I've been surprised at how few white spathes I've seen on the Anthurium seedlings. Considering that almost half of the first generation were from 'White Gemini' (white / yellow), I figured I would encounter a lot of whites, but it's apparently recessive; I get occasional very light pinks,1 but never a spathe that's actually white. Elsa's not white either, but she's close:
And the foliage is large, and has improved dramatically since I started blasting the leaves with water.
However. Thrips still damage the spathes, as you can see from the first photo. She's also had ongoing problems with scale, as have a lot of her neighbors. I've reluctantly resorted to imidacloprid on that whole shelf of plants, because while imidacloprid never seems to completely remove all scale from the house, in the short term, it does seem to be a good way to remove them from specific areas. Elsa was apparently already wet, and when I added a little more water to wash the imidacloprid toward the roots, a lot of her older leaves went yellow.
So it's possible that I've successfully eliminated the scale by killing the plant; I'm waiting to find out.
Even if the overwatering hasn't killed Elsa,2 though, she's probably not a keeper. I like the leaves a lot (really the picture above doesn't do them justice), but they're kind of all she has. As the number of plants solid enough to move up to 6-inch pots increases, I have to get pickier about all steps of the process -- which blooms are pretty enough to hang on to, what level of scale infestation is minimal enough to be optimistic about, that kind of thing.
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1 The palest seedling to date is probably 0215 Nathan Ofithlam ('Gemini' x unknown), who was cool. The only bloom I ever got from Nathan had a small, secondary spathe, and I really wanted to see if that would happen again, but alas, he had problems with his roots, or I overwatered, or both, and he died before he could build a second bud.
(Not really pertinent to the post, but: the only other seedling to ever make a secondary spathe is 0282 Dave Trading. Dave has occasionally even hinted that he might want to make spathes for each individual flower on the spadix,
though none of Dave's secondary spathes have ever been as well-developed as Nathan's.)
2 Anthuriums will forgive you for too much water a lot more readily than for not enough, but there are limits in both directions.
I haven't counted it up, but my guess is that I've lost about twice as many plants to drought as I do to rot.
(Not really pertinent to the post, but: the only other seedling to ever make a secondary spathe is 0282 Dave Trading. Dave has occasionally even hinted that he might want to make spathes for each individual flower on the spadix,
though none of Dave's secondary spathes have ever been as well-developed as Nathan's.)
2 Anthuriums will forgive you for too much water a lot more readily than for not enough, but there are limits in both directions.
I haven't counted it up, but my guess is that I've lost about twice as many plants to drought as I do to rot.
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