bird of paradise flower) in a pot which has been outside all summer and is now in the greenhouse (cold) awaiting coming back into the house.

Somewhere along the way it has developed small, white fungus fruiting bodies on the exposed roots.

My question is; Is it worth bringing it back into the house to try to get it to flower in warmth or is it just bin fodder as the fungus may spread to our small collection of orchids?

She tells me it has not flowered in the 2 years since a friend gave it to her.

Thanks
MikA

Are the roots actually rotting? It might be that the fungus is not pathogenic, that is, it is co-exisiting with your Strelitzia rather than seeking to overwhelm it. A bit like with your orchids, in fact. Maybe you could post a photo.
I grew a Strelitzia from seed years ago and it persisted with me for very many years. I placed it outside through the summer and kept it indoors through the winter, but it never flowered. One year I neglected to bring it in for the winter, which I think was my subconscious telling me to give up on it. Each time I repotted it I found that some of the roots had decayed but there were always new ones developing. The roots are difficult to deal with, being improbably thick and a challenge to properly contain.

Thanks Felix

Your thought about the fungus may be correct as my wife told me she replanted with mycorrhizal fungus and the roots had become uncovered.

I will give it another year to see if it gets to a flowering size.

its not mealy bugs is it ? I always think they look like a white fungus
Although Im sure you probally know them already

Thanks Tigger but it was definitely a fungus. Perfectly formed miniature white mushrooms.

I doubt that using michorrhizal fungi in pots will benefit the plant much anyway unless you intend planting it out in the garden eventually because a plants roots usually fill the pot anyway, the benefit of the fungi is that it attaches to the plants roots but extends to a far greater wider and deeper area finding and exchanging many nutrients innaccesssable to the plants smaller roots in exchange from sugars the plant gets from the sun.

MikA wrote:Is it worth bringing it back into the house to try to get it to flower in warmth or is it just bin fodder

Hard to tell whether the fungus will be a problem. However Strelitzia can be fickle plants.

We grew several a few years back - several flowered, but others did nothing. The flowers were initially impressive, but having seen them grow in large quantities in the Caribbean, they weren't quite the same.

You may well find they need to be in a reasonably big pot once they've grown a couple of feet high. In the end after a year of watering, feeding etc with no more flowers we got rid of ours.