Pretty picture: Cymbidium Atalanta (?)

[NOTE: today's post is not safe for work due to a 372-year-old painting and some language; proceed accordingly]

The only Cymbidium from the 2016 show was pretty, but kind of a nightmare to research.

The tag said "Atlanta," like the city in Georgia.

That's a perfectly sensible thing to name a Cymbidium, but the International Orchid Register didn't have it in their database. And it's ogooglebar, because any search for (Cymbidium + Atlanta) mostly gets you lists of places you can buy Cymbidiums in Atlanta, or photos of Cymbidium flowers that were taken in Atlanta.

If the IOR doesn't have an "Atlanta," that doesn't necessarily mean that no such plant exists: they're thorough, but I wouldn't expect them to have every single grex listed the moment it's official. So it's possible that this is, in fact, Cymbidium Atlanta, but I doubt it. In the seven months between first looking it up and writing this post, the IOR didn't add an "Atlanta," and they seem to be pretty on top of the names, in general, so there probably still isn't a "Cymbidium Atlanta."

There is, however, an AtAlanta, named after the mythological figure instead of the city in Georgia, and my guess is that that's probably what we're looking at here.

Atalanta is interesting.

She was a huntress and virgin, sworn to the goddess Artemis (the goddess of hunting and virgins, among other things,¹ so kind of a natural fit, there), but her father wanted her to get married. This, obviously, would have fucked with the whole virgin thing, plus there may have been a warning from an oracle that marrying would prove disastrous for her, so she declared that she would only marry a man who could beat her in a footrace, and that any man who failed to defeat her would be put to death. And everybody, apparently, nodded and was like, yup, that seems reasonable.² So. Many races and a pile of corpses later, eligible bachelor Hippomenes gets the idea to seek some outside assistance, so he goes to the goddess Aphrodite³ and says, hey, I want to get with this chick but she's not into me and I know I can't outrun her so what can I do?

Aphrodite says here, take these three irresistible golden apples, and when you run against her, just throw one of the apples in front of her whenever she gets ahead of you, and she'll stop and pick them up, giving you time to get back ahead of her. (And if you're wondering how he's supposed to be able to resist picking up these irresistible apples himself, I refer you back to footnote ².) So that's what Hippomenes does, and he manages to win the race by a hair,

The Race Between Atalanta and Hippomenes, 1644, Nicolas Colombel, Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna. From Wikipedia.
and Atalanta's like, well, a deal's a deal. So long, Artemis, see you when I give birth. And eventually Atalanta and Hippomenes have a son, who I'm guessing they didn't like very much because they named him Parthenopeus.

And then some time after that, Atalanta and Hippomenes both get changed into lions, because of course they did, though the details and reasons vary.⁴

Atalanta is, according to the IOR, a very old grex, dating to 1918, and a primary hybrid of Cymbidium erythrostylum (pink to white sepals, with red and white-striped petals) and Cymbidium lowianum (yellow to greenish-yellow, with some orange striping on the labellum). (Ref.) If the plant at the show was in fact Atalanta, then she mostly takes after Cymbidium erythrostylum.

I found a possible picture of Cymbidium Atalanta on an eBay-like site in Australia when I was researching all this in March, showing a pinkish-purple bloom with a white and dark red labellum. The tepals were longer and narrower than this plant, but the red spotting was in more or less the same location, so this is plausibly a different clone of the same cross. On the other hand, one never wants to put too much faith in photos posted by people selling stuff on-line, especially not at sites like eBay, so I'm not willing to treat that photo as confirmation of this plant's identity. But that photo was at least not wildly different from the plant I've got here, and Atalanta seems like a reasonable guess.

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¹ (Confusingly, the goddess of virgins was also the goddess of childbirth and midwifery.)
² It may help to think of ancient Greek myths as comic book / superhero movies: meant to entertain, so there are certain premises you just have to accept, and certain plot holes you just have to ignore, if you want to enjoy the story at all.
³ (the goddess of sexual love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, who as you can imagine had some issues with the goddess of hunting and virginity)
⁴ Mostly the stories agree that being turned into lions was punishment for boinking in a god's temple, though their motivation, and whose temple, vary from story to story. The most complicated of the stories has Aphrodite mad at Hippomenes because he failed to give her the proper respect after she helped him out with the apples and everything. So, as Atalanta and Hippomenes traveled somewhere together, they wound up stopping at one of the goddess Cybele's temples. Aphrodite, being the goddess of sex, made them super-horny, knowing that Cybele wouldn't like this. A. and H. boinked in the temple, and then Cybele was like HOW DARE YOU and turned them into lions.
Why lions? Well, apparently the thinking at the time was that lions couldn't reproduce by having sex with one another; you only got more lions if a lion got it on with a leopard. So changing a couple of people into a pair of lions because they had sex as humans was a way of ensuring that they would never be able to have sex with one another again. Which makes the whole thing sadder than it sounds at first. Though Cybele also appears to have just been really, really into lions, so maybe she changed everybody into lions, I don't know, I didn't look into it.
Why did the ancient Greeks believe that lions didn't / couldn't mate with other lions? Fuck if I know. My go-to theory for this kind of thing is that ancient people were drunk a lot and also not good noticers.

Pretty pictures: Cymbidium Yowie Flame

There never seem to be very many Cymbidiums at the orchid show.

According to the blog's Cymbidium tag, I got zero photos of Cymbidiums at the 2010 orchid show, one in 2011, one in 2012, one in 2013, and now the one in 2014.

What would explain this? Are they just uncool? (If so, why?) Is it hard to get them to bloom in March? 'Cause you can't tell me they're not pretty. And I know they're not significantly more expensive than some of the other kinds of orchids, or harder to find -- I've occasionally seen them for sale in stores around here. So why aren't they better represented at the show?

Cymbidium Yowie Flame = Cymbidium Tapestry x Cymbidium Sensation (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Cymbidium lowianum 'Pitts'

Pretty picture: Cymbidium NOID

Cymbidium NOID.
tag: none

wrong tags: 5
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 4

Pretty picture: Cymbidium NOID

This one was on a vendor table at the show, with no tag, so:

wrong tags: 3
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 2

I can't think of anything to say about this one. It's pretty much all there in the title.

Pretty picture: Cymbidium Starbright 'Sirius'

Lots of Cymbidiums for sale lately in the stores here, but they're all super-expensive. (The cheapest I saw was $50.) This means I will probably never find out whether I can grow a Cymbidium, but that's probably okay: based on my experiences with other orchids, I suspect the answer is yes, but not well.

I really like the way they look, though.

Pretty pictures: Cymbidium cvv.

Seen in Cedar Rapids last Friday, at a little florist's shop. The shop in question, Stejskal Florists, is one we'd happened upon once four years ago, looked at briefly, and then didn't go back to again. This is because it's small, and they didn't have much, and the other places of interest in Cedar Rapids are all on the other side of town -- it just wasn't worth it to go all the way across town to look at Stejskal's. But on Friday we went anyway, and they had Cymbidiums, and Cymbidiums are pretty.


Cymbidiums are also sometimes out of focus. So far they've also always been out of my price range, these two in particular (seriously, folks, florists are like the worst places to try to buy plants, if money is an issue), but someday I'd like to try growing one. I'm especially fond of the pink/red ones, like the one below:


I think we mostly just confused the florist when we came in; they don't, I guess, get a lot of people who are interested in looking at the (attached, slightly rickety) greenhouse, and I kind of assumed that we had permission to do this because someone had given permission four years ago, so there was some confusion at first. And then as we were leaving, she wanted to know whether we were with the nearby community college (which has a horticulture program, which is actually what we'd been checking out four years ago), so then there was another awkward moment, where I wasn't sure if explaining that I have a blog that eats pictures at a phenomenal rate will clarify anything for the person who's asking or just lead to more invasive questions about what, precisely, are these "blogs" of which I speak, and why would I need to take pictures for one, and so on. In this case, I mumbled something about having a blog, and she didn't push for further explanation but I felt embarrassed and weird anyway, so I turned to go, but then I was distracted by the pink Cymbidium and was compelled to stop and take photos of it, making an already-strange moment that much stranger. I did not leave the place feeling particularly suave, I guess is what I'm saying.

But I got a blog post out of it.

Seeing the Rabbits

Cymbidium NOID.
Oh, the sacrifices I make for my readers.

Convinced the husband to take me to see the rabbits¹ yesterday, in the hopes of getting interesting pictures of some kind from one of the garden centers there, to use as blog fodder. He had business at Lowe's besides, so the Cymbidium picture above was actually taken in the Coralville Lowe's, but it was the same trip so it still counts.

And I am here to report: everybody in the world has Schlumbergeras now. Also poinsettias. Prices vary enormously, though colors, strangely, do not. Poinsettias are pretty much restricted to red and pink; Schlumbergeras you can get in white, hot pink, and red, and if you're lucky enough to be in the right store, salmon. It seems like there were more choices, for both plants, this time last year. Am I wrong?

Also, most of the non-box store businesses are running sales now. That doesn't matter as much as you'd think it would, though.

Store A has 50% off houseplants and orchids, which might make their (ordinarily insane) prices borderline reasonable, though they were incredibly disappointing, for the second visit in a row. I went in hoping to see that they still had a variegated Agave I'd been interested in but declined to buy the first time (sadly, they didn't have it anymore).

Then there's the price tags thing. About 2/3 of the plants there aren't priced at all. No tags, no stickers, no signs, nothing. Sure, I could take the plant up to the front counter and ask the employees how much it is, over and over, for each plant I find interesting, but screw that. I'm the customer; I'm not interested in doing extra work in order to buy from you. I've already come 50 miles (80 km) just to stand in your stinking greenhouse; you could meet me halfway by letting me know your prices.

At the very least they could make signs ("6-inch tropicals $22.99," e.g.), if stickering everything individually is too much work. Unlike a lot of customers, I'm willing to read signs, and I'll even seek them out, sometimes, if I have a question about stuff. But no. Not even signs.

Also, Store A, as long as I'm here, it'd also probably be a good idea not to talk to your employees about spraying for whitefly when there's a customer in the next greenhouse over, with no walls between us. 'Cause I can hear you when you speak out loud, you know, especially when you're using your authoritative, booming boss voice, and I know what whitefly is. I mean, geez, guys, I want to support independent, family-owned businesses, and I know you've had an exceptionally rough last couple years, but remembering when you have customers in the store is really simple, obvious stuff, and this isn't the first time. Last time you made me listen to an extended, one-sided cell phone conversation with a lost delivery driver. And I haaaaaate listening to other people's cell conversations. Get it together already.

Store B, on the other hand, is slicker than a slug covered in vaseline, and have all their Christmas stuff laid out all nice and neat, everything sparkly and twinkly and covered in blinking lights to within an inch of its life. If a Cedar Rapidian volcano spewed Christmas, instead of molten rock, Store B looked like it'd been caught in the pyroclastic flow. Store B wasn't discounting houseplants at all, and in fact appear to have raised their prices since I was last there, which is an interesting choice during a recession.²

They also had Christmas music on already, which, as it always does, made me want to strangle puppies. We fled immediately, leaving only a cloud of red glitter where we'd been standing.

And then there is Store C. Store C is small, compared to the others, and has about the same floorspace devoted to houseplants that Store B does, and maybe 25% of the floorspace Store A has. They also occasionally have some bug problems (mostly mealybugs), so I've learned to check the plants pretty carefully before bringing them home.

However. They're also very very cheap (ordinarily about half the price of the larger garden centers), and, more importantly, they appreciate the value of bringing in weird plants, so they're the most likely, always, to have something I don't already have, at a price I can afford. Additionally, when I visited yesterday, they were running a 30% off sale, which they seem to be doing about every second time I visit.

And no Christmas music! and very limited Christmas decor! And they've never been pushy about "do you need any help?" or given me unsolicited, condescending advice about how to take care of what I'm buying.

So I bought two plants at Store C.³ And I would do it again. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth checking Store A anymore, when we see the rabbits. I ordinarily don't bother to check Store B (and now know not to again until January).

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¹ (= go to Cedar Rapids)
² Is it okay to start calling it a depression yet? I mean seriously. We just found out yesterday that my mother-in-law was laid off from her job. My mother doesn't work, never has, and Dad told me last week that the orders at his factory are way down, compared to previous years. He's got decent seniority, so he's unlikely to be laid off, but they appear to be cutting everybody's hours back. And of course things can still get worse.
³ A 3" Haworthia NOID and a 4" Pellaea rotundifolia. I'm uneasy about the Pellaea, but I've considered buying one periodically and held off because of concerns about whether I would just be throwing my money away. This particular plant wound up costing me about $3.50, which I figure is roughly what it would have been from Lowe's, so it's a fairly small risk. We'll see. Pictures eventually, maybe.