[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XLIX

Goodness. It's been so long since I did a transmitted light post that I don't even remember how I'm supposed to do them.

Actually no, that's not true. It's only been like five months. But it'd been nine months before that. I'm definitely a little rusty.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Schlumbergera truncata NOID, phylloclade. Though Schlumbergeras are not quite as abundant in the house as the Anthuriums, they've getting there. The most recent stats for the collection: 959 plants total, 198 Anthurium seedlings (21% of total), 116 Schlumbergera seedlings (12%). None of this changes the fact that they make lousy transmitted light subjects.

Philodendron [erubescens?] 'Golden Emerald.' I don't know what the deal is with this one; it never seems to photograph as bright and saturated as it actually is. It's really much prettier than this in person.

Brassolaeliocattleya Helen Brown. Probably by now it's not Brassolaeliocattleya anymore, but who has time to keep track of these things.

Iris ensata variegata. I have no memory of seeing a variegated Iris of any kind, anywhere. I mean, I know they exist; it's just that this photo is the only evidence I have that I've ever seen one. I didn't even take a photo of the whole plant, so there's no context for this picture. It's a weird feeling.

Salvia elegans. On Sunday, I semi-accidentally wound up looking at some of the pictures of the Salvia elegans we planted in the yard a couple years ago, when it was huge and in full bloom, and: I'm afraid we're just going to have to do that again. Even though I no longer seem to be capable of overwintering them. (Probably the basement is too warm now, what with all the lights.)

Callisia repens.

Tradescantia zebrina. I didn't actually intend for this to wind up next to the Callisia, but it's an interesting comparison, since they have a nearly identical growth habit.

Caladium NOID. Not one of my best Caladium pictures, but with Caladiums, even a bad picture is still okay.

Quercus sp., autumn.

Stromanthe sanguinea 'Triostar.'

Sick Day / Callisia gentlei

Not feeling well on Thursday. Here are two pictures of a plant that is probably Callisia gentlei.

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XLIII

This week looks like it's going to be busy for me again. I couldn't bring myself to water yesterday or Sunday, it looks like I'm going to be going in to Iowa City again on Wednesday, and if I don't hurry up and get busy putting some of my plants up on Craigslist I'm never going to manage to sell them all. (I'm still selling plants, by the way.) Therefore, transmitted light photos.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

P. S.: For anyone who was wondering: Sheba appears to be just fine, without any intervention at all. There was a piece of the nail still hanging off when we first discovered the problem, and we'd assumed that we'd have to take her to the vet to get it removed on Monday, but it disappeared on its own on Sunday. She still didn't like us getting near it on Sunday, but as of Monday she wasn't being protective of the foot anymore. So we're assuming that it's resolved itself, though we'll keep an eye on it for a couple more days just in case.

Bergenia 'Rosi Klose.' I'm not particularly familiar with Bergenia, although I probably should be (this picture was taken at the ex-job, and I assume they had them when I worked there).

Polypodium grandiceps. Surprisingly good houseplant for me so far, though if the plant dries out too much, any unfurling, immature fronds turn black and die, and that's happened a few times. It's also a little on the big side, though mine's not as big as the Phlebodium aureum 'Mandianum.' At least not yet.

Tolmiea menziesii.

Callisia repens.

Morus sp. Very happy with the way this one turned out, plain green though it may be.

Codiaeum variegatum NOID. Some part of me still feels like croton pictures are cheating.

Strelitzia reginae. A particularly fun transmitted light subject. S. nicolai has the same basic structure, but the cross veins are a lot less visible, so it looks more like stripes than like a bunch of little rectangles. Or at least I think that's how it works.

Acer sp., autumn.

Peperomia caperata.

Caladium 'Fire Chief.' Caladiums really suck indoors (at least they always have for me), which is a pity. I would love to be able to grow something like this in the house. Unfortunately, it's too cold in here (year round), and probably also not bright enough. I sort of intended to get some to plant in containers outside this year, but didn't get around to it, or couldn't afford it, or something. Perhaps next year.

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XXXIX

It's hard to follow the plant profiles. Even when it's not a great profile, I've put enough effort into it that I usually don't have time to come up with something else. So: transmitted light photos.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Peperomia orba. I don't know why this wound up being such a crappy picture; the leaves are thick, but I've gotten better pictures with thicker leaves before. Unlucky, perhaps.

Taraxacum officinale. This one, on the other hand, is unpleasant because it was taken at the end of fall and the leaf in question was old. There may have been mildew on it too.

Senecio macroglossus.

Fragaria x 'Fort Laramie,' autumn. I was reminded last fall how brilliant the colors can be on strawberry plants. One of those things I knew at one time but forgot about.

Callisia repens.

Colocasia esculenta. If you only concentrate on the darker areas around the main veins, this sort of looks like a few very carefully-arranged green feathers.

Caladium 'Cardinal.'

Weigela florida 'Alexandra.' If I'm reading correctly, the on-line consensus is that this is the same as 'Wine and Roses.' Looks pretty, whatever you call it. A little dark for the yard, maybe.

Stromanthe sanguinea 'Triostar.' These often turn out nicely, but I rarely think that the photo came out looking like the leaf actually looked in person. This one isn't quite right either (though it's still a nice picture).

Quercus sp., autumn. I have a lot of autumn Quercus photos stockpiled; this isn't the best one by a long shot, but it's still my favorite from this set.

The Quad City Botanical Center, Part 1 of However Many

As I mentioned a while ago, there's a Botanical Center in the Quad Cities, the "Quad City Botanical Center." (Whimsical!) Somehow I'd never heard of it before the husband told me about it this past summer. And I know you would expect me to be bouncing off the walls until we were able to visit, but I actually forgot about it for several months, and only remembered I knew about the place when the husband raised the subject a couple weeks ago.

Botanical gardens are strange mixes of things I like and things I don't. On the one hand: plants. Plants are good. But then there's the part where you don't get to take home the ones you like. Even if you offer to pay for them. It took an enormous amount of focus and self-control, for example, not to leave the QCBC with a couple of Begonia leaves. Also, I'm fairly convinced that I will die, or at least become gravely ill, if I do not very soon get a variegated Callisia fragrans like the ones they have there.

Variegated Callisia fragrans.
Botanical centers are also weird places for me because I have so many plants, and have seen so many others, that my perspective is very warped about what counts as a cool plant. A gigantic, healthy Monstera deliciosa like this one --

Monstera deliciosa, split-leaf philodendron.
leaves me kind of cold. You know, big whoop, I have three of those at home. (Not as big or as nice. Not by a long shot. But a plant I'm very familiar with, even so.) I'm not saying this is desirable. It's just, you know, over time, it takes weirder and rarer things to get me excited.

So I don't know whether my opinion on the place can, or even ought to, matter to anybody, but having said that, I was pleasantly surprised by the QCBC. Part of the good thing about botanical centers, as opposed to retail, is that retail is fairly homogenized. No matter where you go, you find more or less the same set of plants over and over, and ordering is constrained by what's available and what will sell (jade plants, peace lilies, Dracaena marginata, pothos, lucky bamboo) than what the person doing the ordering finds interesting. On the other hand, botanical gardens, like home gardens, can cater a little more specifically to an individual's tastes and whims, which I suggest is a Good Thing, even if you aren't the individual being catered to.

So my guess is that someone at the QCBC has a special fondness for shrimp plants (Pachystachys, Justicia), plants in the Maranta family (Calathea, Ctenanthe), and . . . well, I'm not sure what you'd call the third category. We'll get to it.

I saw at least three shrimp plants, but only two were identified.

Pachystachys lutea, lollipop plant.
I was familiar with P. lutea from the garden center where I used to work. We never had any that were that big, though, and I was never that impressed with them. I get the appeal more now.

The second shrimp plant was one I hadn't heard of before.

Pachystachys coccinea.
Pachystachys coccinea inflorescence, close-up.

It might impress you more if it had been blooming as heavily as the P. lutea, but you get the idea from the close-up, I'm sure.

The picture of the third shrimp didn't turn out well; I was having to fight screwy afternoon light, shaky hands, and a lens that kept trying to fog up. So maybe next time on that one.

The Marantaceae plants were mostly Calatheas, with just one Ctenanthe I remember --

Ctenanthe lubbersiana.
-- but they made up for it by including two Calatheas I'd never seen or heard of. The QCBC gets big, big points for C. majestica:

Calathea majestica.

though they lose some points for making me look up the ID. (ID signs were sort of inconsistently placed, and often covered by the plants they were supposed to identify, which I suppose is the sort of problem botanical-garden-type places would have a lot.) There was also a large, sort of plain NOID, which didn't photograph well:

Calathea NOID.
And another one I had to look up, which I think is Calathea 'Wilson['s?] Princep.'

Calathea 'Wilson['s?] Princep.'
Unfortunately, there weren't any very large specimens of 'Wilson Princep,' and the ones that did exist were in weird, hard-to-photograph locations underneath lots of other plants, so I'll have to try again on this photo, maybe.

The final group of plants I want to cover for this post are all commercial plants, things I mainly knew from ingredient lists. The QCBC had several of them. They weren't nearly as pretty as the shrimps and the Calatheas, but I at least have mental images for some of these plants that I didn't have before.

First up, annatto (Bixa orellana). I realized while there that I knew the word, but had no idea what annatto actually is, or is used for. (Probably you know already, but if you're like I was: it's both a spice and a yellow to orange food coloring, particularly common in cheese, says Wikipedia.) The plant itself wasn't terribly impressive, though with a lot of these plants, I have no idea whether the specimen at the QCBC was particularly large or healthy.

Bixa orellana, annatto.
They also had vanilla (Vanilla planifolia), coffee (Coffea arabica), and sapodilla (Manilara zapota, which used to produce the base for chewing gum: gum is now, wikiposedly, mostly produced from artificial polymers), which I didn't take pictures of: I have a Coffea, the Vanilla wasn't that impressive and anyway I've seen them before, and for some reason it didn't occur to me to take a picture of the Manilara, though I remember thinking about it. Supposedly they had allspice (Pimenta dioica), cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) and bay (Laurus nobilis) too, though I don't remember seeing any of them.

I did get a picture of cacao (chocolate; Theobroma cacao), though I was a little let down; I expected more:

Theobroma cacao, cacao (chocolate) tree.
And the papaya (Carica papaya) was respectable, I guess. Only one I've ever seen in person, anyway.

Carica papaya, papaya.
Finally, they had a couple smallish ylang-ylang (Cananga odorata) plants. Fairly nondescript,

Canana odorata, ylang-ylang.
though there was one flower. (I think it may have dropped off the stem already, and just happened to catch in part of the plant, but if it was a dead flower, it still looked pretty. I couldn't detect a smell, which supports the dead-flower theory.)

Cananga odorata flower.
In the next couple posts, I'll take a look at the really big plants they had, some oddities which pleased me, and a few really impressive specimens of plants I already knew about. I'm tentatively planning Part 2 for 7 December, though that depends on me being able to write and sort pictures and etc. a bit more quickly than usual, so try not to be too disappointed with me if I make you wait a few days longer than that.

Random plant event: Callisia fragrans flowers

We saw a flower bud beginning to form on this plant in January, and ever since, I've been patiently waiting for the flowers to appear. I hadn't seen this before, even online (not a clear and detailed picture, anyway), so I wasn't sure what to expect, but based on its relatives (Tradescantia, the other Tradescantia, Cyanotis), I was expecting little three-petaled flowers that would last for a day, and based on its name ("fragrans"), I expected the flowers to be scented.

Some of this turned out to be correct. The first flowers opened for real on Valentine's Day, and were not three-petaled (at least not obviously so), and I'm not sure how long they actually last.


But they were scented. It's a lot less intense than I had expected. Three sites on line claim that the flowers smell like honey, which . . . um . . . no. I don't think so. I mean, maybe they develop a honey smell over time or something, but at least for the first few days, they smelled more or less like hyacinths, though much less intense. Hyacinths that are very far away, maybe.

The flowers also open and close daily: I'm not sure when they open, but by about 4 PM, they look more like this:


Also, scent production seems to shut down around 4 PM too, though you can still smell it a little. It's not clear whether new flowers open and close every day, or if some of these are opening and closing several days in a row. (Individual Tradescantia flowers, I believe, are only open for one day: they just make a lot of them, in the same place, over and over, so it appears to be the same flower multiple times.)

The Callisia flowers are on a long stalk (maybe 18 inches / 46 cm?) that bobs around relentlessly if there's even the slightest breeze, so they're a pain to photograph. To get the two pictures here, I had to take about 60. They're also so small by comparison to the plant that there's no good way to take a photo of both plant and flowers simultaneously, which is why there isn't a picture like that here.

Little bunches of flowers appear at intervals down the stalk; so far, there are two on the stalk that have actually opened, and another two that look like they're still developing.

That's about it for the report. If they start smelling like honey, I'll be sure to let you know.

Random plant event: Callisia fragrans flower bud

The winter of previously-unseen flowers continues, apparently, with Callisia fragrans. Supposedly, one needs greenhouse-like conditions in order to get these to bloom indoors, or at least that's what Google says Glasshouse Works used to say. I don't think the plant room is really all that greenhousey, or at least it's not as greenhousey as I would like sometimes, but clearly it's working out somewhat.


I've never seen the flowers before in person; I've barely ever even seen the plant. WCW has a very large one, and obviously I have one (which I obtained through a trade), but I've never seen one for sale in a store. I like the plant, but I kind of understand why they're not more common: its habit is weird, and kind of unwieldy: little rosettes of leaves at the end of crazy-long runners that flop all over and get tangled in things. Still. The flowers are supposed to be fragrant, and it's incredibly easy to grow. I'll let you know if it lives up to the hype when they open.