Specialists and Generalists

Two things have happened lately that have gotten me thinking about the plant collection and which plants are and are not valuable to me. One, I've been doing a lot of complaining about how much time it takes to water everything, so someone finally did the obvious thing and asked me, straight-up, whether all the plants were in fact necessary, whether I even enjoyed having them around. Two, I'm preparing to propagate some stuff for selling/trading season,¹ and since in the past, I've rarely sold out of any plants I offered (last year, I think the only one I sold out of was Ledebouria socialis), I'm doing the propagation this year with an eye towards which plants I have that I might actually want to have extras of at the end of the summer. No point in having thirty pots of a plant I don't even like sitting around when October arrives, after all.

What this has done for me, then, is it's made me focus pretty hard on which plants I like and don't like, which plants are and aren't working for me. Hence Monday's anti-orchid outburst, and my new realization that I never want to own another African violet, which I hadn't told you about until now.²

I've always been fairly indiscriminate in my plant purchases: there are a few plants that have just never appealed to me,³ but of the 128 options in the Rumble Among the Jungle list, I've attempted all but 19 at one time or another, and I've never felt like specializing in any particular family, genus, or species. But I'm starting to see how that could happen. Orchids and African violets are off the table today. Maybe I decide I've had enough of ferns (which have also been having a rough year here) next week. In a couple months, I finally accept that I don't have adequate light for desert cacti. In the fall, I decide no more Hoyas because of their tendency to suddenly disintegrate for no obvious reason.⁴ And so on.

The question is: is this process of gradually shrinking the field of possibilities how specialists come to specialize, or do most plant specialists only ever care about one thing to begin with? And how often does it go the other direction, where a narrowly-focused African violet person dabbles in a few Episcias and Streptocarpuses, then a Pilea or two, and eventually becomes a generalist? I'm guessing generalist --> specialist is more common than specialist --> generalist, but I don't actually know.

So I submit the question to the group for anecdata. Are you a specialist or a generalist? (If a specialist: what family / genus / species?) Which direction have you been moving, over time? Could you see yourself moving from specialist to generalist, or vice-versa?⁵ Is specialization more common among outdoor gardeners? Etc.

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¹ (Look for an announcement around mid-April.)
² Because I know there are fans of orchids and African violets reading: it's not the plants themselves, not exactly. Obviously I've found them interesting enough to buy them over and over in the past. But I cannot keep them alive here, in my current situation, and after a certain point, buying more and more of a plant you can't grow stops being admirable perseverance and becomes stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality. Also, it's tough to like a plant when all you get to do is watch one specimen after the next slowly run downhill and die, so even if my situation changed, I wouldn't try growing them again. I'm over them. (Orchids are so 2008.)
Should maybe also note that I still have three orchids and two African violets, and I don't intend to get rid of any of them unless / until it becomes obvious that they're not going to work for me either. I have a very, very difficult time discarding healthy plants, even when I don't like them. They don't even have to be that healthy.
³ Examples: Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, Opuntia spp., Lithops spp./cvv., Nephrolepis exaltata, Rhododendron cvv.
⁴ Which has happened again in the last couple months, this time with H. polyneura.
⁵I'm not likely to get a very narrow focus on any particular group of plants anytime soon; there are too many plants already here that I like and that do well for me, but if I were going to specialize, I suspect I'd focus on the genus Anthurium. For the past nine months or so, I've been crossing plants and starting seeds every time I get an opportunity to do so, to the point where the basement now holds six plastic containers of seedlings. I don't have a particularly good sense of how many individuals are actually down there right now, but I'd ballpark it at around 150.

One of the containers. This particular batch was started in November 2011, and have 'Gemini' (medium-sized red-pink spathe with yellow spadix) as the female parent. Don't know for sure who the father was, but 'Pandola' (large medium-pink spathe with medium-pink spadix) is the one I'd guess.
Odds are that all of these Anthurium mongrels are commercially worthless, but I won't know until they get old enough to bloom, around 2016. I'm going to continue to cross them and start seeds anyway, because doing so amuses me, so the possibility is there that randomly-crossed Anthuriums will make up a larger and larger proportion of my plant collection as time goes by. At the same time, I can't imagine being without Aglaonema, Dracaena, Synadenium, Schlumbergera, and half a dozen other things. (In fact, I'd probably lean more toward Aglaonema instead of Anthurium, if only they were easier to flower, cross, and germinate indoors.)

Another shot of the same container of seedlings.