Anthurium nos. 1752 "Reyna Terra Esova" and 0642 "Bianca Donk"

So this camera-replacement thing is going on way too long, and I'm very frustrated about it. You'd think it would be as simple as going to Amazon and finding a third-party seller who had the camera,¹ finding somebody with the best balance between camera condition, buyer ratings, and price, and then ordering it. But no. After a week, I have no camera, no evidence that the seller has actually shipped a camera, and no response to my message to the seller asking whether I would ever be getting my camera. I mean, Amazon has apparently also not charged my credit card yet, which is good,² but the deadline for returning the expensive camera that thinks tan is green³ is approaching and I'm getting nervous.

And as if all that weren't enough, we've got a couple seedlings today that are difficult to make interesting.⁴

Reyna is fine, I suppose -- decent shape, and she seems to have some thrips resistance, but she's also just another pink / pink, and the foliage is only interesting insofar as it doesn't have a lot of thrips scarring, and the leaf texture is a bit unusual.

She does have interesting genetics -- she's another seedling from the NOID pink-green. All four of those so far (Reyna plus 1372 Shelita Taylor, 1373 Donet McKim, and 1750 Dreuxilla Divine) have had very ordinary colors, but in theory they could produce unusual children. Not sure if it's worth it to try, especially since I'm already basically out of space for the Anthurium seedlings.⁵

Almost positive Reyna's one of my own names, so there's no real queen to talk about.

0642 Bianca Donk has only produced one bloom so far, I think,

and that's actually not terrible. I mean, if we must have a pink, this is at least a strong shade of pink, and a sort of interesting spathe shape. And the seed parent was 0276 Zach Religious, who is not without his problems, but who does at least seem to bloom pretty freely, and the inflorescences are large and long-lasting. They even sometimes get more interesting with age.⁶ Bianca also takes after her father in that her leaves show the same sort of venation, the type I was calling "fishbone" venation,

and Zach also puts a long narrow tip on the end of the spathes and leaves like this. So it's possible that Bianca would get more interesting and attractive with age.

On the negative side, Bianca waited a long time to bloom, and hasn't bloomed much since she got started. Sometimes plants bloom really hard and heavy once they're moved up to a larger pot (0105 Deanne T. Christ is a good example of this -- took forever to complete a first bloom, but once I saw that it was a good color and moved her up to a 6-inch pot, she's been knocking out one inflorescence after another ever since. Always at least four spathes at any given moment.), but that doesn't happen reliably enough to count on, and even if it could be counted on to happen, Bianca's still only pink, so why bother. Also, for all the offsetting she's doing, her foliage overall doesn't look great:

It's possible that that would also straighten out if she were given room in which to grow, but . . . ennh.

There are only three blooming seedlings from Bianca's seedling group (BN): Bianca, the disappointing 0645 Mabel Syrup, and the unfortunately-also-named-Bianca 0648 Bianca Del Rio. So none of them have been great, and there are only two BN seedlings left to look at, neither of which is very promising.⁷

Of the five BNs, 0648 Bianca Del Rio is the only one that might end up having offspring someday, and I'm still undecided about that. So maybe the whole batch of them was a bust. Oh well.

"Bianca Donk" is probably a name that's been used by an actual drag queen at some point or another, but I'm not aware of anyone who regularly performs under this name.

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¹ (a third-party seller because the camera is no longer being produced, so Amazon itself doesn't have any)
² (if also the literal least that Amazon could do)
³ (which it still does; I have not found a way to convince it otherwise, though there has been some progress in teaching it that orange is not pink. It is also unexpectedly bad at photographing Schlumbergera blooms: it's okay on the oranges but surprisingly bad on the reds, and has difficulty figuring out where to focus.)
⁴ (and, uh, spoiler alert: I'm not really going to try making them interesting, either)
⁵ I think I'm past due for another purge. I've just been too preoccupied with the camera, and other garbage, to bother.
⁶ In particular, the color and veining on Zach's older spathes gets kind of weird. Example:

I think this is at least somewhat attractive, though it doesn't look good from a distance.
(Incidentally, this is one of the better photos the new expensive camera has managed to produce so far.)
⁷ 0649 Layona Davenport produced a thick head of tiny foliage from lots of suckers early on,

(24 May 2016)
and has interesting color on the new leaves, but she's never attempted to bud, and the foliage is falling apart lately: individual leaves yellowing and falling off, some suckers dying entirely. It's unclear how much of this is my fault (probably from miswatering) and how much is lack of stamina on her part.
0650 Phyllis Deen has larger and more-interesting foliage, but it's all chewed up by thrips, and although she's started to bud twice, neither bud managed to complete development and open a spathe.