Seedlings update (including, for the first time, Schlumbergera!)

After many, many months of struggling to get even halfway-decent Anthurium photos, I think I have finally cracked the problem. It involves crawling through a thicket of Agaves under a table,¹ but it improves the color fidelity from my camera, so it's worth it.²

This means you'll be seeing more Anthurium seedlings. But first, I've finally gotten some blooms from one of my Schlumbergera seedlings. (You forgot those existed? Sometimes I do too!) And it is spectacular.

³

And now you're thinking, well, that's very nice, certainly, but "spectacular," Mr. S.? Aren't you overselling it a little?

Perhaps. But it seems pretty darn spectacular to me. I didn't already have an orange Schlumbergera, and orange is a color I particularly like in flowers, so it's a lucky break that the very first schlum to bloom happens to be a deep, vivid orange. It also wasn't expected -- the known parent was 'Caribbean Dancer,' which is red with a magenta tube. Orange with a white (very pale pink, in the right light) tube isn't something I was expecting to see out of 'Caribbean Dancer.' Not in a single generation, anyway. But I did say in the Schlumbergera profile that Schlumbergera genetics and breeding is screwy like this, so I suppose I should have been expecting to be surprised.

The new schlum is in the foreground; 'Caribbean Dancer' is the red one in the background.
Whether you find it impressive or not, this has made me ridiculously, deliriously, uncharacteristically happy, for a couple weeks and counting. Unlike the Anthurium seedlings, I hadn't given names to the Schlumbergera seedlings in advance, so I got to search for names for it. (Presently it's just "Number 25.") Out of curiosity, I used the photo search by color at TinEye Labs to see what sorts of things it might be reasonable to name a flower this color, and have settled, at least for the moment, on Schlumbergera "Clownfish," though I haven't definitely ruled out "Road Work Ahead" or "Oompa."⁴

I've been very pleased with some of the Anthurium seedlings as well, but "Clownfish" / No. 25 is the first plant I've made where my reaction has been oh my god I would absolutely buy that if I saw it in a store I must propagate a million of them and have it forever. It doesn't hurt that it is apparently more willing to bloom than the 100+ other seedlings, or that it's apparently less sensitive to day length, since it's tried to bloom a few times before this. Seriously. You have no idea how excited I am about this.⁵


Schlumbergeras 7 and 23 are also in bud, so we might have some more schlum pictures coming up soon. Early indications are that 7 will be orange or red and 23 will be pink or magenta, but schlum buds change even more during development than Anthurium buds do, so that's just a guess.

Whew.

There's also another Spathiphyllum seedling getting ready to bloom (which would be the third to do so), as far as it goes, but I'm willing to bet that you can imagine that just fine without me showing you a picture.


Moving on to the Anthuriums:

Since the last report, four more Anthurium seedlings have produced buds. They are:

Sylvester⁶ (#31) -- color indeterminate, may wind up being a little orange but it's hard to tell
Mario Speedwagon (#200) -- looks like it will end up somewhere in the pink/purple/lavender neighborhood
Rhea Listick (#231) -- also purple to some degree or another, but it's too early to tell how purple
Heather Boa (#149) -- red or dark red


Bob Humbug (#76)
We've also finally, finally seen a full-grown flower from Bob Humbug (#76). He's kept us waiting since October, and I lost track of how many buds he's aborted since then. (It's approximately five.) But Bob turns out to be red to dark red, depending on the light, and the spathe is respectably-sized:

It's not amazing. Arguably not worth the wait he put us through. But there's nothing wrong with it either.

The wavy edges, by the way, are just a side effect of the spathe having just opened when I took the picture; it had smoothed out by the next day.


Ross Koz (#234)
The Haus of Kinda-Purple officially gained a new member this week, but I'd suspected Ross would be at least a little purple for quite a while. The spathe isn't as big as Alyssa's, and the color and veining isn't as neat as Carson's, but Ross is the one with the unusually large, flat, shiny, unblemished leaves that I was pleased with anyway, so to have purplish flowers on top of that makes me nearly giddy.

As sometimes happens, the back is a different color than the front:

And here are the three members from the Haus of Kinda-Purple together:

(L-R) "Alyssa Edwards," "Carson Trucks," "Ross Koz"
And yeah, the size difference really is that pronounced, though I think Alyssa may be slightly closer to the camera.


Betty Larsony (#58)
Betty's spathe had some kind of malfunction while it was unfurling, so it's torn. But it would have been a pretty awesome inflorescence if it hadn't. (And it's still okay. Maybe next time, Betty.)⁷

Elijah Sturdabowtit (#118)
Elijah is the one from this set where I'm not sure the color in the photo is accurate or not. I've been watching it for the last couple weeks, and got excited because it looked like it was going to be a little bit orange.⁸ And then once it actually opened, it looked pink to me. Except that it still photographed kind of orange. But it looked pink. So . . . Elijah is either the first player for Team Vaguely-Orange, or another unphotographable oddball like Deena Sequins. Or both, I suppose.

It's too bad the foliage isn't nicer. Maybe it'll improve.


And that's the report for now. I had intended the Schlumbergera announcement to be accompanied by a different, more contemplative kind of post, but after trying to write it several times and not being happy with how it was turning out, I finally decided that it was more important to tell you about the new bloom than it was to try and get deep. You can only keep Pointer-Sister-level news quiet for just so long, after all.

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¹ No, seriously. When the Agaves came inside last fall, I didn't want to put them with the other plants, because I knew that some of them had scale. I never wound up finding a good place to put them, so they've been "temporarily" under the dining table that serves as my office desk, all winter. Because the table was developing wobbly legs, we've bolted it to the wall.
The north-facing window in my office has a shelf of plants in front of it, naturally, and will only roll just so far because a lower shelf is holding all the surge protectors. And then the table with the Agaves underneath is right next to that. So in order to take photos using the window for lighting, I have to roll the shelf back as far as it will go, then crawl under the table, through the Agaves, take the pictures, and then crawl back out. It works, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking for an easier way.
² If you care, this solution was inspired by this Flash Photography Crash Course (found via MetaFilter), specifically the part about hard light vs. soft light.
³ The Schlumbergera pictures pre-date my discovery of the crawling-under-the-table photography method, but the colors are pretty accurate.
⁴ Most of the pictures that came up with TinEye were also of flowers, with roses, Gerberas, Hibiscus, Papaver orientale, and various lilies dominant. Tomatoes are also highly represented, which initially struck me as weird (we're accustomed to thinking of tomatoes as red, not orange) but is undeniably relevant to the color. There are also a surprising number of photos and logos related to the Free Burma movement. I investigated, but didn't come up with much of an explanation: the best I could do is that it seems to be related to the use of saffron to dye the robes of Buddhist monks, and Buddhist monks are one of the more prominent groups in the Free Burma movement. However, Buddhist monks' robes are more traditionally dyed maroon, so I don't know if that even explains anything. Concert photos, chili peppers, tulips, sunsets, and unidentifiable abstract things make up most of the remainder. I did see one picture of an electric stove's burner, with the coil glowing orange, that I thought was nice, and so for a second or two "Burner Coil" was under consideration, but I didn't want to have to explain that.
Meanwhile, oranges, orange juice, Snooki, and John Boehner were all unexpectedly underrepresented in the TinEye results.
⁵ I am aware that other orange Schlumbergeras exist. I don't care. This orange Schlumbergera is mine. You can't bring me down. I even found a moderately advanced scale infestation on Tuesday. Water off a duck's back: I have an orange Schlumbergera.
⁶ Not a drag queen, but close enough.
⁷ On being told "and this one's Betty Larsony," the husband's response was "yeah, she looks like a Betty." And it's true: she does.
⁸ It's a seedling from 'Orange Hot.' 'Orange Hot' is only orange compared to all the pinks and reds, but it's the best I've got to work with.

Pretty pictures: Paphiopedilum vietnamense

*wistful, longing sigh*

Oh HELL no.

From the Hy-Vee (grocery store) in Iowa City:

This was basically my reaction:

[short break while I collect myself]

Perhaps I'm taking this all a little personally. You know I have feelings about Anthuriums. But even trying to look at this objectively, this is not a good idea.

Some people, I'm sure, will be able to grow Anthuriums this way. For months, even. Maybe years. This is because although outdoor climates are sort of generalizable (in terms of, for example, the USDA garden zone map: a plant that will grow in Illinois zone 5a will probably also grow in Iowa zone 5a), indoor climates are not. Everybody keeps their homes at different temperatures. Some homes are pretty air-tight, some homes are drafty. Some people are extremely conscientious about watering, other people forget about their plants for weeks at a time. Some people have thick hedges just outside their windows, other people's windows are unobstructed. Etc. So it's true that there will be somebody who buys a Just Add Ice Anthurium and sees it live, accidentally.

But for most people, in most homes, that tag is not giving good advice.

Let's leave aside that the instructions are self-contradictory. (Don't let the plant get below 55F / 13C, but water it with 32F / 0C water? How does that work?) My personal Anthuriums -- and there are, as regular readers know, many personal Anthuriums here, some of which are pictured below -- don't rebloom without pretty strong light. The ones upstairs get partial sun from an east window; the ones downstairs are situated just below fluorescent lights. So I'm not liking the instructions to keep the JAI Anthuriums out of direct sun. A big, unobstructed south-facing window might be too much, sure. But it's not true that they can't handle any sun.

I also can't get mine to bloom without some pretty heavy fertilizing, and I notice that the instructions from JAI don't mention fertilizer at all. Which is . . . alarming.

Anthurium seedling no. 282 ("Dave Trading")
Back in the days when we were getting all riled up about dye-injected plants, and how misleading it was for companies to sell them without acknowledging somewhere on the tags that they wouldn't rebloom in the same color, one of the excuses provided by company spokespersons was that most of their customers throw the plants out after the blooms are done anyway. Therefore, there was no need to address what was going to happen when they rebloomed, because no customers ever bothered to try. With Phalaenopsis, I could sort of maybe almost see that being a valid argument, even.¹ And there are probably people who would throw out an Anthurium after it's finished blooming, too, I suppose. (Savage, uncivilized, heathen-type people.) But it's a bit different with Anthuriums, in that they're capable of producing blooms continuously, for a very long time.² There's really no excuse for giving people Anthurium-growing directions that will discourage repeat blooming.

One of the excuses from JAI is likely to be that their ice-cube watering suggestion takes some of the guesswork out of watering, saves time, will keep people from overwatering, and is more convenient than trying to judge how much water is coming out of a watering can. And that's true enough, as far as it goes, though I think the harm caused to a plant by repeated cold shocks negates whatever benefit you get from providing the correct amount of water.

As far as the convenience part goes, well look: if you have the time to refill the ice cube tray from the tap, and you have time to stop and crack the tray and bring an ice cube over to the plant, then you have enough time to skip the middleman and bring the plant to the tap. There are many tricky things about watering houseplants, but figuring out how to transport the water from the tap to the plant is a solved problem.³ The instructions JAI provides also make no allowances for the fact that plants use different amounts of water at different times. It may be that in your home, six ice cubes a week is just dandy in October, way too much in February, and not nearly enough in May.

I suppose ice cubes also protect a person from having to stick their fingers into potting soil, which is a problem for some people. More on that in a bit.

Anthurium seedling no. 245 ("Sawyer Ad")
So if you have a Just Add Ice anthurium, here's what you do.

1. While chanting "No ice on tropical plants, no ice on tropical plants" aloud, take the tag off. Rip it up. Burn the pieces. Take the ashes outside and cast them to the four winds.

2. Pick up the plant. Does its container have drainage holes in the bottom for water to run out? If yes, set the plant down on a saucer. If no, transplant the plant into a pot the same size, that does have drainage holes, and then set it on a saucer.

3. Just Add Ice is basically correct about air temperature. Locate a spot that a) is large enough for the plant to sit in, b) gets bright light for most of the day -- brief morning or afternoon sun is okay -- c) is away from cold drafts and doesn't leave the plant touching cold windows, and d) isn't directly in the path of a heater or air conditioner. Then put the saucer and plant there. If you do not have such a spot, do the best you can, I guess, and don't get your hopes up.

4. A couple times a week, use your fingers and touch the soil. Does it feel moist, damp, spongy, or cold? Then it is wet, and you don't need to water it. Does it feel dry and crunchy? Even when you stick your fingers an inch or two deep? Then it is dry, and you should water it. You should be checking the soil on some kind of regular schedule, but don't water on a schedule. Water according to when the soil is dry.
I know it's icky and traumatizing to have to touch potting soil, but there really is no substitute for doing so when you're trying to determine how often to water.⁴ Maybe wash your hands / take a Xanax / see a therapist / call your sister afterward, if it's going to be that big of a problem for you. Or just don't try to grow live plants.

5. When you water, use water which is neither extremely cold nor extremely hot.⁵ Don't tease it with just a little water; run a lot of water through. You want the water to reach the whole rootball. Let the plant drain in a sink or bathtub or whatever for about ten minutes (longer than that is fine), then move the plant back to its saucer. Never make an Anthurium stand in its drainage water.
I wind up watering my Anthuriums every two weeks, on average. You may have to water yours more often or less often, depending on your home's conditions.
You're not watering often enough if: the plant wilts, developing leaves crack or have holes, or leaf edges develop dead patches.⁶
You're watering too much if: the lowest leaves are continually turning bright yellow and then falling off,⁷ or if you're seeing lots of fungus gnats around the plant. This doesn't mean you should stop watering entirely, just that you need to recalibrate your finger to let the plant get a little drier between waterings.

6. Buy a general-purpose houseplant fertilizer containing micronutrients,⁸ and use it according to the label directions. Doesn't matter if it's powder you have to mix up yourself, or sticks you push into the soil, a pre-mixed liquid, organic, whatever. Just do what the directions tell you to do and you'll be fine.⁹

7. It's usually best not to move Anthuriums to containers larger than 6 inches (15 cm) in diameter. Their root systems do require some air, and too much wet soil sitting around the roots cuts off this air and causes the roots to die and rot. If you feel you must use a large pot, at least try to go with one made of a porous material (like clay), and mix some unchopped sphagnum moss in with your regular potting soil. Larger pots will hold water in the center of the rootball a lot longer than smaller pots will, so you should wind up watering a lot less often.

8. Vow to yourself that you will never buy another "just add ice" anything, and that if you ever see another person considering purchasing one, you will (politely!) advise them not to.

That all probably looks pretty complicated (eight steps!), but it's really not that bad. Two of the steps are semi-jokes (1, 8), one will almost never apply (7), and two are decisions you'll only need to make once (2, 3). Anthuriums can be forgiving plants, and can be very rewarding if treated decently. Save your money for a business that respects you enough to give you good care instructions, though.

Anthurium seedling no. 271 ("Wanda Reulthemal")
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Photo credits:
Actual Anthuriums, Just Add Ice tag -- me
"Do not want" macros -- the first page of the Google results for "do not want;" I'm hoping that the original photographers and macro creators are collectively okay with me reusing them like this.

¹ Though it doesn't let them off the hook for not mentioning the color change. If all your customers throw them out and don't care about reblooming, then you won't lose any sales for informing them about the rebloom color, right? And if you know that some of your customers do care about reblooming, then not mentioning the rebloom color or the dye-injection is basically lying to those customers, right? So doesn't it follow that the only reason you'd ever not mention it is because you're hoping to deceive people?
To their (miniscule) credit, the dye-injected phal people did eventually acknowledge this, after an absurd amount of foot-dragging and excuse-making.
² My personal record is two years, with a NOID pink variety, though this isn't something I keep track of ordinarily; it's quite possible that a different plant has since broken that record.
My 'Florida' Anthurium still has the two flowers I blogged about on 1 August 2013, though they've changed colors (from orange to red), and is in the process of producing a new bud as of last week. Two years isn't that impressive if a single flower can last seven months. The smaller-blooming cultivars have shorter-lived blooms, but are quicker to replace them, also, so it all kinda works out.
Phalaenopsis fans will be annoyed that I haven't mentioned yet that Phalaenopsis can also bloom for a long time, with new buds forming on the flower spikes as old flowers drop off. So I'm mentioning it. I do think it's a different thing, though, because once a Phalaenopsis is done, it's really done for a while, and even the best of care is not going to produce another bloom spike for a few months. Both Anthurium and Phalaenopsis have long-lasting flowers, but only Anthurium is really capable of blooming continuously. As long as I'm on a Phalaenopsis tangent, I might as well mention that phals can handle lower temperatures than Anthuriums too, and consequently might be less damaged by being watered with ice. Though I still wouldn't recommend it.
³ Another of the excuses is likely to be Why are you being such a snob about this??!? How do you know it doesn't work if you haven't tried it??!? My answer: pretty much the same way that I know not to water plants with boiling water, liquid nitrogen, Cherry Pepsi, or bleach. A plant might be resilient or lucky enough to survive those treatments, but that doesn't make them good ideas. Wild Anthuriums don't get their water from ice, so domesticated Anthuriums probably shouldn't either.
⁴ (You do not want to get me started on moisture meters.)
⁵ If it's too cold to hold a finger in comfortably for 30 seconds, don't use it on the plant. If it feels any hotter than lukewarm, don't use it on the plant. (I have accidentally watered my plants with hot water before. It takes a long time for adjustments to the water temperature at my watering station to result in adjustments to the water that's actually coming out, and sometimes I overcorrect. A few seconds of hot or cold water doesn't seem to do anything bad to them one way or the other, as long as I run a lot of water of the correct temperature through as soon as I notice.)
⁶ Mechanical damage -- like if something falls on the plant, or there are insects feeding on it, or if it's in a location where it gets bumped a lot by people or animals passing by -- can also cause new leaves to develop rips, holes, or distorted areas. Developing foliage is very sensitive and easy to damage, so if you see this sort of thing, rule out mechanical damage before deciding that your problem is underwatering.
⁷ Some dropping of the lowest leaves is normal, and will happen occasionally even if you're doing everything perfectly. Don't freak out over one or two yellow leaves. It's when you find yourself picking off yellow leaves constantly that you should start to wonder if maybe you're doing something wrong.
⁸ It's not a guarantee, but generally speaking, if the label says that it contains copper, then it's probably got the other micronutrients as well.
Ideally, you're going to buy from an independent local garden center, which has knowledgeable employees who can guide you to the fertilizer you need. (Big box store employees may also be knowledgeable, of course. It's just not as big of a part of their job to know stuff, so taking advice from them is more of a gamble.)
It is cheating to go to the independent store to ask for advice and then going to the big box store to buy the actual product. When I worked at the garden center, this was one of maybe three things that customers could do that got me really angry with them. Don't be one of those people.
⁹ With most houseplants, it's better to use less fertilizer than the package directions indicate, but more often. So if the directions tell you to add 1 tsp. to a gallon of water and feed once every three months, your plants are probably better off if you mix 1/4 tsp. in a gallon of water and use that at every watering. There are exceptions to this general rule, though, and Anthuriums are one of them.
If you are watering thoroughly and giving the soil a good flushing-out when you water, you can give Anthuriums a lot more fertilizer than package directions state. My Anthuriums get fertilizer that's about double strength, and they get it with every watering, but I also run a lot of plain water through before I pour the fertilizer in, so the old fertilizer doesn't build up in the soil, and the new fertilizer is somewhat diluted by the plain water that went in before it.
For your purposes, though, just do what the label tells you to do at first, and you can start experimenting with more fertilizer once you feel like you've gotten the hang of watering, temperature, light, etc.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Mistral's Sunrise Flame 'Mendenhall'

This is a very strong contender for my favorite orchid from the whole 2013 orchid show. (Other contenders: Dendrobium pierardii, Caulaelia Snowflake Northland, Rhyncholaeliocattleya Dick Smith 'Aloha Spirit,' Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips, Cattleya amethystoglossa) Not sure what the appeal is exactly, other than it being sort of an unusual color. But it was the first time in a long time that I looked at a Phalaenopsis and said wow, I'd really like to have one of those.

It doesn't hurt that it co-ordinates nicely with the current blog colors, though that couldn't have been why I liked it at the show.

Phalaenopsis Mistral's Sunrise Flame 'Mendenhall' = Phalaenopsis Golden Bells x Phalaenopsis Habsburg

Random plant event: Cereus peruvianus

I have two very tall, weak Cereus peruvianus. They've been with me since 2004, and for some of that time, I have just plain not had a good bright spot to keep them. Because of the lack of light, they get tall and weak, and because they're tall and weak, the number of possible locations is reduced, so it's this whole unhealthy-cactus vicious cycle.

Currently, the only location available to them (without cutting them down, anyway) is in a corner of the plant room, where the ceiling is 10 feet (3 m) high, as opposed to the 8 feet (2.4 m) or less everywhere else in the house. (More on that decision here.) The cacti have been okay there -- they're not growing much, and they're covered in cobwebs, but nevertheless they stay alive and grow and stuff. So occasionally it happens that, because they're right inside the door, we accidentally knock them over when we're bringing big things in or out, and because they are weak from being a little light-starved, when they get knocked over, it usually doesn't end well for them. Or for us, either, because there are not a lot of things that will ruin your day like a cactus falling on you.

So the last time this happened, it was with the taller of the two plants. When it hit, it landed on the edge of a shelf, so it basically snapped itself off at the point of impact. I straightened it back up, threw out the piece (I was tempted to propagate it, but I already had one cutting, from when the same thing happened with the shorter of the two plants, and I didn't see much point to doing another. I think this was also during a period when I was feeling unusually purgey w/r/t the plants, because of scale, or because I was tired of moving them in and out all summer, or something like that.), and waited for it to resprout. Which it did, in two places, up at the very tippy-top of the plant. And now one of those branches has reached the ceiling, meaning that I need to make a decision again about whether or not to start a new plant from it BUT WAIT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE POST IS ABOUT:

The post is about this:

One of the new branches is also producing roots, about nine feet in the air.

I knew that lots of plants (Monstera, Crassula, Chamaedorea) can produce aerial roots, including quite a few cacti (Selenicereus, Hylocereus, Schlumbergera), but it had never occurred to me that this was something that Cereus might do. How often would it really get the opportunity in the first place? It's not like they grow next to trees that they might attach themselves to, or anything.

So I figure I pretty much have to try to propagate now whether I want to or not. I mean, this is meeting me way more than halfway.

Elsewhere on the Web

Three things, arranged in order of increasing plant relevance:

The first has no relationship to plants at all, but I include it because 1) I sort of felt like I needed a third thing, and 2) it makes me chuckle every time I look at it: Straw Feminists in the Closet, from Hark! A Vagrant. (Specifically, I usually lose it when I reach the frame where the dad is swatting at the feminists with the broom.)

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I'm still spending quite a bit of time with Sims 3. Because objects in Sims 3 are rendered as a mass of polygons, with a texture painted over it, complicated branchy objects like trees and shrubs would be really difficult to render well if they tried to be realistic -- even if you rendered a leaf as being completely flat, a tree with hundreds of leaves would exhaust the computer's ability to process them all as individual objects. So what they do instead is, some plants are rendered as a few flat polygons, and then transparent sections get cut out after the polygon is painted, like so:

Ordinarily, this all happens fast enough that you don't really notice, though when I'm really pushing the limits of my computer, occasionally everything appears in gray like this and then sloooooooowly gets colored-in, one object at a time.

A lot of medium-sized plants like shrubs just don't get rendered at all until you're up pretty close, which is . . . tough to get used to, actually. You're just out, you know, running around like you do, and then all of a sudden, FWOOM, these shrubs suddenly appear. And I say FWOOM rather than BAM or POP because they don't just blink into existence; they start out tiny and then get larger as you get nearer. But not the usual way that things get larger as you get nearer. They actually get larger relative to the other things near them. I'm not describing it well. I couldn't make it happen when I tried to get screencaps, or I would have pictures. (I suspect the issue must be specific to certain graphics settings.) You can kind of get the gist of what I'm talking about from looking at these two shots of a dandelion:

First, you see from the bottom photo that most of the foliage is in three vertical planes which intersect in the center of the plant, and then the leaflike shapes get cut out of those planes and colored in to look like leaves and Bob's your uncle. But the flowers themselves are a flat image that rotates to face you, regardless of the viewing angle. (Notice how it's the same five flowers, in the same positions relative to one another, even though the top picture is being viewed from the side, and the bottom picture is being viewed from overhead.) This is, I'm pretty sure, known in computer graphics nerdery as a sprite or billboard.

Shrubs and trees both are mostly made by pasting a bunch of copies of the same sprites together, and then rocking them back and forth independently to make it look like the leaves and branches are moving in the breeze. It can be a pretty convincing illusion if you don't look too closely at it, though it does get kind of disorienting to spin 180 degrees around a hydrangea and find yourself looking at the exact same flowers the whole time you're rotating.

Game designers can also just let you paint the image of something vaguely plantlike onto the terrain without even trying to be three-dimensional about it, which saves the most processing power of all:

That works pretty well from far away, when a large area of terrain is painted. Up close, like in the photo, it looks kinda silly.

For a lot more of this sort of thing, there's a tumblr devoted specifically to video game foliage (there's a tumblr devoted specifically to everything), which is called, appropriately enough, Video Game Foliage. Even if you really don't care about the gaming, some of the art is really neat, and it's plant-focused.

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Finally and most importantly, Joseph Tychonievich has a podcast, Grow ALL the plants!, and the first episode is up. The guests this week are Rick Schoellhorn, former new products director for Proven Winners, and Julia Hofley, formerly a garden center manager and buyer. This particular episode is about the process of finding new plant varieties, and how they get from the breeders to the store.

It's more interesting than I'm making it sound. Plus it's short (~20 min.), and you'll finally find out how to pronounce Tychonievich. (We've all wondered. You're not alone.)

It's also worth keeping an eye on the site because there's a really, really high chance you'll know one of the guests on the next episode, which will publish Saturday the 22nd.

Actually you might know several of the guests, I suppose: I don't know how connected you are in the whole plant-writing/-blogging universe. But there's one guest in particular.

Unfinished business: Haworthia NOID

About a year ago, I posted about some odd behavior from a few of my Haworthias. They're some of my oldest plants, and had never done anything particularly weird before, but all of a sudden they decided to go from looking like this --

-- to this --

and I wasn't sure what was going on. I still don't know, but a recent comment on that post prompted me to share an update. This is what they look like now:

Which I guess is improvement, kind of. It at least seems like a more natural look than either of the first two photos. But the whole process was a little scary, and I'm not sure what to do with them now. Perhaps I ought to propagate?

Saturday morning Sheba picture

Sheba's still here. So's the snow. I'm pretty happy about both.

I feel badly for those readers who are tired of snow and wish it would stop already. Also envious. I have yet to reach snow satiety, and I think 2008 was a record snow year for Iowa, so it may well be that the concept of too much snow just doesn't exist for me. Or that if it does exist, I would have to move somewhere else in order to experience it.

Pretty picture: Angraecum sesquipedale

Another photo taken from a distance. Hence the blurriness. Though my camera doesn't handle whites and reds well anyway, so it would likely have been blurry if I'd gotten close too.

I do kind of like the flower. Maybe I'm just reacting to the shape? (It's different from the rounded petals and sepals of Phalaenopsis, therefore it's good?)

Unfinished business: Hippeastrum, fungus, itching, Cyperus

Just picking up from the previous update: the Hippeastrum has bloomed. I got two flowers, both of them solid red, though they looked very orange-red right up until opening (and still look a little orange in some lighting). I don't know that this is going to turn me into a Hippeastrum devotee or anything, but they're self-fertile, and you know how I get with seeds,¹ so this will probably not be my last amaryllis.² This one was started in March 2010, so that means basically four years from seed to bloom. I have no idea if that's typical for Hippeastrums.

I don't know whether the white streaking on the back of some of the sepals here is normal for Hippeastrum, or an indication that there's some 'Apple Blossom' ancestry in there after all, or something else, but it seemed worth mentioning.

Less happily, about ten hours after "An Uncharacteristically Upbeat Post" published, I found the Euphorbia fungus on a plant that I thought had been cured, and then discovered it on at least three more plants that week. You'd think I would have learned by now never to think (much less to say) that any of my problems has ever been resolved.

Though shutting up about my problems doesn't seem to work that well either: the itching is still happening, albeit not as often. I've been using petroleum jelly after showering for about six weeks now, and although I'm not itching as often, I'm still itching. It's just that now I have maybe two bad days per week, instead of three. The itching is a little less life-consuming when it does happen, as well: shorter duration, responds better to benadryl. So there's been improvement on that, but less than I'd like. The next step in the process would be a referral to a dermatologist; so far I've declined to do that because 1) it's gotten somewhat better, and 2) my expectation is that seeing a dermatologist is a lot less likely to result in a cure for the problem than it is to result in more visits to a dermatologist. Nothing against dermatologists: I'm sure many of them are very nice people who are highly competent doctors. I just don't think this problem is a dermatologist kind of problem.³ If it gets worse, I'll reconsider.

Finally, just an update on the Cyperus alternifolius (original post from last July here), so I don't have to end the post on such a down note:

The third cutting did eventually sprout; it just took a really long time. It caught up to the size of the other two pretty quickly after I potted it up, which was surprising. I've since put all three together in a single pot (mostly for space-conservation reasons; I'm pretty certain the plants would have been fine where they were), and the resulting plant looks like this now:

So far, I'm pleased to make its acquaintance. It's been a while since I met a new plant that I got along with this well, actually.

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¹ There will be at least one more seedling-related post coming relatively soon, though in a surprise twist, it won't be about Anthuriums. And I'm pleasantly surprised and happy about it anyway.
² "Amaryllis" is the common name for Hippeastrum even though there's a genus called Amaryllis. Much like the way "pothos" is Epipremnum and not Pothos, "nephthytis" is Syngonium and not Nephthytis, or "coleus" is Solenostemon Plectranthus and not Coleus. Even when common names are scientific names, you still can't trust 'em.
³ So what kind of problem is it, then, if not a dermatologist problem? I don't know. Maybe it's a ghosts-of-dead-spider-mites problem.

A couple more Anthurium seedling updates

I know. I know! I wouldn't be doing another of these posts so soon if I didn't have a really good reason. Actually, two reasons, but they're two reasons that are also sort of the same reason.

This is the first reason:

#35, "Alyssa Edwards"

Anthurium flowers are always kind of frustrating to photograph. The spathes are shiny, so it's nearly impossible to prevent reflections with or without the flash, and the spathe and spadix are never at the same distance, so in macro shots you can usually only have one or the other in focus, not both at the same time. Alyssa was even more difficult than usual, though, since the thing of interest about her is the color, the color difference from the other Anthurium seedlings is subtle, and my camera sucks at accurate color reproduction. The plan for this post is basically to throw a bunch of pictures at you and hope that they average out in your brain to something accurate.¹

It may help reveal the difference in color if I show Alyssa next to some of the other Anthuriums. Here she is (L) with #126, Erin Dirtylondry (R):

And with #58, Betty Larsony (R):

Betty's a lot more typical of the flowers I've been getting, that pinkish-red 'Gemini' spathe. Betty makes Alyssa look more purple; Alyssa makes Betty look more orange.

This is in fact the real Alyssa Edwards, talking to Coco Montrese on RuPaul's Drag Race. The seedling named for Coco, #37, hasn't really thrived here and is still in its original 3-inch pot. Which is just as well, 'cause Coco came across as being sort of a terrible person and doesn't deserve to have an Anthurium seedling pretend-named for her.
Alyssa Edwards' seed parent was Gemini; I don't know who the pollen parent was, but my guess would be 'Krypton' (roughly the same color as Alyssa) or the NOID purple.

I don't know why Alyssa's got those brown/orange spots on the spathe; I haven't seen any thrips lately, but that's a possibility. It could also be drought stress, bruises, or damage from the heat of the fluorescent lights. I have limited placement options for a lot of these, and although I don't have any proof yet that the lights are causing problems, things like this make me wonder.

The other notable seedling:

#85, "Carson Trucks"
Carson is also a little bit purple, though the color is more pink-purple than red-purple. Carson's spathe is also smaller than Alyssa's. According to my notes, this was what Carson looked like when the flower first opened:

Which is a perfectly nice, clean-looking light pink. But s/he's definitely not that color anymore. (I even went downstairs and checked to make sure. This next picture is pretty accurate. It might even understate the amount of purpleness.)

The slightly darker spathe margin is a real thing, too, not just a photographic artifact. A few of the seedlings have had margins that contrasted with their spathe as buds, most dramatically Zach, but the difference faded before the spathe opened. So I'm pretty excited about Carson.

Since the last post, five more seedlings (for a total of 26) have developed buds, though those are all too small and underdeveloped for the color to be completely predictable. My guesses at the moment:

Patty Cake (#223) -- pretty definitely a 'Gemini' type
Barbara Seville (#66) -- light / medium pink?
Eileen Dover (#116) -- orange/coral? (seed parent is 'Orange Hot')
Eliza Boutisecksis (#120) -- orange/coral? (seed parent is 'Orange Hot')
Yvette Horizon (#275) -- pretty definitely a light / medium pink

So at this point, we have basically six different groups of seedlings:

1. Those with a little purple in them like 'Krypton' (Alyssa, Carson, probably Ross)
2. Those that are basically just 'Gemini' retreads (Betty, Bijoux, Sawyer, maybe Bob)
3. Those that are slightly orange/coral like 'Orange Hot' (Elijah, possibly Eileen and Eliza)²
4. Those that are straight-up red (Sal, maybe Bob)
5. Those that are light or medium pink (Rowan, Erin, Zach)
6. Whatever Deena Sequins is³

Notable for its absence: there are no white seedlings yet, even though about 40% of the seedlings have a white-bloomer as seed parent ('White Gemini'). It seems like there ought to be at least one, at some point, though I suppose the white could be recessive, in which case I won't see one until generation 2.^{4, 5} A decent orange would be really nice too, but the only orange I've got is 'Florida,' and as far as I can tell, it doesn't shed or accept pollen ever, so I can't do anything with it.

Also absent is anything particularly new. Most of these are basically the same as one of the eleven or so varieties I started with. Carson and Deena are probably the closest I've gotten to creating anything, and I'm not sure I even like Deena that well -- but this is just the first 26 seedlings. I have almost 300 yet to bloom, and however many future seeds to start. All kinds of things could still happen.

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¹ Like you even care. As with the previous Anthurium seedling update post, I will remind you that it's still Northern Hemisphere winter, and if somebody's got flower pictures to show you, you can't afford to be too picky about quality or species.
² I am not happy that all the 'Orange Hot' offspring that have bloomed so far have "E" names, and even less happy that two of those names (Elijah, Eliza) sound almost exactly the same. It defeats the purpose of giving them all names if the names wind up being easily confusable. Goodness knows I had a hard enough time, while sorting pictures for this post, remembering that Alyssa was #35 and Carson was #85. It seems that my brain wants them to be the reverse.
³ Deena varies more with age and lighting than any of the others, and I have pretty much given up on trying to pin down her color. Definitely too purple to be a 'Gemini' type or a red, but too dark and not purple enough to categorize with Alyssa and Carson. Presently, Deena looks to me like Alyssa with a dark, spathe-matching spadix, but that'll change when I see her again tomorrow. So Deena's her own category.
⁴ Anthuriums are not supposed to be self-fertile, because the pollen is shed at one time and the female flowers are receptive to pollen at another. I'm not sure I believe this, though, because selfing is one of very few explanations I can come up with for why 'Gemini' and 'White Gemini' have produced so many seeds.
⁵ Speaking of generation 2: Zach is in fact pregnant. So . . . that's going to be happening at some point in a few months. I've fiddled around a little at random with the others, when they looked like they were shedding or receptive to pollen, but Zach's the only one where anything's happened.