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Anyone with experience promoting horizontal buce spread.

L

Little

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I have about 20+ Bucephalandra in a bucket about to go into a tank.
Some of them are very tall and I want to plant it in a semi carpet style.
I wondered if anyone has experience of these two methods.

1. Attach the buce laying down (what was vertical growth, laid horizontally). Half the leaves will be squashed under it (or I can trim the leaves off?) and growth pattern will initially look weird.

2. Cut the long vertical rhizomes into 1 inch pieces and attach vertically. Growth pattern will look more natural but potentially end up growing tall again.

The heart of the question is long rhizome direction vs a larger number of individual pieces.

Anyone with experience of both approaches?
Thanks.
 
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They'll rotate leaves to find the light so if you lay them losely horizonally for a few days you should find the leaves all rotate to one side. If you lay them horizonally. I haven't laid tall buce down specifically but at a guess (what usually happens) is you'll then likely get new roots and side shoots out the leaf nodes.
 
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Not quite sure what 'semi carpet style' means, are you attaching them to something or planting them in the substrate? My experience is that they always grow towards the light so I would imagine method 1 to be the best option and if possible train them along a branch or whatever where the process described by @tam above should occur. I have never done this but have seen a similar scenarios when trapped by hardscape or obscured by other plants whereas the main stem is growing sideways searching out the light and shoots appear along the the leaf nodes. If you are planting them in the substrate then I suppose carefully weighing down the main stem with a stone or something appropriate until the roots take hold and then moving it along as it grows. As I said I have not deliberately done this but have done so accidentally. Buce love to get their roots into the substrate.
 
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Semi carpet is probably not the right term.
I mean, a lower, tighter growth.
I have a lot of longer leggy bits.

The plan is to attach the buce to bags of gravel. I will then lay the bags around my iwagumi layout.
I will keep the rhizomes in tact and lay horizontal then.

Just had a message that my new tanks pallet delivery is today, so probably will get stuck in over Christmas.
 
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It's the pruning that makes them clumps... it's the same as stems, if you cut them you usually get two side branches, cut each of those you get two more so then you have four points of growth instead of one. I'd be inclined to lay them down but if they are very low also chop into sections... laying down and chopping should encourage lots of side growth.
 
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