Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Anthurium nos. 1336, 1714, 0963, 1219, and 1508

The main hangup for posting has been that I didn't have photos ready for the various seedlings that needed posts; I caught up on that a few days ago. (Getting names chosen for the Schlumbergera seedlings is also an obstacle, but at least I can do Anthuriums.)

So I now have 62 unblogged Anthurium seedlings, and 48 Schlumbergera seedlings. If I were to do one post per day, with one seedling per post, then I won't manage to catch up until the middle of November, and by mid-November more of both kinds of seedlings will have bloomed.1 I don't think I can do more than one post per day (one post per day is already pretty unlikely), so the obvious thing to try is to do more than one seedling per post. So here we are.

So my plan is to lump some of the less-interesting Anthurium seedlings together in bundles of five, and get them out of the way that way, and hopefully that will free up enough time for me to find names for the Schlumbergeras. (Interesting Anthurium seedlings -- and yes, there are some -- will still get individual posts.)

Anthurium no. 1336 "Erica Rae O'Hara"

Erica Rae isn't bad, just nothing we haven't seen before. The inflorescence is a good size, and the spadix is maybe slightly interesting -- don't see brown spadices very often --


-- and the foliage is actually pretty nice. Very shiny, more thrips-resistant than average,


and the plant has a nice form overall.


The new leaves are even kind of ornamental on their own.


So I'll keep her.


Anthurium no. 1714 "Augusta Wynndt"

Similar story with Augusta: blooms are a good size and look nice,


though the two cameras don't agree on what color the spathe is, and I don't remember what it looked like well enough in person to be able to tell you which is the real color. Old camera:


New camera:


Leaves are again nice and mostly unbothered by thrips, though the texture is different from Erica Rae's:


And the overall form is pleasant.


Also a keeper.


Anthurium no. 0963 "Cassandro"

It's possible that Cassandro will do something prettier in the future, or would if given a bigger pot in which to grow, but I'm not impressed so far.


Even if subsequent blooms were bigger and less damaged, he's not doing anything we haven't seen before, and the plant overall is pretty weak-looking.


I suppose the narrowness of the leaves is maybe mildly interesting.


But overall, no compelling reason to keep Cassandro.


Anthurium no. 1219 "Niles Marsh"

Niles has a slightly unusual color.


I mean, we've seen pale pinks before, but not very often, and Niles has produced quite a few blooms since he got started, which is a point in his favor.


Unfortunately, light pink is a really terrible color for thrips damage -- I still haven't determined whether the thrips are more attracted to lighter spathes, but thrips damage definitely shows up a lot better on light-colored blooms. Which dampens my enthusiasm a bit. The leaves are nevertheless pretty nice,


and it hasn't seemed overly bothered by the thrips otherwise. I'm a little concerned about the growth habit -- that stem looks kind of long, for a plant with such a small number of leaves --


but we can probably keep Niles around and see how things go. The spathe color is enough justification to keep the seedling, as long as the thrips don't get too extreme.


Anthurium no. 1508 "Tabbi Katt"

And finally, the very misleadingly-named Tabbi Katt (the name of a real drag queen), which has decent blooms in a boring color,


though the thrips seem to be more of a problem on Tabbi than on the other seedlings from this post. That notch on the left side of the spathe shouldn't be there. The thrips don't seem to be a problem on the foliage, though, which is nice,


And the plant is otherwise pleasant.


So Tabbi's also a wait-and-see kind of seedling, but I like her chances a lot better than Cassandro's. Not a bad group of seedlings overall, just less interesting than I would like.

Next post on Saturday.

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1 Indeed, the 2017-18 Schlumbergera season hasn't even ended yet. Ordinarily, the blooming is basically over by the end of April, but this year I've had seedlings bloom for the first time in May (470A, 426A, 376A), June (183A), and July (473A, 434A, 421A, 123A). Which shouldn't be happening; my guess is that the air conditioning, plus the downstairs lights being on timers, has convinced some of the seedlings in the basement that it's November year-round. For the sake of being able to do a Schlummies post for the 2017-18 season, I'm going to arbitrarily set the cutoff at 1 September: anything that blooms after that will officially belong to 2018-19.


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