Anthurium no. 0288 "Cookie Buffet"

I've let myself get way behind on the blog posts lately, because I've been working on a special, complicated photo for like a week and a half, which has required me to take and sort a bunch more pictures than usual.¹ I've also been burning a lot of time outside, catching and drowning Japanese beetles (who discovered the Cannas about a month and a half ago and have been merrily shredding them since), and a couple days went toward beginning a purge of the 4-inch Anthuriums too, which is still technically in progress as I write this (18 August), but I haven't done any purging for a while, because it's very time-consuming, sitting there wringing my hands about whether or not to get rid of a seedling.²

The upshot being that I don't have a lot of time to devote to this particular post and seedling, because so much else has been going on.

Fortunately, Cookie's not the sort of seedling that would inspire a lot of excited chatter anyway. She's a middle-of-the-pack pink / pink:

The bloom wasn't bad when it first opened, as you can see, but it hasn't aged especially well. (I don't have a recent photo, but just trust me.) Cookie also lives in a bad neighborhood: her flat was ground zero for the scale-infested Gasteraloe leaf, a few months back, which means that although I've thrown some imidacloprid around, I'm still finding scale nearby. None actually on Cookie, as far as I can remember, but it's only a matter of time.

Cookie's internodal distance is also a lot longer than I would like. It's not bad enough to condemn her to the wastebasket necessarily, but she's floppy enough to be annoying to water or photograph.

The best thing she's got going for her, really, is her foliage. It's not amazing, but the leaves are relatively unblemished, and they're broad and flat, which I like. I doubt this will be enough to get her moved up to a 6-inch pot; it likely won't even be enough to keep her out of the trash can. As I keep reminding myself, I'm not going to breed awesome, wonderful Anthuriums by holding on to every single seedling forever. Can't make an omelet, gotta know when to hold 'em, etc.

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¹ The worst part of which is that if everything goes according to plan, y'all won't even get to see it until the end of September.
² (Even if the plant looks awful, has never even tried to bloom, and is nearly four years old, I still have to really think about whether or not to keep it.)