Irony

We live a few houses away from a farm supply store of some kind. I've never investigated too closely what they actually have or do, but I know ammonia tanks are part of it, 'cause we see a fair number coming and going, and there's a truck scale, which I know because they shook the house for several days this summer while they put in a new one. But otherwise it's kind of a mystery.

So on Monday I was out with Sheba and saw this in the yard, which had blown over from the farm place. Fortunately, I was wearing multiple layers of protective cynicism (it was cold out: layering is important), or I would probably have died of irony poisoning right then and there.

The text reads "[logo] The Natural Resource."
A disposable styrofoam cup, that's blown into someone's yard from a business that didn't even dispose of it properly, is very possibly the worst time to be reminding anybody about natural resources and associating them with your brand, correct?

The Quad City Botanical Center, Part 2 of However Many

This is the second post about our visit to the Quad City Botanical Center (henceforth QCBC) a few weeks ago. (Part 1)

The QCBC building. Photo by Ctjf83 at Wikipedia.
The tropical plants area of the QCBC is divided up in a way that makes it feel relatively small, but the pamphlet the husband picked up says it's 6444 square feet (599 square meters), and 70 feet (21.3 m) tall at its tallest point. So there's room, and somehow they've managed to get some very big plants in there, even though their website says they've only been around since 1998. (Presumably some of the plants were of pretty good size before they were planted.)

My favorite, naturally, was the Pandanus utilis.

Pandanus utilis.
I tried to take a picture that would show the spiral arrangement of leaves, to explain the common name "screw pine," but the sun was behind the plant, and there was only so much I could do. This was the best one I got:


Seeing this one at the QCBC made me even more determined to get a Pandanus utilis of my own someday, though. Not that I needed the push.

Odds are that more visitors are impressed by the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, than the Pandanus. It was certainly much taller, if nothing else:

Cocos nucifera.
And it did, I admit, educate me a little as to how the coconuts are attached to the plant: I always thought they were held closer to the foliage than that. (You may have to open the picture in a separate window to see the coconuts.)

Not all the big, impressive plants were unfamiliar: the QCBC also has the largest Murraya paniculata I've ever seen. I can't imagine how overpowering the smell, when it's in full bloom. The people who clean the room must hate this plant. (My own makes a mess of the husband's office on a regular basis, and it's a tiny fraction of the size of this one.)

Murraya paniculata.
They also had a big, healthy Philodendron erubescens that was trying very hard to pull down the building:

Philodendron erubescens (?).
I suspect there is a law that all botanical-garden-type places have to have at least one gigantic Alocasia or Colocasia somewhere.

Alocasia sp.? Colocasia sp.? I'm not really getting any better at telling the two apart. . . .
I was surprised to find a Duranta at all (it's not a plant I think about a lot, or expect to see anywhere), but finding a really big, chartreuse one was a pleasant surprise:

Duranta erecta 'Golden Edge.'
No flowers on the Duranta, which is too bad. I want to smell one again sometime and see whether I still think it smells like cookies.

There were pothos plants climbing, literally, the walls (you can see some of them in the background of the pictures from Part 1), but this particular one got to the ceiling by climbing a support column.

Epipremnum aureum.
I also saw a Syngonium podophyllum with mature leaves at the QCBC. I'd seen this before, but it'd been a long time:

Syngonium podophyllum.

The plant that most impressed me, though, of all the plants there, was their Caryota mitis (fishtail palm), which was not only enormous --

Caryota mitis.
-- it was also flowering. Rather a lot.


The flowers aren't pretty, but apparently they don't have to be in order to work.


And this very new flower below looked like an octopus to me, which makes me like the species way, way more. I've never had good luck with C. mitis indoors (in my experience, it's hard to find one that's not buggy), but if they can grow octopi/-puses/-pods, then I think I need to rethink my position.


They also had a few other very large plants that I'm leaving out of the post because they didn't photograph well, including a Chorisa speciosa (silk floss tree) that nearly touched the ceiling and was dropping pink flowers on everything underneath it. I'd heard the name before, but it wasn't a plant I was familiar with at all. In person, it was maybe a little too huge and a little too far away for me to relate to, but still. Always nice to meet new folks.

There were also quite a few gigantic banana plants (Musa sp.), and a very large but badly lit Breynia disticha (snowbush, also sometimes Breynia nivosa). Maybe I'll get pictures of those the next time we go.

Re: Ads

So I said I would have a decision about whether the ads would stay or not after they'd been up for a week, and that means today. I'm going to punt, though. As I write this (Saturday night), it's unclear where the total is going to be after a month, or what I could normally expect for a month's worth of ads. I had a specific dollar amount in mind that I felt would make having the ads worthwhile, and right now I'm thinking there's only a 50-50 chance of reaching that number, so there's a 50-50 chance that the ads will remain after 29 December. I probably won't announce it then. They'll either still be there on 30 December, or they won't.

Probably doesn't affect you one way or the other, unless you had really strong feelings about whether someone else's blog should have ads on it or not (and why would you?). But I said I'd let you know what the decision was, so I am. As you were.

More New Plants

These are the latest batch of plants, from the trip to Cedar Rapids last Wednesday. Mostly what impresses me about these, if anything does, is that most of them were very cheap, for what they were, especially relative to the ex-job (which is still what I weigh plant prices against, those being the prices I know best). One in particular.

In the order of purchase:

Peperomia verschaffeltii. Earl May, Iowa City, $9.
(Well, okay, this one wasn't cheap.) This is one of the two plants I bought specifically for Nina. I'd passed it up at least three times before this: though I wanted it, in part because it was the only one I'd ever seen, I've also had pretty consistent bad luck with the non-succulent Peperomias (P. caperata, P. argyreia). P. argyreia was particularly frustrating. So I only bought P. verschaffeltii because I knew I had a terrarium to put it into.

The logic seemed sound, but then we got to Cedar Rapids and I saw one at Peck's for either $5 or $6, which made me wish I'd waited.

Adiantum capillus-veneris. Peck's, Cedar Rapids, $6.
Speaking of Peck's: I hadn't been there in at least a year, I think, because the last time I was there, everything seemed really ordinary and expensive, and the time before that, everything was covered in Christmas crap and it took me like twenty minutes after I left to stop dry-heaving.

And then a month later they sent me a bill for the glass door I (allegedly!) ran through in my haste to escape the glitter and poinsettias. But, you know, if I can't go to Pierson's anymore -- and I cannot -- then it seemed like maybe I should reconsider Peck's.

And although, yes, somebody'd left a six-inch layer of Christmas on everything in the store with a cement mixer, the houseplants were more or less left alone, and the music was at a low enough volume that I could ignore it, so I bought some stuff anyway. I would never ever ever have bought an Adiantum if not for the terrarium (When I was still at the ex-job, WCW told me once that they had trouble keeping Adiantums going even with the greenhouse, never mind in the drier air of somebody's home.), but since I have one, we're going to try it. It'll be pretty if it works.

(Unfortunately, I finally tried cleaning the new terrarium yesterday, and am no longer optimistic that it's ever going to be usable. Yesterday was a fairly bad day all around, and I'm easily frustrated, so this is not the last word on anything, but let's don't go expecting miracles.)

Radermachera sinica. Peck's, Cedar Rapids, $5.
I've tried Radermachera once before, and it was underwatered to death very quickly, which put me off them for a long time. I'm going to try again, though I'm not sure I have much higher hopes for this specimen. I'd consider it in the terrarium, but I think it'd probably outgrow the terrarium so fast there'd be no point. Can anybody opine about whether that would be a good idea?

(I'm pretty sure you can: what I mean is please would you.)

Saintpaulia 'Shimmer Shake.' Frontier, Cedar Rapids, $4.
We're also being brave again about Saintpaulias. I've kept one alive for over a year (maybe two years?), so maybe I can do this. It didn't photograph particularly well, but African violets with blue or purple flowers never do, and it was nearly bloomed-out besides. If it survives long enough to flower, it'll be prettier.

Schlumbergera NOID. Frontier, Cedar Rapids, $3.50.
I was planning to wait until after Christmas to pick up Schlumbergeras, but there's so little variety out there this year that I figured I should grab a yellow one when I saw it: Frontier is the only place I've seen with yellow holiday cacti this year. (Includes: Reha's, Earl May, Peck's, Lowe's, Wallace's) Everybody's favoring the red ones really, really hard, and then most of what's left over is pink. Is it always like this?

Anyway. So I was happy. And this is a very pretty flower, too, with a little flush of pink around the center. However many thousands of seedlings had to be grown out and evaluated to get this, it was totally worth it.

Oncidium Tsiku Marguerite NN #1. Frontier, Cedar Rapids, $10.
And then there were orchids. Frontier had them the last time I was there, and I didn't have money to buy any, which sucked because they were the cheapest I'd ever seen for a non-Phalaenopsis orchid that was old enough to flower. So it was a relief to see that they still had some. This Oncidium's flowers aren't especially beautiful, but they're fragrant in a weird way -- the scent reminds me of cardboard, that vanilla/woody/chemical smell. (Another opinion, from a poster at orchidboard.com, is that it has a "comfortable" smell, like the poster's grandmother's house. For what that's worth.)

Mainly, though, I was impressed by the number of roots. Which is perhaps a weird thing to be impressed by, but the plant's practically bursting out of the pot, and there are roots all over the place, so it seemed really healthy, if nothing else.

I assume that I should wait to repot until at least after the flowering is over, right?

Potinara Eye Candy 'Sweet Sensation.' Frontier, Cedar Rapids, $10.
More orchids. This is the one that caught my eye first, the one I knew for sure I wanted to get. No detectable scent, but the colors are particularly nice, and long, careful examination of the Wallace's Orchid Show photos led me to the conclusion that Potinaras are my favorites. (Or one of my favorites.) Can I grow them? I don't know, but I've had a Brassolaeliocattleya for two years now, which is related, so maybe. And unlike the Blc., I know that these orchids are all old enough to flower, so there's more hope of reblooming.

Potinara Eye Candy 'Mellow Yellow.' Frontier, Cedar Rapids, $10.
Orchids again. Same cross as the preceding plant, but a different clone. No scent on this one either. I'm surprised that it's colored so differently from 'Sweet Sensation,' but I suppose I shouldn't be. I don't think I've ever seen two different clones of the same cross side-by-side before.

I'm less impressed with the color of 'Mellow Yellow,' but it looks really good next to 'Sweet Sensation,' which is the main reason I got it.

Leuchtenbergia principis. Frontier, Cedar Rapids, $5!!!!
I already had a Leuchtenbergia, which I bought about a year and a half ago. It was in a 6-inch (15 cm) pot, and I paid $25 for it. It hasn't done anything very exciting, but it hasn't given me any trouble, either. So I didn't need this plant at all. But: it's rare to see it for sale, it's bigger than the first one, and it was priced about 1/8 of what it's worth. (The guy at the counter said that they'd had it for a long time and it wasn't selling, so they gave it a ridiculously low price to get rid of it.)

I don't have a good place to keep it, of course. But I'm sure something can be worked out.

Pretty picture: Brassolaeliocattleya Darcy-Rose Campbell

I really thought I had more pictures of non-cattleya-alliance flowers than this in the Wallace's Orchid Show set. I mean, I don't mind if you don't mind, but I went to a certain amount of trouble to avoid repeating genera, yet they're all starting to look the same to me anyway. (The last one, Paph. delenatii 'Santa Barbara' x Sib., is a notable recent exception.)

Looking at this picture, I'm mostly struck by the difference between the (big, wide, frilly) petals and the (narrow, plain) sepals. Usually the breeders try to make them both big and frilly, don't they? Or am I misremembering?

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Plans for Nina's new place, mentioned in last week's SMSA/ONP, are coming together much more slowly than I'd hoped.

I have purchased a couple plants specifically for Nina, things I would never have bought without a terrarium to put them in. I'm not going to tell you what they are, because that's Monday's post, but I'm sort of pleased (maybe) about trying a couple new things. Planting them is a ways in the future, still.

The aquarium was dirty when we got it (mostly mineral deposits in rings around the tank; it might have been used for salt-water fish, or it might have just been used somewhere with really hard water), and some of the spots don't come off with just soap and water. There's also a bit of tape residue involved, it looks like. I intend to try cleaning it with vinegar when I get a chance, and maybe acetone or rubbing alcohol if the vinegar doesn't work, but I've been too busy watering, writing, shopping, or lying around with a headache (Tuesday was a bad day) to get to that yet. I also can't plant right away because I haven't chosen all the plants -- I still need at least two more, maybe three, and I don't know what they're going to be, so I don't know where I want to put the ones I have already.


Even once we have the plants in place, Nina can't move in for a while: lid and lights were not included, and we have to figure out what we want to do for those. I asked at the pet shop where we get Nina's crickets, and it looks like a new lid is roughly $20-25, which seems excessive for something that's basically just a wire screen with a hinge in it. And then a light fixture, plus special UV-producing bulbs, adds however much more. So we're at least going to shop around for a little while, if not try to improvise one or both items.

Which all means that Nina's stuck with her ratty old cricket-chewed Vriesea for a bit longer. But maybe I can make up for not getting her anything last Christmas by presenting her with a new apartment this Christmas.

Knowing her, she'll focus on the lack of a formal dining area and stainless steel cricket warmer, and complain anyway. But we'll see.

The Quad City Botanical Center, Part 1 of However Many

As I mentioned a while ago, there's a Botanical Center in the Quad Cities, the "Quad City Botanical Center." (Whimsical!) Somehow I'd never heard of it before the husband told me about it this past summer. And I know you would expect me to be bouncing off the walls until we were able to visit, but I actually forgot about it for several months, and only remembered I knew about the place when the husband raised the subject a couple weeks ago.

Botanical gardens are strange mixes of things I like and things I don't. On the one hand: plants. Plants are good. But then there's the part where you don't get to take home the ones you like. Even if you offer to pay for them. It took an enormous amount of focus and self-control, for example, not to leave the QCBC with a couple of Begonia leaves. Also, I'm fairly convinced that I will die, or at least become gravely ill, if I do not very soon get a variegated Callisia fragrans like the ones they have there.

Variegated Callisia fragrans.
Botanical centers are also weird places for me because I have so many plants, and have seen so many others, that my perspective is very warped about what counts as a cool plant. A gigantic, healthy Monstera deliciosa like this one --

Monstera deliciosa, split-leaf philodendron.
leaves me kind of cold. You know, big whoop, I have three of those at home. (Not as big or as nice. Not by a long shot. But a plant I'm very familiar with, even so.) I'm not saying this is desirable. It's just, you know, over time, it takes weirder and rarer things to get me excited.

So I don't know whether my opinion on the place can, or even ought to, matter to anybody, but having said that, I was pleasantly surprised by the QCBC. Part of the good thing about botanical centers, as opposed to retail, is that retail is fairly homogenized. No matter where you go, you find more or less the same set of plants over and over, and ordering is constrained by what's available and what will sell (jade plants, peace lilies, Dracaena marginata, pothos, lucky bamboo) than what the person doing the ordering finds interesting. On the other hand, botanical gardens, like home gardens, can cater a little more specifically to an individual's tastes and whims, which I suggest is a Good Thing, even if you aren't the individual being catered to.

So my guess is that someone at the QCBC has a special fondness for shrimp plants (Pachystachys, Justicia), plants in the Maranta family (Calathea, Ctenanthe), and . . . well, I'm not sure what you'd call the third category. We'll get to it.

I saw at least three shrimp plants, but only two were identified.

Pachystachys lutea, lollipop plant.
I was familiar with P. lutea from the garden center where I used to work. We never had any that were that big, though, and I was never that impressed with them. I get the appeal more now.

The second shrimp plant was one I hadn't heard of before.

Pachystachys coccinea.
Pachystachys coccinea inflorescence, close-up.

It might impress you more if it had been blooming as heavily as the P. lutea, but you get the idea from the close-up, I'm sure.

The picture of the third shrimp didn't turn out well; I was having to fight screwy afternoon light, shaky hands, and a lens that kept trying to fog up. So maybe next time on that one.

The Marantaceae plants were mostly Calatheas, with just one Ctenanthe I remember --

Ctenanthe lubbersiana.
-- but they made up for it by including two Calatheas I'd never seen or heard of. The QCBC gets big, big points for C. majestica:

Calathea majestica.

though they lose some points for making me look up the ID. (ID signs were sort of inconsistently placed, and often covered by the plants they were supposed to identify, which I suppose is the sort of problem botanical-garden-type places would have a lot.) There was also a large, sort of plain NOID, which didn't photograph well:

Calathea NOID.
And another one I had to look up, which I think is Calathea 'Wilson['s?] Princep.'

Calathea 'Wilson['s?] Princep.'
Unfortunately, there weren't any very large specimens of 'Wilson Princep,' and the ones that did exist were in weird, hard-to-photograph locations underneath lots of other plants, so I'll have to try again on this photo, maybe.

The final group of plants I want to cover for this post are all commercial plants, things I mainly knew from ingredient lists. The QCBC had several of them. They weren't nearly as pretty as the shrimps and the Calatheas, but I at least have mental images for some of these plants that I didn't have before.

First up, annatto (Bixa orellana). I realized while there that I knew the word, but had no idea what annatto actually is, or is used for. (Probably you know already, but if you're like I was: it's both a spice and a yellow to orange food coloring, particularly common in cheese, says Wikipedia.) The plant itself wasn't terribly impressive, though with a lot of these plants, I have no idea whether the specimen at the QCBC was particularly large or healthy.

Bixa orellana, annatto.
They also had vanilla (Vanilla planifolia), coffee (Coffea arabica), and sapodilla (Manilara zapota, which used to produce the base for chewing gum: gum is now, wikiposedly, mostly produced from artificial polymers), which I didn't take pictures of: I have a Coffea, the Vanilla wasn't that impressive and anyway I've seen them before, and for some reason it didn't occur to me to take a picture of the Manilara, though I remember thinking about it. Supposedly they had allspice (Pimenta dioica), cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) and bay (Laurus nobilis) too, though I don't remember seeing any of them.

I did get a picture of cacao (chocolate; Theobroma cacao), though I was a little let down; I expected more:

Theobroma cacao, cacao (chocolate) tree.
And the papaya (Carica papaya) was respectable, I guess. Only one I've ever seen in person, anyway.

Carica papaya, papaya.
Finally, they had a couple smallish ylang-ylang (Cananga odorata) plants. Fairly nondescript,

Canana odorata, ylang-ylang.
though there was one flower. (I think it may have dropped off the stem already, and just happened to catch in part of the plant, but if it was a dead flower, it still looked pretty. I couldn't detect a smell, which supports the dead-flower theory.)

Cananga odorata flower.
In the next couple posts, I'll take a look at the really big plants they had, some oddities which pleased me, and a few really impressive specimens of plants I already knew about. I'm tentatively planning Part 2 for 7 December, though that depends on me being able to write and sort pictures and etc. a bit more quickly than usual, so try not to be too disappointed with me if I make you wait a few days longer than that.

Other: Menards Parking Lot

Events lined up for me yesterday such that the plants were all watered and the husband had a free day, so we went to Cedar Rapids so he could watch me buy plants. Except he didn't even do that, because he stayed out in the car with Sheba, so really it was more like, he drove me to Cedar Rapids and then watched me bring plant-containing bags out of stores. It's apparently more fun than it sounds like.

Sheba, meanwhile, threw up twice during the trip and then once again after we got her back home, which hasn't happened in a long time, and we're all a little confused about why it would have happened on this particular trip. She'd been doing so well with car rides previously. Sheba never seems particularly disturbed about throwing up, but she's also never really happy about it either, unlike some dogs. Mostly, yesterday, she just seemed kind of tired. (In fairness, the trip was cutting into her nap time quite a bit.)

But so anyway, the point is that I didn't have time last night to get a post together, by the time the plants all got unpacked and photographed and added to the spreadsheets and stuff. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have gone out without having a post ready first, 'cause I'm all responsible like that, but I've been working for a couple weeks now on a post about the trip to the Quad City Botanical Center, and it hasn't been going well. Also it might want to be three posts. I don't know. The upshot is that I've been running around a lot, and this could pay off in the form of all kinds of really cool posts about all kinds of great stuff at any moment, so be ready.

Meanwhile, for today, you get a photo from the Menards parking lot in Iowa City, which isn't plant-related but has to do with a plant-buying trip so it's, like, plant related by association, or something.


There's a pretty substantial Amish and Mennonite community around here, mostly south of us, in and around Kalona. And sometimes they need to go to Menards.

This is something one sees occasionally in the area, especially near Kalona, though it's fairly unusual to see horse-drawn carriages as far north as Iowa City. Too much traffic, I suspect, to be horse-friendly. I saw plenty of people doing double-takes in the parking lot. One couple even whipped out a camera and got a photo with the horses in the background. (Yes, I was taking pictures too. But it's different: I'm a blogger. I have to.)

If I can get one together, there will be a plant-related post this afternoon, but I also have to start watering again today, and there are a ton of pictures to sort, so that might happen, and it might not. We'll see.

Random plant event: Mimosa pudica flower

I'm not a fan of sensitive plants. I know, I know, I'm a grumpy old man with a shriveled black heart who will never know the true meaning of Christmas. But it's just -- they always look kind of scruffy and weedy and miserable. (They actually are weeds in warmer climates than Iowa's.) And then if you touch one, it'll wilt and then look even more miserable. As novelty plants go, it's kind of a dumb trick, though I concede that even a dumb trick is better than no trick, like most plants.

Anyway. So this isn't one of my personal plants: I took the pictures at Pierson's, in Cedar Rapids, in October.


That said, the flowers would be sort of pretty, if there were more of them and/or they were larger. And even as the solitary small things they are, the flowers are interesting, I suppose. Different from the usual flower.


I dunno. I was basically neutral about Mimosa pudica until I worked with them at the garden center. So much time spent trying to separate plants that had grown into one another and tangled; so much angst about germination until we found the secret (hot water + overnight soak + bottom heat). I never hated them the way I hated some plants, but I can't imagine ever wanting to own one, either.

'Course, there are other schools of thought.