Trailer Taming - Part 1: Naturally Trailing Types

There are two main types of trailing African violets.  Bushy trailers form multiple crowns from a center point, but generally don't form long branches.  Naturally trailing types grow long stems or branches and can be trained to grow as large, full plants, with the potential for high bloom counts.  The secret to a full plant with a nice round shape is to get many crowns to grow along these trails.  Why do you see so many straggly trailers?  Many people hesitate to grooms plants and avoid taking leaves off of even single crown plants.  Grooming trailers to be nice full plants requires you to remove many leaves—most of which will be perfectly healthy and green.

Most plants will get nice and full if you remove the leaves that block smaller crowns.  Do this consistently, especially on young trailers and those you move up into bigger pots.  Sometimes drastic steps are needed. 

Here is a great example of a trailer that needs to be trained to grow more crowns.  It is a pretty nice plant here, but it has a significant flaw—it does not have enough crowns for the size of the plant.  The leaves are healthy and the shape is nice, but it grew very quickly for me, so I repotted it into larger pan pots without doing the needed training.  It is growing in a 7 inch pan pot.

I need to take off a lot of leaves, exposing bare stems underneath them.  I will do this in two steps so I don’t stress the plant too much.  Here is the plant after a good grooming.  I removed a lot of leaves.  Small crowns are visible on the bare stems and near the center of the plant.  These crowns can now grow since they have light now.

One month later, one side is showing a lot of smaller crowns on the bare stems.  I will pluck more leaves out and the plant will look pretty bare….but, in a few months it will fill in.  Keep the leaves on the ends of the crowns to be sure and provide enough energy for the plant.   If these crowns are still sticking out at odd angles when the rest of the crowns grow in, I will remove them.