Anthurium no. 1209 "Raven Samore Holiday"

And now we're into a short run of seedlings that aren't doing anything very weird, unfortunately. Not that Raven's doing anything particularly badly,

and she's a little weird in that both spathes so far have been very wide and short -- the proportions in the above photo are pretty much what you'd see if you were looking at it in person -- but the color isn't anything new. There's maybe a little bit of green on the lobes, at the bottom of the spathe in the photo, but that's about it. Just a weirdly-proportioned red / yellow.

Raven's the offspring of 0223 Patty Cake, who was also a red / yellow, notable mainly for having very long peduncles.¹ Patty's main problem was that she had long internodes;² Raven doesn't seem to have that problem yet, though it's maybe a little early to tell.

The foliage is distinguished mostly by being very flat -- the secondary veins aren't particularly thick or heavy, and the texture is overall very smooth.

There's some thrips damage. Nothing too terrible.

Overall, the spathe proportions are the most interesting thing here, and I'm not sure "interesting" is quite enough, but it's not a disaster, so I'm probably keeping Raven around for a while. We'll see how it goes.

There is a real performer who goes by "Raven Samore Holiday," but I had a really difficult time digging up information about her, so I don't have any to share. Sorry.

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¹ (the "stem" connecting the inflorescence to the rest of the plant)
² (internode - the distance between two nodes; nodes are the places on the stem where leaves emerge. Long internodes are a problem because it means that the stem gets long quickly, which means the plant flops over and starts getting viney)

Anthurium no. 1171 "Chris of Hur"

Seedling 1171 is unremarkable on first glance:

I mean, Chris doesn't have one of the most common color combinations, which is worth something, but it doesn't look weird. And yet, Chris is weird.

For one thing, its ancestry. 1171 is another 'Joli' seedling, like 1325 Dixie D Cupp. And the only hint it gives of the relationship is in the buds, which are pink, rather than the red or orange one would expect.

A number of seedlings have started out orange (or pinkish-orange) and aged to pink, but this is the first time I've ever seen that go in the opposite direction. Probably this can be explained by observing that the two sides of a spathe don't always match: usually if it's pink on one side, it'll be pink on the other, but 0330 Faye Quinette, for example, is brown on the back of the spathe and orange on the front,¹ and I've recently been incredibly disappointed by 1594 Roxy-Cotten Candy [a real performer name; spelling sic] because she's dark brown with nearly-black veining on the back, while the front is just red.² So there's precedent for buds of one color opening as spathes of a different color; I've just never seen this particular combination before.

Which is probably enough weirdness to justify keeping Chris; he probably wouldn't be otherwise, though. The leaves are okay,

and the plant as a whole is fine. Not horribly leggy, at least.

On the negative side, not only do the spathes flip back from the spadix (which is pretty common, if undesirable), but they often get more and more reflexed with age, to the point where they almost start to roll themselves up into a tube.

The thrips do seem to leave it alone, at least. Not entirely, but mostly. So that's good.

There is an actual Chris of Hur; her style of drag isn't to my personal taste,³ but she sounds like an interesting person, based on this interview. I especially like the idea of the "draggle" (drag + Fraggle) aesthetic; reading that in the interview, I was like, what?, but then I saw the video embedded in that article and I was like, oh, right, that's actually the perfect description for what she's doing there.

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¹ (i.e., the green pigment is being expressed only on the back)
² I mean, if you want to give it maximum partial credit for interestingness, you could maybe say it was a brownish-red, like 0842 Pretty Punasti. But that's a stretch.
³ Though as I've noted previously, almost nothing is to my personal taste the first time I encounter it, and the "I don't like this" reaction doesn't seem to have much to do with how good it is or how much I end up liking it. Which is why the rare occasions when I do like something the first time (most recently with Shearwater's "Quiet Americans") are big deals.

Anthurium no. 1325 "Dixie D Cupp"

Dixie is the second seedling of 'Joli' to bloom, and is the only 'Joli' seedling that actually resembles her parent at all. (At least of the three to bloom so far.)

Like 'Joli,' Dixie's blooms are lavender / light orange to begin with, and end pink / pink.

(6 April 2017)

(25 April 2017)
Like 'Joli,' the thrips find Dixie delicious.

And that includes the leaves.

Dixie also has a tendency to begin unfurling a spathe and then give up on it partway through; not only does this not look very nice, but it gives the thrips that much more room in which to hide, and makes them that much harder to remove.

'Joli' eventually became very long and floppy, which was the main reason I discarded it (possible Xanthomonas infection and thrips damage were also factors); it remains to be seen whether Dixie will have the same issue, but . . . given the performance so far, I don't have any reason to doubt that she will.

Which makes the decision about whether to keep Dixie or not a very difficult one. I only have so much room, and any pink/pink or red/yellow that was this scarred and ratty-looking would go in the trash without hesitation, but I only have just so many purple-blooming plants, and it would be nice to have the genes around for breeding purposes even if the plant itself isn't so great.¹ For now, the decision is to keep Dixie, I guess, but I don't like her chances of still being here in a couple years.

There was a real Dixie D Cupp, a drag queen from Atlanta, Georgia; I couldn't find much information about her on-line, though. Basically just this memorial page, which identifies her as being active in raising money for causes related to HIV/AIDS; she died in 2010.

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¹ 0105 Deanne T. Christ, 0200 Mario Speedwagon, and 0802 Dana International are actually purple. Deanne and Dana have pretty significant thrips problems, and Mario is very leggy and doesn't produce a lot of blooms.
There are also seedlings that have enough of a purple tint to their pink or red spathes to get me hopeful that their seedlings might be purple: 0231 Rhea Listick, 0234 Ross Koz, 0259 Tasha Salad, 0514 Lauren Ipsum, 0886 Zaria Baudit, and 1249 Celeda.
And then there's a third group which have a purple parent or grandparent and consequently might contain recessive purple genes: 0097 Colin Ambulance, 0108 Deena Sequins, 0758 Miles Long, Esquire, 0771 Nina Flowers, 0789 Marsha P. Johnson, 0791 Joslyn Fox, 0799 Hope Sandreams, and 1181 Tajma Stetson.
Of the three groups, the only one to produce purple offspring was 0200 Mario Speedwagon, the seed parent for 0802 Dana International. None of the children of 0234 Ross Koz have even hinted at purpleness, and the only purple in the descendants of 0108 Deena Sequins is in the spadices: the spathes have all been red or pink-red.
So you can see why hanging on to a purple-blooming seedling might seem like a good idea, even if it's not a great seedling. There might not be any other way to get a decent purple.

Anthurium no. 0788 "Owen McCord"

I mentioned at the end of the last post that 0788 was, like, 0728 Sister Dimension, one of the seedlings from 0273 Wes Coast. Wes was a pink/pink without a lot of notable qualities: the most interesting thing about him was that the pink was unusually vivid, in that unphotographable way that seedlings sometimes just glow. (Even then, it didn't happen with every bloom, so I'm not sure what I was actually seeing.) Wes's seedlings, on the other hand, always had two things: huge leaves, and scale. 52 seedlings, of which only 5 have survived (10%); more than half (30 of 52, or 58%) were thrown out due to scale infestation. Not very promising territory in which to be looking for awesome seedlings. And yet:

And it's not that we've never seen an orange/orange before; there are several.¹ However, Owen is, I think, the first seedling to do both orange/orange and orange/yellow:

Not sure which he prefers; so far I've only seen one bloom of each. The orange/orange is most recent, so odds are that's the "real" color, if there's a real color.

But that's not even the best part. I mean, I like the orange blooms, but the main story in Owen's case is actually the foliage. Not many individual leaves,

but they're huge, and vary considerably in color as they age. True, they end up at the same boring green as most Anthurium seedlings:

But they get there through a pretty colorful progression, from red through brown and olive:

I feel like this would be awfully pretty in a mass planting, should there ever be enough of them for a mass planting, in a place where they could survive being outside.

Which is getting pretty hypothetical since so far there's just the one plant and it's in Iowa, but we can still imagine.

In any case. Really happy with Owen. He's developed kind of a sideways lean in the last few months; probably at least some of that's because he's been growing towards light, as plants do.² Hopefully that will be fixable if/when he's promoted to a 6-inch pot.

Definite keeper, not even a question. The next seedling up is a much more difficult decision.

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¹ Though mostly they're the same seedling under different names, or close relatives thereof: 0115 Erlene Adopter, 0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, 0581 Adam All, and 0586 Vera Special are all divisions from the same original plant, all with interchangeable orange/orange blooms and the same peculiar tendency to yellow along the leaf veins; I still don't understand why that happens, or whether it's a bad thing.
Then there's 0120 Eliza Boutisecksis, the half-sibling of the Erlenes, and 1727 Mercedes Sulay, daughter of one of the Erlenes.
Other seedlings sort of lean toward orange/orange blooms, but are too red (e.g. 0116 Eileen Dover), green (0330 Faye Quinette), pink (0813 Arya Reddy), or pale (0317 Dred) for me to consider them fully orange/orange.
² He has totally adequate overhead light, and no reason to need to move in on another shelf's lighting, but the problem is that his own shelf is pretty crowded, and the adjacent shelf is full of short germination containers that don't obstruct their light at all. So the light looks better to the side, and we get a lean.