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 First Class 2 (a computer program of African violet cultivar names) 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 purpleish hue and the other leaned toward fuschia, 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.  When compared to a real plant of MELODIE KIMI in my collection and 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. Back to Members Page Return to Newbie's Nook page design by Alana