Pretty pictures: Anthurium andraeanum cvv.

I've mentioned before, probably more than once, that I generally have at least one Anthurium blooming at any given moment. Here's what I had going on March 23. Just 'cause.


A NOID pink flower, from my longest-lived Anthurium (at one time, I suspected 'Cotton Candy,' but I've never had any idea; pink Anthuriums are pretty common. The photo didn't really reproduce the color well: it's basically just a medium pink, like bubble-gum pink.). The plants had been around forever, and I cut them back maybe a year and a half ago or two years ago, I don't remember, and tried to root the tops in water and then soil. This is a bad idea. Don't do that. I lost about half of the cuttings, and the ones that have survived are only now getting around to flowering again, and look pathetic anyway. It's not impossible to restart Anthuriums, but don't do it the way I did.


Technically not flowers yet, but they will be. These are buds of 'Red Hot.' As you can see from the photo, 'Red Hot' isn't exactly red, but it's kind of a red-pink. The more exciting part for me personally is that the leaves start out sort of a red-orange, and gradually change to green as they age, which is pretty.


I tried to adjust the color on this to match reality a little better, but failed. This is 'Orange Hot,' a name which is a lie, being neither orange nor especially hot. It's a really interesting color, but nobody at work was fond of it, and it didn't sell that well either: in person it's a kind of pink-orange color that made me think of the "flesh" color of certain (Caucasian) dolls. In some situations, it was attractive, but it tended to clash with anything that was around it. I have one anyway, of course, and it's a pretty agreeable plant: this particular plant has a bud on it too.


I don't have an official ID for this, but people suggested 'Purple Plum' and 'Anouk' as possibilities when I first posted about it. It's one of the more consistent bloomers as long as I water it properly; it stops if I let it get too dry, but only for a couple weeks.


'Pacora' is another good one: the spathes are larger than those on most of my plants, they're a nice, solid red (the spadices vary from light yellow, as shown here, to green, to yellow with a green tip - I haven't figured out what determines the spadix color), the new leaves come in reddish, as for 'Red Hot,' and it's a very consistent bloomer.


'Pandola' has large pink blooms, sometimes with a little green in the "ears," which turn lighter pink as they age. This flower is a very old one, on the verge of turning yellow, but it's still not looking too bad, considering it's probably been around for two or three months.


These are more typical of the 'Pandola' color, though they'll be a little lighter than this when they open.


'Florida' is one I've photographed for the blog quite a bit, but it's just so darn photogenic, I can't help myself. And this bloom was there, ready for a photo. So. Unlike 'Orange Hot,' it's a real orange kind of orange, and like 'Pandola,' it also frequently has a little green around the "ears," which you can see in this picture.

I have other varieties here, including a couple red-violets and a white, but they weren't blooming on the 23rd. Perhaps another time.

Random plant event: Stapelia NOID flower bud

I discovered this during the last round of watering, on the 22nd. I'd seen the Stapelia start a number of buds since I bought it last summer, but most of them aborted while still tiny, and I'd pretty much given up on looking for flowers around November.

Which all means that by the time I found this one, it was already huge, roughly 6 inches (15 cm) from tip to base. I'm not especially looking forward to the smell, but I will be interested in getting a definite ID for it. Obviously updates will be forthcoming once something happens.

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Prince Charming

This is one of the orchids from Saturday's orchid show in the Quad Cities. Full-size view is recommended.


I don't have a lot to say about the orchid, which I think is pretty self-evidently cool, and any commentary I had would be roughly along the lines of hey, isn't this orchid pretty self-evidently cool?, which seems like a waste of your time and mine.

In Sheba news:

As of Day 3, the allergies are still a complete non-issue, which is awesome. The slight amount of reaction I had at the animal shelter when we first picked her up appears to have been from her environment, not the dog herself; since we bathed her on Friday, I haven't even had a small reaction. Unlike Fervor, too, she can play-bite me without it being a problem, though it's rare for her to try.

On the other hand, her anal glands need to be emptied (which we'll take her to a vet as soon as we can, but in the meantime this is not an endearing quality, and sometimes I have to back away from her because the smell is too much, which she of course doesn't understand). She whines when crated, though usually not for very long. She appears to bore easily, which is both good (probably pretty smart, then?) and bad (going to need more toys, play, and direct interaction?). She's agonizing to walk: she clearly hasn't been on a leash much, doesn't know how it works, weighs about 50 pounds (23 kg) and is very easily distracted by birds and squirrels. Both of which are everywhere at the moment.

She does seem to have figured out pretty quickly that she's not allowed on the furniture, she seems to be totally housetrained, she appears to understand that she's not to go into the basement (we have the stairs blocked off, but it's not like she couldn't jump the barricade if she wanted to: when we tried blocking the plant room, she jumped over the block just fine), and she hasn't done anything obvious to any of the plants, if anything at all.

So it's not all bad, or even mostly bad, and the problems we have are fixable, but at the moment, this whole anal-gland situation means I don't enjoy her a whole lot inside, and her unwalkability means I don't look forward to being outside with her either. And I feel kind of bad that I'm not happier about her being here.

Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia leaflets sprouting

The longish essay-type thing I had planned for today first turned into a different post than I had intended to write, and neither the original idea nor the new one were ready by the time I woke up yesterday. Also the coffeemaker has decided to stop working, plus we'd already been planning to go to the Illowa Orchid Society Spring Show at Wallace's, in Bettendorf (~1 hour away) yesterday so that I could get new and exciting pictures of new and exciting orchids for you guys, but then we had to figure out what to do with [not?-]Sheba when we went, because if we took her there was a good chance she'd yak in the car and be miserable, but if we didn't, she'd be alone in the house and be miserable, and then also plus I had to start the watering cycle again because I had Salvia elegans wilting in the basement already.


So yesterday just kind of didn't work. On a number of levels. And instead of the thoughtful, psychologically penetrating post that I'd thought I would post today, you get a long, drawn-out series of excuses and a couple kind of ugly pictures of baby Zamioculcas plants.

I don't know when these were started for sure; they came from plants that came into work with a few of their leaves broken off. If I'm remembering everything correctly, that means I've had these for either 13 or 17 months. Growing Zamioculcas from leaflets is really not worth the time and effort unless you do it on a pretty large scale, and maybe it's not worth it then, either. There's also the disappointment where sometimes even after you get a leaflet to sprout and nurture it along for a year, it'll still fall over and die on you if you give it too much water (has happened to me). Or it will just sit there doing nothing for ages if you don't give it enough water. But it's kinda fun, if you have the space, aren't made unhappy by looking at dirt for a year and a half, and have a really flexible definition of the word "fun."


On the more positive side of yesterday, the trip to Wallace's netted me a few months' worth of orchid pictures, and they're mostly prize-winning orchids of genera we haven't seen at PATSP before, so that much was very worthwhile. There were orchids for sale all over the place, too, but I think I have decided that orchids are just not going to be one of my things: I don't seem to have a natural talent for growing them, and learning seems likely to involve a lot of plant corpses and even more money. Certainly the flowers are often breathtaking, but I don't need to have all the plants I see, not really.


I did buy an Iresine herbstii, though, and had a nice conversation with one of the employees (Kate Terrell, Nursery Manager), because she e-mailed me after running across PATSP somehow, and she told me I should introduce myself if/when I visited for the orchid show. We had a nice conversation, and of course it's very gratifying to have somebody in Eastern Iowa taking blogs and the internet seriously, particularly when it's my blog. There may be more on this later. The conversation got cut short when she was called away to handle a tree question, and my camera's batteries died shortly thereafter, so we left without getting a proper well it was nice to meet you in, but we'll be back at some point, and y'all may see more references to Wallace's in the future.

As for Sheba, we left her crated at home while we were gone, after first taking her on a long and extremely frustrating walk (Sheba does not yet see the walks as a collaborative activity), and playing with her until almost the exact moment we left. So she probably slept through most of the time we were gone, or at least that was the plan. If she was upset by being left alone at all, she appears not to be holding it against us.

Saturday morning Nina picture

An old picture today; I haven't seen Nina do this in a very long time.


Maybe just a phase she was going through? You know how a lot of kids these days are experimenting with tail-curling.

Plans to try to add some pictures of Sheba, or whatever her name is, failed to come together fast enough, but I will try to get some for next week's Saturday morning Nina and/or Sheba picture post.

Pretty picture: Murraya paniculata flowers

As with the Plectranthus x 'Mona Lavender' I wrote about on Tuesday, the Murraya paniculata flowers sporadically all the time, but has gotten really excited all of a sudden, within the last week or so. Possibly the trigger was that I moved it to the watering station and gave it a good soaking and showering a couple weeks back. It's heavy, so this is hard to do, and doesn't happen that often.

In any case. I was moved to write about this partly because the current round of blooming is so intense, and partly because James Missier posted about his plant a few days ago. In that post, he mentions rumors of the flowers' scent being poisonous, which is similar to a couple comments I had after I posted the plant profile a couple years ago -- some anonymous person showed up and promised me a "lifetime of illness" unless I got rid of the plant, and claimed that his/r children were all allergic to it. People are (as we know) sometimes allergic to things, but by the time my anonymous commenter left his/r comment, we'd already had the plant for a year, blooming sporadically throughout, and both the husband and I were fine. I'm not saying that we haven't both been sick for the last three years, just that it seems like the sort of thing I'd remember.

Unless part of the illness involves memory loss, obviously.


James said in comments on his post that he'd read an account somewhere of a woman who'd found that the flowers' scent triggered her migraines and other ailments. This is certainly plausable: in some sufferers, migraines can be set off by certain scents, and (wikiposedly), some migraine sufferers experience heightened sensitivity to smell too, as part of the aura. (The word aura refers to sensory or neurological signs that precede a migraine in about 20-30% of sufferers; most commonly visual disturbances like seeing flashing lights, blurred vision, or scintillating scotoma, but tingling feelings in the face or extremities, heightened sensitivity to odors, or olfactory hallucinations are also fairly common.) As Murraya flowers have a pretty strong odor on their own, anybody who was exceptionally sensitive to smell during a migraine's aura, or triggered into migraines by strong smells, would obviously be hit pretty hard by it.

So there may be something to this, and it's probably a good idea not to put a Murraya in a store or other public space, because one doesn't want to give other people migraines. At the same time, it's no more "poisonous" or "dangerous," as far as I can tell, than when people wear too much perfume, cologne, or aftershave, or use scented laundry detergent, or whatever. Strong smells can trigger allergies or migraines in certain people. We knew this already.

Perhaps I'm being overly defensive. But I like this plant, and don't want to see people getting scared away from it over nothing. Some people will be allergic to it, and others may find it triggering migraines, but both groups should be relatively uncommon, and if you or someone you live with fall into one group or the other, you probably already know about it and wouldn't be buying a Murraya anyway. So.

And they really do smell nice.

BREAKING: Dog Adoption Complete

We did adopt Sheba. I don't react allergically at all to her saliva, apparently, and only slightly to her dander (which might not be her: it could be something else from the shelter), so I think this should work. Won't be able to say it's definitely worked until some time has gone by, of course, but I think there's reason to be optimistic, based on how things have gone so far.

It was a very long ride back for her, and unfortunately she does get carsick -- though we'd been driving for just over an hour before she actually threw up, and she'd had a pretty intense day already and was perhaps not at her best to begin with. So hopefully this won't be as much of a problem in the future.

I'll add a picture or two to this post as soon as I get them uploaded and sorted and everything.

UPDATE:

This one is pre-vomit, obviously, though she looked just fine post-vomit too, once we got her out of the car.
I'm pretty sure there are better photos possible; this was just the best of what I was able to get today. Perhaps there will be others to go with this week's Nina picture.

Except for the ears, she really does look an awful lot like a scaled-down Fervor.

Have You Seen This Plant?: Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest'

The website for Twyford International, a tissue-culture company located in Florida, with a separate facility in Costa Rica, lists a large number of plants that are very familiar to me, that we got from Florida all the time when I worked in the garden center. Twyford produces and either holds the patent on, or has applied for a patent on: Aglaonema 'Golden Bay;' (Correction: Whatever Twyford's site may claim, they have not in fact applied for the patent on 'Golden Bay;' that belongs to Florida Foundation Seed Producers.) the Anthuriums 'Gemini,' 'Krypton,' 'Red Hot,' (Correction: Whatever Twyford's site may claim, they do not in fact hold the patent on 'Red Hot;' that belongs to Florida Foundation Seed Producers.) and 'White Gemini;' Microsorum musifolium 'Crocodyllus;' the Dieffenbachias 'Tiki,' 'Tropic Breeze,' 'Tropic Marianne,' and 'Tropic Rain;' and the 'Brasil,' 'Imperial Green,' and 'Imperial Red' Philodendron varieties.

Also Philodendron 'Xanadu,' but nobody's perfect.

I own, or have owned, all of the above plants except for Aglaonema 'Golden Bay,' and 'Golden Bay' is on my list to get at some point. So the point is that I'm generally happy with the plants Twyford puts out there, save for 'Xanadu,' which is Satan come to earth in the form of a plant,¹ plus a fair number of their plants were developed by Dr. Richard Jake Henny of the Plant Daddy blog (Sadly, there's a lot less plant-daddying there lately, and a lot more cars, fishing, and complaining about the weather, but the archives are still worth checking out.²), which makes them special just because I usually don't know anything about where my plants originated, much less their creator's feelings about cold weather.³

So I have been excited for quite some time, since discovering their website, about the possibility of one day owning a Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest,' which looks a lot like 'Tropic Rain' in the (blurry, low-res) photo,

Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest.' Photo from Twyford International and used without permission; I will take it down immediately if anyone at Twyford has a problem with this and says so.
but which has a different texture to the variegation which I find more appealing.

And I have waited to see one of these show up in my area, for a couple years now, without luck. Not only have I never actually seen one, but we never had them on the availability lists from Florida. They were never even an option. So finally, I e-mailed Twyford to ask them where they were, and why they had 'Tropic Forest' on their website even though they don't appear to sell the plant.⁴

The answer didn't help very much; the people who wrote me back basically said that they'd never seen it before either, and didn't think they've sold 'Tropic Forest' in the last two years, and they're sorry the website is so out of date (all the news-clipping and press-release pages end in 2004, and their availability list stops last August). They did suggest some wholesalers I could check with, and I appreciate their being nice enough to answer in the first place, because they didn't have to -- I'm just some guy with a blog who might, if he finds a source, buy a plant or two of 'Tropic Forest;' they didn't really stand to gain anything by writing me back. So this was very kind of them. But at the same time, I'm no closer to the goal of having one of the plants, either.

So the report, at least for now, is: 'Tropic Forest' is a real Dieffenbachia variety, patented and everything, originally created in Australia by Edwin J. Frazer, from a cross between Dieffenbachia 'Birdsey No. 4' and D. 'Marie Selby 79-92,' sometime before January 1995, when the patent application was first filed. Nobody has seen 'Tropic Forest' since January 2007 (the date on the picture in footnote 3) and Twyford, at least, hasn't sold it in the last couple years. Nor does anyone else appear to selll it either, at least not under that name. If you sell it, if you have one you might give me cuttings of, if you've spotted it somewhere, if you know Edwin J. Frazer or are Edwin J. Frazer or think you maybe once talked to someone named Edwin at a party who had an Australian accent and did something with German-sounding plants, for the love of all that is good and holy please e-mail me.⁵

PATSP Profiles for:
Aglaonema cvv. including 'Golden Bay'
Anthurium andraeanum cvv., including 'Gemini,' 'Krypton,' 'Red Hot,' and 'White Gemini'
Dieffenbachia cvv., including 'Tiki,' 'Tropic Breeze,' 'Tropic Marianne,' 'Tropic Rain,' and (hypothetically) 'Tropic Forest'
Philodendron hederaceum, including the cultivar 'Brasil'
Philodendron 'Xanadu'

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¹ Not really. It's true that I have a problem with 'Xanadu,' but the houseplant incarnation of Satan is, I'm pretty sure, Ravenea rivularis, the majesty palm. Maybe poinsettias or Opuntia spp. 'Xanadu' maybe places somewhere in the top ten, though.
² Also: if the reader will take a close, full-size view of this photo from Plant Daddy, s/he will see some very interesting-looking yellow-speckled experimental pothos in the foreground. There's also an odd-looking vining plant of some kind which I think is either a Philodendron hederaceum or another kind of pothos, with sort of long, narrow dark green leaves and a bright white or cream-colored center, on the far right-hand side of this photo.
³ SPOILER: He's against it. Not overly fond of birds either.
⁴ (Indeed, the plant doesn't even appear to exist: when I Googled for it, the only hits that came up were for the Twyford site, multiple sites referring to the patent for 'Tropic Forest,' one really good picture, and PATSP, because I mentioned 'Tropic Forest' in passing during the Dieffenbachia profile. Davesgarden.com has a page for 'Tropic Forest,' but it's just a placeholder: there are no photos or comments.)
⁵ (See the sidebar and follow the directions.)

BREAKING: DogQuest 2010

Informed as of about three hours ago that SHEBA IS GO. Repeat, SHEBA IS GO.

In-person allergy check is expected to be around 1-2 PM CDT tomorrow, and if that goes even remotely well, she'll be home with us by maybe about 4 PM tomorrow.

Pretty pictures: Plectranthus x 'Mona Lavender' flowers

I've had this plant for almost a year now, and it's flowered off and on in that time, but never anything terribly impressive. It wasn't a particularly big plant, either, of course, but I think the main problem was that it wasn't happy with how much light it was getting. Since we got to the new house, and the plant got one of the choice spots in the southwest corner of the plant room, though, it's going nuts with flowers. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting a usable picture of the whole plant (it's a bit gangly: low light will do that), but there are plenty of close-ups of the flowers.


As far as I can tell, the flowers don't have a scent or anything, but they're pretty anyway.


Most pictures of 'Mona Lavender' on-line have darker-purple flowers than this; the degree of purple depends on how much light the plant receives.


Flowering is triggered by short days, though you still have to have reasonably bright light during those short days; mine didn't bloom much during the winter, despite the day length.


The plant is a hybrid developed in the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens; more information about that here.

In DogQuest2010 news, we may get to adopt the "perfect" dog from Fairfield that I talked about in the last post -- I spent most of the hiatus moping about the unfairness of this, but called the Fairfield shelter again yesterday around noon and left them a message saying, basically: we were there last Friday and were looking at Sheba and then somebody else applied for her right after we left and I know this is kind of a long shot and I probably sound crazy for even asking but I noticed that she's still on Petfinder so I thought maybe there was the possibility that she's still available and so could you please just call me and tell me one way or another because I'm kind of obsessing thanks bye. (Sometimes when I'm leaving phone messages, I speak without any punctuation.¹)

And an hour passed, and I didn't hear anything, so I took a nap. And when I got up, there were no messages or anything either, and I was like, oh well, I guess I'll have to accept this, then, damn it all to hell, and! Then! at like 4:50 PM, I got a call from the shelter saying that the person who had applied for her was supposed to pick her up today, and didn't, and when the shelter called to ask WTF, the person said they'd decided they didn't want her after all, so she was available again.

Faxed in an application two hours after that. And we will see. I think they're likely to approve us, at least in a tentative kind of way: I admitted on the application that allergies are an issue (which they already knew, because we'd told them about Fervor when we visited before), and that we would need to check on that again in person before adopting officially. They will take her back and refund the adoption fee if allergies turn out to be a problem, though. I assume there's a time limit of some kind on that, but if there are going to be problems, allergy-wise, then they're going to show up within the first week, so I'm not too worried about that.

I mean, I'm worried. But only for myself. They were taking good care of her there, and they would be again if we had to bring her back. As with Fervor when we took him back, she'd be fine and I'd be a wreck.

And I'm trying not to get too excited about this, but she's the only dog we've looked at that we've both liked, and we agreed on her immediately, she had no obvious qualities that would pose any problems for us, and the odds have seemed so long that we'd find any dogs that worked for our situation that I was starting to despair of ever finding one.²

The evidence so far suggests that I may be allergic to her, but less so than I was to Fervor -- I reacted a lot more to Fervor's play-biting than his licking, and almost not at all to his dander.³ Sheba (we will have to do something about this name) didn't seem at all inclined to bite, though she licked a lot.

I've also heard conflicting stuff about whether or not allergies get worse with continued exposure: some people in the comments on the last post said it was possible to gradually increase exposure and eventually stop reacting entirely, but the Iowa City shelter person said that if you're having animal allergies, they will only get worse over time.⁴ It basically all comes down to me and my stupid immune system.

And I guess my nervous system also: I got itchy spots on my face and right arm just from thinking about my allergic history and potential, while writing this.

So I'm trying not to get too excited about Sheba.

But I'm failing, failing, failing.

-

¹ At other times, I leave phone messages that are practically nothing but punctuation. I like to keep people guessing.
² After having looked for a whole week and a half. What can I say, I despair easily.
³ Even though the allergenic protein is the same in all three cases. According to something I read somewhere.
⁴ Which fits better with my prior experiences with animal allergies, though I've been told I have relatives who developed sudden allergies around puberty and then grew out of them in their 30s. Don't know if that's necessarily true, of course.
I do fit at least the first half of that: we had dogs and cats both when I was growing up, and I was never allergic until I was 11 or 12 years old, when I was suddenly really really allergic to cats. Dogs were never a problem until about eight years ago.

Dog Adoption Quest Continues:

So far, the husband and I have looked at about sixty dogs, roughly eighty of which were pit bulls.¹ The one out of the sixty that we both agreed we really really liked and wanted (a German shepherd / black lab mix; very similar to Fervor, but about 1/3 the size, less into play-biting, and female) was adopted out from under us before we could even figure out for sure whether I was allergic.²

We've been to four shelters now (Iowa City,³ Washington, Fairfield, and Tipton), and we've only found two remotely serious contenders: the one above that we didn't have a chance to adopt (Fairfield) and a Grand Pyrenees that we applied for but are probably not going to adopt (from Tipton), even if approved, because . . . I'm not sure. I'm not allergic -- the shelter people even swabbed his mouth and then swabbed the inside of my elbow with the saliva,⁴ and nothing happened at all. So at least we know that I'm not allergic to the entire species. And he's big, but big dogs are not necessarily a problem: Fervor was a large dog, and we didn't worry about that with him.

The problem is more that neither the husband or I particularly clicked with him. This may be because of the breed: everybody says that Grand Pyrenees are slow to warm up to strangers, as well as being kind of headstrong and territorial and a pain in the ass to train. Not that we want or need a dog that's going to be trying to lick our faces 24/7, or even that it has to be a case of love at first sight again, as it was for me with Fervor and (even more so) the one that was adopted out from under us, but there should at least be something. A spark.

Plus, grooming looks Sisyphean. Though that wouldn't bother me so much if he had a better personality. The reason this picture is of him in the cage, rather than outside, is because he's only looking at me in hopes of getting out of the cage: once we took him out, he completely refused to acknowledge me or the camera, so all the pictures are crap. Manipulative bastard.
So we keep looking. There's no lack of shelters nearby, and the shelters, alas, have no shortage of dogs. Sooner or later it will happen. It's just really frustrating to lose one great dog to allergies, and another dog to . . . well, I guess it's allergies there, too, technically, since the possibility of me being allergic was why we didn't fill out the application immediately. Damn my neurotic immune system.

But in any case. Not allergic to the entire species, so we are going to keep trying, even if I didn't think we would as of last Tuesday. And someday, we'll find one. The question then becomes -- do I re-use the name "Fervor," the name I've been sitting on for the last twenty-five to thirty years, or do I have to come up with a new name, since I named one dog that already? I mean, I don't want to give him/r a complex. (Dog psychoanalysis is not cheap.) And does "Fervor" sound right for a female dog, were we to get a female dog? The husband thinks it sounds unisex, but I think it sounds male. Maybe "Zeal" or "Mania" would be better for a girl?⁵

Side-note: the large announcement I said I was going to make when I come back from hiatus is postponed for a while, I think. So forget I brought it up. If/when things are in order, then I'll tell you what's going on.

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¹ (Joke, not typo. There are a lot of pit bulls in shelters. I'm not sure which is more upsetting: that people feel such a need to be strong and manly and shit that they have to get vicarious manliness by borrowing from their dogs, or that they care so little about the dogs they're using that they'll abandon them once the pressure to be manly subsides. I suppose we could adopt one -- despite the reputation, it's my understanding that they're perfectly nice dogs when properly trained and socialized -- but neither the husband or I find them especially appealing. And it's not like there aren't plenty of other dogs to choose from.)
² Seriously. I played with her and held her and got her to lick me and all that, for quite a while, and she was as wonderful as Fervor but without the tendency toward overexcitement and play-biting, i.e., perfect, and then we left to go get something to eat, discuss, and allow the allergies to appear if they were going to. Then when we came back half an hour later, I was told that right after we left, someone else showed up, with an adoption application already filled out for the dog in question, and they were like 99% positive that they wanted her, so they have priority and we're s.o.l. And this, of course, is the only dog we've seen so far, including Fervor, that both husband and I were enthusiastic about. (The husband was kinda ennh about Fervor to begin with.) Which is just not fair.
Though it possibly wouldn't have been fair anyway, because the allergy stuff was inconclusive: I itched, but it wasn't necessarily from her, and there wasn't very much of it. So we would have had to repeat the test. But still. Damn it.
³ Nobody there I was interested in, though Fervor is there again and I at least got to give him a proper goodbye, which made me feel better. I was kind of an emotional wreck on Tuesday when we brought him back -- intellectually the decision made sense, but emotionally I hadn't caught up, and the husband wouldn't let me be in denial about it. Which was kind of mean. So it was nice to see Fervor again. Still wish we could have kept him: I'm appreciating his virtues a lot more, as we look at more and more other dogs. And I appreciated his virtues quite a bit at the time, as the reader will recall.
⁴ Inside of the elbow, underside of the forearm, and back of the hand: if I'm going to react, it's going to show up in one of those three places. The elbow seems to be the most sensitive of the three.
⁵ (We considered "Enthusiasm" briefly, until I realized that "Enthusiasm" best shortens to "Thusie," which sounds nicely feminine. So far so good, but it's hard to say, and I could see it being tempting to lisp the word as "Thuthie." And then if she ran away or something -- I mean, there's no way two gay men can run around a small rural Iowa town calling "Thuthie! Thuthie!" without causing much snickering and the reaching of lethal self-consciousness levels. The husband said having to call "Fervor" was bad enough, the one time Fervor got away for a few minutes.)

Geneticist (Phalaenopsis cvv.), Part II

All right now. Here's Part II of the Phalaenopsis profile, where I tell you how to grow them indoors. If you're in the mood for genetics (or interested in finding out about the origins of the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas"), you may want to read Part I first.

There are 60 or so natural Phalaenopsis species, which are distributed throughout Southeast Asia, with a number of species in India, Indonesia, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam (among other places). These all hybridize with one another pretty easily, and with the occasional other orchid genus, which is how we've gotten so many different cultivars. The name Phalaenopsis means "looks like a Phalaena:" Phalaena is the now-obsolete name for a genus of large moths. (I don't know what "Phalaena" means.) This used to make more sense than it does now, as most of the Phalaenopsis species and hybrids available originally were large, more or less "flat," and either white or mostly white, all fairly mothy characteristics. You can still find whites if you want them, but most of the phals I see being sold now are pink or pink-purple.

Phalaenopsis NOID.
Phalaenopsis are also surprisingly big business. I mean, orchids in general are gaining in popularity, but phals seem to be the bulk of those: I found one claim that 75% of orchids sold in the U.S. were phals in 2000, and although I'd guess that percentage has maybe dropped slightly in the ten years since, I'm sure it's still pretty close to that. I've been noticing them a lot in the home-makeover shows in the last couple years.¹ The range of colors and sizes has expanded as well, mostly through the kinds of breeding I talked about in Part I. If you try hard enough, you can now find phals in white, pink, pink-purple, yellow, dark purple, and then various combinations of those colors in spots, stripes, and gradual shadings. I've also started seeing dwarf varieties in stores recently, which are in the same colors as the others, but at about one-third scale.

I personally only have one Phalaenopsis, and it wasn't my idea: the husband wanted to buy one, and, like with our Murraya paniculata, I tried to talk him out of it, but he did it anyway. It's still alive, after a year, but it hasn't rebloomed, and, frankly, it's not much to look at without blooms, so I wouldn't be heartbroken if it were to die on me or have some kind of horrible garbage-disposal accident² or something. But that's not a very nice thing to do to a helpless, innocent plant, so part of the motivation for writing this profile was the hope that I could figure out what it wants and get it to reflower, so I could keep my murderous impulses stifled.

Did I succeed? Not exactly. Here's what I got.

LIGHT: General internet consensus is that a bright window without a lot of direct sun is best. A number of sites specifically recommend eastern exposure, but I don't think that's as important as just getting a very bright location without full, all-day-long sun. Some filtered sun (through other plants or sheer curtains) is fine. Plants which get too much sun will scorch; plants which aren't getting enough will just fail to bloom, grow slowly, or be generally weak and dumb-looking. Ideally, you want enough light to tint the undersides of the leaves slightly purple, like so:

Purple coloration at the base of my personal Phalaenopsis, after moving it into a spot that gets a small amount of direct sun.
Sometimes the top of the leaf will turn slightly red or purple, or leaves will develop a thin red or purple margin. The Internet is divided about whether this is necessarily bad: some sites advise that if you're seeing a differently-colored margin on the leaves, this means the plant is getting too much light, and you need to move it away from the light source a little; other sites say this is the level of light you should be aiming for. Everybody does seem to agree that if you're seeing purple, then you're at about the upper limit of what's acceptable illumination.

Artificial light is also done fairly often; most sites that mention it suggest four 48-inch (1.2 m) fluorescent lights, at a distance of 6-12 inches (15-30 cm) above the plant. This seems really intense to me, by comparison with the recommendations for natural light, but there was a pretty broad consensus.

WATERING: This is probably where I've screwed up the most with mine. Phals don't have large, swollen stems for storing water³ like many other orchids, so they don't handle drought as well. If your plant gets dry to the point of wilting before you water it again, you've waited too long, and this will put stress on the plant. The various websites I found were maddeningly non-specific about how to determine whether a plant is too wet to water, though, and too much water will lead to root rot. The overall impression I get is that it's best to water thoroughly, discard the excess water that drains off, and then let the plant get almost dry, but not entirely dry, before watering again.

I suspect it's probably easier to water plants that are grown in sphagnum moss, as opposed to plants grown in bark;⁴ in my experience, sphagnum stays more or less the same moisture level through the whole clump, whereas with bark, the top layer can dry out whether the middle of the rootball is wet or dry. (Though see what I have to say at GROOMING.)

Flowers from my (or the husband's) personal Phalaenopsis, when it was first purchased. This has not, so far, happened again.
Everyone is also very insistent that phals should only be watered in the morning, because the water has to be evaporated off the leaves before night, because standing water on the leaves and cooler temperatures, combined, will lead to leaf rot. One also should be very careful not to let water stand in the growing tip of the plant, because this will also cause rot. I'm sure everybody has good reasons for saying these things, but in the average home environment, where temperatures don't fluctuate that much and the humidity level is likely to be low to begin with, I'm not sure this is really something to get panicky about. Certainly I've watered my plant at night (or maybe more like late afternoon), and I haven't had any crown or leaf rot. But then, I'm a rebel, and I'll never ever be any good.

TEMPERATURE: Phalaenopsis prefer fairly warm temperatures. The usual recommendation is for 75-85F (24-29C) during the day, falling to 65-75F (18-24C) at night. They can go cooler than that if they have to, but try not to make them if you can help it.⁵ Hotter temperatures, above about 90F/32C, will slow growth, and extreme swings in temperature can cause developing buds to abort. Hot temperatures will also prevent the formation of bloom spikes.

Most of the plants sold in large quantity by retail are able to take fairly big swings in temperature, and you can induce bloom formation by giving the plant temperature swings of 15-20 degrees F (8-11 degrees C) between day and night. Everybody agrees that one night of this is not enough to do it, but precisely how long you have to do it varies from source to source. The optimists say two weeks of this treatment will suffice, and the pessimists say six to eight. The duration and precise temperatures vary according to the ancestry of the plant, which you're unlikely to be able to find without doing a lot of research -- and even if you did find out which species make up your particular hybrid and in what proportions, that still doesn't tell you very directly how much cold your plant can stand. So play it safe, and don't go higher than 85F / 29C in the day or lower than 60F/16C at night.

Plants also need to be kept at least a few inches away from cold windows during the winter: the air near a cold window is much colder than in the rest of the room, even with good air circulation. Phalaenopsis should also be kept away from direct blasts of hot or cold air, as from an air conditioner or heat vent. But these things are true of almost all plants grown indoors.

I kind of dig this color, though the patterning is not what you'd call especially pretty.
HUMIDITY: Phalaenopsis will do best in 50-75% relative humidity, which is fairly high for the average house, especially in colder climates, winter, or both.⁶ They also need good air circulation at the same time, so very local methods of increasing humidity, like misting and pebble trays, aren't that useful. (Some sites recommend misting and pebble trays anyway. I don't really see the point, but if it makes you feel better, I guess.) My personal experience suggests that humidity is not as critical as all that, but then, my personal experience is also that they don't rebloom. So.

PESTS: Phals can come down with more or less everything: scale, thrips, spider mites, fungus, viruses, kindergarteners, whatever. I personally have only ever seen mealybugs. Phalaenopsis aren't especially likely to have pest problems, in my personal experience, but when I asked for suggestions for mite-prone plants, a while back, people suggested Phalaenopsis, among other orchids. So it can happen.

Pesticides that are safe for other plants are not necessarily safe for orchids, so check the labels first to make sure the pesticide in question is labeled for orchids. Wiping plants down with oil and/or dishwashing soap is said to work as well as pesticides on spider mites, possibly better.

We generally didn't try to cure plants that had mealybugs, where I worked: usually we just threw them away, rather than risk spreading the problem to any more plants.

With kindergarteners, removal by hand is usually the best approach, though you'll probably have to repeat treatments regularly. Pesticides are effective, but frowned upon by . . . pretty much everybody.

I like this one too.
PROPAGATION: Virtually all large-scale production of Phalaenopsis is done through tissue culture, which is great and interesting and everything but isn't really practical for the home grower.

Growing from seed is a little better, though orchid seeds are incredibly tiny, highly prone to fungal diseases, and a pretty long-term prospect besides, since it may take five to seven years before a seedling is old enough to flower, and by that point, honestly, what are the odds that you're still even going to care what the flower looks like? Plus, even supposing that you do keep them all going for five to seven years,⁷ there is absolutely no guarantee that you're going to wind up with anything particularly special. But if you really want to know, there's some basic information about growing Phalaenopsis from seed here.

The most practical method for home propagation is still not incredibly practical, but: plantlets, called "keiki,"⁸ sometimes form spontaneously on the flowering stem of a plant. This can also be induced, sometimes, by applying a cytokinin (a plant hormone) paste to the dormant nodes on a flower spike. When a keiki has grown some substantial roots, two inches long or thereabouts, and about three leaves, then it can be removed from the parent and potted up separately. Keiki can also be left on the stem; given enough time, they'll flower while still attached to the parent plant. More specific information about keiki can be found toward the bottom of this page.

A Phalaenopsis bloom stalk with two developing keiki. Photo by RobertoMM, from Wikimedia Commons.
GROOMING: Phalaenopsis will need repotting every year or two, if everything's going well. There are a lot of prepackaged orchid mixes (the one we used at work contained various species of bark, sphagnum moss, charcoal, and perlite) out there; I think sphagnum by itself works pretty well for smaller plants, but for larger ones you do probably want something a bit chunkier.⁹

Actual grooming of the plants is fairly minor; you'll need to pick up dead flowers occasionally, and leaves drop once in a while, but there are usually not enough of either for grooming to be a major project.

After flowers have bloomed and drop, the spike itself can produce additional buds and new flowers, if it's still green and healthy-looking. The way to force this is to cut off the spike below the last blooming node; the new top node will, if conditions are favorable, produce another spray of flowers. This sounds like a great thing, but there's one substantial catch: it drains enough of the plant's stored energy that subsequent blooms will be smaller and fewer in number. For a very young or weak plant, doing this may deplete it enough that once you've run through all the nodes on the first one, you'll have to wait a very long time before the plant gets it together to bloom again. It could also weaken the plant enough to leave it susceptible to disease or pests. Consequently, this is best only attempted on well-established, large plants, and you're probably best not to force a new set of flowers more than once or twice.

On the up side, if the spike doesn't dry up and die, the plant may still produce a second round of flowers from that spike, all on its own, in which case you may as well assume that it knows what it's doing and let it.

FEEDING: Oh my god. Fertilizer instructions for Phalaenopsis are almost impossible to summarize, because every site I looked at had different ones. People recommend NPK ratios of 1:1:1, 3:1:1, 1:3:2, and 2:1:2. They recommend half-strength dilutions, and quarter-strength dilutions. Some say you shouldn't feed when the plant is blooming; other sites say to feed year round. Some people swear by adding a teaspoon of epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) to a gallon of water and watering with that during the one particular time when you want to initiate a bloom spike. I also saw recommendations to dilute your fertilizer more if you're growing in sphagnum moss than if you're growing in bark, though they didn't explain why there would be a difference.

Some of the variability in instruction could be because a plant's nutrient needs depend on its ancestry, so different methods may work better for you if you're growing some hybrids than if you're growing others. Perhaps a phal with a large percentage of Vietnamese genes wants subtly different things than a phal with mostly Phillippine ones. Or possibly it really doesn't matter that much. I mean, there may be no actual "right" answers here.¹⁰

So I don't even really know what to tell you. Some stores carry fertilizer which is supposed to be specifically for orchids. It's usually a small bottle, and has an NPK breakdown of like 3-9-6 or something. This is probably about as good an option as any, if you only have one orchid and aren't going to need to be feeding fifty plants at a time. Getting a more concentrated fertilizer and diluting it down yourself is generally more economical, but it's also (barely) more work.

I personally feed with a 14-14-14 time-release Osmocote formulation, and probably not enough. (I throw in maybe two or three of the little balls every three or four months, because I'm scared that if I use more than that I'll burn the roots.)

Yet another Phalaenopsis NOID. I like the patterning on this one, though it's hard to look at for very long.
If you're trying to promote blooms, switching to a 1:3:2 formulation (like 10-30-20 or 8-24-16) for a brief period may help. Or it may not. I've seen a lot of discussion about whether or not high-phosphorous fertilizers are useful for inducing blooms, and everybody seems to make logical sense, but they also all contradict one another and I don't know whose logic to trust.

Feed less often during the winter, or when there's a long run of cloudy days, or when growing in cooler temperatures. Accordingly, feed more often in summer, bright light, and warmth. This is pretty much standard for any plant, though.

In an ideal world, you'll know a more experienced grower who has the particular cultivar you own, and you can just ask him/r about feeding. In this world, I'm inclined to say pick something simple, and if it doesn't appear to be working then try playing around with strength or NPK ratios or epsom salts or whatever.

Sometimes, orchid flowers appear which have their own ideas about how flowers should be constructed. Ordinarily, there are three actual petals in the front of the flower (one of which forms the "lip," and then two held above), and then three sepals behind the petals. In Phalaenopsis, the sepals tend to be colored and shaped more or less the same as the petals. In this particular example, the two real petals have gotten a little confused, and are partially transformed into "lips," hence the odd little growths toward the center of the petals, and the overall strange shape of the petals. It's like they started to develop into lips and then suddenly remembered not to or something. Flowers like this are called "peloric," for reasons I declined to investigate, and there are much more extreme cases of . . . pelorism (?) than this. Andrew is probably more the person to ask about peloric flowers, though, since his blog is where I first heard about them.
So that's what I was able to find about caring for Phalaenopsis. It doesn't sound so hard -- in fact, one of the more annoying things about writing this profile was that almost every single site I ran into assured me that these were very, very easy to grow and bloom, so easy that anybody can do it. Yeah. Okay. Except not: all the sites that said phals were soooooo easy would, in the next sentence, turn around and warn not to water at night, lest root rot set in, and not to give them too much light, lest they scorch. And these sites were all prescribing specific temperatures at specific times of day and year, making impossible-for-most-people humidity-and-air-circulation demands, contradicting one another in really specific ways about fertilizer, and just kind of generally doing everything possible to make them sound really weird and touchy.

And then they brightly sum up with a big rah-rah Phalaenopsis are wonderful! Anybody can grow them! kicker, which, you know, talk about sending mixed signals.

Ultimately, I think the mixed signals are kind of appropriate, and how difficult you find Phalaenopsis is going to be somewhat a matter of perspective. If your point of comparison is whether you can treat one just like your Dracaena marginata, then you will in fact find phals to be kind of a challenge. If your interest in growing phals is to produce huge, perfect, florist-quality blooms, then you're going to have a rough time at first. But the actual work required is pretty similar to other houseplants: they need water, light, warmish temperatures, humidity, and fertilizer, like most everything else. My trouble with them has been, mostly, that the set of intuitions required for growing phals well is different from the intuitions required for growing most of my other plants, so I do the wrong thing semi-regularly, even still, and the plant suffers for it. So, bottom line, are they easy? Kinda. But also no. But mostly they're simple. Except when they aren't. Am I being clear?

Way more references than you care to read (probably):
http://pubs.caes.uga.edu/caespubs/horticulture/orchids.html
http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/orchids/
http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/orchids/msg1005210822286.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalaenopsis
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/PTLK/1350.html
http://www.aos.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Culture_Sheets&CONTENTID=3705&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm
http://www.orchidweb.com/phalcare.aspx
http://houseplants.about.com/od/orchids/p/Phalaenopsis.htm
http://www.plant-care.com/phalaenopsis-orchid-care.html
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Phalaenopsis
http://www.angelfire.com/on4/angelorchids/PropagatingOrchidsnew.htm
http://www.orchidboard.com/community/hybrids/17309-phalaenopsis-secrets-including-re-blooming.html
http://www.rv-orchidworks.com/orchidtalk/genus-specific/15420-can-you-rebloom-phalaenopsis-same-spike.html
http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/orchids/2004090359017731.html
Prior PATSP posts portraying plentiful pretty Phalenopsis portraits.¹¹ (A few of these were recycled for use in the Phalaenopsis profiles.): (1) (2) (3)

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Photo credits: mine except for the keiki photo.

¹ (I don't watch these shows so much, but the husband does.)
Phalaenopsis appear to be used in interior design because they're brightly-colored, they hold on to the flowers long enough that you can reuse them from show to show and not have to buy new ones for every shoot, and they're tough enough that the designers can place them wherever in a room and they'll still do okay, they're not going to freak out and drop all the flowers or something.
It might just be that phals are trendy plants right now, though. I mean, HGTV never seems that interested in the plants. I get the impression that from an interior design perspective, or at least from the perspective of an HGTV designer person, there are exactly three kinds of plants: orchids (mostly Phalaenopsis), palms (I'm too palm-blind to identify any particular species being used, but decorators can't live without them), and cactus (which are usually not actual cactus: I mostly see Aloes).
² (Less plausible now that I have the watering station in the plant room and no longer have to water all the plants in the kitchen sink. And not that I would anyway. Just, you know, if it happened, I wouldn't be heartbroken about it.)
³ Called pseudobulbs, from the Greek pseudo-, meaning false, and the English bulbs, meaning bulbs.
⁴ Some growers somehow manage to pull off growing Phalaenopsis in soil, which I do not recommend trying in the home at all. If you've bought such a plant, take it out of the soil as soon as you can and replant it in something that will breathe better, like sphagnum, bark, coco fiber, or some combination of these. It's not unheard of for the growers who do this to cover the soil with a thin layer of bark, so if the pot feels heavier than bark ought to, dig around a little.
My guess is that plants being grown in tropical climates dry out fast enough that soil isn't a problem, and soil no doubt ships better than bark does -- I've knocked my own bark-planted orchids out of their pots a number of times, just in the course of trying to water them, so I can imagine it's much worse when you've got a bunch of plants in a tall, mostly empty box (orchids are generally shipped in bud, so you need room for the flower spikes: this leads to boxes that are mostly empty space). But still.
⁵ At work, we would drag all the orchids outside during the summer, and then leave them out until the low temperatures were forecast to be below 40F/4C. I do not necessarily recommend this for the reader, but it's what we did. This probably sounds colder than they actually got: the orchid spot at work was under a lath house and under a couple large trees, and was in a city besides, so the orchids probably all stayed a few degrees warmer than the official low temperature.
This was partly because the later we let them stay out, the more time we had to try to move stuff around in the greenhouse to have room for them.
So, so much of my time in that job was spent on rearranging plants in hopes that space for new plants would magically appear once I'd done so.
⁶ (Even here in the Subjunctive Botanical Gardens, humidity dips below 50% pretty regularly. If it's been a while since I watered stuff in a given room, it's not unheard of for the winter humidity to get down close to 25-30%, even.)
⁷ Not a minor thing at all: Phalaenopsis seed pods may contain thousands of seeds. Most of those won't sprout, or will succumb to fungus, or something, but still, even if a tiny, tiny fraction of the possible plants survive, you could still be looking at twenty plants, and that's a lot of work, just from a single cross.
⁸ (Hawaiian for "child" or "baby") I have been informed via e-mail that keiki can mean a great many more things than just "child." As with aloha, which most of us know can mean "hello" or "good-bye" (and which we're less likely to know may also mean "love," "sympathy," "kindness," "sentiment," and many other things, depending on context), keiki may refer to, variously: a single child, multiple children, descendant, the child of a close friend, calf, colt, worker, or shoot/sucker (the meaning in the Phalaenopsis case). This is much like the way "kid" in English can refer to one's own child, anybody's particular child, a young goat, or as a verb for joking playfully with someone: context tells you which meaning pertains.
In the original Hawaiian, the singular and plural are the same (one keiki, two keiki, etc.), as in English words like "fish," "sheep," "reindeer," etc. As the word becomes adopted into other languages, by people who may or may not be aware of its treatment in the Hawaiian, one may see the form "keikis," as well as plurals that aren't even correct in English, like "two keiki's."
The terminal -s would be redundant and wrong in Hawaiian (like a native Hebrew speaker pluralizing the English "deer" to "deerim," using the plural suffix from a different language), but all kinds of things happen to words when they move from one language to another, as the speakers of the adoptive language regularize pluralization, conjugation, declension to that of the new language, so I'm not sure whether it's necessarily incorrect to say "keikis." It is, though, more respectful to the Hawaiian people and language to use "keiki" for both, even if it's not the usual English plural, so you may as well.
⁹ Small wads of fresh sphagnum dry out fairly evenly, but larger, or older, wads don't so much. So a large orchid in a bunch of sphagnum is likely to wind up in situations where the center of the root ball is wet, but the outside is dry, tempting the orchid owner into overwatering, rot, and plant death. Decently-sized bark chunks can't pack together well enough to block airflow to the base of the plant, so it will dry out more evenly. The specific medium doesn't necessarily matter as much as that you water appropriately for whatever it is, and that you change it before it breaks down and collapses around the roots, which both sphagnum-based and bark-based mixes will do over time.
¹⁰ As a rule, I assume that if advice about a particular plant varies considerably from person to person, that probably means it doesn't really matter that much how you do it. If it made that much of a difference to the plant, then everybody would do it the same way.
¹¹ (I realized I had some alliteration going and ran with it. It doesn't mean anything in particular.)

Personal-ish: Why I Can't Have Nice Things

This is why I can't have nice things.

We took Fervor back to the shelter around 3 this afternoon because the allergy thing was getting less ambiguous and more obviously something I wouldn't be able to live with for the next year, five years, twelve years, whatever. Obviously this sucks tremendously for me and the husband; from Fervor's perspective, though, he got a 4-day vacation from the shelter with lots of walks and a couple car rides and now he's back home again.

Part II of the Phalaenopsis profile was already ready to go up tomorrow, so I'll let it go ahead and post, but I'm going to start hiatus early, if it's all the same to everybody, and not post anything after that until the 24th, when I was planning to return. I'll still be around and reading comments and stuff. I just don't feel up to composing new posts for a while.

The odds we'll try again with another dog are, I think, less than 50%.