Anthurium no. 0791 "Joslyn Fox"

As I write this (11 October), the only new Anthurium blooms to write about are Joslyn (the subject of this post) and 0045 Lineysha Sparx, who I'll post about on Sunday. I still have some first-time buds in progress,¹ but if the past is any guide, some of them will abort their blooms, or need to be discarded, before a bloom actually happens, and only two of them appear at all close to opening at the moment, so it'll be a while before they can get posts.²

So the post frequency is about to slow down again. I have a few non-Anthurium things I can write about, including an update on the Polyscias seedlings (spoiler: of the original 11 seedlings, only 9 remain alive, and only 4 or 5 of those are still looking good and doing well), but until the Schlumbergeras start doing their Schlumbergery thing, things are likely to be a bit quieter here than they have been.

So let's take a look at Joslyn.

Top left: 9 September 2016.
Top right: 11 September 2016.
Bottom left: 17 September 2016.
Bottom right: 22 September 2016.
Deciding how to record Joslyn's bloom color has been tough; depending on the lighting, and the age of the inflorescence, the spathe reads as pink, light coral, or peach. And the spadix substantially shifts in color with age, from a light orange-pink initially, to orange and then pink. Sometimes it looks really interesting and like a distinctly new color combination, and other times it's just another in a long line of pink/pinks.

Joslyn's one of 0200 Mario Speedwagon's kids; I was hoping for purple blooms. So she might or might not be interesting, but either way she's a little disappointing.³

Nothing especially remarkable about the leaves.

The plant as a whole is more or less average, given her age. One sucker, maybe two.

Probably a keeper overall, because even if Joslyn isn't that impressive, she's still a little bit different, and there are probably some useful genes in there somewhere. But if she happens to come down with a terrible case of scale or something and I have to discard her, I'm not going to feel terrible about it.

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¹ 0407 Maria D'Millionaire; 0434 Irene Staldwindos (maybe; I think Irene aborted her bud already); 0446 Venus Xtravaganza; 0758 Miles Long, Esquire; 0765 Hope Leeze; 0789 Marsha P. Johnson; 0802 Dana International; 0811 Alma Children; 0892 Eddie Izzard; 0929 Asia Persuasia; 1095 Carolina Pineforest; 1145 Jimmy James; and 1211 Gina Marie Rittale.
0802 Dana International is of particular interest: she's a seedling of 0200 Mario Speedwagon, one of my few purple-blooming seedlings, and looks like she's (maybe) going to produce a purple bloom as well.
² 0446 Venus Xtravaganza is open just enough that I can see the spadix, but it's not clear whether she's going to open the spathe further. So I'm holding off on scheduling a post until I can be sure that the photos are as good as they're going to get.
0765 Hope Leeze is also really close right now, but has been really close for what feels like months already. I don't know whether it's actually been months, or just feels like it, because the election has completely ruined my sense of time.
I swear it feels like the election started 700 years ago. And I'm literally counting the seconds until it's over,



though it's not like things will be normal again after the election is done. I'm afraid we're going to be feeling this one for years.
³ Purple genes appear to be at least somewhat recessive. Only 3 in 10 seedlings of the NOID purple have been purple, and only 1 of the 7 known grand-seedlings have been purple (and that one's questionable, since it's based on a bud which hasn't opened yet).

Pretty picture: Vandachostylis Lou Sneary 'Bluebird'

We've seen Lou Sneary once before, in 2015, and it photographed so poorly that I didn't want to give it a blog post to itself. Bad as that photo was, I think the 2016 is even worse.

I mean, it's enough to get the idea. And the plant in 2015 was unusually yellow, so at least the 2016 foliage is an improvement. But my camera is just not able to figure out where to focus with such a three-dimensional bloom spike.

I also have an issue with calling it 'Bluebird,' but you could probably have guessed that without me telling you.

Vandachostylis Lou Sneary = Vanda falcata x Rhynchostylis coelestis (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0426 "Zelda Zizzle"

Zelda's a frustrating one. It must be something with the (fluorescent) lighting in the basement,¹ because I swear she's much more interesting down there than she is upstairs. In the harsh light of day, though, her blooms are merely pink / yellow, with a lot of thrips damage. Hard to get excited about.

On the other hand, Zelda's got more interestingly-shaped leaves than most; the normal heart shape is still present, but the lobes of the heart are so small that they're barely there at all, making the overall leaf shape all but triangular. I mean, I'm not going to go so far as to say that it's necessarily attractive, but it's certainly different.

The leaves don't have a lot of scarring,² which I guess is a plus. I don't know. If foliage were the only consideration, I'd keep Zelda; as it is, though, I'm not sure.

So I'm going to punt, and delay the decision about what to do with Zelda until later. The smart money is probably on her getting dumped, though. I mean, it'd have to be a hell of a second bloom.

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¹ In the process of switching to some LEDs. The LEDs are brighter, and supposedly use less energy than the fluorescents I'm phasing out do, but I've recently discovered that both LEDs and fluorescents cause heat problems.
The fluorescent bulbs will actually leave scorch marks on Anthurium leaves that happen to flop into direct contact with them, which is bad, and was part of the reason I wanted to switch to something else. However, the top of the fluorescent fixtures stays slightly above room temperature, close enough that I don't have to worry about placing plants on a shelf directly above them.
The LEDs are the opposite: the bottom surface, that's potentially in direct contact with the leaves, is room temperature, not warm at all, but the tops are actually kind of hot, enough that plants directly above them dry out a lot faster than they used to. I'm also a little concerned about what this means for the energy efficiency, because I find it hard to believe that the LEDs can be converting that much electricity to heat and still somehow be more energy-efficient than the fluorescents were. Plus, there's the possibility that I may have to keep some fans going in the basement all the time, to keep the heat from building up too much above the LEDs, and running fans 24/7 could well negate whatever energy savings I'm getting from the LEDs. Though I'm also getting more light per fixture, which I like. So it's all very complicated.
² I'm often kind of confused when this happens, when the spathe is all chewed-up but the leaves are fine or vice versa. I think often it's a matter of when the thrips happened to find the specific plant in question: if they arrived late, then the leaves will be fine and the spathes will be a mess. But sometimes it might also be a matter of the thrips finding one easier to attack than the other.

Anthurium no. 0799 "Hope Sandreams"

Like 0807 Lucinda Italic, 0799 Hope Sandreams is boring, but in a way that's so well-executed that I don't really mind. The color basically amounts to just a pinkish-red/pinkish-red, which is a little out of the ordinary, but not dramatically so.

I'm a little interested in the shape: the spathe was more triangular than usual, and also had sort of wavy margins, both of which are still true a month later. And she seems to resist thrips damage well, or maybe she's just a color that hides it well: either way, it's nice.

There's a second bud opening as I type this, but it's opening so slowly that I don't know if its shape will be similar. There's always a chance that it was doing something weird for the first bloom, and the others will be less interesting.

The leaves aren't particularly special, but at least they aren't scarred to hell and back by thrips damage. So that's something.

And Hope has some nice, symmetrical suckering going on, too.

For the moment, at least, I intend to keep her, especially if the second bloom is nice but probably even if it's not.

0799 Hope Sandreams is from sibling group BV, along with 0760 Delta Work; they're both the children of 0108 Deena Sequins. Hope takes after her mother a bit more than Delta does, though Delta hasn't fully settled on a look yet. Or at least I hope not, 'cause what we've seen from her so far has been pretty hideous.

L-R: 0108 Deena Sequins, 0760 Delta Work, 0799 Hope Sandreams.

Anthurium no. 0807 "Lucinda Italic"

Lucinda's a tough call, as far as deciding whether or not to keep her. The bloom was agonizingly slow to open; I wound up with so many pictures that I could just about make a time-lapse .gif of it:

21 August.

22 August.

23 August.

26 August.

1 September.
The bloom isn't a particularly interesting color. I don't have a ton of pink/orange, but I'm pretty bored with pink spathes now, so even if Lucinda's not literally the most boring possible color combination, she's pretty close. But the form is good, and the thrips scarring is pretty minimal. And the bloom in the photo is still on the plant now, after more than a month, looking decent, so it could be worse.

In other news, the leaves are decently shiny and broad, though they have a bit more trouble with the thrips:

And the plant as a whole is suckering well, and looks fairly symmetrical and everything.

So probably Lucinda's going to stay. I'm not going to make it a priority to move her to a bigger pot, but she'll get to stay.

I should probably also mention that Lucinda is the offspring of 0234 Ross Koz, though there's no obvious family resemblance. She looks a lot like her late (half-?) sister, 0855 The Very Miss Dusty O, though Lucinda is better in basically every way, particularly the critical aliveness aspect.

L-R: 0234 Ross Koz, 0807 Lucinda Italic, 0855 The Very Miss Dusty O.
1038 Adlai Lowe is also from the same seedling group (the BY group), but as Adlai has still not bothered to put together a real bloom yet, so it's hard to tell how similar he is to his siblings.