The AVDPVD50POS, and other matters

Assorted items for your amusement:

1) An author photo has been added to the sidebar. Certain artistic liberties have been taken with the photo, particularly the part where it's not a photo, but it resembles me in the sense of having a similar number of limbs and eyes and stuff. (Picture was created using the Hero Machine 2.5 at UGO.com.)

2) Yesterday, the husband and I went to the Annual Variable-Duration Post-Valentine's-Day 50%-Off Sale (henceforth AVDPVD50POS) at Pierson's Flower Shop & Greenhouse in Cedar Rapids (uninformative website here), where I saw a number of interesting plants and even bought a couple, at perfectly reasonable sale prices instead of the usual outlandish everyday prices.¹

3) One of the two items I got at the AVDPVD50PS was a smallish Aglaonema 'Stripes,' which is not that spectactular of a plant necessarily, but I've been wanting one, and this saves me from having to spend 4 times as much for a slightly bigger plant from work. So, you know, yawn.

4) The other plant I got, for only $30, was a three-cane (2, 3, and 4-foot canes, actually) Dracaena fragrans 'Lindenii,' which cv. I had mentioned in the Dracaena fragrans post but never expected to see, much less see at an affordable price less than a month after putting up the post. It looks like this:

(Full view, at home, in bad lighting)

and also like this:²

(Close-up, at the greenhouse, in better lighting)

The immediate effect of getting this home was, every time I came around a corner and saw it in its temporary spot on the kitchen table, the thought ran through my head, It's like a photo negative! and made me smile or otherwise behave goofily.

UPDATE (9 Aug 2008): Actually, it looks like the 'Lindenii' was probably actually a similar but newer variety called 'Sol.' I don't know how similar the two varieties might be, since I've never actually seen a decent color picture of 'Lindenii.' 'Sol' is hard to find; I'm pretty sure somebody must be selling it, or else how would Pierson's have gotten some, but when I asked our tropical supplier in Florida about it, she said oh, no, it's totally been discontinued. (But -- Pierson's! How come they can get it from somewhere and you can't get it for us?)

5) There was also a Spathiphyllum variety I was considering, even though I don't necessarily like Spathiphyllum all that well. The picture doesn't show it well, but the leaves are sort of silvery-gray. The plants behind these are the regular green, if the contrast helps give you a sense.



as well as a few Spathiphyllum 'Domino,' the cultivar that looks like it's been shat on by the world's biggest flock of pigeons, which I didn't take pictures of.³

6) There will be a post in the semi-near future in which I explain why I'm willing to advertise on-line for places in Cedar Rapids⁴ and the Quad Cities⁵ but not the place where I actually have a job and a stake in the financial well-being of the place. In case you'd ever wondered.

7) Also I promise to get to the Hoya carnosa profile sometime. It's been difficult to write, mostly because there's sooooooooooooooo much out there that's already been written about them, and soooooooooooooooo many sites already devoted to them, that it's kind of hard to make it my own. Also I think I may be using the wrong "person" angle. I expect to have similar problems when I get to Saintpaulia spp., though in that case, at least, I'm almost positive that I have the right "person" for the job.

(Hoya carnosa profile post is up. Also I did have the right "person" for the Saintpaulia ionantha cvv. profile, which is also up now.)

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Photo credits: all me.

¹ Whether because they mark-up their plants more than we do, or get charged more by their suppliers to begin with, Pierson's prices are almost always 15% more than ours for any given plant, at least for smaller plants (up to about 8- or 10-inch pots). This is okay for them, I guess, because they are in a larger market than we are and so they can probably still find people who will pay that, but it also means that the only time I find their prices particularly reasonable is during the AVDPVD50POS, and consequently three out of the four plants I've gotten from them have been during the AVDPVD50POS, the one exception being the previously-mentioned Aglaonema 'Red Gold,' which I had to buy because it was a fucking Aglaonema 'Red Gold.' Which, by the way, they still had one or two 'Red Gold' left, if you're in or near Cedar Rapids and you're interested, and now they're only $11.50 or thereabouts for a 6-inch pot, which is a steal even for a regular everyday humdrum Aglaonema.
² They also had another D. f. 'Lindenii' available, though it was not in quite as good a condition as the one I bought.
³ The silvery ones would be $11.50 also; I'm not sure about 'Domino' because I wasn't interested in it, and so didn't check the size of the pot it was in, but I'd guess it was probably also $23 regularly, and $11.50 during the AVDPVD50POS.
⁴ Amusing family anecdote: when my (much) younger sister was much younger than she is now, she misheard Mom and Dad talking about going to Cedar Rapids and got very upset because they wouldn't let her come with them to see the rabbits too.
⁵ This would be Wallace's Garden Center, which is in a bigger market still, but has more reasonable prices than Pierson's, a better-looking, more open store, and still occasionally has interesting or difficult to find stuff. I like the location in Bettendorf better than the one in Daveport: it's newer and larger. My Begonia rex-cultorum leaf sections (propagation post) came from Wallace's, as did my Sansevieria trifasciata 'Black Gold.' They even had 'Pink Princess' Philodendrons there for $20 last summer, but everything I've heard about PP makes me think it'd be too slow and too frustrating for me to grow, so I didn't buy one.