Indoor plant, outer-space history

BERWICK, Pa. - Thanks to outer space, Arietta Varner's African violets produce half-dollar-size blooms nearly year-round and need little care.

Her two plants come from a strain grown from seeds that spent about six years in space in the 1980s. The seeds were exposed to radiation, which caused certain genetic mutations.

Guests to the Varner home are drawn to the pair of potted plants, which are by the living-room window.

"They can't believe the size of the blooms," said her husband, Ron. "Some of them are as big as half a dollar. That's almost double the size of a normal African violet."

Arietta Varner's daughter, Crystal Russ of Levittown, gave her mother a small, potted Space Violet as a Mother's Day gift about nine years ago.

Ron Varner, the green thumb of the two, tended to the plant. He watered it once a week, gave it a fertilizer supplement every three weeks, and kept it in a window where it got bright, indirect light.

A year later, the plant had grown, so he put it in a larger pot. Four years after that, it was even bigger, and he moved it to a pot about eight inches in diameter, where it stays today.

During that second transition, a piece of the plant fell off. Ron Varner put it in water, where the cutting sprouted roots. He potted it, and now they have two plants.

The second one took about four years to reach the size of the first one.

Arietta Varner, 82, enjoys the novelty of the plant's connection to space, and she appreciates when visitors are interested. She keeps a card describing the plant's origin to show people.

When the space seeds were returned to Earth, some plants grown from them were hardier and bloomed almost constantly. A company called Optimara cultivated the plants and marketed them as Space Violets.

Ron Varner, 72, has grown African violets that have never left the planet, but he has not had the interest to see them through as long as the space violet. He has either given up on them or given them away, he said.

That makes it tough for him to compare the growth and care of the space violet to a standard plant. But he can say the space violets are easy to take care of.

"They don't need hardly any attention. I take care of them and water them, and she admires them," he said.

A veteran cultivator of flowering plants and vegetables, Varner uses Miracle-Gro on most of his flora. But the chemical fertilizer is unnecessary for the space violet, he said.

The plant produces a thick bed of round, fuzzy leaves, out of which sprouts a bouquet of about 20 blossoms. That's nearly four times as many as a standard African violet would sprout.

The blossoms are a light, bright purple with a greenish frill at the edge that turns to pink as the cuplike flower opens.

The seeds that would produce the plants branded as EverFloris were put into space in 1984 and were supposed to stay there for a year. But because of slipping NASA schedules and then the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the capsule holding the seeds stayed in orbit until 1990.