Pono Plant access to important plants

Blue Jade Vine

Strongylodon macrobotrys

no formal IUCN category

Its rarity is biology, not marketing. The blue jade vine is bat-pollinated, self-incompatible, and its seed does not store, so nearly every plant in cultivation is a clone raised from a cutting or a layer. That is the whole mission in one plant: access to it is a real problem, and the fix is propagation, not collection.

Status

Endemic to the Philippines and considered declining and threatened in the wild by deforestation and the loss of its bat pollinators. No formal IUCN Red List assessment has been published, so we describe it as threatened rather than assigning an official category.

no CITES listing found

Native range

Endemic to the Philippines: Luzon, Mindoro, and Catanduanes.

Propagation

  • semi-ripe stem cuttings with bottom heat
  • air-layering (marcotting)

Under the mist

Our hypothesis, not established: It already roots from misted cuttings, and its worst enemy is rot in wet media, exactly the failure mode a bare-root, high-oxygen mist chamber reduces. We think it is a promising candidate for high-pressure aeroponics.

Access

  • Nursery-propagated only, never wild-collected.
  • No CITES and no US ESA listing, so a rooted, inspected plant is legal to grow, sell, and ship interstate with no species permit.
  • APHIS specifically prohibits fresh jade-vine flowers from leaving Hawaii, so we ship the rooted, inspected plant or cutting, never the cut flower.

How to obtain: waitlist

The turquoise is real chemistry, not a trick of the light. It comes from documented copigmentation of malvin, an anthocyanin, and saponarin, a flavone, at roughly a 1:9 ratio in mildly alkaline petal sap near pH 7.9 (Takeda et al. 2010).

Kew went about thirty years without a single seed pod until hand-pollination finally worked in 1995. That is why nearly every plant you will ever meet is a clone: the vine cannot easily set seed on its own away from its bats, and the seed it does make will not keep. Propagation is how the plant survives outside its forest.

In Hawaii it is on solid footing. Plant Pono screens it low-risk (a score of -9), meaning it is non-invasive and safe to grow here. It was introduced in 1950 and became a lei favorite after a 1956 Lei Day contest win (Plant Pono).

We list its conservation status carefully. It is clearly declining in the wild, but no formal IUCN Red List assessment has been published, so we call it threatened rather than borrowing an official category it has not been given. We also found no CITES listing for it. Where a claim is honest we cite the primary source; where the record is silent we say so.

Sources