Pretty pictures: Orange

Mom was fond of the color orange when I was growing up: we had orange curtains in the kitchen, and orange Tupperware containers for flour and sugar, orange measuring spoons, just orange orange orange. (It was the 70s: people did that then.) I never really cared for it, personally, but I can see how orange flowers in the garden might be nice. A lot of them have been grabbing my attention lately.

Bracteantha bracteata 'Sundaze Flame.'
Younger Co-Worker told me a few days ago that she hated strawflowers. I don't recall her giving any reasons, when I asked why, she just kind of gestured at them, like it was just obvious. Possibly she said something about them being noisy. I told her that I'd heard that only stupid people hate Bracteanthas. Then the next day, Wonderful Co-Worker spontaneously expressed a dislike of Bracteanthas too. I don't know what it is. They seem like perfectly nice plants to me. Last year, they hung around forever, not really selling, and then all of a sudden I came in one day and they were all gone, all sold to the same person. I'm hoping history repeats.

Begonia NOID, possibly 'Britt Dark.' I usually take pictures of the ID tags after taking pictures of the plant: it's faster than writing things down. In this particular case, though, the pictures may have gotten out of order, and so I'm not sure what this plant's proper name is.
Rieger Begonias are one of those plants that have really, um . . . what's the opposite of "grown on me?" "Grown off me?" That doesn't sound right. In any case. I don't know why, exactly: they're tricky to water (too much and the leaves mildew, not enough and the edges of the petals turn brown and hideous), but that's not the entire story. I don't know. Whatever the reason, somewhere along the way I started referring to them in my head as "the vile Rieger begonias," and it's not entirely a joke.

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis 'Caribbean Breeze.'
Hibiscus, though, are fine. I was actually incredibly tempted to buy this one when it was around (it's since sold). The picture doesn't do it justice. I held off because of the price (not outrageous, but a little high for what it was) and because Hibiscus are so bug-prone that I'm not sure I want one. I mean, I want one, but not if it's going to get aphids, whitefly, and spider mites.

Calibrachoa 'Tequila Sunrise.' I recommend opening this one, in particular, in a new window.
I like Calibrachoa in general, but 'Tequila Sunrise' in particular. The colors!

Cosmos 'Cosmic Mix.'
Cosmos 'Cosmic Mix.'
'Cosmic Mix' is the only Cosmos we've offered for sale since I've had this job. I know there are other colors and mixes, because we have them for sale as seeds, but for some reason we don't bother with them. I don't know why not. I do love 'Cosmic Mix,' though. Yellow-orange, orange, red-orange. Pretty hot.

Zinnia 'Profusion Apricot.'
Zinnia 'Profusion Apricot' doesn't photograph well: the first batch I took came out looking kind of pink-purple, and the above photo, from the second round, is closer but still wrong somehow. It looks all . . . muddy in a way that the real flowers don't.

Gerbera jamesonii 'Festival Spider Orange.'
We haven't actually had this particular plant around for a couple months, but it's worth throwing in here anyway. Orange is orange. I'm not a big fan of Gerberas, for essentially the same reasons as the Reiger Begonias: they're not easy to keep going at this time of year, when so many other things need our attention too. They tend to either get too wet (in which case mildew) or too dry (in which case wilting). Though like the Riegers, they sell well.

Tagetes patula NOID, probably 'Safari Orange' or 'Durango Orange.'
I like the little marigolds. This year's crop turned out much better than last year's: they're very pretty. We maybe should have started more.

Thunbergia alata.
Got this one in pre-finished as a hanging basket. We started some of our own from seed, too, but they're not really doing anything yet, and I'm thinking by the time they're ready to bloom, it may be too late.

If Time Ran Backwards for Plants

It doesn't happen all that often, but sometimes at work I luck into doing some really long, boring thing, and my brain has to entertain itself. Usually, this doesn't result in anything very interesting (in fact, usually, it means I have a song running through my head for hours at a time -- or sometimes just a couple lines from a song, if I don't know the whole thing, which is horrible), but every once in a while, something bubbles up that's odd enough to share.

So last Monday, I was transplanting plugs of Impatiens (or "fucking Impatiens," as it's more commonly known among the staff¹) and the plant-related synapses in my brain (which are many) happened to be firing at the same time as the ones that were remembering a snippet from Slaughterhouse Five, and I started to think, what would it be like if time ran backwards for plants but not people?

Fucking Impatiens 'Super Elfin Lipstick.'
Now obviously time runs the direction it runs, and so any thought experiment like this winds up running into inconsistencies eventually, but I choose to ignore that. Here's what I came up with:

• Plants are these things that people erect with axes, or random pieces of debris on the ground that assemble themselves, stand upright, and then turn green. This is especially likely to happen after a freeze. Once erected, they slowly leak carbon dioxide and pollution and consume oxygen, in an attempt to suffocate all human life. (We think.) So people are always trying to get rid of plants, by setting aside special areas of property, called gardens and lawns, to shrink them (plants are highly attracted to something in the center of the earth) until they're small enough to fit in pots. They then bring the pots to garden centers, where we pay them to take their dangerous plants, which we deflate further in the greenhouse. When they're very, very small, we shove them into flats of very tiny plugs, seal them into boxes, and send them away, so they can't hurt us any more. Sometimes we stick the tiny plants into trays and they shrink down to little rocklike structures called seeds, which don't emit carbon dioxide and are relatively safe, but we still seal these seeds up in packages to prevent them getting out.

Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer,' the color-changing variety I mentioned a few days ago. I think the new flower is on the left and the old flower is on the right, but I'm not positive about that. In any case, these flowers are both from the same plant, whatever the sequence of events actually is.

• This is never a permanent solution, though, because plants are always spontaneously forming themselves from rotting gunk on the ground. Occasionally, too, and especially when there's a dirty plate in front of a person, the person will vomit up pieces of plant, and then reassemble them in his/r mouth, before putting them on the plate. This is called eating. Bugs vomit up enormous quantities of plants all the time. So we never get rid of all of them at once.
• Fertilizer is the chemical residue left behind by deflating plants. Sometimes people are organic gardeners, and the deflating plants leave behind manure as a residue instead. Manure is apparently much more dangerous, because people never leave it just lying around: they always pack it into bags and send it away for other people to place in pastures and barns, so the manure can moisten itself and eventually jump up cows' asses.

Ipomoea batatas 'Blackie.'

• Weeding is the process of sticking certain quick-deflating plants into the soil.
• In some special circumstances, the debris on the ground will leap onto the plant and quickly become brightly-colored, which we call flowers. Flowers will remain on the plant until visited by a pollinator like a bird or bee, which rub pollen onto and vomit nectar into the flower, at which point the flower will close up and begin to shrink into the plant.
• Plants are also always beaming heat and light up to the sun (and to a lesser extent, lamps and candles and stuff). They have uncanny aim. This is called photosynthesis and is something of a mystery, though we think it has something to do with all the carbon dioxide they're pumping out.
• Sometimes garbagemen will leave bags of leaves at the curb for homeowners. The homeowners then scatter the leaves all over their lawn with a rake (raking), and a while later the leaves jump onto nearby trees and change colors, eventually turning green and shrinking. Exactly where the garbagemen are getting all these leaves in the first place is unclear, but the supply appears to be inexhaustible.
  
• Watering is the process of deflating plants by sucking water out of them with a hose, or watering can.

Calibrachoa 'Superbells Saffron.'

• Once in a while, enormous clouds of smoke and flame will converge upon a charred spot and form plants. These are called wildfires, and although they create new plants, which is unfortunate, fires can be quite beneficial. Among other things, they can heal burn victims, build new houses out of rubble, and bring animals back from the dead. Wildfires appear to be particularly creative if firefighters can "water" them.
• For unknown reasons, people in parts of Central and South America, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and much of Africa are putting a lot of effort into destroying their natural plant-free areas and erecting enormous forests instead. This probably means that they are trying to destroy the planet, or hate the United States, or something like that. Whatever it is, it must be important, because they're actually taking their houses apart and stitching trees together to be planted in these areas.

If you think of anything I've left off the list, say something in comments.

-

¹ It's not that it's so terrible. There's just so much of it.

Pretty picture: Calibrachoa 'Superbells Saffron'

Calibrachoa has been a problematic genus for us where I work, at least since I've been there. Last year, they all did okay up until a couple months into the season, where most of them suddenly and irreversibly yellowed (probably a mineral deficiency: iron was suspected but never proven). This year, we gave them a different fertilizer, on Younger Co-Worker's suggestion, one that had trace elements included (last year we were adding the trace elements ourselves, based on calculations from 2007, which obviously didn't work out right for some reason or another), and worked a slow-release iron product intended for lawns into the soil for the Calibrachoa and Petunia plugs.

And the, er, survivors look great, so that was a good idea too. But there was some confusion about how much of the slow-release product was supposed to go into the soil, on a day when I wasn't there, and so some of them got a lot more than they were supposed to and burned and died. So we have, now, a lot of some colors, and not so much of others, depending on who potted them up originally and how quickly the error was caught and the plants repotted.

But like I said: the survivors look great. (And the Petunias, which had similar yellowing problems last year, though not nearly as severe, look amazing: there's actually a lot of hand-wringing going on at the moment about how we're going to stunt their growth, because they're so huge and vigorous that we don't have room for them anymore, already, well before the gardening season even begins.)

So far, only the yellow Calibrachoa variety has bloomed, which is strange. These are marketed to us as being nearly interchangeable except for bloom color, but clearly the different varieties have different ancestries, with different ideas about timing and conditions and such. Not so much as a bud on the coral, red, blue, pink, or 'Tequila Sunrise' (a color-changing speckled variety which is variously orange, pink and yellow), but the yellow ones have been blooming for a couple weeks now.

Pretty picture: Calibrachoa 'Callie Sunrise'

We didn't do so well with the Calibrachoa this spring. Some varieties did just fine, but a few of them went chlorotic (yellow) early in the season and then stayed that way; in the end we had to throw some of them out. This is, I'm told, something that happens with them a lot (Petunias too), and can be corrected if they're fed enough and at the right times.


We also brought in some prefinished baskets in various colors: we could, in theory, make our own, but for various reasons we'd never be able to get them presentable as early as we'd need to, so we buy them instead.

'Callie Sunrise' is a variety we didn't have in four-inch pots, one that came in only on the prefinished baskets. We did have 'Tequila Sunrise,' which is similar (a little pinker), and which was thankfully not one of the plants to go chlorotic on us. (It's a good seller; we had a lot of them.)


I liked the red ones better, myself, but any Calibrachoa in good condition is pretty striking.

Actually, any Calibrachoa in bad condition is striking too, as far as that goes.