Pretty pictures: Schlumbergera

You knew this was coming sooner or later. 'Tis the season and all.

As I write this, it is Sunday the 23rd, and I have a lot of Schlumbergera buds still in progress, so I'm not sure how many seedling bloom pictures I'll wind up having to show you. So far, though, I've got bloom pictures for numbers 008, 022, 024, 025 ("Clownfish"), 026, 054, and 057. There are at least buds on another three (055, 060, 064), and four other plants (021, 079, 083, 099) were up-potted a few weeks after the others. Theoretically, those four could decide to set buds and bloom before New Year's, though I don't expect them to. And as of 23 November, anyway, I'm contemplating moving a bunch more to 4-inch pots so that I can use the 3-inch pots for another batch of seedlings, which means there's an outside chance of seeing some others.

The point being that it's not clear which and how many seedling pictures I may be able to show you eventually, but most of the varieties I actually purchased or traded for have bloomed now,¹ so I figure I can show you those, give the seedlings a few more days to do whatever they're going to do, and then start showing you the seedling pictures next week.

So here are the six named and NOID varieties blooming around the house lately:

The NOID yellow plant had a tough time of things during its first year here (which would have been 2011), and I moved it to the basement so I could try to salvage some cuttings in a warmer, more consistently-lit environment. Most of the cuttings failed, but one pot remained, and the surviving plant filled in over the course of a few years, such that I felt comfortable moving it back to the plant room this year. I don't know whether it had been feeling frustrated during the three intervening winters, when the artificial lights in the basements prevented it from setting buds, but it sure seemed that way: once I moved it, it budded up in a hurry, bloomed all over the place, and then was more or less finished by the time all the other plants started to produce flowers. I did try to make some crosses with it, but I don't know whether any of them actually took.

'Caribbean Dancer' remains the star of the Schlumbergera collection, both because it's damn pretty and because it's gotten big. (I've had it since 2008, though, so that's kind of to be expected. The other plant I've had since 2008, which you'll see later, is still pretty small, though at least some of that is because it's still in the original 4-inch pot.)

The NOID magenta has bloomed before, but this year it's working extra hard at it. It's a very ordinary sort of color for Schlumbergera blooms, but that's not to say it isn't still nice.

The NOID white has produced a lot of blooms this year as well -- it's the second-largest plant I have -- but the white is also not that interesting, really, and it's difficult to photograph well.

'Exotic Dancer' is blooming for the first time this year; it had previously been living in the basement and so never got the opportunity. It's more similar to 'Caribbean Dancer' than I was expecting. Not that the red and white isn't nice; it's just that from a distance they look pretty much like the same plant.

And, finally, the NOID peach, which is occasionally more of a salmon or light coral. I got it in 2008, as a cutting from work, and I'm not sure whether I knew what color it would bloom when I brought it home or not. Maybe I did; maybe I just saw some dropped segments and took them home without regard for what they were: I did that sort of thing a lot in 2008. In any case, it's bloomed very regularly, though since I haven't moved it up to a larger pot, it's still very small. Lots more white in the petals this year, it seems like, than there has been in years past.

Many of the seedlings take after the NOID peach to some degree or another; I'm all but certain that most of the seedlings that have bloomed already have been 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach crosses.

And that is that. My plan is to start with the seedling posts on 2 December; we'll see whether I can keep up with that.

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¹ The only ones I'm still waiting on are:
• a NOID peach / salmon which may or may not be the same variety as a NOID peach / salmon that's already bloomed,
• 'Stephanie,' which has buds, at least, but is extremely late to the party, and
• Schlumbergera x buckleyi, which in previous years has often declined to bloom at all and has no buds I'm aware of at the moment, but did bloom at least once, last winter. So maybe it will again.

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Shu Long Black Jack

Don't know the ancestry on this one; there's a Phalaenopsis Shu King, but I couldn't locate any Dtps. Shu anything, much less Shu Long Black Jack, on the orchid registry. 'Course, I haven't looked since March, when I uploaded this, so it's possible that there's something there now.

Ordinarily I might go check on that, but I am exhausted, having put together a blog post for Friday that's not an orchid post. You know, like somebody who writes a general houseplant blog would.

And then there are plans to make even more non-orchid posts for like a week and a half in December, though that depends on me getting some photos together that I have not actually gotten together yet. And also you should probably not get your hopes up, in terms of post variety or quality. But even so -- new things to look at, on a more or less daily basis, soonish. It's pretty exciting, really. Assuming I can get it all together in time.

Pretty picture: Pleione x confusa 'Golden Gate'

Another new genus. Don't know a lot about Pleione, but this is apparently a naturally-occurring hybrid of P. albiflora and P. forrestii (Ref.), and I guess it's interesting. "Pretty" might be a stretch, but you can call almost anything interesting and have it be true.

Pretty pictures: Cattlianthe Alyssa Nehemie

Cattlianthe Alyssa Nehemie = Cattlianthe Fancy Lady x Cattleya Wendy's Valentine (Ref.)

Pretty pictures: Dendrobium convolutum 'WK' x self

I have in my notes that the pictures here are a bit more impressive than the plant was in person, on account of the flowers being very small.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum bellatulum

I really like this flower, but I'm not going to talk about it because there's something else on my mind.

About a week ago, I received this comment on the "Comment Policy" page:¹

Please do not post pictures of my plants unless you ask my permission...owner, Phrag. Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane' AM/AOS CCM/AOS

Which refers to this post from 2012.² This confused me on multiple levels, since the plant's owner was not being disparaged in any way (indeed, the photo contained no text which could have identified him³ as the owner), and since I felt like the term orchid show sort of implies that people might, you know, look at the orchids.⁴ Photography is not discouraged at the show, and it could hardly be a surprise to the orchid's owner that people photographed his plant, since at least a third of the people at the show, every year, are walking around with cameras and sort of obviously taking pictures of things. The way the comment was phrased, it seemed like the objectionable part was the posting of the photo, but the photo -- that specific arrangement of pixels -- belongs to me, legally, and I can do whatever I like with it, regardless of who the subject belongs to, so if that's the problem then somebody's just going to have to deal.⁵

I spent a few days being kind of riled up about this, and then I remembered something. Rarely, I get comments on the orchid picture posts complimenting me on my beautiful orchids or whatever, in the sort of way that implies that the people leaving the comments believe -- in spite of comments to the contrary and tags like "Wallace's Orchid Show 2014" -- that the orchids in the photos belong to me. So perhaps the person leaving the comment believes that I'm misrepresenting the orchid in the photo as being my own plant, rather than his. I don't think that would technically be illegal to do, but obviously it'd be kinda douchey of me if I were.⁶

So. For the record.⁷

• Displaying pretty things in public, at a show, where photography is not only not prohibited but actively encouraged, is likely to result in people taking photos of the pretty things. If this is a problem for you, you should probably stop entering your orchids in shows which are open to the public.
• Photographs legally belong to the photographer who takes them unless / until the rights to the photo are sold or the photos specifically placed in the public domain. I don't have to ask anybody's permission to post my own photos on my own blog, no matter what the photos are of.
• All the PATSP posts tagged with "Wallace's Orchid Show [year]," where "[year]" = 2010 or any year after 2010, do not depict my own plants and were never intended to imply that they did depict my own plants.

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Photo credits: mine, mine, all mine (though the plant is not mine)

¹ Which I published and then accidentally deleted, so you won't see it if you go there. For future reference: there is a "Delete forever? (Cannot be undone)" checkbox on the comment-deletion screen, but whether you check the box or not, there is no way to recover deleted comments. The only difference checking the box makes is that if you check the box, it will be as if the comment never existed in the first place, and if you don't check the box, the comment will be replaced by a line saying "This comment has been removed by a blog administrator."
So if you publish a comment and then have second thoughts about it, your options are between having it publicly readable forever, or having it publicly unreadable forever -- there's no option to take it down temporarily but preserve the option of restoring it later, even if "cannot be undone" implies that there is a way to undo the deletion.
² And this photo, specifically:


³ Pretty sure it's a him, based on blog statistics from the same time, the members of the Illowa Orchid Society named at its home page, and Google. And the sense of entitlement the comment projects.
⁴ I mean, it's not the 2011 Illowa Orchid Society Describe, now, is it?
⁵ In the U.S., at least, people can apparently take a photo of you whenever you're in public and reproduce it however they like, with certain exceptions made for context. Like, you can't use a random photo of some guy to illustrate a newspaper article about alcoholism without getting the model's permission, lest it appear that you're saying they're an alcoholic. But otherwise, there's a general assumption that being in public means you've implicitly given permission to have your picture taken. And that's for people. (Ref.) I imagine there's probably even less of an expectation of privacy when you're a plant. And less still when you're a plant that has been entered in a public orchid show.
⁶ (It's maybe worth pointing out that the original comment doesn't say that. This is just my guess as to what's bothering the guy. A literal reading of the comment implies that he believes that he owns any photos taken of his orchids, and that he should be consulted before anything's done with said photos.)
⁷ As far as I can tell, the guy who left the comment hasn't come back to the blog and will probably never see this defense of mine anyway. I suppose if the situation comes up again, I at least have the defense all written out and linkable now.