Sunday, August 29, 2010

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XXIX

This batch is maybe a little heavy on the aroids, but what can I say? A lot of them have broad, thin leaves, which makes them very tempting subjects.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Philodendron 'Golden Emerald.' A much more interesting plant than the photo makes it appear.


Spathiphyllum 'Golden Glow,' flower spathe. Didn't work as well as I'd hoped, but I get so few chances at white photos that I figured I'd run with it anyway.


Monstera deliciosa. My Monstera has been pretty badly abused: I don't give it a lot of light, or warmth, or humidity. Not that I wouldn't, if I could, but it's big and awkward and I don't have a lot of spots where such a plant could go. So I get thin, pale, unsplit leaves like this one. Good for the transmitted light photos, bad for basically everything else. The especially confusing thing about this is that I took cuttings from this plant, and potted them up together, and they're also growing thin, pale, small, unsplit leaves even though they're getting very good artificial light and in a much warmer location. So maybe there's more going on here than I recognize.


Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei.' Seems like it's been a long time since I tried a transmitted light picture for this plant. My sense of time, when it comes to these, is kinda screwy, though. I have photographs taken for Part XLIX already.


Philodendron gloriosum. I did finally reach the point with my plant where I had to cut it back. It needed to be repotted, and the thick, woody stems had crawled to the edge of the pot and made a right angle downward. No way to move the plant to a bigger pot without cutting at least some of these stems back, so I did. There's some indication that the cut-off parts might be rooting in water, which would be great news if true, but even if they do root, I'm not sure what I can do with the pieces. At least the plant survived the repotting, though. I'd known that I needed to do this for a long time, and had been scared that the plant would die if I did.


Dieffenbachia 'Starbright.' Looks like an Aglaonema to me.


Aglaonema 'Gold Dust.' Looks like a Dieffenbachia to me.


Zingiber malaysianum. I'm impressed with the range of colors I've been able to get out of this plant, with transmitted light pictures. As far as it goes, I'm still quite happy with it as a houseplant in general, too. So long as I don't neglect to water, it'll grow just fine for me.


Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Glennis.' I've taken a lot of 'Glennis' photos in the hopes of getting one that resembles the way the plant looks when viewed by reflected light. I've realized that that was never going to happen. This is nice too, though.


Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Kong Rose' sport. The weird orange color isn't natural to the leaf, but has to do with the light I was using. It doesn't really look like this, but I liked the effect so well that I kept it.


11 comments:

Liza said...

Well, I like these photos. I could see a casual reader stumbling across them, though, and thinking that you smoke lots of pot. I'm just saying.

Tigerdawn said...

I like the Spath flower photo. It looks erethral.

Unknown said...

You should do a microscopic version of the cells themselves. Why are close up leaves so interesting?

mr_subjunctive said...

Aaerelon:

I'd very much like to, actually, but lack of a microscope prevents that. (I did buy a microscope once, through Amazon. It sucked -- I could actually get better resolution with the camera on macro mode -- and I couldn't afford to get one that was expensive enough not to suck. But someday.)

I also have a theory about why I like the close-up leaves so much, but I was going to talk about that in a future installment, so I don't want to spoil that by writing the theory here.

Unknown said...

Annoying gecko-girl here!

Do you mind if I use Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Kong Rose' sport picture as a reference for a painting?

mr_subjunctive said...

Errant:

You're annoying? Since when?

No problem on the picture.

Unknown said...

Woot!

And since ever. ;)

Unknown said...

http://onecrazycleric.deviantart.com/art/Tree-of-light-177425794

mr_subjunctive said...

Errant:

Very interesting, in the good way, not the say-"interesting"-because-you-can't-think-of-anything-nice-to-say way. The description that comes to mind is "lunar surface."

Minor nitpick -- it's subjunctive, not subjective. (Lots of people miss that. One of the disadvantages of having an obscure, long internet handle.)

Unknown said...

Fixed! Blame the young generation and their ever-shortening attention span, if you will.

Nature Assassin said...

Love the 'Warneckei,' and the S. 'Kong Rose' makes me excited for fall! It's even prettier than a maple leaf.