Hello and apologies in advance if this comes off as too long winded and rambly.

The closest place that sells Adenium is 1250 km away from where I live, so my only option is to order online. I've bought most of my seeds from that seller on account of at least being in the same country, but I've also bought some from a seller on Etsy.

But how do you know that you're getting what you're ordering until the plant is mature and blooms? Is there even any certainty that the seeds will develop the same way that the mother plant? There seems to be endless varieties and it's hard to know if a seller is using their own photos or just something they found online. The Etsy seller came highly recommended and from reviews, it seemed that their photos were genuine.

The seeds from the "local" seller have had a pretty low germination rate on most varieties (Somalense being the exception, 100% germinated and are alive after 2.5 years). I am guessing that the low germination rate is due to the seeds not being fresh.

The ones I bought from Etsy got me 28 plants from ordering 20 seeds as there were extras, all of them germinated and while 3 died, I got 3 surviving cuttings, so it evened out.

The Etsy seeds were supposedly 4 varieties of Adenium Obesum: Grace, 7440, Pink Panther and Golden Year. So far, only one of them has bloomed. It was supposed to be a Pink Panther, but looked like this:





It looks a lot more like a Chorfa from the same seller. Is it likely that the seeds are from a Pink Panther mother plant that got pollinated by Chorfa?

Then we have the ones from the "local" seller. These two were in the same pack of "Adenium Obesum Triple Flower":





They look nothing alike, one with flashy flowers and one with plain red ones. The first one (I call her Tracy because her designation in my system is 3C) has the same shape of the flowers but different colours every time it blooms, ranging from almost white with pink patterns to solid hot pink. Is this normal? The other varieties I have look more or less the same every time, but they all have simple flowers. Either way, Tracy is the gift that keeps on giving, blooming the first time 11 months from seed and over and over ever since. She may not have as chonky a caudex as many of the others, but she sure makes up for it in flowers!

And then there's this...

It's meant to be an Adenium Obesum 7440, but I don't quite know what to make of it. The long, curved leaves are fuzzy both top and bottom. I've seen varieties where the leaves curve up like a boat shape, but these curve upside down by comparison. Would anyone happen to know what it might be? The other ones from the same pack have "normal" leaves that are not fuzzy on either side. It has flower buds now so hopefully the flowers will develop and give a hint.

One thing I suppose one can never know is how the caudex is going to turn out. I absolutely love all the weird and wonderful shapes they end up in.

Somalense


Black Somalense


All in all, growing from seed is a bit of an adventure, a quest of exploration, full of surprises. If you read this far, thank you for joining me down the rabbit hole.

@Ylis, no need to apologize, rambling is here. You have great looking seedlings' blooms there. These would be an envy of people like us hoping to get special seedgrown blooms!


To answer your question, there is no way to know what you are actually getting unless you know the Seller is growing them from their own inventory. My hubby bought desert roses seeds that were supposed to be multi-petals, and so far it has been 2 years and I have some bloom but mostly single petal pink and so far none has spectacular blooms as yours.

Desert roses seeds do not come true to parents even if self pollinated. I have hand pollinated seeds from my own desert roses but I mixed and matched them with double or single pollens. So the real test now is once these seeds (from my own hand pollinated seedpods) bloom, will they bloom single petals pink or will they have special blooms. That is something I have yet to see. I am good in germinating seeds but not very good in making them bloom early .

This one with fuzzy leaves could be an obesum x arabicum hybrid


It would be interesting to see what the blooms look like.

You've gotten some lovely blooms even if they are not what you were hoping for.

I have no clue where to buy seeds that are going to produce doubles/triples. I bought some cheap ones just to try them out & then spent quite a bit more on some from a different seller. That seller showed pics of double blooms. Hoping to get doubles/triples from that batch. I did ask yet another seller on eBay if the seeds are from double blooms (they show pics of doubles) but were honest enough to say they were from single blooms. The Thailand sellers are showing some singles/doubles/triples. Maybe next year I will order from there if all goes fine with what I have now.

@Wildbloomers is the only one so far who has successfully hand pollinated and produced blooming sized seedlings from double or triple petals but if I recall correctly, the results are mixed. Some produced multipetals but others are single petals. But if they came from non pink pod parents or pollens, the seedlings blooms are not pink. So I think the seedlings being sold online that are supposed to be special blooms or multiple petals are really from single petals pink desert rose.

for the replies!

@GigiAdeniumPlumeria What you say about pollination and parents is reassuring - and a bit frustrating. It's like having to wait several years on opening a Christmas present.

The more I think about it, the more I am reminded of colour genetics in dogs and then it makes perfect sense. If two red Shiba Inus can produce sesame (wolf coloured) puppies, and if the merle gene can hide in a red/brindle/sable Cardigan Welsh Corgi then why should the same not apply to plants? Nature is amazing.

I'm glad I tagged all the seeds from the start since it would be impossible by now to tell which plant came from which seed.

The "Triple Flower" that turned out single red flowers grows differently than the ones I got that were just "Obesum" in that it, like Tracy, has more branches without pruning rather than predominantly shooting one tall stem up as the others have.

I'm also pretty certain that the ones I got as Arabicum, Arabicum Black Stem, Arabicum Black Giant, Arabicum King Kong and Thai Socotranum S1 are, if not exactly what the seller claimed, at the very least different from the Obesum and Somalense ones. Only two of them have fuzz under the leaves, but they all grow slower, are more susceptible to root rot, want much less water and are chunking out the trunks. Since the big caudex is what mainly attracts me to desert roses, I have high hopes for them. But it does take patience and I keep having to stop myself from overwatering them.

When you pay $5/seed and only 25% of the seeds even germinate, it's not great to kill the babies with overwatering. It's never great, of course, but I'm much less fussed about it if I have 10 more of the same seedlings and spent $0.3 per seed.

@KatsPlantsTX The one I ordered from on Etsy ships internationally from Réunion (France) with Phytosanitary certificates and while the first one to bloom didn't look like the picture from the order, it's certainly got at the very least double petals. The seller, Jim, pollinates the seeds himself and ships quickly. Even though the seeds had a long journey to get here, I planted them 17 days after I ordered them. The name of the Etsy shop is passiondesplantes. If I was going to get more seeds for the sake of the flowers, I would order them from there. Might be worth a shot if you want to try?

Ylis, thanks for letting me know where to go to get some seeds. I am currently at my limit of how many seedlings I will need to take care of if most of them get big enough to go outside next year. Once I am ready to plant more seeds I will order from Jim. Please keep us updated on your plants.

A previous discussion:
The thread "Will adenium seeds come true to parent?" in Adeniums forum

This is a decent article about this:
https://extension.sdstate.edu/...

And this:
https://aggie-hort.tamu.edu/ar....

See page 6/7 for seed section of this article:
Adenium cultivars will not breed true. The seedlings will
not duplicate the genetics of either parent. Any seedlings
resulting from the cross should not be assigned the cultivar name of either parent.
https://extension.arizona.edu/...

@purpleinopp ! Lots of good information in those links.

I particularly liked the illustrations for the breeding example. It appears to confirm what I was thinking about the similarity to colour genetics in dogs. Too bad adeniums can take so long to bloom. At least with dogs, you can be fairly sure of the colour after a few months.

LOL! So true. I'd have to say that puppies and Adenium sprouts are both in the upper level of cuteness. : )

I specially like the last article about the adeniums.

I have so far a 7 month old seedlings bloom and now 1 in bud but since we are dropping below 50s, that could lengthen the opening of the buds or could mean buds might drop! I have a few adeniums now totally bald!

purpleinopp said: A previous discussion:
The thread "Will adenium seeds come true to parent?" in Adeniums forum

Based on my personal experience on multi-petals… it is not guaranteed to have multi petal blooms similar to pod parent. Here's a discussion based on actual results of our own hybridization:

https://garden.org/thread/view...

Here is the seedling from my hybridization:



Here is the pod parent:



Now I'm curious if other seedlings will bloom multipetal.

I just found this thread and have been down this road as well, sort of. Two years ago I didn't know what a desert rose was, then my mother bought one for a friend and said she'd like one. I started looking for seeds and bought 100 "mixed obesum" seeds from a seller in India for $9 on amazon. I planted the first 50, they all germinated and I managed to keep 45 of them alive, a year later I planted the other 50 and 40 germinated, 35 are still hanging in there. By the end of last summer I began to realize that some were markedly different, I sent a local etsy seller who sells obesums some pictures and she said none of the pictures I sent were of obesums 😲

I checked my amazon history to make sure I ordered the mixed obesums and I had, the seller wasn't on amazon any more so I used the wayback machine to go back to may 2022 and found the seller's listings, he was also selling mixed adeniums at that time. Now that I am almost 2 years into this and have done a lot of reading, I am sure I got mixed adeniums. I've got arabicums, crispums, rcn's, brazilians, I think maybe a black somalense or two, possibly a mutiflorum, and several different obesums. I'm not complaining, I enjoy the challenge of growing them and you can't go wrong with 80 adeniums for $9. If you don't count the cost of pots, fertilizer, soil, antifungals, neem oil, and a ton of my time and attention 😛

I've got about another 100 seedlings started but this time I made sure I ordered specific species, we'll see how that pans out 😉

That sounds amazing! And far more economically viable than my ventures.

This time round I was lucky to hit a buy one get one on some seeds I actually wanted, I wound up paying $6.75 per 20 seeds each of black somalense, rcn's, multiflorums, and brazilians. I got 100% germination on the black somalense and a little over 50% on the rest. Then I ordered 100 mixed single petal obesums so I could try my hand at grafting and hand pollinating, I have some nice singles, doubles and triples to work with in what I already have. I paid $20 for that 100 and received 180 seeds from him with 100% germination on the first 40. I think maybe the adenium gods are cutting me some slack after the first time around 🙏

I really want to get some seeds from this plant to see if they come out the same as the parent.

The flowers start out pure white and then turn pink. It put on 2 sets of four flowers last year and they all did it over 3-4 days after opening. It would be a great plant for cross pollination too. I just need to figure out which one it is again. I repotted it about 3 days before we had to evacuate for a hurricane, I hadn't marked the pot, and it had dropped it's flowers before they all got put in the dining room together


I know it's in a black gallon pot and it's an obesum, which narrows it down to about 20 plants, I'll just have to wait patiently until it shows itself

Wow! You got some really nice collection there Kyle! I see some doubles, triple and white! You can sometimes identify by comparing your photos with the leaves and the "structure" of the plants.

The $6.75 for 20 is a great buy but 180 seeds for $20 is even awesome! Did you have to pay for international shipping? There are others here in the chat for Adenium seeds who are looking to buy Adenium seeds online. I didn't recommend the one hubby bought my seeds because my supposedly mystery multi petals seedlings all bloomed pink so far.

I get so many seeds from mine and can't sow them all so I donated my extra seeds through Victory Seeds so others can try to grow them.

@critterologist see above post of Kyle. You can buy seeds online for a great price!

@GigiAdeniumPlumeria for the

I bought the 100 single petal seeds on etsy from a seller in Mission Texas that also sells grafted plants, and fancier seeds (sometimes). I didn't pay shipping, only tax, but it was back in feb. and they were on sale. I'm guessing it was the tail end of his 2023 seeds. He was prompt with shipping and answered my questions right away. I just looked and they are $37.99 right now.

I got the other seeds from a seller in Manassas Virginia on ebay, they are still $6.75 plus $3 shipping for 10 seeds. He sells a bunch of other interesting seeds as well.

I will post the links if there's an appropriate thread for that kind of thing you can point me to.

GigiAdeniumPlumeria said: You can sometimes identify by comparing your photos with the leaves and the "structure" of the plants.

I went through all my pics from last year, I've only got a half dozen pictures of that plant and they don't show much of the plant structure. It's got a vertical center branch and then 3 or 4 branches coming off a round caudex at 45 degree angles. I've got a half dozen with that basic form, I'll be keeping a close eye on those 😉