Anthurium no. 0473 "Margo Howard-Howard"

Margo produced a first bud fourteen months before actually blooming. It's fairly common for the first bud or two to drop off before one manages to open, but fourteen months is an awfully long time to wait, and she's lucky I was patient.

The bloom is unobjectionable. Not a rare, one-of-a-kind color combination, but at least it isn't pink/pink or red/yellow.¹

Not that impressed with the foliage, though, mostly because of thrips damage.

And as it's aged, the stem has become long and floppy, which doesn't show in the whole-plant photo below because it's an old photo, taken when the first bud appeared.

Margo is one of relatively few seedlings with 'Orange Hot' as the seed parent; about half of those seem to wind up with orange spathes, and the others have been some shade of red or pink. Margo's only sibling, the late 0480 Walterina Markova was pink/purple,

0480 Walterina Markova

so I'm hard-pressed to guess what Margo's pollen parent might be. But I suppose the plant breeding wouldn't be any fun if I always knew what was going to happen and why.

Margo's a keeper for the time being, though considering how little she's bloomed and the state of her leaves and stem, I don't really see her being a long-term, permanent resident.

I should possibly also mention that Margo Howard-Howard is not one of the names I came up with. There was a performer who worked under this name in New York City in the 80s, and someone wrote an autobiography under the name (I Was a White Slave in Harlem), but the autobiography is thought to be at least partly a work of fiction. (At best, it's full of unverified/unverifiable details.) There's something interesting going on there, but I don't have the time to look into it, and it's complicated by the existence of an author named Margo Howard, making the drag queen difficult to search for. If you're motivated to look into it and happen to find something informative, leave me a link or something.

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¹ Which are themselves fine and attractive combinations, but as you'll remember from the collage of the first 100 blooms, there have been a lot of both, so any seedling of any other color has a much better shot at being kept around.