Hi, my aeonium sprouted a mysterious inflorescence type structure. However, the components look more like baby aeoniums than flowers. What could that structure be? I started clipping them off and callousing them over.

Was that the right thing to do?


what are these things?

They are hen & chicks
To The Forum

Looks like your aeonium changed it's mind in mid production.
decided to put off pups instead of flowers

Enjoy the extra plants

Sorry for wrong ID, I could have sworn they were H & C

Question?
Can not see in the photo,
Is there a mother plant on top ? or on bottom?

If the mother is on top it is a normal way of reproduction , to shoot babies from the stem.

Hard to figure out where it's coming from, where and how it's planted.
You can snap or cut the stem off, let it callus over and replant it either in the ground or in a pot. (protect from frost)

Sometimes Aeoniums branch prolifically after or instead of flowering... not sure why this happens, it's not that common. But you can certainly cut the rosettes off the end and start new plants. Our neighbor had a big old purple Aeonium do this and it was rather spectacular afterwards until some passerby decided to take it home.

Baja_Costero said:Sometimes Aeoniums branch prolifically after or instead of flowering... not sure why this happens, it's not that common. But you can certainly cut the rosettes off the end and start new plants. Our neighbor had a big old purple Aeonium do this and it was rather spectacular afterwards until some passerby decided to take it home.

Thank you all! One of my other aeoniums did that, too and the structure was sheered off in a windstorm (which started hellacious wildfires, but that is another story. Although that actual plant structure was completely unfamiliar to me and a prolific googling section yielded NOTHING about baby aeoniums branching off of adults, I figured I'd snip them off and use them as cuttings, since they did look like little pups. We'll see how they do!

If they do well, it will be like a huge windfall!

For the record, most Aeoniums (especially the ones in cultivation) do branch as adults, some of them sparingly and others with wild abandon.



What's unusual about the plant in the photo is that it was on its way to flowering, but then reversed course and went vegetative instead.

As a general rule it's incredibly easy to get most of them to branch, almost on command actually, by removing the top part of the rosette but leaving several healthy leaves at the bottom still on the mother plant. Basically you remove the top half of the rosette and force the bottom half to branch to survive.

To give you one example I have been growing this variegated Aeonium for years, and my annual cycle (by now ritual) is to behead the plant in the way described above twice, waiting only as long it takes the cutting to sprout new roots and start growing again (maybe 6-8 weeks). Those two beheaded plants will grow up with 8-10 branches each (to be harvested later at my convenience) and the rosette which gets rooted for the second time I will allow to grow full size and flower 1-2 years later. So by judicious use of the knife I can multiply a plant that might branch 2-3 times at most to 20 new heads without losing the joy of seeing the flower.



With a plant like that, no sense in ever running out.