Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon

And now we have the first orchid of the 2016 show. I don't think this happened deliberately, but it seems somehow fitting that the year begin with Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon, who has also appeared in 2014 and 2015. (The 2015 pictures are the best set.)

I-Hsin Balloon is probably the Phalaenopsis I most covet, from all the ones I've seen at the show.¹ I'm also happy to see it show up for a third consecutive year -- it's weird, because normally I'm all about seeing new stuff, but there are a few plants I look forward to seeing at the shows, and I-Hsin Balloon is one of those.²

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon = Phalaenopsis Sogo Lisa x Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Gem (Ref.)

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¹ (Though arguments could also be made in favor of Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight', Brother Goldstone, Brother Sara Gold, and the last NOID from this set.
I probably don't covet any of them enough to actually buy them, though. Partly this is because I don't really buy plants anymore, except for the occasional Anthurium or Schlumbergera, and partly it wouldn't make any sense to bring new orchids in, because I'm not a competent orchid grower.)
² The king of repeats is Guarianthe aurantiaca, which I've gotten photos of every year except for 2013. (I imagine it was probably there in 2013 too, and I just missed it.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon

So at the show this year there were two specimens of I-Hsin Balloon, and just like last year, I loved them both. Something about this particular hybrid really does it for me.

I was also pleased to note that the name on both was "Balloon," though I sort of knew before I even got to the show that that was likely how the tags would read.¹ A couple days prior to the show, I got this comment on the 2014 post from "Marcia:"

I own this plant and I registered it exactly as Hausermann's label stated...it will be in the 2015 show at Wallace's...sure like to know who you are.

Which I'm not really that interested in whose fault it is that it was tagged incorrectly, since it's easy enough to see how it could have gotten changed. It's easy to drop (or add) a double letter. A smudge or piece of dirt could turn a lowercase "n" into a lowercase "r" easily enough, and while in most contexts "ballor" would be a nonsense word, it's not like "I-Hsin" is everyday English, either.

So anyway. I would like it if sellers, in particular, would treat plant names as important enough to double-check. I feel like the ID is part of the product, and if you can't be bothered to proofread your tags before you send plants out, that says something about what else you might be skipping over on your way to make a buck.² I can't say that I've ever declined to buy something I wanted solely because of mistagging, but it does get me to look more closely at a plant, and often if the ID is wrong, there's something else wrong with the plant too.

It would be nice, also, if exhibitors in orchid shows would also double-check names, since orchid shows are a big place where the general public gets exposed to orchids, and if they see a plant they like and want one just like it, it's helpful to be able to search for it by its actual name. Plus, you would think that if awards are being given out, it'd be extra important to make sure that you have the names right. If you can get a blue ribbon for growing the biggest, most colorful, most beautiful Neostylis anyone's ever seen, but it's actually a Laeliocattleya, clearly something's gone wrong with the show.³ But Marcia says that was how the tag had it, and I don't doubt her, so whatever. It'd be nice, but it's not that big of a deal.

In any case. I left Marcia a comment back at last year's post, but she didn't respond, so we still haven't met. We could have -- at the show, I knew who she was,⁴ and I could have gone up and introduced myself -- but 1) I wasn't feeling especially social that day to begin with, no reason, just sometimes I wake up not wanting to deal with people and that was one of those days,⁵ 2) call me paranoid, but "sure like to know who you are" sounds a little ominous if you read it the right way,⁶ and 3) when I first saw her, she had kind of a sour expression on her face, which is understandable in that by this point the show had been going on for several hours already, and I imagine it's kind of exhausting to be part of an orchid show even if you're an extrovert and you like being in orchid shows. I mean, I assume she's probably a perfectly nice person and she would almost certainly not have gotten me banned for life from the orchid show or framed me for murder or anything like that. But given 1) and 2), I had pretty much decided that I wasn't going to say hi anyway, so it didn't take much of a push to make that decision final. Next year, maybe.

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon = Phalaenopsis Sogo Lisa x Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Gem (Ref.)

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¹ Still with the "Dtps.," though, which is no longer accurate. Though given that botanical genus names have been in upheaval for several years now, and occasionally revert to their original designations, I can understand not leaping to correct it to "Phal." immediately.
² Though even there, things will happen that are out of your control. I've complained a number of times about the Exotic Angel brand (started by Hermann Engelmann Greenhouses -- apparently in order to sell plants you have to have a double-N in your name somewhere, which is why I'm thinking about changing my name to Mr. Subjunnctive -- but Engelmann was purchased last year by Costa Farms) being terrible at getting IDs correct, and I think mostly that's because Engelmann didn't give a shit, but, it's also the case that customers will switch tags around, with or without malicious intent, or that a tray of plants will get knocked over and dumped out on the floor on the day when the person who knows what everything isn't scheduled to work.
It remains to be seen whether Costa will do a better job with the tagging than Engelmann did, though I am not optimistic, considering my previous interactions with them: see the Strelitzia incident or the more recent Anthurium incident.
³ Not that anyone would make that particular error: I'm using a deliberately ridiculous example. But you see the sort of thing I mean.
⁴ (Name tag, plus looking for Marcias on the Illowa Orchid Society's web page to confirm a surname)
⁵ Those days are becoming more frequent as I get older, a troubling trend when extrapolated into my 80s. I blame Facebook.
Not because Facebook necessarily has anything to do with it; I'm just trying out this thing where when I don't like something, I hold Facebook responsible for it. You'd be surprised how often Facebook-blaming makes sense.
Though now that I think about it, by the time I'm in my 80s, I will likely be dead, living in a radioactive hellscape searching through debris for small rodents to eat, or in a robot-staffed nursing home, and in all of those situations, being antisocial is unlikely to be my worst problem.
⁶ "Dr. ChaosDoom, stroking the Siamese cat in his lap and smirking at the video monitor, said 'I'd sure like to know who you are' to Captain HeroGuy. Outside, thunder crashed."
This reading is maybe even more understandable if you imagine that Captain HeroGuy had been complaining, a lot, and in public, about Dr. ChaosDoom's 2011 and 2012 world-domination plans being really poorly-spelled and factually inaccurate.

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Shu Long Black Jack

Don't know the ancestry on this one; there's a Phalaenopsis Shu King, but I couldn't locate any Dtps. Shu anything, much less Shu Long Black Jack, on the orchid registry. 'Course, I haven't looked since March, when I uploaded this, so it's possible that there's something there now.

Ordinarily I might go check on that, but I am exhausted, having put together a blog post for Friday that's not an orchid post. You know, like somebody who writes a general houseplant blog would.

And then there are plans to make even more non-orchid posts for like a week and a half in December, though that depends on me getting some photos together that I have not actually gotten together yet. And also you should probably not get your hopes up, in terms of post variety or quality. But even so -- new things to look at, on a more or less daily basis, soonish. It's pretty exciting, really. Assuming I can get it all together in time.

Pretty pictures: Doritaenopsis I-Hsin Ballor [Balloon?]

Still oiling the plants in the basement. This is going . . . okay. Both Breynia distichas have responded to the oil by dropping about 50-75% of their leaves, which is unfortunate. Though I knew there'd be some plant that had problems with it.

I had expected the Agave victoriae-reginaes to object to the oil, since they'd had problems with the neem oil two years ago. But apparently that was something specific to the neem, not oil in general, because they're fine.

All the Anthuriums have been oiled twice so far (maybe three times by the time you read this; I am supposed to spray them a third time on Monday), and I haven't seen any scale since I started. That's not necessarily due to the oil; I wasn't seeing scale regularly in the first place. It nevertheless seems like a good sign. I saw a couple thrips right after the first spraying, and I think I saw another couple after the second spraying as well. At the time, that was depressing, but considering how many I ran into before the first spraying, I'm thinking now that it's a serious improvement, if I have to search and search just to find two.

I've also updated the "plants I've tried" list, just under the header, for the first time in like seven months, and added a "cause of death" line for the many, many plants on that list that I am no longer growing. So if you've sent me a plant at some point in the past, and you're curious about whether or not it's still alive but you don't want to ask me directly because that would sound accusatory, now you can find out its fate without having to ask.

In our regularly-scheduled orchid news, we have another name problem. But the actual bloom is pleasant:

So the problem with the name is that although the orchid registry knows of lots of cultivars with "I-Hsin" somewhere in the name (these are apparently all bred by the same person, W. T. Chien), "I-Hsin Ballor" is not one of them. I-Hsin Ballerina looks very different, when you search Google for images, and I-Hsin Balloon is not exactly the same but is a lot closer to my pictures. So my guess here is that this is actually I-Hsin Balloon, and somebody in the long chain of transcriptions that runs between W. T. Chien and the Illowa Orchid Society has really bad handwriting, or needs glasses, or something.

There's still one point of confusion, though, even if we accept this as I-Hsin Balloon, which is that the orchid registry lists Doritaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon as Phalaenopsis Sogo Lisa x Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Gem (Ref.), neither of which are Doritis or Doritaenopsis, so exactly where do they get off calling the progeny of that cross a Doritaenopsis? I'm choosing to deal with this discrepancy by pretending that I didn't notice, and I encourage you to do the same.

(Actually, there's a debate about whether or not Doritis is even a real genus, so probably what's happened is that the source for the information on the parentage and the source for the grex name disagree on the Doritis question, leading to a Doritaenopsis with no Doritis ancestry. I am usually a splitter, when it comes to taxonomic issues, but on the Doritis / Phalaenopsis question I'm a lumper, because Doritis sounds to me like a skin disease that causes one's skin to form orange triangular scales with a cheese-flavored covering, and I would just as soon not have to deal with that mental image.)

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Chain Xen Pearl 'Ming Ho'

Doritaenopsis Chain Xen Pearl 'Ming Ho' = Doritaenopsis Ching Hua Spring x Doritaenopsis Nobby's Pink Lady (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Ox Firebird 'OX1495'

I go back and forth on whether or not I like this kind of Phalaenopsis flower. Currently I'm thinking it seems a little busy.



Scalepocalypse 2012 update:

Aloe striata (1 Sep 2012, plant room) -- discarded because the infestation was pretty far along, and because the plant had sort of outgrown its spot anyway and I had already been toying with the idea of throwing it out.
Philodendron 'Congo Green' (1 Sep 2012, plant room) -- only one actual insect spotted, so I neemed it.

Apparently the scale on the Alpinia was not as confined to the Alpinia as I'd thought, as these two were both in the same general area. Other plants in the vicinity have been pre-emptively sprayed.

*sigh*

Rumble Among the Jungle, Match 5.2

Results of match 4.6:
Oncidium alliance orchids barely managed a victory over Sansevieria trifasciata cvv.. The final vote was 61-59.

Today's match has me very nervous.

Match 5.2
Phalaenopsis and Doritaenopsis cvv. (moth orchid) vs. Schlumbergera cvv. (holiday/Thanksgiving/Christmas cactus)

(All unidentified Phalaenopsis cvv.)

Center and top left: Schlumbergera 'Caribbean Dancer;' others are NOID.

Rumble Among the Jungle, Match 4.3

The outcomes for matches 3.13 and 3.14:

The outcome of match 3.13 was pretty easy to call in advance: Haworthia spp. built a commanding lead over Adenium obesum and then held on to it, eventually winning 66 to 46.

Match 3.14, on the other hand, was ridiculously close through the whole voting period, and the lead flipped back and forth between Cycas revoluta and the self-heading Philodendrons ('Autumn,' 'Prince of Orange,' 'Moonlight') several times. At the buzzer, the Philodendrons had a three-vote lead, 58-55, so they will advance to the fourth round. Sorry, cycad fans.

Haworthia spp. and the self-heading Philodendrons will square off in match 4.7. Voting begins on 29 October.

And now, the match of the day.

Match 4.3
Phalaenopsis and Doritaenopsis cvv. (moth orchid) vs. Hoya carnosa cvv. (wax plant)

(All unidentified Phalaenopsis cvv.)

Clockwise from top left: Hoya carnosa 'Krimson Princess,' 'Chelsea,' all-green revert of 'Krimson Princess,' 'Krimson Queen.'

Rumble Among the Jungle, Matches 3.5 and 3.6

Rules and Stuff
1) It's probably possible to vote more than once per poll, but please don't. If I believe that someone is voting repeatedly, I will throw out those results, repost the poll, and seriously question that person's priorities.
2) If you want to link to a poll on Twitter / Facebook / your blog / whatever and encourage your friends to come and pump up the support for your favorite plants, you are encouraged to do so.
3) You are also encouraged to leave comments on Rumble posts, if so moved.
4) All photos will enlarge if opened in a separate window/tab.
5) You can choose which plant is "best" according to whatever criteria you decide for yourself. My personal process is a bit convoluted.¹
6) All polls will be open for three days.

The results for matches 2.25 to 2.28:

Adenium obesum scored a solid victory over Zamioculcas zamiifolia in match 2.25, winning by 61 to 43.
Ficus benjamina lost match 2.26 to Haworthia spp. by a similar margin (40 to 66).
Adenium obesum will now face Haworthia spp. in match 3.13; voting begins October 21.

It looked like Cycas revoluta had match 2.27 all sewn up after about the first 24 hours of voting, but Tradescantia zebrina surged a bit in the last two days. Tradescantia still lost, but it was close: 56 to 50.
The self-heading Philodendrons beat Tillandsia cyanea in round 2.28, 54 to 45.

Cycas revoluta goes up against the self-heading Philodendrons in match 3.14 (the Pi Match!), also on October 21.

And now, today's third-round excitement:

Match 3.5
Phalaenopsis and Doritaenopsis cvv. (moth orchid) vs. Araucaria heterophylla (norfolk island pine)

(All unidentified Phalaenopsis cvv.)

Top: young Araucaria heterophylla. Bottom: mature A. heterophylla.





Match 3.6
Cereus peruvianus (peruvian apple cactus) vs. Hoya carnosa cvv. (wax plant)

L-R: Cereus peruvianus monstrose, C. peruvianus, C. peruvianus 'Spiralis.'

Clockwise from top left: Hoya carnosa 'Krimson Princess,' 'Chelsea,' all-green revert of 'Krimson Princess,' 'Krimson Queen.'





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¹ I'm deciding according to a hypothetical situation in which all of my houseplants are gone, as are all the other houseplants of the world, except for one producer/supplier/retailer. Said person is offering to restock me with one or the other of the plants in question but refuses to give me both. Which one would I choose?

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Chain Xen Queen 'A0-175'

Blargh. Another Phalaenopsis. Even if it's a Doritaenopsis.

Though I suppose I shouldn't complain so much about Phalaenopsis. Mine's still alive, and it's even growing a new leaf as of about a week or two ago. It's not a rebloom, but I'm suddenly doubting that orchids do rebloom. My observations show that they flower once, then die. (Sometimes very slowly, though. Like bromeliads.) Everybody else in the world is obviously mistaken.

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Happy Valentine x Phalaenopsis New Eagle

Phalaenopsis¹ don't normally do that much for me. Nothing actually wrong with them, but I've seen a lot of them, I've picked up dropped flowers from a lot of them, I've watched quite a few of them die, I've seen a couple produce keiki,² and by this point I feel like I've pretty much seen everything a Phalaenopsis -- at least the commercially viable ones -- is capable of doing.

This one is not hugely different either, but it's different enough to bother with: I hadn't seen this paint-dipped effect before. Don't know that I particularly like it, but I hadn't seen it before.

It's sort of terrible, by the way, to be an orchid snob already when I've only ever owned seven orchids, two of which are dead.³ I feel like I should have paced myself better, or something.

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¹ I know, this is Doritaenopsis, but the two names are pretty nearly interchangeable, Doritis being a genus of orchids which some taxonomists consider synonymous with Phalaenopsis anyway.
² As noted in the Phalaenopsis profile, the word keiki is both singular and plural in the original Hawaiian, so it's respectful, if not required, to use it the same way in English. Not everybody does, so one does see "keikis," and in the grand scheme of things the decision of whether to add an "s" to keiki is trivial, but I try to use it in the original Hawaiian way, both out of respect for the culture and because that way I get to write nitpicky footnotes about formation of plurals. And when I get to write nitpicky footnotes, then we all win.
³ In chronological order: Ludisia (R.I.P.), Dendrobium, Dendrobium, Brassolaeliocattleya, Paphiopedilum, Phalaenopsis, Oncidium (R.I.P.). Though to be fair, the Ludisia stuck around for a long time, and only died because of a bad repotting decision, and the Oncidium was unwell to begin with. So.