Conservatory Chronicles: Sausage Tree Update

The north sausage tree (Kegelia africana) has begun to flower and is overlapping with the south sausage tree's blossoming. We've begun to pollinate them by hand back and forth using a paintbrush. Pictured is the first tiny fruit. The second picture shows our paintbrush pollination method, in which the The hairy paintbrush fibers act like the hairs of a bat that would pick up the pollen when visiting one flower. The pollen is moved by the bat to the next flower of another tree, thus cross-pollinating two flowers of different trees.

A new sausage forming

Hand-pollinating with a paintbrush