Is it normal for Kalanchoe to grow 60 centimetres tall (1.97 feet)?

This is the story of the weirdest Kalanchoe Blossfeldiana I’ve ever seen.

It was Halloween 2002 when I bought the necessary gadgets for the day. Here in Sweden it’s a custom to buy plants with orange flowers that day. Anything black and anything orange goes. Kalanchoe with orange flowers is THE Halloween plant here! So I went and bought this little fellow who was as cute as a button and as small as a toy. The entire plant was 3 centimetres tall (1.18 inches) and 7.62 centimetres wide (3 inches) with about 20 leaves and a few flowers. Now this kind of plants you usually keep for a month or so ‘till it drops its flowers and then it’s a matter of time till you throw it in the garbage. In a couple of occasions I’ve heard people keeping them for a year or so, maximum, but they never even saw them bloom again and since its not the prettiest plant without flowers, well, it’s very common that people throw them away. Well not me. I kept it. And it started growing and growing. It was weird it was growing really because I didn’t pay so much attention to it. I decided to repot it in a bigger pot and that’s about all I did for it. In the end I put it in a room all alone in front of a window and sometimes I even forgot to water it for weeks. It a rather ugly plant but I can never throw away something because it’s ugly. So 3 years later it was 60 centimetres tall (1.97 feet). It couldn’t stand on its own anymore so I had it against the window supported by threads tied in various places so that it could stand up. Since I had no idea what these plants are supposed to look like – if they are hanging plants, standing plants or bush plants – I had to improvise and decide myself if it would stand or hang. Then one dark winter day in December 2005 I saw the weirdest thing. Little buds! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I never thought I’d see a plan like tat blooming ever again. I mean that’s the main reason people throw them away. By January it was blooming like crazy!!! Lots and lots of flowers and lots and lots of buds kept on coming. It was blooming until May 2006. For five whole months it was blooming and blooming and growing and growing. Then it stopped. Then this summer it started looking kind of sad. As plants do when you over water them. But I didn’t over water it. In fact I let it dry a little bit like you do with succulents and then water. But still, it looks as if it is saying bye bye. I’m posting a couple of pictures of its blooming time. I’m not posting any pictures of how it is now because it just looks the same without the flowers and you can’t really tell from a picture that it is feeling bad. You have to touch it to understand and see that the leaves are not shiny anymore.

So my question is.
Have you ever seen a thing like that before? Is Kalanchoe Blossfeldiana supposed to grow so big? Is it blooming every 3 years? Is it a winter bloomer? Do you think that this was its swan song? Should I cut it down? And if I do and it grows again so big, should I let it or should I keep it in a standard height by pruning regularly? Is it supposed to stand or hang?



Thank you, for reading :)

Have a nice day.



Alexandra

 

Try looking at this link. It should answer your questions.

http://www.plantfacts.com/Family/Crassulaceae/Kalanchoe.blossfeldiana.shtml

Buzz

 

One of my books says a maximum 40cm for Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, but it also says:

Some of the other species of Kalanchoe are cited as growing to 1m or more tall (K. beharensis even up to 6m tall, and K. hilldbrandtii 5m), so yours could be a hybrid with one of these larger species.

 

Thank you everyone for your replies :) It is good to finally know a little more about this weird looking plant of mine.
I also read something interesting that explains why it bloomed after 3 years.
I’ll just copy and paste here :

That explains it for me because as I said in the end I got tired of looking at it so I put it in a room all alone and sometimes forgot about it in the darkness for days. And this is when it started blooming. So it was really weird for me because I never heard of a plant that likes darkness o_0.

But now after reading this and reading your comments and references I understand a bit more of what I’m dealing with here. It’s good to know I’m not growing a mutated plant. Still . . . I like to continue calling him “Muty†:)

I have decided to trellis & train it and I’ve already moved it back into the dark room and who knows maybe I’m lucky and it flowers in Halloween :)


Thank you very much everyone :)