Looking for 
details for a houseplant we bought last year, I discovered it was a Flowering Maple, or better yet, an Abutilon striatum.
Ours is growing pretty good, but needs some kind of trellis to support all the twigs. Half jokingly, I refer to it as the Ivey. Luckily, now we know what it actually is, we can focus on its predicament: it has a virus. Those funny yellow specks on its leaves? It’s caused by a virus, a virus that particularly likes Abutilons.
Flowering Maples, although infected, do not seem to suffer in regard to vigor and flowering. In fact, the virus is responsible for most of the species’ ornamental value. Thus, the question arises – Is AMV a disease? According to Webster’s definition of a disease as “an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body that affects the performance of the vital functionsâ€, one could argue that it isn’t.
I always wondered why that cat of ours is chewing those leaves.
(picture courtesy of UCC Biology Department)