Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Anthurium no. 0330 "Faye Quinette"

I feel like I should probably get this out of the way right at the beginning: Faye is more or less impossible to photograph. Keep that in mind.

Faye's the brown one. You remember the brown one. Super-slow to develop, which was even more agonizing than normal because I was anxious to see how the bloom would turn out. But so here it is:


As sometimes happens, the front and back of the spathe are different colors. The back stayed more or less the same medium wood-brown throughout the bud development, and only started to change after the spathe had been fully open for a while. The spathe interior is a dull light orange. This is the most accurate photo I could get that shows both colors at once:


I was sort of braced for Faye to be awesome, and I was sort of prepared for her to be terrible, but this is neither of those, so I'm not sure what to feel.


What I actually got is probably more pleasant-looking than what I would have had if the interior matched the exterior. If nothing else, it doesn't look as dead as I'd thought it might. Which is possibly good. And I like that it's something new and different, even if it's not quite as different as I was expecting. We lucked out with the contrasting spadix, too: a matching spadix on this color would have been gross. And the foliage is good.


It's just that it's a little too pretty to be ugly, and a little too ugly to be pretty.


The other thing this means is that I probably didn't have to get 'Midori' last summer after all, since I apparently already had a plant that produces chlorophyll in the spathes. The seed parent is the NOID red, which even if the spathes on the NOID red aren't particularly dark or brownish, they're dark enough that it seems plausible that that's where the green is coming from. (For the orange, there's really only one plausible choice -- 'Orange Hot,' which seems to have been involved in most or all of the seedlings with orange blooms.1) Though 'Midori' is now kind of exciting on her own, since I'm pretty sure the first bloom of 'Midori' that I pollinated had the NOID red as the pollen parent. The seedlings from that cross2 could, in theory, wind up red, red-brown, green, or tan.


So what do you think? Pretty? Ugly? Neither? Both? Interesting? "Interesting?"3

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1 'Orange Hot' is the seed parent for 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" and 0031 "Sylvester," both of which are solidly orange, as well as the orange-then-pink 0118 "Elijah Sturdabowtit."
0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha" looks orange so far, but has not yet opened a bud, so that's a tentative confirmation of the theory: her seed parent is 'Orange Hot' also.
The only orange blooming seedling that doesn't work with this theory is 0329 "Gladys Panzarov," but whatever explains Faye also explains Gladys, since they're siblings.
The strangest thing, for me, is that 'Orange Hot,' despite the name, is barely orange at all. I mean, Eliza, Sylvester, Elijah, Marsha, and Gladys are all way more decisively orange than 'Orange Hot.' Which makes me very curious about why it's named that. Was "Peach Hot' taken?
2 Only four of which are official so far: 1033 "Phoenix," 1092 "Mia Amor," 1093 "Luna Stones," and 1094 "Ella Vawaydego." Here's a recent picture of Phoenix:


I do still have some seedlings from this cross still in the germination containers, though.
3 I.e., I hate it but I don't want to say so to your face like this so I'll say something ambiguous and let you decide what you want it to mean.


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like it. I think it's both pretty and pretty interesting. In the photos it appears to fall in the category of 'autumn' colors like copper, bronze, burnt orange etc. Those tend to be quieter shades, but easy to live with.

Texas Anon

TL said...

I like it but I can't tell why. I just do. I guess the brownness is the sort of ugly that somehow looks right? (Like moles or scars can sometimes look cool.)

Btw, if I can make a suggestion, it would be great if you could take a picture of the entire plant along with the flower when possible. I know you've already got a lot of pictures to sort through before posting but it's kind of hard to get a sense of the plant as a whole. I can like a bloom and I can like the foliage but it's not always easy to imagine how they work together.

mr_subjunctive said...

TL:

I would actually like to get whole-plant pictures more often, but it's difficult because the plants are often slightly taller, or wider, than the background I use for the photos. I have other, larger backgrounds available, but they require so much extra effort to set up that I generally don't bother.

Anthuriums have an additional photographic problem in that the leaves are often large enough to block the rest of the plant: it can be really challenging to find an angle for a photo that actually shows the plant, and not just a couple leaves sitting out in front of it.

I'll work on it, since you asked, but don't expect miracles, okay?

Paul said...

This one I would have to give a resounding "meh". Just doesn't do anything for me.

Anonymous said...

I like it. Offbeat colors are interesting

Anonymous said...

The picture/link between your brown/orange spath picture and your leaf/foliage picture is broken.

mr_subjunctive said...

Anonymous:

Yep. It was a joke .gif that was apparently deleted from whatever site I was linking to. Found a new one, though that link will probably eventually vanish too.