The first one is Dracaena fragrans. The ivy looks like Hedera helix. I'm not a fern-o-phile but I'd guess Boston fern. Nice spider plant baby, BTW.

Looks like these are outside. Are you in FL?

Hello Purple, I'm in Australia! Lol the little spider plant is just dangling there attached from the mother plant.

I have a dracaena fragans too and I could be wrong but I think the one in the picture is different. The leaves are a much darker green and the stem/trunk is green too where as d. fragans has a more woody colour. Probably from the same family though!

This post was edited by scope on Wed, Jan 22, 14 at 9:18

Aha, Australia. Hope you are enjoying a normal summer there. Having an unusually cold winter in most of US, ugh!

There are different cultivars of D. fragrans, or it could be another similar Drac. I'm sure you'll hear from more people about it. It does take some time for a trunk to lignify, to turn from green to hard, brown & woody.

Dracs are very sensitive to PH and tap water chemicals, though probably not a factor for your plants outside now. If you think one of the plants is just pale, it could have chlorosis. I repot these plants since I know that has worked almost every time in the past. This usually happens to my plants from having mostly tap water over winter (chemicals, high PH,) but can be caused by various things that make a plant unable to obtain nitrogen.

If you remove the drain saucers, you may be able to stop the tips from turning brown, if water sitting in those is what is causing that. Another possibility is that the roots have no more room to grow, packed at the bottom of the pot? I wouldn't/don't use saucers on any plants outside, especially if they can be rained on.

Thanks for your tips, hope you are keeping warm! I put those saucers so the roots don't grow into the soil beneath. I normally remove the water when it's been filled but I've been too lazy haha!

I actually rescued this plant from the roadside last week. The leaves were like that already, not sure what's causing it but hopefully it gets better from now on! The lower leaves were much worse so I cut them off. This one seems to grow leaves much lower down the stem/trunk than d. fragans? A lot of the lower leaves have been cut off so you can't see it in the pic.

That happened to a plant at my Mom's house, the roots grew through the pot. Turning the saucers over, they could still provide a barrier but not fill with water. Something to think about.

No doubt we can't know what happened to this roadside plant before you brought it home, but we know what *should* make it happy.

By the time a Drac trunk lignifies, the leaves from that section are usually gone. Newer shoots that pop up fairly quickly can have leaves over a much wider span than an older, woody trunk with a 'poof' of leaves at the top. The more healthy the tree, the more leaves it could have, but similar to a palm, it's normal for the older leaves to be discarded eventually in the process of growing taller.

Brown tips on the current, healthy leaves are normal on a Drac in the sense that so many of them look this way, but always a sign something not ideal is going on. Changing the things known to cause it most often is the most logical way to try to put a stop to it.

Have you had a chance to inspect the roots of this new tree yet?

That's not a Fragrans, it's a Dracaena Janet Craig - think the posh name would be D. Deremensis Janet Craig.

TY for the cultivar name, Jon. According to EOL, Wiki, theplantlist.org, Dave's, Kew, University of Melbourne, RHS, they are synonyms (D. fragrans and deremensis.)

I think Janet Craig could be it!

Purple, I haven't inspected the roots yet but it is probably root bound inside the pot. It had a lot of roots coming out if the drainage holes. The soil in the pot was hydrophobic. It must've been really thirsty!

Just looked in my most recent book and you're right Purple, almost all the Dracs are Fragrans now!

But to be honest we only ever refer to things as e.g. Dracaena Janet craig anyway, and miss out the middle name.

Jon, I'm with you, man! No doubt 'Janet Craig' is the most specific name available now. What kind of Drac is it? IDK, but it's definitely JC. Right.

Extraneous rant alert, proceed at your own risk, no lifeguard on duty, not responsible for personal items, and keep out of reach of children, side-effects can include nausea or vomiting, in case of an... no wait, that won't apply:
I swear they just want to make sure everybody who wasn't at the lab that day looks like an idiot talking about stuff they've been studying longer than the whippersnapper renamer has been alive. And like people have nothing better to do than discuss old/new/same plant names, assuming they manage to find the trail of them. Who wants to seem like a know-it-all, pointing out the newest name of a plant? "I've been calling it this for decades." "Well, 'they' say you're wrong now." Even those who claim to support plant renaming, even that done as a result of genetic testing, bristle when they're told their plant is no longer a rldsafeha, it's a lkfsauehkaul, even though rldsafeha only means something like 'red leaves' in Latin. The fact that there's no single authority in the world over such things doesn't help at all. If folks want to give plants genetically correct names, I don't see why they can't just attach that as a piece of info to the already universally known/accepted name, like any other info about a plant. That it comes from this place, and likes this amount of sun, etc... The info they discover is very helpful, but only if we know what plant they're talking about.

Breathe...

Sometimes Purp, one's just got to let it go (& breathing, is of course, hugely helpful in these letting gos). This naming & renaming thing can just get TOOOOO crazy.

It happened some time ago, but some of this (& some other aspects of discussion too I think) got so heated at Hoya Forum that two big named Hoya people (1 a vendor, 1 an expert), well, the mere mention of either of their names is now forbidden. I just had to warn a person new to Hoyas who thought they'd invite one of the aforementioned 'forbidden' names to participate there. I had to EM him privately & suggest he drop that invite & why.

If you've ever seen it at Hoyas, sometimes someone will comment about 'she whose name can't be mentioned' which alludes to 1 of those 2 people.

Anyway, I decided long ago I can't sweat this stuff. If I've got a botanical name which has been correct, then I'm good.

TY :+) Eloquently and accurately stated. I admire the peace you've made with this. The solution is probably more scrabble, off to check this theory now...

> their plant is no longer a rldsafeha, it's a lkfsauehkaul.

Purple, you're hilarious. "Homo humurouseoaeia" is the Latin name, I believe.

> 'she whose name can't be mentioned'

Karola incognitae?

But seriously, I am reading a biology book now, and one of the chapters talks about human species' own taxonomy. Metazoa (for multi-cell organizms), then Chordata (with a nerve cord), then vertebrates (with a spine), then mammals (with hair, self-warming bodies and milk for their young), then Eutherea (whose young spend a long time developing in the placenta), then primates (dexterous hands, nails rather than claws and reliance on vision more than on smell), then Anthropoidea (my favorite non-classifying classification, meaning "like human") then Hominidae, then Catarrhinni (possessing "downward-facing nostrils". what???), then the Hominoidea (larger primates who walk upright and are committed to the ground), then genus Homo and finally species sapiens (the ones who wear pants, look at things in microscope and rename plants on a regular basis).

It occurred to me that (1) a lot of thought does go into this, (2) classifications seem to be shaky/arbitrary at times and (3) when new species are discovered (still happens surprisingly more often than I'd thought) that do not fit into this, it has to be redone, and because DNA testing is becoming cheaper and cheaper, we can expect reclassifications to continue for a long time even for species already discovered long ago. So, we all will have to deal with it, I guess.