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

Five green pictures, five orange pictures.

As I write this, I have no idea how yesterday's election went, but the odds are that I was pleasantly surprised by something and unpleasantly surprised by something else. Since bad news always hits me harder than good, this means I'm probably in a bad mood today. I mean, I saw a "vote no on retention of activist judges" sign¹ yesterday in someone's yard while walking Sheba, and it ruined a good chunk of my late morning / early afternoon. And that was just one guy. So today is probably not a good day for me. Be gentle.

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

Persea americana. We started a couple avocado trees from seed during the winter, less because I had a burning desire to grow avocados than because the husband likes to eat them. One is doing pretty well; I'm having trouble communicating with the other. I pinch it, it grows back one replacement growing tip. I pinch that tip, and it grows one replacement. The first plant understood that it was supposed to branch; I'm not sure why the second one is having such a hard time with the idea.

Unknown Cirsium sp. I was more certain about IDing this as a Cirsium then than I am now.

Salvia elegans, dead(ish) leaf. Arguably closer to pink than to orange, but whatever. When I first put the Salvia elegans outside last spring, some of the leaves turned weird colors from the cold. This is one of those. Not really pretty, exactly, but it's something I didn't know this plant could do.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Rustic Orange.' Not especially pretty, but I think the irregular red spots on the underside of the leaf were odd enough to call your attention to.

Populus deltoides. Fairly similar to yesterday's Liriodendron tulipifera photo.

Ambrosia trifida. Probably the prettiest ragweed-related photo you're going to see all month. Lucky you!

Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana.' Pretty much what you'd expect it to look like, I suppose. The main motivation for taking the picture was that this is a plant we cut back, and the newly-sprouting leaves, once they reached full-size again, looked very pretty.

Malus sp. My favorite from this batch. For some reason, I even kind of dig the blurry bits on the sides.

Zingiber malaysianum. The range of colors I get out of this plant continues to please me. I wish there were some way to do them all at once.

Heuchera 'Venus.' I prefer this to yesterday's Heuchera photo, though not by a lot. There are some very nice Heuchera varieties that are really plain by transmitted light; this isn't one of them.

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¹ (Translation for non-Iowans: "How dare the Iowa Supreme Court try to tell me f*gg*ts are people!")

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

Transmitted Light Week continues!

I think I may be self-sabotaging: on yesterday's walk with Sheba, I wound up collecting several dead leaves. Brought them home, and then spent half an hour or so taping them to the kitchen window, getting pictures, and pulling them down. I think I probably got enough photos yesterday that I technically lost ground. (I may have gone a little nuts with the oaks.) But oh well. I'll still be ahead for the week.

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

Iris cv. There seems to be some kind of mathematical pattern to how lit up the different veins are, but I can't quite figure out what it is.

Rheum sp. Whatever. A lot of transmitted light photos wind up looking like this.

Acer platanoides key, red cv. This seemed like a good idea at the time, though now that I look at it again, six months later, I'm not sure I like it. In person, it was very pretty, though. I guess the camera didn't capture what I was hoping to capture.

Philodendron bipinnatifidum (?) 'Spicy Dog.' From the venation, I think it probably is either P. bipinnatifidum or a hybrid of something with P. bipinnatifidum: it looks very much the same, except that P. bipinnatifidum's leaves are more deeply split. The plant is growing fine for me inside, though it's getting to the point where I think I'm going to have to find it another spot already: it's gotten big fast.

Iresine herbstii 'Blazin' Rose.' I like this photo better than the Iresine picture from Sunday.

Unknown Spiraea cv. I wouldn't have had any idea on the ID for this plant had it not been flowering when I took the picture. Very pleased with how it turned out: this is probably my favorite from the batch.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Tilt a Whirl.' I'm surprised at how similar this is to the last 'Tilt a Whirl' picture I took, a long time ago.

Liriodendron tulipifera. The full-size photo is nice. I was really excited about tulip trees this spring, when they were blooming, and even though we don't actually want to plant a lot of trees in back ('cause I want whatever sunlight we can get for the plants inside; it's bad enough having the maple out there blocking a lot of the afternoon light), I thought about trying to get one of these. Then I found out they get to be 120 feet tall (eventually) and have a tendency to fall apart in high winds, and I gave up on that plan.

Heuchera 'Green Spice.' I feel like I ought to like this one better than I do. I mean, the texture is interesting, it's in focus, there are interesting shapes. I think I must be having trouble with the color combination. Not a big fan of mustard yellow and brown.

Schlumbergera 'Caribbean Dancer,' petal. Probably Schlumbergera petals are too small to do this effectively, but at last it's a nice, bright color.

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

There have been better sets of transmitted light photos, but maybe I can make up for this with my theory about why I like the transmitted light photos.

Some of it is just that there are pretty colors, and I like pretty colors. In fact, that's probably the main appeal, but it doesn't explain why leaves. The world is full of pretty-colored things I could take pictures of. Candy wrappers, yogurt-cup lids, my collection of superballs --


and so on. It's not even strictly a botanical thing, the transmitted light photography, because I could just take pictures of flowers all the time, if I were looking for brightly-colored, botanically-relevant pictures. So there's something specific to the veins.

And I think the explanation is that I see the leaf pictures as street maps. I wind up looking at real street maps quite a bit anyway, but also I used to play a lot of Sim City, particularly the last one, SC4, when I find myself without internet access, or when I'm merely extremely bored and can't work on the blog. I'm pretty sure I did everything I could possibly do with the game a long time ago, but I still like fiddling with it.

The point is that leaf-venation is a transportation network, and transportation networks fascinate me. And different leaves are reminiscent of different kinds of street plans. London (or at least parts of London) has weird, curvy, organic street networks. Washington DC streets are usually straight, but go in every crazy direction. Council Bluffs, IA has incredibly boring, straight, evenly-spaced streets in a perfect grid. Murphy, TX (suburban Dallas) has a more or less regular grid of main streets, but each square in the grid contains all kinds of curved, inefficient streets that frequently subdivide into cul-de-sacs. And I see similar patterns in the leaves. Most leaves fall into the Murphy pattern, but pretty much the whole Maranta family have Council Bluffs veins. Ferns tend to be London-like.

Something to think about, maybe, if you want, as we peruse this thirtieth batch of photos. In a lot of cases, of course, the venation won't be clear from the small versions of the pictures, but you can see them enlarged by clicking on them or opening them in a separate window. Not every leaf necessarily falls into one of the above models, which were only ever supposed to be broad descriptions in the first place, but I've opined below about which plants fit which maps. There are probably better city choices to be made, too, cities with street plans that are more exaggerated versions of the above (though Council Bluffs is pretty extreme already). Feel free to go to Google Maps if you like. (I would have included Google Maps maps in the post, but as I understand the Terms of Service, I'm not allowed to.) There are also some actual landscape shots at boston.com that are interesting, if thought of as leaf-veins, from in and near Fort Myers, Florida.

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

Eucharis grandiflora. Definitely built along the Council Bluffs model, though a little less regular than the town. This is a really frustrating leaf to try to photograph -- somehow the venation always seems clearer in person than it appears in the photos -- but I'm impressed with it as a houseplant. I can't figure out why more people don't grow it indoors, but I know there has to be a reason.

Tillandsia cyanea. For obvious reasons, we don't build road networks that have a bunch of parallel roads with few or no cross-streets. T. cyanea will only get the reddish stripes if grown in pretty intense light, and once it gets the stripes, you have to be pretty close to the plant in order to see them.

Heuchera 'Georgia Peach.' The contrast on the photo isn't quite good enough to tell what's going on here exactly, but it looks to me like something in the Washington / Murphy mode.

Asplundia 'Jungle Drum.' Also not much like an actual street map, at least not from this far back. Up close, the veins are mostly parallel, with occasional cross-veins at irregular intervals. Basically a Washington/Council Bluffs cross. Incidentally, I'm basically convinced now that this is actually Asplundia 'Jungle Drum.' Carludovicas look nothing like this, as far as I can tell from the internet. I'll go back and update everything whenever I get the time. I've got quite a list of corrections piling up. UPDATE: Done!

Tulipa NOID, petal/sepals. Also basically a bunch of parallel streets, but the color is pretty. This is probably my favorite of the group, plain though it is.

Stromanthe sanguinea 'Triostar,' in black and white just to try something different. Stromanthes are total Council Bluffs plants, though that's hard to see in this photo. The light gray areas, at full magnification, look very orderly, though.

Monstera deliciosa 'Cheesecake.' Also not a good example of road-mappage. In fairness to me, the pictures were in this post long before the road-map thing got added, so I wasn't choosing them with an eye to how well they'd reflect it. Arguably, this means that I should have waited to write about it until I could pick representative pictures, but, um . . . hey, isn't that Halley's Comet?

Stromanthe burle-marxii. Council Bluffs all the way, if you look at the cross-veining between the main ones. The main veins on their own mostly resemble Fort Myers. The coloration on this picture freaks me out a little. There's something about it that evokes the word "electrical," for me.

Hoya polyneura. This might be the only Hoya I've ever seen that had venation significant enough to show up in a picture, and looks like sort of a London-Murphy combination. Nice plant. Not a lot of Hoyas out there that I'd consider growing just for the foliage, but H. polyneura is pleasant.

Begonia NOID. Not really vein-relevant (the main veins have that sort of extremely organized haphazardness that you find in Washington, though), but the colors and patterning are pretty. I bought a leaf of this and tried to start new plants from it by leaf-section cuttings, which I only just moved to individual pots a couple weeks ago. Most of those look like they're going to survive, though there are four or five that I'm not going to count on.

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

I am beginning to experience actual anxiety about whether or not I can maintain all of the plants while we're trying to get everything set up in the house. I don't actually have a good way to water set up just yet, so if they're dry, I have to take them to the kitchen sink (low-capacity, slow, but easy and relatively clean) or outside to the garden hose (high-capacity, fast, but awkward and messy). The plan is to get a shower in the plant room at some point, eventually, but until then, I don't like any of my options.

This is, of course, intensified by the fact that the in-laws will be here in a couple weeks, give or take, which tends to make the husband slightly nuts, and by the fact that last I knew, we were planning to get married at some point while the in-laws were here. Which would be good and all, the being married, but I would kind of rather not do it while the husband is slightly nuts and when I don't know where my clothes are. Which I don't. Know where my clothes are.

Also we've never had to put them up before, when they've visited, because we didn't have spare rooms in the apartment. We still don't really have spare rooms (in a way -- it's a three-bedroom house, but all three are already spoken for to the extent that we couldn't put a bed in), but there's been talking of having them stay here anyway. Now, the husband is not a morning person, and neither am I (more of one than he is, though), so the idea of them roaming around in the morning bumping into the plants and rummaging through the breakfast cereals before either of us are in a state capable of directing their behavior is mildly terrifying. It's still all up in the air.

Anyway. So there's all this pressure to have everything in place by the end of the month, and it's all going very slowly. Also, despite having much more time to work on the blog, the house, the plants, etc., I somehow seem to be getting less done than ever. I blame the internet.

In any case. Transmitted light photos.

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

Epiphyllum NOID. Not really any veins visible, or at least not very many, but that's okay, since these aren't really leaves anyway. (They're stems. They're just big, flat, leaf-like stems.)

Raphanus sativus 'Plum Purple.' It had never occurred to me to wonder what radish leaves even looked like, before WCW started some from seed at work. They're larger than I would have expected.

Convallaria majalis cv. We happen to have a healthy-looking clump of these in the backyard, left over from the previous owners. I kinda like them. The leaves are kinda cool, too, in an understated kinda way.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Electric Lime.' One of the more boring coleus varieties, though the picture is dull less because it's an intrinsically boring cultivar and more because the picture just sucks.

Brassica oleracea 'Copenhagen Market.' I find cabbage completely incomprehensible. Some people feel that way about lentils.¹

Phlebodium aureum 'Blue Hare.' Trippy.

Dracaena 'Indonesian Tracker.' This is one of the plants I got last year from Asiatica Nursery, and although it's been prone to dropping leaves every time I water (which I'm sure means something, but I don't know what it's trying to tell me), it's been doing pretty well overall.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Fishnet Stockings.' Fun, right? The variety seems to be remarkably inconsistent about whether it wants to be chartreuse with dark purple veins; some of the plants I've seen were more just chartreuse with an irregular dark purple spot near the petiole, or chartreuse with a purple ring around the outside of the leaf. But when it works, like in the above picture, it can be pretty awesome.

Heuchera cv. 'Georgia Peach.' Not my best photo, but it was basically impossible to keep reflected light out. This is kind of an ongoing problem with Heuchera cvv. in particular.

Petunia grandiflora 'Sugar Daddy,' petal (-s?). (Do Petunias have just one big petal, or several small but fused petals? How does that work?) I thought these were pretty damn amazing flowers, though I don't think they sold especially well. People don't seem to be looking for innovation in their Petunia flowers so much. Pretty awesome venation, in any case.

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¹ This is a quote from "Dollhouse," just so you know. Adelle says "Oh my god -- I find lentils completely incomprehensible" in episode seven of the first season. It's funny in its own right, but it's funnier if you know the character.

I truly do, though, have trouble with cabbage, conceptually, both with the eating and with the growing.