Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum putidum

Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia

Okay, well, the third part of the Anthurium update just doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. So we may as well look at the other plants for a bit. A few of them are even doing things.

A very, very long time ago, in the halcyon days of August 2011, I managed to obtain some leaflets of Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Zamicro' or 'Mini' or something like that. (The cultivar wasn't identified.) And I tried to start some new plants from the leaflets, as you do. Which went well, for once, and a year later I had actual plants, in tiny four-pack cells.

(June 27)
Three years after getting the leaflets, they're all still in four-packs, because I am terrified of repotting them. Repotting Zamioculcas, for me, has always gone badly, and although I think I know why these are doing well when previous Zamioculcas haven't,¹ I am still scared to mess with them in any way. They're growing, I'm happy, they're happy: why fix what ain't broke?

And that's how things have been for quite a while. Then a couple weeks ago, I learned that if anything, I have underestimated how happy they are, because behold:

(From June 13, plus or minus a day.)

That's the first one. I think there are two more on the way. Excitingly, they appear to be at more or less the same stage of development, which means that I might wind up with two flowers blooming at the same time, and you know what happens when I have two aroids blooming at the same time.

(June 27)
Though as long as it takes Zamioculcas to grow from a cutting, I can't imagine what slow kind of torture it is to grow them from seed. You know I'm going to try regardless, but I'm going to be crossing my fingers at the same time in hopes that the pollination fails.

The spathe never really get any prettier than it is in those first couple photos:

(This photo and the next: June 27)
But the way the spadix dries up is sort of interesting.

So that's something that happened. I'll let you know if I get any pollination. As much as I hope I don't wind up with seedlings, I am kind of interested in seeing what the berries and seeds actually look like.

-

¹ A gritty, fast-draining soil mix, and shallow soil for the size of the plants. Previously, I'd been using pots with standard dimensions (as wide as tall), and regular potting mix. Short-term, this was usually fine, but given enough time, eventually something would happen and they'd rot.

Pretty picture: Cattlianthe Gold Digger 'Buttercup'

Apologies for the continuing silence. The whole May/June stretch this year has just been one derailment after another: injury, illness, drama. And the drama is not necessarily over.

Posts are still coming, I swear, if things ever calm down enough for me to work on them.

Previously (as Laeliocattleya): 2010

Cattlianthe Gold Digger 'Buttercup' = Cattlianthe Red Gold x Cattlianthe Warpaint (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Chain Xen Pearl 'Ming Ho'

Doritaenopsis Chain Xen Pearl 'Ming Ho' = Doritaenopsis Ching Hua Spring x Doritaenopsis Nobby's Pink Lady (Ref.)

Mid-June Anthurium Update, Part 2

So this is the one that was going to be about Anthurium genetics, but I've realized that even though I've read a bunch in the book and elsewhere, fairly carefully even, I still can't entirely grasp what's going on. It doesn't help that the book is almost 20 years out of date, and that even more complicated explanations are sitting out there on the internet, taunting me with even more details I don't understand, but I suspect the main problem is that I don't have any actual training in genetics, so everything I understand about how genes work is self-taught. That works out okay when it comes to concepts, but I get lost quickly when the specialized vocabulary gets going.

This is uncomfortable. It's especially uncomfortable because I understand enough of the individual pieces that I feel like I ought to be able to understand the whole. And also because understanding what was going on genetically was the whole reason I bought the book¹ in the first place.

Specifically, I wanted to understand #097, "Colin Ambulance," to whom you were introduced in Part 1. Here's Colin again, to refresh your memory:

And here is Colin's seed parent, the NOID purple:

Even taking into account that I don't know who the pollen parent was, it would be hard for me to find a more opposite-colored mother/daughter pair. Aside from 'White Gemini,' I don't even have any varieties that are this light, and 'White Gemini' is probably not the pollen parent.² But then, most of the NOID purple's children don't look much like her. Here are the six known offspring to date:

Clockwise from top left: #046 ("Aurora Boreanaz"), #097 ("Colin Ambulance"), #110 ("Delta Badhand"), #202 ("Mason Pepperspray"), #200 ("Mario Speedwagon"), #108 ("Deena Sequins")
Now, Mario looks enough like his mother that it'd be easy to guess that they were related even if you didn't know. And although Aurora and Deena don't look much like their mother on first glance, that slight purple tint to the spadices would give away the relationship if you stared at them long enough. Maybe even Delta. But it's been a mystery to me how Colin and Mason happened.

Not to spoil the ending, but -- it turns out that that's just how it goes with Anthuriums, a lot of the time. The children don't necessarily resemble their parents very much. Not only do Anthuriums have multiple pigment-making genes, but the expression of those genes is moderated by other genes, one of the pigment genes makes the starting material that the other pigment genes work on,³ and some pigments mask the appearance of other pigments. Put all those genes and their interrelationships into a cross and mix themselves up, and you can cross spathe color A with spathe color Z, expecting to get spathe colors in between A and Z, like C, L, and W, and instead wind up with spathe colors ü, ¿, and ♂. (Though sometimes you also end up getting F, F, and more F -- even the unpredictability is unpredictable.)

The pigments involved in Anthurium spathes are pelargonidin (orange), cyanidin (red), peonidin (purple),⁴ and chlorophyll (green). These colors may be produced in varying quantities, depending on the genes that determine how much pigment to make. So cyanidin is responsible for red spathes, as you'd expect of a red pigment, but it's also (usually) the pigment in pink spathes, just in a lower concentration. Same thing goes for pelargonidin, which can be coral⁵ or orange; chlorophyll, which can be varying intensities of green; and peonidin, which changes color depending on the pH where it is, and how much of it there is, but runs from pink to purple.⁶ The varying intensities of color, in varying combinations, give us all the different possible colors of spathes.

⁷

Pelargonidin, cyanidin, and peonidin are all either being made or not being made, under the direction of one gene for each, and then another gene influences how much is made. (It looks like each pigment has at least one corresponding intensity gene, though I may be misunderstanding that.) But the point is that when you shuffle the pigments around during pollination, sometimes the intensity genes get shuffled around too, and a red crossed with a red may yield a pink, for example.

And the genes influence one another, besides. The gene for "make red pigment" I think uses orange pigment as the starting material; that is, it produces orange pigment, then turns some of it into red pigment. So unless I've misunderstood something badly,⁸ you can't have a red spathe unless there are genes present for making both orange and red. Add to this the possibility that plants with peonidin in them may have different pH in the spathes, and consequently may be producing different colors out of the same genes, and the tendency of red pigment to mask the presence of orange or green pigment, and you can see how variable things might get. The authors of the book at one point crossed two pinks together and wound up with, by their count: 5 bright red, 19 red, 42 light red, 4 dark pink,⁹ 7 pink, 2 orange, 21 coral, 10 light coral, 1 white with a touch of pink,¹⁰ and 29 white.

So you can see how complicated and frustrating being an Anthurium breeder could be, even before you factor in the consequences of randomly pollinating everything with whatever's handy.

Since I haven't been able to do much deliberate crossing, due to the fact that Anthurium inflorescences don't spend that much of their lifetimes shedding pollen or accepting pollen, and the fact that up until pretty recently I didn't have that many plants blooming at once, the semi-unpredictability isn't that big of a problem. It's tough to be frustrated by things standing in the way of your goals when you aren't working toward any particular goals. (In fact, so far, it's been plenty exciting to find out that I can make seedlings at all -- none of the houseplant books talk about growing Anthurium from seed.¹¹) I've basically been a toddler mixing together all the finger-paints and seeing what happens. New colors! New shapes! Cool!

A comparison of the darkest (#005 "Chad Michaels") and lightest (#097 "Colin Ambulance") seedlings I've gotten so far.
And I'm likely to continue finger-painting for a while: I just don't have the facilities to determine what genes I'm working with. In the book and the paper both, the procedure for figuring out what they had was that they just made deliberate crosses between two plants, however many times were necessary to get enough seedlings to be statistically relevant, and then they just grew them all out and counted the colors at the end, for as many different varieties as necessary. Which, we're talking about 75-100 seedlings for each cross, and doing a single pair of plants doesn't tell you much about either plant's genes: you have to compare what you get when you cross each of those two plants with a bunch of others. With 13 cultivars in my founding population here,¹² that's 91 different possible combinations, with each combination producing, say, 75 seedlings, and at minimum, I'm stuck growing out almost 7000 seedlings for two years just to be able to make reasonable guesses about the genetics of what I have. In the meantime, new seedlings have arisen that I will probably also be interested in using for future breeding, so I'd need to cross some of those out as well, to determine what genes they wound up with. So breeding everything out until I understand what genes are present doesn't work. And genetic sequencing is way too expensive, plus I don't think the relevant genes have even been identified, so having the sequences wouldn't necessarily do me any good even if sequencing were affordable. I'm just doomed never to understand exactly what's going on.

So, you know. Fuck it. I might start getting a little more careful with the crosses, and aim in certain directions (In particular, I would love to create a decent-sized, blistered, dark purple spathe, or any green spathe at all,¹³ especially if the leaves were nice, too.¹⁴), but we're probably looking at more finger-painting. Which is fine. If I've learned anything from all this, it's that it's relatively easy to get new colors; the hard part is getting new colors on purpose.

A composite photo of the best picture I've gotten so far for each of the 40 seedlings that had produced a finished bloom, as of 4 June. It's more impressive at full size, should the reader be considering opening it in a new window.

(► indicates seedlings making their first photo appearance on the blog in the mid-June posts)

First column, top to bottom: 005 ("Chad Michaels"), 066 ("Barbara Seville"), 108 ("Deena Sequins"), ►125 ("Anya Wei"), ►232 ("Rhoda Badcek"), ►231 ("Rhea Listick"), 245 ("Sawyer Ad"), 235 ("Rowan DeBoate").
Second column: ►097 ("Colin Ambulance"), 059 ("Bijoux Tuit"), 126 ("Erin Dirtylondry"), 031 ("Sylvester"), 223 ("Patty Cake""), ►244 ("Sara Problem"), 116 ("Eileen Dover"), 282 ("Dave Trading").
Third column: 046 ("Aurora Boreanaz"), 035 ("Alyssa Edwards"), 076 ("Bob Humbug"), 200 ("Mario Speedwagon"), 276 ("Zach Religious"), 243 ("Sal Monella"), 271 ("Wanda Reulthemal"), 234 ("Ross Koz").
Fourth column: 026 ("Peaches Christ"), ►283 ("Anne Pursand"), 239 ("Russ Teanale"), 149 ("Heather Boah"), ►216 ("Gillian Jamm"), 280 ("Jujubee"), ►247 ("Selma Carr"), 273 ("Wes Coast").
Fifth column: ►083 ("Carmen Adairya"), 063 ("Audrey Quest"), ►202 ("Mason Pepperspray"), 085 ("Carson Trucks"), 238 ("Rudy Day"), ►110 ("Delta Badhand"), 118 ("Elijah Sturdabowtit"), 275 ("Yvette Horizon").
Coming up in Part 3: what sorts of things do Anthurium breeders care about, and why? (This will probably take me several days to do, since there are ongoing family things happening, and it's a complicated subject besides. I hope to get a product review post in before Part 3 as well, but we'll see what I'm capable of.)

-

¹ For those who want to follow along at home, it's Breeding Anthuriums in Hawaii, Haruyuki Kamemoto and Adelheid R. Kuehnle, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI, 1996. (ISBN: 0-8248-1645-5; Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Half.com; AbeBooks.com; Alibris) [Note if you're interested in buying: definitely do some comparison shopping before you buy. The original list price was $31.00; I've seen used copies available for about $3.50, and as I write this, there's some greedy and hopeful soul on Alibris who wants $123.80, which is just adorbs.]
² 'White Gemini' probably isn't the pollen parent because I can't remember ever seeing 'White Gemini' produce pollen. Anthurium spadices accept pollen before they make it, so any spadix that's highly fertile, like 'White Gemini,' gets pollinated before it makes any pollen of its own. It's also the case that some varieties just never make pollen, though I don't have any reason to think 'White Gemini' is one of those.
³ Such that if both copies of the "make orange pigment" gene are broken, the plant will produce white spathes, even if there are also genes telling the plant to make lots of red pigment. Without the ability to make orange, there's nothing for the plant to make red out of.
⁴ Actually those three are all the 3-rutinosides, but the pelargonidin/cyanidin/peonidin parts are where the color's coming from so it's easier to use the short, inaccurate form of the molecules' names. I know, like you even care.
⁵ Anthurium geneticists use "coral" to mean light orange, though I've always thought of it more as the medium-brightness color midway between pink and orange. Google image search for "coral color" suggests that as a color, "coral" can mean pretty much anything you want it to mean, as long as it's not dark and resides somewhere in the pink/red/orange neighborhood. Clearly someone needs to set some guidelines, but in the meantime, we'll go along with the scientists' fucked-up understanding of what "coral" is, because it'll make things easier to write about.
⁶ Peonidin is only present in hybrid Anthuriums with some A. amnicola or A. formosum in their ancestry. The discovery of A. amnicola, in particular, did a lot for the world's Anthurium breeders, and it was still a relatively new and exciting thing in 1996 when the book was written. (You can hear the excitement in the text every time A. amnicola gets mentioned.)
Not only did A. amnicola introduce the possibility of purple spathes, but it's also been important in creating miniature Anthurium varieties, along with the white-to-lavender A. antioquense.
⁷ And then there are the yellow Anthuriums. You can't make yellow from orange, red, purple, and green. For our purposes, we're going to pretend that the yellows don't exist, because this is all complicated enough already, and anyway, they're probably explainable in the same sort of fashion that all the other colors are. The yellow pigment in most spadices comes from an unidentified (?) flavone (Pelargonidin, cyanidin, and peonidin are all anthocyanins, which are similar to flavones but not quite the same.), and there's a good chance that it's the same molecule in yellow spadices and spathes alike, but I haven't actually run into anything yet that explains yellow Anthuriums genetically, so if you ask me about them I'm probably going to just smile awkwardly, shrug, and try to change the subject.
Unless you're just asking whether or not they exist, in which case I will get very excited indeed. I've seen one in person, once, didn't buy it, have never seen another, and consequently have had a three-year-and-counting case of non-buyer's remorse that still gives me pangs of regret every time I remember.
It looked like this:


I'll also get very agitated if you ask me about dye-injected yellow Anthuriums. It's probably a good show, but stand back and bring a raincoat, as there will be spittle and gesticulations.
⁸ And there's a good chance that I have, because this was the trickiest part of the genetics and I spent a lot of time reading stuff about "recessive epistasis" over and over, hoping to understand it. I feel like I more or less do, but I still don't understand it quite well enough to explain it to people so there's a good chance that I'm not following something properly. Pretty much anything in this whole post could be wrong, but I'm at least trying pretty hard not to be wrong.
⁹ Which I know it wounds like "light red" should mean "pink," but I've seen it for myself, and "light red" is a different color. Damned if I know how to describe the difference to you, but #280 "Jujubee" is definitely light red, and #232 "Rhoda Badcek" is definitely pink, and they are definitely not the same color.

An old, light red inflorescence of #280 "Jujubee."

The dark pink #232 "Rhoda Badcek."
I think the distinction is mainly about the graininess of the color -- "light red" is a mix of full red speckles and white speckles, whereas pink is more uniform. That's at least how I distinguish them when I'm describing the colors to myself. The margins of light red spathes also tend to be fully red, whereas the margins of pink spathes may or may not be darker than the rest of the spathe, which you can also see in the above photos.
¹⁰ Which is also a thing that happens. 'White Gemini,' for example, is usually just white, as so:

But the last bloom I got from it had some streaks of pink at the base:

¹¹ Nor Spathiphyllum or Schlumbergera, as far as that goes. Growing houseplants from seed is sometimes discussed a little bit, usually in the context of indoor/outdoor annual-type plants like coleus, but houseplants are a niche interest to begin with, and growing self-produced seeds of houseplants is even nichier.
¹² pink: NOID pink, 'Pandola,' 'Joli'
red: NOID red, 'Gemini,' 'Red Hot'
red-violet: NOID red-violet, 'Krypton'
purple: NOID purple
orange: 'Florida,' 'Orange Hot' (if I'm feeling charitable)
white: 'White Gemini'
other: 'Peppermint Gemini' (blotchy red and white)
Though 'Joli' hasn't been around long enough to pollinate or have been pollinated; 'Florida' is possibly sterile (I've never seen it produce or accept pollen); I'm unclear about how different 'Gemini'/'White Gemini'/'Peppermint Gemini' actually are from one another; and there's a possibility that the NOID red-violet is also a 'Krypton.' (Neither one blooms very much, and I'm not sure they've ever been blooming simultaneously, so it's tough to make comparisons.) So it's possible that there are only really nine founding varieties.
¹³ Though good luck getting a green; none of the founding varieties are green, and I've seen no indication so far that any of them have genes for green spathes. If someone would like to buy me a 'Midori' so I can pursue this dream, feel free.
¹⁴ The leaves vary from one variety to the next a lot more than you'd think. Or possibly it's that thing where when you spend enough time looking closely at something, you eventually start making distinctions no one else would even see. Not sure which applies here, but I suppose we'll find out whenever I wind up talking about foliage.

Saturday Morning Sheba Picture

Due to unanticipated levels of family chaos, your regularly-scheduled Anthurium update post is postponed.

Here is a photo of Sheba in its stead.

Pretty picture: Osmoglossum pulchellum

Yeah, this photo didn't really work.

Mid-June Anthurium Update, Part 1

I'm hoping to tie this Anthurium update to the stuff I've been learning from the new book about breeding them, but there's an awful lot of stuff in the book, and an awful lot of new stuff with the seedlings, so I wound up kind of overwhelmed. Possibly if I split it up into enough small posts, it'll be easier to do, though depending on your level of interest in Anthuriums that might be more than you really want to know.

But I do have to tell you some things, however I do it. So let's try jumping into that and see how it goes.

Here are the statistics as of 7 June 2014:

There are 432 Anthurium seedlings here, officially.

Of those, 58 (13%) have at least attempted to bloom at some point, and 40 (9%) have actually produced a mature inflorescence. Of the remaining 18 that have attempted to bloom but haven't actually bloomed, 14 are working on a bud now, and 4 produced a bud, aborted it, and haven't started a new one yet.

It's not clear how many seedlings have managed to be pollinated so far. It takes a long time for anything visible to happen to a spadix when pollination is successful. The F2 generation is definitely underway, though, thanks to #276 ("Zach Religious"). He was pollinated, he produced mature berries, the seeds were removed from the berries and sown on vermiculite, and 23 out of 24 seeds have germinated.

Seedlings from #276 ("Zach Religious"). These were sown on 15 May; the photo was taken on 7 June.
Barring catastrophe, we should be seeing the first blooms from this group in about November 2015.

#271 ("Wanda Reulthemal") has also definitely been pollinated, and has maybe 20 developing berries on a single spadix. She'll be up next.

In the last week, it's become clear that #239 ("Russ Teanale") and #247 ("Selma Carr") have been pollinated as well. Not only that, but it looks like every. Single. Flower. on their spadices is developing a berry, which will be fun when it comes time to pot them up. There also appear to be a few berries developing on #059 ("Bijoux Tuit"), #234 ("Ross Koz"), #245 ("Sawyer Ad"), #005 ("Chad Michaels"), #063 ("Audrey Quest"), and #273 ("Wes Coast"), though most of those look like they'll produce maybe ten seeds at most. Still, though, that's nine confirmed or likely pollinations, so the second generation will be getting a lot bigger soon.

So there's that.

Since the last Anthurium update, 11 seedlings have produced a first bloom. Some of these, like #232 ("Rhoda Badcek"), are perfectly adequate flowers but nothing we haven't seen before.

One (#283 "Anne Pursand") is downright ugly, to my mind:

Anne just doesn't work for me because she's doing three things Anthuriums are not supposed to do at the same time. One, she's got thrips damage (the irregular brown patches on the spathe), though that's arguably my fault, not hers. Two, the spathe is small. Three, the spathe is also badly reflexed, which is a vocabulary word from the book. Most Anthuriums grown for indoor container cultivation will have spathes that are more or less upright and cupped around the spadix, when they first open. Your better varieties will stay that way as the blooms mature, too. Anne, on the other hand, flipped her spathe back away from the spadix almost immediately, much like a dudebro popping the collar on his polo, with similar consequences for her attractiveness. And I don't know what's going on with that spadix, but it's not helping the overall look.

The best thing from this batch turns out to be #097 ("Colin Ambulance"), who managed to surprise me with a brand-new color:

Initially it was sort of a light peach (Colin is one of the three palest spathes so far, though that doesn't photograph well; anything too dark or too light gets its color adjusted automatically by the camera.) with a peach/orange spadix; it's aging into pink with an orange spadix, but I dig both versions.

It also makes no damn sense: the seed parent is the NOID purple. It's not even a nice pale lavender kind of purple; it's pretty dark. There is no way this color should be able to come from that color. (I'm going to try to explain that in Part 2. Emphasis on "try.") Regardless of how it got here, though, I like it.

We've also finally gotten a bloom from #231 ("Rhea Listick"), who had previously aborted her first attempt, right as it was ready to open.

Not a new color -- it's very similar to #035 ("Alyssa Edwards") -- but this is a color I like, so I suppose it was worth the wait. The spathe is smaller than Alyssa's, for now, but a lot of the seedlings produce larger blooms as they mature. Rhea also seems to be more blistered than Alyssa. Blistering is the quilted, lumpy texture on some spathes, where the major veins in the spathe are raised above the rest of the spathe. Blistering is for some reason very desirable in cut flowers, less so for potted plants. I can take it or leave it myself, though I notice that it seems to be related to the size of the flowers -- bigger spathes tend to have more blistering than smaller ones -- and it seems obvious enough why large spathes would be desirable.

Let's jog quickly through a few more. #247 ("Selma Carr") wound up with an interesting shape, which would be fun if it were genetic, but alas, I think it's from mechanical damage during development:

#125 ("Anya Wei") is a perfectly nice red/yellow, just like all the other perfectly nice red/yellows,

and #244 ("Sara Problem") is a perfectly nice pink/pink, just like all the other perfectly nice pink/pinks. Except for some thrips damage.

#202 ("Mason Pepperspray") is pretty tiny. For a few days after it first opened, the spathe formed a nearly-perfect hemisphere around the spadix. That's flattened slightly with age, but the shape is still unusual. The color's gotten lighter with age as well. I'm less happy about that.

#110 ("Delta Badhand") is also very very small, and strongly resembles #116 ("Eileen Dover"), to the point where I wonder if both plants don't have the same parentage. (If they do, then they'd both be NOID purple x 'Orange Hot;' Delta's seed parent is the NOID purple and Eileen's is 'Orange Hot.') Unfortunately, I tore her spathe on the first day it was open, which I feel bad about.

I also have a mental association with the name Delta that makes me feel very strongly that this plant is way, way too dark to be a Delta, though I have no idea why that is. (I have a similar problem with Mason Pepperspray, who seems way too light to be a Mason.)

#216 ("Gillian Jamm") is nice if you can ignore the thrips scars (which I'm getting pretty good at):

And finally, #083 ("Carmen Adairya"), who photographed really well her first time out:

Carmen has since relaxed a little, so the spathe is more of a straightforward heart shape than the tulip shape here. In the couple weeks since I took this picture, the main veins near the spadix have darkened up. The book has some really pretty examples of that sort of thing; I'd be happy to see more contrasting veins.

Carmen also illustrates our final vocabulary word, blush. Sort of. I found the book's explanation of blush difficult to parse. It's sort of an irregular splash of pink or coral color shading heavier toward the spadix, plus a darker version of the same color in the spadix. Blush isn't always visible when it's present: a coral blush will be hidden by a bright red spathe, and if the blush spreads far enough, it can be hard to tell the difference between a pink spathe and a white spathe with pink blush. It's also not clear how dark a spadix has to be before it qualifies as blush: I infer that if there's any red or orange in the spadix, then you have a blush regardless of what the spathe might look like, but what about pink?

In Part 2, I'll try to sum up what I understand about Anthurium genetics. So Part 2 is gonna be really, really short.

Pretty pictures: Papaver orientale

Not my own plants; this is the garden of the same person who had the yellow and blue Iris that I posted on Sunday. Regrettably, none of the photos accurately convey how many of them there were, all doing the visual equivalent of screaming their heads off. The display is kinda wonderful, though the one big failing of this particular kind of Papaver is how brief the blooming period is. Is someone working on breeding some that bloom longer? Or are there already some that bloom longer that y'all just haven't told me about?

Lawn Ornament: Giraffe

Pretty cool, though still not as good as the baby Pegasus in Tipton.

I'm a little unsettled by the bird nest in the giraffe's neck. Birds will be birds, though. Probably unavoidable.

I tried googling to see if I could find out anything more about the piece, but nothing came up. Worse, I was pretty lost when we happened across this, so all I actually know about it is that it's in a pretty nice neighborhood in Iowa City somewhere. You'd think someone would have said something about a life-sized (?) giraffe in Iowa City before this. Maybe it's new. Maybe Iowa Citians are just that jaded about art. Maybe there was an even bigger rhinoceros two blocks away that hogs all the attention. It's a mystery.

Random plant event: Ananas 'Mongo'

I'm still trying to catch up with everything that's happened in the last few weeks. This is one of those things.

It's not visually very interesting, I suppose. I mean, you've probably seen a pineapple before. The main points of interest here are:

1) It just kind of came off spontaneously when I tried to adjust the stalk. (The stalk didn't actually fit into the shelf that the plant's been on since it came inside last fall, so from time to time I have to try to squeeze it back in there without breaking anything important.) It makes total sense that a pineapple's fruit would detach on its own, but for some reason this idea had never occurred to me before.

2) It smells so good. It's probably technically edible, but it's also very tiny, and not bred for taste ('Mongo' is an ornamental variety.), so I'm probably getting more from smelling it occasionally than I would from eating it once.

3) It's tiny, for a pineapple. The actual fruit, excluding the leaves, is only 2 1/2 inches (6.4 cm) long.

When I got 'Mongo,' I was under the impression that it was a cultivar of A. comosus, but at some point along the way I began to doubt this for some reason I don't remember, and started calling it just A. 'Mongo.' After smelling the fruit, I'm now thinking that no, it probably really is a variety of A. comosus after all. (So why not acknowledge that in the post title? I don't know.)

The plant is probably not going to go outside this summer, because I remember how exhausting and unrewarding it was to be moving plants in and out all the time last year. Not that it was going to produce fruit again right away anyway, but that's probably going to slow down the development of offsets.

Pretty pictures: Iris cvv.

So last year, as you'll remember, I got two stalks of Iris flowers, on the NOID blue-purple plants, and that was it. No other blooms, no other colors.

It's looking like that was mostly due to 2011's drought, because this year I got blooms on all the Irises except for the NOID blue-purple one.

(N.b. before we launch into the pictures: I request that the reader pay no attention to the dandelions and other weeds in the background. Or if you must notice them, at least don't judge us for them. Not that we don't deserve the judgment. I'd just rather you didn't, is all.)


'Reincarnation:'

'Reincarnation' bloomed last fall as well (it's a rebloomer), but I apparently didn't blog about that even though I took the pictures. Go figure.


'Shelley Elizabeth:'

'Shelley Elizabeth' previously: 2012


'Frivolous:'

I'm not sure I was aware, prior to hearing about 'Frivolous,' that yellow irises could be bright dandelion yellow, as opposed to pastel gender-neutral-nursery yellow. But they can. Oh, how they can.


All three varieties were gifts from Ginny Burton. (So was the NOID blue-purple that didn't bloom, as far as that goes.)


Bonus unidentified irises that aren't mine:

Spotted here in town. There was also a completely unreal number of orange poppies¹ in this yard, which may or may not get a separate blog post later.

This purple and white combo from the University of Iowa Hospital would have been much more impressive if I had been able to capture the whole planting at once. There were other priorities that day, though,² so the above are the only two shots I attempted.

-

¹ Having trouble with subject-verb agreement here. Is it "was . . . a number" or "were . . . orange poppies?" I'm about 75% sure it's the former, but somehow both sound wrong. Maybe I still have enough of a cold that it's impairing my grammar. (Evidence in favor of this theory: in the previous sentence, I wasn't sure whether it should read "enough of a cold to affect my grammar" or "enough of a cold to effect my grammar," so I reworded it to get around the question. Though affect is right, isn't it?)
² Neither I nor my husband were the patient, and we're both fine as far as we know. The explanation for what we were doing there is long and complicated, has an unclear diagnosis and an ambiguous prognosis, and isn't something I feel like sharing with the whole internet, so that's all the explanation you get.

Pretty picture: Prosrhyncholeya Chief Green River

I'm now at the stage of being sick where I no longer feel "sick" -- my brain is more or less working properly, and I'm not constantly tired -- but I still have symptoms of being sick. Like, every so often my nose will suddenly fill up with thick, unmovable snot and I'll have to drop whatever I'm doing and try to push it out. Which is vastly preferable to the sore throat. There's some family stuff that may keep me semi-occupied for another week and a half, but I can once again imagine writing substantial blog posts, and imagining blog posts is a prerequisite for writing them, so we're making progress.

Meanwhile, this goofy little orchid.

I have to say I'm not a fan, but I'm not sure if that's the orchid's fault. I might be biased against this one because the handwriting on the tag was screwy, so I spent a really long time trying to find an orchid that didn't exist before accidentally happening on an ID that made the tag make sense.

Prosrhyncholeya Chief Green River = Rhyncholaeliocattleya Chief Cluster Suns x Cattleychea Chief Green Cernua (Ref.)