Pretty picture: Lantana camara 'Patriot Firewagon'

Surreptitiously photographed at the Iowa City Menards. Not that they would necessarily have objected if the photographing had been brazen and obvious. I just feel weird wandering around, taking pictures of things. I keep expecting to be accosted by large men in sunglasses and accused of stealing trade secrets or something.

Though I suppose it wouldn't make sense to keep sensitive trade secrets out in the open, in the garden department, where they could be photographed.

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

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

Peperomia clusiifolia cv. There's really no point to trying to do the transmitted light thing with Peperomias. Not that I won't probably try again anyway, but just -- it doesn't work. Leaves are too thick.

Pelargonium x hortorum cv. Sort of a lost-in-translation thing going on here: in person, this was a not-bad picture, but by the time it's cropped and shrunk, it doesn't look like much. Pelargoniums tend to be difficult anyway, because the leaves, annoyingly, try to curl, which makes it hard to get things properly in focus.

Plectranthus ciliatus. Doesn't make a very good houseplant, though it's a vigorous grower in the greenhouse, or outdoors. They get huge.

Hedera canariensis 'Gloire de Marengo.' Excellent focus, and it doesn't even have spider mites visible, so this is, like, the Platonic ideal picture of Hedera canariensis venation.

Lantana camara 'Landmark Yellow.' Good old Lantana.

Hosta cv. 'Orange Marmalade.' Is not even remotely orange, by the way. Not sure what sort of weird Hosta-grower logic was operating when the name was assigned.

Philodendron bipinnatifidum. Sort of mildly surprising: the venation here is very visible, but the plant is so huge that you're not looking for anything on this small of a scale.

Polyscias balfouriana (new leaf). I dislike this picture but can't pin down a reason why. Nothing obviously wrong with it. Maybe the focus could have been better.

Begonia NOID. Not the best of this particular batch, probably, but it's different from anything else I can remember posting before. It's a cane-type Begonia, maybe also an "angel-wing," but I really have a hard time understanding all the fine distinctions in the world of Begonias as far as which are fibrous, tuberous, angel-wing, dragon-wing, non-stop, and so on and so forth. I can more or less tell the rexes apart from everything else, but that's about all. A person could get a Ph.D. in Begonias, it looks like.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Gays Delight.' "Gays" may or may not have an apostrophe in it: the name doesn't really make sense without an apostrophe in there somewhere, but officially, there may not be one.

Personal-ish: House

Yesterday the husband closed on a house in another town (not Iowa City, though relatively nearby), which we will be moving into at some point. I've never owned a house before,¹ which was, I thought, a pretty good reason not to be into outdoor plants, so now we're going to find out if I really think tropical plants are superior, or if I was only saying that because I couldn't have any temperate-zone plants.

Obviously the blog is going to suffer a little bit in the short term; although the husband has already rented a storage unit in said town, and has been moving stuff into it for about a month now (he's a glass-half-full kind of person; he's thought the deal was going to go through for a lot longer than I have), there's an awful lot to move, and of course I've been busy enough with work and the plants and the blog and whatever else it is I do, so my stuff is a lot less, er, dealt with than his.

Sempervivum 'Red Beauty.'
Exactly how much the blog is going to suffer is yet to be determined; I'll let you know.

As for the gardening: as best as I can tell (I've only actually seen the place once, and that was at night), the yard is mostly sun. It's basically a long thin strip that extends west from the house. There's a tree at the far end, and there will be a fence on the north and south sides of the property, but there's not really anything else for shade.

Portulaca 'Tequila Mix.' It's only just getting started now; it'll be more awe-inspiring later.
I've already bought some plants for the yard (The glass is occasionally half-full for me, too -- particularly when optimism means I can buy plants): so far we have a whole flat of Portulaca grandiflora 'Tequila Mix' (moss rose), because it's the best annual ever,² a Lantana camara 'Rose Glow Improved,' because I have positive associations with it now, a smallish pot of strawberries (Fragaria 'Fort Laramie'),³ a Sempervivum 'Red Beauty,'⁴ Lysimachia 'Goldilocks,' and I have some 'Quarterback' coleus⁵ from last spring that I kept as a houseplant, as well as brand-new-this-year 'Kingswood Torch,' 'Glennis,' 'Peter Wonder,' 'Splish Splash,' and possibly others I'm failing to remember. I like coleus. The coleus won't necessarily end up outside. In fact, I have no idea what I'm going to be doing with most of this stuff. To begin with, I'm just buying the plants I like, and we'll see how that goes, and we'll worry about having some kind of coherent plan next year. This year, we're just trying out the outdoor gardening thing to see if it's any fun. I've been told it is, but I remain skeptical.

There are perennials I like too (Lysimachia is supposed to be a perennial here.), but I don't know any of them terribly well, and most of the ones I do know somewhat and like okay are shade-lovers that I don't think will work that well for this situation. Shrubs I know basically not at all, and trees are not a good idea, I think, because we may want to put up a greenhouse in the back someday, and planting trees and shading the whole back yard could make a greenhouse kinda useless. Also it's not that big of a yard anyway.

Lysimachia 'Goldilocks,' in extra-dramatic lighting.
I'd also really like to find something for the lawn besides grass. I mean, the grass that's there already is fine and all, but mowing, weeding, spraying, watering, etc. all seem like really dumb ways to spend one's time. I hear there are other things that can be used instead, but I've seen very little about what, specifically, or how one goes about replacing grass. Anybody know any good references?

Pictures of house and lawn to follow . . . when I get around to it. The husband reports that there are Hostas.

-

¹ Technically, I still don't, since the whole deal has gone through under the husband's name, but I think he's going to let me live there anyway.
² So long as the rabbits don't eat it, which Kim tells me they like to do. I believe her exact words were "rabbit candy." Worrisome, but I'm still going to try.
³ (We had NOID strawberries in the back yard when I was a kid. I went ahead and bought the 'Fort Laramies' already because it looked like we were in danger of selling out of strawberries before the house thing went through. Strawberries are all but flying out the door this year.)
⁴ My good grandmother had Sempervivums outside her front door. (Like some people, I had a good grandmother and an evil grandmother, both of whom were into plants. Evil grandma went for ornamentals, irises and clematis and snapdragons and tulips and so forth, with only a few vegetables. Good grandma had less time on her hands, so she went more for vegetables, with only a few ornamentals. Both of them had houseplants: evil grandma probably deserves most of the credit -- or blame -- for my interest in them. By most measures, I take more after evil grandma than after good grandma.)
⁵ (Solenostemon scutellarioides)

Iowa City Graffiti: The Birds

I'm afraid I have not yet completely managed to get my head around the Iowa Supreme Court's UNANIMOUS decision this morning. I'm still working (writing this very quickly while on lunch break, at home). Every so often, I remember what's going on and think to myself, HOLY FUCK, but then the moment passes and I forget again. This will probably be happening a lot for a few days.

For those who have asked: yes, the husband and I will be getting married (in as cheap and low-key a way as possible, I think) when the opportunity exists. I've been reading that it will take a while for the 99 county courthouses to get themselves set up to be able to do same-sex marriages (the delay, I'm guessing, has mostly to do with printing new forms? I'm really not sure, and nobody has said), but the Des Moines Register said that it should be possible by April 24. As I officially came out to my parents on April 30 (1997), I'm leaning toward April 30 to do the actual marriage (beats April 25, which is Mom's birthday), but we'll see how things go.

I appreciate all the people who have stopped by to say congratulations. I'm basically out of time now, but there will be more talking about this later, after I've had time to read some stuff and finish the plant-watering I started yesterday and so on and so forth.

Oh, and I would appreciate it if my co-liberals could refrain from acting like this is totally out of character for Iowa to do. The Upper Midwest in general (IA / MN / WI / IL) used to be progressive all over the place. There's a history. Try not to look so shocked that it's Iowa. We're not all a bunch of slack-jawed reactionary bigoted hicks here. If it were Oklahoma, or Utah, then maybe you could be surprised.

Now I want to try something.

I want a million, billion dollars.


Ah. Apparently Lantana pictures aren't magic. Oh well. Worth trying.

EDITED TO ADD: Like it says, the post was written in a hurry. I did not mean to suggest that everybody in Utah or Oklahoma are slack-jawed reactionary bigoted hicks. (For example, some Oklahomans have very taut jaws. I kid, I kid. . . .) I know they're not. But still, Iowa is a good order of magnitude less surprising than Utah would be. It's also worth noting that if you haven't already seen it, there's going to be a backlash coming: the way the Iowa Constitution is set up, it's hard to change, but you can bet that there are people organizing now who are going to try, and a lot of money is going to be changing hands in order to make that happen. No victory is ever so solid that it can't be lost.

One bright spot I see is that even the bigots are likely going to see Iowa benefit from this. We have no residency requirement for marriage here, so anybody can come across the border and marry, which means that not only are we going to be seeing a sharp spike in wedding-related business in the next few months, as couples who have been waiting for something like this start planning and having their own weddings, which will be awesome for those of us tangentially connected to the floral industry, but there's going to be a lot of money coming in from out of state too, and possibly people moving to Iowa. This will be good for Iowa. Maybe not so much for MN/WI/IL/MO/NE/SD, 'cause I assume they're the states that will be losing most of the people who do come here. And if the Iowa economy improves as a result, even the hard-core bigots are going to be a little less worried about it.

It also means that every drought, tornado, car accident, flood, or, you know, livestock escape from now until 2030 is going to be attributed to the Judgment of the Lord Upon the Wickedness of Iowa. But, you know, the 2008 floods happened when Iowa had last (barely) voted for Bush and had a Defense of Marriage Act restricting marriage to one-man-one-woman, so I'm not going to be convinced God cares unless our next disaster is a lot worse than that. Ask Cedar Rapids how bad that would have to be.

Pretty picture: Lantana camara 'Rose Glow Improved'

I continue to work on the plant-toxicity post, which is now looking like it's going to be a PATSP Special Event, something on the order of Houseplant Toxicity Week. (Hey, if the Discovery Channel can have Shark Week . . . ) Things keep getting added and subtracted and moved around, and at last check, the damn thing was up to 6400 words. Not unprecedented (the two parts of the Saintpaulia ionantha cvv. post, combined, were about that long), but unfortunately I think I was also only about 1/3 finished, too. So the plan at the moment is to find some way to break it up into a weeks' worth of small posts, though I'm unclear on how to do that, so we may get a Plan C at some point. I don't know.

What I do know is that Lantana camara is toxic. But it's also pretty. And butterflies like it. This was a popular variety last year; one of the nursery lot guys planted up a big tub with this, a dark purple Petunia, and a light blue-purple Scaevola, and the three of them together looked really nice.


On the down side, it's kill-you-dead poisonous. And it smells a little weird. Like citrus, but . . . wrong citrus. It's also, according to Toxicity of Houseplants, one of the ten most toxic weeds in the world, which is pretty impressive given the competition.

I like it anyway.