Pretty picture: Pulsatilla vulgaris

Like yesterday, another picture of a perennial I'm not incredibly familiar with. The picture is much more impressive (or at least much more, you know, big) if opened in a new window. You can practically count the pollen grains.

Though please don't. You have better, more interesting things to do than pollen-counting.


PATSP may be a little light on text and long on perennial photos this week, because I'm working feverishly to try to get the plant-toxicity posts presentable. My goal is to make April 12-18 "Houseplant Toxicity Week." If I can't get it all together by April 12, then we may have to make it April 19-25 instead, which is probably more appropriate anyway. I feel a little weird about starting Houseplant Toxicity Week on Easter. I also want to get this done, though, finally, so if I can do it on Easter, then I will.

More on Iowa and Gay Marriage

According to a UCLA study referenced by UPI, gay marriage will bring an additional $160,000,000 into the state economy over the next three years, due to couples from neighboring states where gay marriage is not yet legal choosing to marry in Iowa. The estimate is that 55,000 couples would do this.

Assuming that Iowa doesn't panic and fuck it up somehow. Midwesterners are not, as a people, especially prone to panic, but as the late Molly Ivins observed, sex has never been known to inspire a lot of particularly clear thinking.

Random plant event: Brunnera 'Jack Frost' flowers

Owing to the way that things are set up at work, I spend most of my time with the tropicals and annuals, but we have perennials too, and occasionally I wind up getting to see them.

I don't have much to add to this picture; Brunnera is one of those plants I remember kind of liking but the name hasn't really been sticking with me. Hopefully that will change now, though. One of the nice things about having a blog turns out to be that when you're forced to stop and contemplate a particular plant for a post, it does burn the plant's identity into your brain. I think having to come up with posts for PATSP last year is probably how I learned about 40-50% of the annuals. Maybe this year we'll see more perennial pictures.

Pretty picture: Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer'

Yesterday at work, Younger Co-Worker attempted to guess my two favorite annuals based on what we had more varieties of this year compared to last year. She guessed coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides) and Osteospermum cvv. She got it half right: coleus is high on the list.

This year in coleus we will have: 'Quarterback,' 'Fishnet Stockings,' 'Merlot,' 'Merlin's Magic,' 'Pink Chaos,' 'Gays Delight,' 'Saturn,' 'Kingswood Torch,' 'Dappled Apple,' 'Tilt a Whirl,' 'Electric Lime,' and 'Splish Splash.' The last four of those are new compared to last year, though 'Tilt a Whirl,' at least, had been around previously. 'Dappled Apple' was a substitution: we were supposed to have gotten more 'Gays Delight' -- which, contrary to the name, ain't all that -- but I guess they were out or something and sent us 'Dappled Apple' instead. Which 'Dappled Apple' is more similar to 'Electric Lime' than 'Gays Delight,' so I'm not sure that was the best of all possible substitutions, but whatever.

Everybody has their favorites: WCW likes 'Tilt a Whirl,' Perennial Expert has had nice things to say about 'Gays Delight,' Younger Co-Worker is terrifyingly insistent that 'Merlin's Magic' is the best one, and I . . . well, it's probably 'Kingswood Torch,' though if 'Splish Splash' ages well, I could see it winning out in the end.

So far the customers seem to be siding with WCW, and 'Tilt a Whirl' is selling the best, but it's also early.

Younger Co-Worker got wrong, though, the guess about Osteospermum. I like them, but Portulaca are better. I mean, if I were forced to choose. Which I'm not.

Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer.' Picture is really much better opened in a new window.
We do have a couple new ones this year, though unlike with the coleus, I can't name them all off the top of my head. The picture is of 'Bronze Charmer,' which changes colors as it ages, and is variously lavender, peach, yellowish, pink, and orange. It seems very nice. We got more varieties of Osteospermum this year less because I like them a lot (though I do) than because we sold out of them pretty early last year.

Portulaca, we're just getting the same stuff as last year, no more no less. Although I really like them, I don't fool myself into thinking that everybody else in the world shares my enthusiasm. I save those kinds of delusions for Anthurium andraeanum.

UNRELATED LIZARD UPDATE: Visited a pet store yesterday to find food. No mealworms. (?)(!) Freeze-dried flies of some kind instead. Also I balked at spending $24 for a heating pad. (Baby steps!)

We have a ten-gallon aquarium for Nina (somehow the husband had obtained one before Nina entered our lives -- I'm not sure how that happened, but obviously it was kind of prescient), though for the moment she's still in her glass cookie jar. The aquarium will be planted at some point today?, I guess?, and then Nina will be packing her stuff and moving. Hopefully anoles are pretty tough: she's had to go through a lot lately. I take some comfort in the fact that she's been a very good honey-eater, when I've remembered to give it to her. (I'm kind of a bad lizard dad. Baby steps!)

I'm thinking this might be the time to buy that Fittonia I've occasionally thought about getting. It's handy that I was already thinking about plant toxicity, at least: I have some sense of what I can and cannot put in the aquarium with her. Should I try to overwater? I'm sure fungus gnats are yummy. . . .

Pretty picture: Pelargonium peltatum 'Burgundy Ice'

Okay okay. That was fun. We've had a cold, a lizard, and gay marriage, but let's get back to talking about the plants.

. 

.

. 

I'm sorry; I got nothing. Could I maybe get a pass for today and just try to be, like, extra clever tomorrow, please?

Iowa City Graffiti: The Birds

I'm afraid I have not yet completely managed to get my head around the Iowa Supreme Court's UNANIMOUS decision this morning. I'm still working (writing this very quickly while on lunch break, at home). Every so often, I remember what's going on and think to myself, HOLY FUCK, but then the moment passes and I forget again. This will probably be happening a lot for a few days.

For those who have asked: yes, the husband and I will be getting married (in as cheap and low-key a way as possible, I think) when the opportunity exists. I've been reading that it will take a while for the 99 county courthouses to get themselves set up to be able to do same-sex marriages (the delay, I'm guessing, has mostly to do with printing new forms? I'm really not sure, and nobody has said), but the Des Moines Register said that it should be possible by April 24. As I officially came out to my parents on April 30 (1997), I'm leaning toward April 30 to do the actual marriage (beats April 25, which is Mom's birthday), but we'll see how things go.

I appreciate all the people who have stopped by to say congratulations. I'm basically out of time now, but there will be more talking about this later, after I've had time to read some stuff and finish the plant-watering I started yesterday and so on and so forth.

Oh, and I would appreciate it if my co-liberals could refrain from acting like this is totally out of character for Iowa to do. The Upper Midwest in general (IA / MN / WI / IL) used to be progressive all over the place. There's a history. Try not to look so shocked that it's Iowa. We're not all a bunch of slack-jawed reactionary bigoted hicks here. If it were Oklahoma, or Utah, then maybe you could be surprised.

Now I want to try something.

I want a million, billion dollars.


Ah. Apparently Lantana pictures aren't magic. Oh well. Worth trying.

EDITED TO ADD: Like it says, the post was written in a hurry. I did not mean to suggest that everybody in Utah or Oklahoma are slack-jawed reactionary bigoted hicks. (For example, some Oklahomans have very taut jaws. I kid, I kid. . . .) I know they're not. But still, Iowa is a good order of magnitude less surprising than Utah would be. It's also worth noting that if you haven't already seen it, there's going to be a backlash coming: the way the Iowa Constitution is set up, it's hard to change, but you can bet that there are people organizing now who are going to try, and a lot of money is going to be changing hands in order to make that happen. No victory is ever so solid that it can't be lost.

One bright spot I see is that even the bigots are likely going to see Iowa benefit from this. We have no residency requirement for marriage here, so anybody can come across the border and marry, which means that not only are we going to be seeing a sharp spike in wedding-related business in the next few months, as couples who have been waiting for something like this start planning and having their own weddings, which will be awesome for those of us tangentially connected to the floral industry, but there's going to be a lot of money coming in from out of state too, and possibly people moving to Iowa. This will be good for Iowa. Maybe not so much for MN/WI/IL/MO/NE/SD, 'cause I assume they're the states that will be losing most of the people who do come here. And if the Iowa economy improves as a result, even the hard-core bigots are going to be a little less worried about it.

It also means that every drought, tornado, car accident, flood, or, you know, livestock escape from now until 2030 is going to be attributed to the Judgment of the Lord Upon the Wickedness of Iowa. But, you know, the 2008 floods happened when Iowa had last (barely) voted for Bush and had a Defense of Marriage Act restricting marriage to one-man-one-woman, so I'm not going to be convinced God cares unless our next disaster is a lot worse than that. Ask Cedar Rapids how bad that would have to be.

Pretty picture: Lantana camara 'Rose Glow Improved'

I continue to work on the plant-toxicity post, which is now looking like it's going to be a PATSP Special Event, something on the order of Houseplant Toxicity Week. (Hey, if the Discovery Channel can have Shark Week . . . ) Things keep getting added and subtracted and moved around, and at last check, the damn thing was up to 6400 words. Not unprecedented (the two parts of the Saintpaulia ionantha cvv. post, combined, were about that long), but unfortunately I think I was also only about 1/3 finished, too. So the plan at the moment is to find some way to break it up into a weeks' worth of small posts, though I'm unclear on how to do that, so we may get a Plan C at some point. I don't know.

What I do know is that Lantana camara is toxic. But it's also pretty. And butterflies like it. This was a popular variety last year; one of the nursery lot guys planted up a big tub with this, a dark purple Petunia, and a light blue-purple Scaevola, and the three of them together looked really nice.


On the down side, it's kill-you-dead poisonous. And it smells a little weird. Like citrus, but . . . wrong citrus. It's also, according to Toxicity of Houseplants, one of the ten most toxic weeds in the world, which is pretty impressive given the competition.

I like it anyway.

The Prodigal Lizard Returns

Crazily trying to water the house plants on my day off, which as many of you know involves checking the 500ish plants one at a time to determine whether they require water, and then picking up those that do and taking them to the bathtub, where once the bathtub is full, I water the lot with the detachable showerhead, the plants drain, and then we move on to the next set. It's time-consuming and kind of sucks, but I have yet to find a system I like better for doing what I have to do.

So I had just finished a round, and was bending over the tub to get some out and take them back to the living room, when ANOLE! IN THE BATHTUB! I managed to get her into the living room, with some difficulty, and then she sprang (sprung? springed?) out of my grasp and led me on a tour of the carpet under couches and tables and plant racks for maybe twenty minutes. Much of the area in question needs to be vacuumed, it turns out.

In the end, I was victorious, so I gave her some fresh water and a drop of honey and order is restored in the household again.

Except now I think maybe I want to keep her, rather than taking her to the water treatment plant. I have little or no idea how to do this. (I also think I want to name her Rebecca Glasscock, which the two readers of mine who will get that joke will find it very funny indeed.) But so: is keeping a lizard something that's going to involve major changes to my life? Am I going to need to grow mealworms and stuff? I can google as well as the next guy, but I'd appreciate suggestions, references to good pages on anole care, whatever.

UPDATE: Due to public outcry, I have changed the name from Rebecca to Nina. I'm a little hesitant, still, to do so, because I'm unconvinced that getting a lizard named for you is always a compliment, and like the last thing I would want to do would be to insult Nina, who really was awesome. But if we all can understand that it's meant as a compliment, we'll go with it.

Now so long as I don't fuck it up and kill her, I suppose we're golden.

Personal-ish: Iowa Supreme Court Decision Tomorrow

PREFACE: Feel free to skip this one if you know it's going to rile you. We don't have to agree on everything. Abusive comments will be deleted as they appear; negative comments will be decided on a case by case basis; positive comments will mostly be allowed to stand, but I warn commenters not to go off attacking broad categories of people. The decision about which comments are abusive / negative / positive is, of course, mine.

The Iowa Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in Varnum v. Brien by 8:30 AM (local time) on April 3. This case could, potentially, overturn Iowa's 1998 Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as being solely between a man and a woman. The "Brien" in the case name is Polk County Recorder Timothy Brien (Polk County = Des Moines, for all intents and purposes), who is being sued by six same-sex Iowa couples for denying them marriage licenses in 2005.

The District Court judge in the case, Judge Robert Hanson, originally sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that the due process and equal protection guarantees in the Iowa Constitution made it unconstitutional for the state to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples; he subsequently put a hold on the ruling pending a decision from the Iowa Supreme Court.

This, obviously, is a kind of big deal for me and the husband, and I'm kind of anxious about it. It's not so much that there's that much at stake here, exactly, at least not at the moment: we can't file taxes jointly, but, you know, tax-filing is a fairly small part of my life, and I'm not expecting that to matter a whole lot. But I do worry, sometimes, about what would happen if. If I were to die, I don't know that my parents would necessarily try to prevent the husband from inheriting my stuff (and it's not like there's that much stuff anyway; nothing of any real value), but they're not necessarily big fans of his either, and the law would give them the right to if they wanted. (I'm fairly certain that the husband's parents wouldn't stand in the way if the situation were reversed.)

If one of us were to wind up in the hospital, I'm not sure how that would work, whether we'd be able to see one another. Iowa City is about as gay-friendly as Iowa gets, which is why we like it here, but I'm unclear on whether or not there are any specific laws in place covering that situation, so I don't know how that would go. And there are a number of other things like that, things I haven't even thought of, that -- well, I mean, it's not like it keeps me up nights. But there's always that low-grade anxiety in the background. So it'd be nice to have that dealt with.

I don't know how optimistic to be about this decision. I don't really know the court in question, I haven't seen anything about how people think it's going to go, and I've had kind of a string of personal unpleasantness lately that either means I'm on a losing streak or that I'm due for a win, so either way it'll seem inevitable after the fact. I also don't have any direct control over the outcome, and I'm not willing to pretend that I do by praying, crossing fingers, thinking positive thoughts of my own or soliciting positive thoughts from others. Which is uncomfortable, obviously, but it's really not up to me, and I don't see any particular harm in acknowledging that.

I know straight couples have their anxieties too: what if something happens to the kids? What if one of us gets sick? Etc. But the laws acknowledge them as a unit, too. As far as the state of Iowa is concerned today, the husband and I are just kinda friends who have shared some expenses for a couple years, and I deserve as much say on his life and stuff as I did with those of my college roommates, which is to say, basically none. Will that still be the case tomorrow? I have no idea. I really don't. This is a really uncomfortable situation to be in, and, I submit, not one that a country which truly believed in equal treatment of its citizens, and permitting behavior which does not damage the liberty or property of another, should ever put its citizens in. That is, I think even if the decision tomorrow goes the way I would like, I think the fact that it even had to be decided by a court in the first place is fundamentally wrong.

*sigh*

Change the things I can, accept the things I can't, wisdom to know the difference, yada yada.

While we all wait, let's enjoy some music videos (Be warned: very few people will like all five):

Random plant event: Tillandsia NOID flower

It kind of amazes me how fast we go through Tillandsias. I mean, I can see why people would be interested, in theory, and WCW loves them, but honestly, WCW's tastes are not what you'd call mainstream, so the fact that regular customers like them too kind of surprises me.

Of course, I wonder about the long-term survival rate of the plants we sell. Maybe we sell so many because the same five rabidly devoted people keep killing theirs over and over, not because they have broad appeal. I.e. that they're cult plants, like the way that The Cure is a cult band or "Firefly" is a cult TV show.

I'm finding it hard to have a reaction to that thought.

Anyway. So we have another true-flowers moment:

Plant / context

Close-up of flowers.
Meanwhile, my cold is sort of dissipating: we're now at the stuffed-head, my-ears-crackle-when-I-swallow phase. This beats the pants off the it-burns-when-I-breathe, my-whole-face-is-dry-and-hot phase. I can even do similes again, as you all witnessed above with the cult-plant paragraph.

Though it may be a few days before they're good similes.

Also, a side-note: I am shamed to admit that the brown anole from the post a few days ago has escaped, and is now somewhere in the apartment. I'm even more shamed to admit that this was totally my fault, and it was in fact so blindingly stupid that I'm not going to tell you how it happened, because if I tell you, you will point and mock me.

I'm not sure what happens now. So far, there have been no sightings, and this was long enough ago that she could be, literally, anywhere in the apartment. The situation is something like living in a haunted house, in that I'm now expecting that, you know, I'll step groggily into the shower some morning and ANOLE! Or I'll slide under the covers on the bed and ANOLE! Or I'll open the door on the microwave and ANOLE! Though obviously she's not going to show up until after I've forgotten that I'm supposed to be looking for her.

But then, maybe it's more like living with a benevolent ancestor of some sort. I mean, if she's doing anything, she's got to be eating bugs for me, right? And I wouldn't necessarily ever see her doing it? Sort of quietly guiding the plants toward health and prosperity behind the scenes?

I don't know. I told you it'd be a while before the similes worked again. Meanwhile, I am shamed and congested.

Pretty picture: Zantedeschia x 'Picasso'

Apologies in advance for whining (but isn't the calla lily in the picture pretty?), but I had a cold in early March, and as of about last Friday or Saturday, I have another one. Sore throat, runny nose, stuffy nose, fever, aches, etc. As I write this (Tuesday afternoon), I'm feeling like . . . like . . . well -- I feel bad (facility with simile is one of the first things to go, when I'm sick).

Anyway. So somewhere in the snot-dripping, fever-induced haze that was March, we had calla lilies. And one of them looked like this:


It was pretty. But then it sold. And now I'm going to take a nap.