Anthurium no. 0610 "Nina Levin"

And I'm back! Or at least that's the plan: I suppose I haven't proven anything yet.

Good news: new posts scheduled almost every day from now until early October.¹
Bad news: most of them are going to be Anthurium seedling posts, and not very interesting.
Good news: a few of them actually are slightly interesting.
Bad news: I'm not going to have a lot of time to work on them, as quickly as I'll have to write, so even the interesting ones will be pretty short, and probably less interestingly written than they could be.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether this is overall a good thing or a bad thing.

In any case, here is Nina:

My Anthurium-breeding book says speckling is a dominant trait, so there was reason to think Nina (the first seedling of 'Peppermint Gemini' to bloom) would be speckled, but alas, the only thing about the bloom that comes close to speckling is the thrips-scarring. I was disappointed about this for a while, but I've sort of come around -- at least I like the bloom color, and the leaves are decent:

The new leaves are even unusual in a good way:

I mean, I get that brown isn't maybe the prettiest color, but it's striking. I've seen worse foliage.

Nina's main flaw is her habit: she flops around a lot when I move her in and out of the tray for photos and waterings. Plants with long internodal distances have this problem a lot -- long internodes mean long stems, and long stems can twist more easily where the stem goes below the soil line -- but in Nina's case, I think it's more a matter of having to share flats with other plants. It's hard to put them all back in exactly the same places, so sometimes plants wind up growing in one direction for a while, and then a different direction, and the stems wind up permanently kinked and flop-prone.

Verdict: keeper, mostly for breeding purposes. Haven't actually been able to pollinate her yet, though.

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¹ (40 posts, scheduled over the next 49 days)