One of the reoccurring questions I get is around the subject of virus. Everyone has there own opinions of virus, its origins and whether a plant is, or is not affected.

I, like many of you reading, have lost plants to virus and about 10 years ago I had a huge cull of my collection as I felt I needed to bin anything that remotely looks infected - I am sure I threw some good plants away by mistake but I wanted to be sure that I had taken the strongest course of action that I could to protect the remainder of my plants.

Most folks first recognise the signs of virus in flowers, with petals and sepals becoming blotchy and stained, but what if the plants are not flowering (Flowering sized plants do not always flower) or are flowering sized - without the flowers to show potential infection you may host an infected plant in your collection for a couple of seasons without knowing.

Over the years I started to notice something in plants which I suspected, I noticed that those plants which showed the usual signs of virus (marked flowers) also developed a 'curled' tip to the emerging leaf. I have posted a selection of photos below to show what a healthy plants looked like (Shantung 'Greenshank' and 'Ducat') and what correctly turned out to be an infected plants (Shantung 'Natasha' and Soufriere 'Sunrise').

Since purging my collection I have run a strict quarantine process for ALL new plants coming into my collection and I feel that this has paid off, both of the infected plants below ended up in the bin!

One of the lessons I have learned along the way is to be very careful who I source plants from and do my best not to get blinded and hypnotised by names and labels that I want/need.

As I said, these are just my observations and thoughts on the matter :-)