Pretty pictures: Pinkish Red

Pressed for time again -- we were elsewhere for a good chunk of yesterday.

Most of these were taken at the ex-job; the rose was at Lowe's.

Dianthus NOID. I should know what the variety is: it's the same thing we sold during the two springs I worked there. I just forgot, and there's no time to try to look for the ID.

Lamprocapnos x 'King of Hearts.' I regret not getting a clearer photo of the foliage on this one; it seemed different. Not that I'm hugely familiar with bleeding-heart foliage.

NOID Cattleya alliance orchid.

Paeonia 'Hoki.' ('Tis the season.)

Cyclamen persicum NOID. If anybody still remembers my Cyclamen experiment from last fall: it looked worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and then I moved it to the (cool, humid) basement under shop lights, and it's doing massively better. Among other things, it's growing HUGE leaves. Which I guess is good. I was getting sick of it and considering throwing it out, so it's shaping up just in time, pretty much.

Rosa 'Radtko' (doubled knock-out rose). I'm sure there are roses out there that I could find interesting and exciting, but I haven't run into them at Lowe's. Not that I expected to. I'm just saying.

Dianthus NOID. Dianthus were one of my favorites to sell, at the ex-job; they smelled nice, and I enjoyed deadheading them. I'm not currently growing any, and probably won't in the near future, because we're still working on establishing a raised bed in the backyard, and even if we had a bed already I maybe still wouldn't grow any because I don't know if I'd want to, but they were nice, occupationally speaking.

Top 12 PATSP posts of 2010

Once again, I wait to do the year-end retrospective until after the year is actually over.

The husband: But you're supposed to do those at the end of the year, when you're looking back. The beginning of the year is supposed to be about looking forward.

Me: Well yeah, but how can I say they're the best posts of 2010 before 2010 is over? I mean, maybe I'll write a really kick-ass post for December 31.
[pause]
Not that I did. I'm just saying I could, and then it wouldn't be on the list, and nobody would know about it, and even I would probably forget that I'd written it, but even if I remembered it and put it on the 2011 list, it wouldn't be the same because it's on the wrong year's list, and in the future somebody who's combing through the debris of our civilization after the apocalypse has happened will run across my blog on some server somewhere and they'll be all like, wow, this guy must have been brain-damaged or something: he's got a post on a "best of 2011" list that was written in 2010, no wonder the zombies got him, and I DO NOT WANT PEOPLE CALLING ME STUPID AFTER THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE BECAUSE I DIDN'T DELINEATE YEARS PROPERLY, OKAY?

The husband: Oh. [pause] Okay.

Anyway.

Last year I came up with sixteen favorite posts; this year, either I sucked more, or I had higher standards, 'cause I only wound up with twelve. (Actually, it's neither, I think: I was reasonably fond of most of the plant profiles I did this year, but I figure the main purpose of writing these lists is to call people's attention to posts they might have missed, and the profiles, though I work hard on them, already have links in the sidebar and get read regularly regardless. I did include my very favorite 2010 profile, but I didn't include all the profiles.)

So without further ado.

12. Pretty pictures: Paeonia cvv. (28 May 2010) I still don't necessarily like peonies all that well, but I really liked the way this particular photo turned out:



11. The One About Plant Theft (20 July 2010) Sometimes people will steal plants. Does this mean people are terrible? Yes. Yes it does.

10. Pretty pictures: Passiflora spp. (11 July 2010) This has very little to do with the pictures (though they're nice) and everything to do with me being proud that I managed to come up with an argument that Passiflora flowers are actually all about the TV show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," instead of the crucifixion of Christ like everybody thinks.



9. Random plant event: Hoya lacunosa flowers (17 January 2010) Mostly me going off on the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day participants for not having a sufficient number of houseplants, something I'm tempted to do again this winter. (Instead, though, I think I'm going to try to get it together to participate.)



8. List: Houseplants Which Could, In Theory, One Day Produce Something Edible, Perhaps (5 October 2010) May or may not have been one of my best posts of the year (though my preamble, with an eight-item list of disclaimers, is certainly the acme of something or another), but it attracted lots of comments.

7. Lawn Ornaments: Frozen Water Balloons (6 January 2010) This post has been weirdly popular with people who don't otherwise read PATSP: I've seen it linked to from a number of non-gardening websites, which surprised me. Plans to build on the idea this year by constructing a multi-colored back yard ice-block fort have been hindered by the lack of suitably large and durable containers in which to freeze the water. I'm still hoping to figure something out, though.



6. Pretty picture: Vanda Pakchong Blue (20 April 2010) Included because this is, upon review of all 2010 posts, my favorite photo from the whole year.



5. List: Houseplants You'll Want to be Growing During the Zombie Apocalypse of 2014 (5 March 2010) This was also extremely popular with non-gardeners (lots of zombie enthusiasts out there, it turns out), but gardeners liked it too. (Enough that one of them may have ripped off the idea, which I find bothersome, though I can't prove it was malicious.) And it won me a Mousie, which means a lot of you knew about it already and you want me to move on to the next one on the list. So I will!

4. Being Robin Ripley (8 April 2010) PATSP's contribution to the Ugly Vegetable Garden War of 2010.

3. BREAKING: Dog Adoption Complete (25 March 2010) The very first Sheba-related post that included pictures. You knew there was going to be a Sheba picture somewhere in this list.



2. Carmen Miranda (Ananas comosus), Part I (17 June 2010) I made an exception to the general no-plant-profiles rule for this particular post, for the simple reason that I will never again write a footnote that's as perfect as this post's footnote 5, and I will not stop telling people about it until everyone in the whole world knows.



1. Book Review: Hothouse Flower, by Margot Berwin (30 September 2010) I read a book once and found it unsatisfying.



What will the best posts of 2011 be like?

Probably quite a bit like these, actually. But we won't know for a year, so keep reading.

Pretty pictures: Paeonia cvv.

Peonies have always struck me as a little too -- too froofy, too big, too campy. Like a falling-down-drunk drag queen with half a watermelon on her head, trying to do a Carmen Miranda impersonation and angrily insisting that everybody watch. Not just excessive, but somehow embarrassingly excessive.

And the ant thing doesn't help, either.

But as with most things, they become interesting if you look at them closely enough. And this first one, frankly, knocks my socks off. Not saying I'm ready to buy one for the yard, but I can see why somebody would, now.¹






I was also not previously aware that there existed yellow-flowering peonies. This seems . . . wrong. Though if it's not screaming hot pink, I suppose I could be okay with it. I still haven't seen any yellow peonies actually planted in someone's yard -- this one is from a garden center in Iowa City a few weeks ago.


This is more what I think of when I think "peony." Ostrich-feather fans, Vegas showgirls, those new kinds of fireworks that seem to explode for a minute and a half, blue-dyed chrysanthemums² the size of a baby's head. It's not terrible, viewed on its own terms, but I don't think I could handle having one of these in the yard.


This last one is of a tree peony, which are a lot less common around here. In fact, I think there may only be one in the entire town. It's a monster -- probably eight feet across and four feet tall, loaded with blooms -- and maybe that's part of why more people don't plant them. I tried taking photos of the whole thing, and they didn't turn out well (still learning the new camera³), so you don't get to see, but it was impressive. And the blooms, individually, aren't terrible either.


-

¹ And by the way -- do fern-leaf peonies only bloom for like three days and then that's it? I tried to get a halfway decent picture when they all bloomed here a few weeks ago, and failed, but didn't figure it was a big deal, because they're peonies, they'll bloom again. But they haven't bloomed again. Any of them. The foliage is interesting, and the flowers are okay when present, but considering how expensive they are, I'm sort of shocked that the show isn't any longer than this.
² Chrysanthemums -- at least the bigger spider-mum types -- elicit the same feelings in me as peonies. Maybe worse. When I was in high school, while we were living in South Texas, it was apparently the fashion for boys to give their girlfriends these enormous corsage-like things at Homecoming time, which usually had one or more spider mums, plus like a mile of ribbons in the school colors, and glitter, possibly sequins (?), photographs, this whole gigantic production. (I swear to you: I remember one girl's Homecoming thingie very vividly because there was a cowbell included. A cowbell!) With the ribbons and everything, they usually stretched down to the floor, or almost to the floor, the girls wore them all day, and I never really understood the purpose. Unless the purpose was just to let everybody know that they had boyfriends. They weren't even single-day things, necessarily; I don't remember whether people wore them every day for a week, or if it just seemed like that because different girls were wearing them on different days for a week. It was one of those bits of culture shock I never understood or even asked about.
I assume (hope?) it was just a South Texas thing. It might have even been a South-Texas-in-the-late-80s thing. I mean, this was also the period when all the girls were trying to get their bangs to look like a wave cresting a foot above their heads, and a lot of them wore dresses and skirts from time to time with two-foot wide decorative bows sewed on the back.
Somehow only the Homecoming flowers seemed strange to me at the time. Tall hair and bows the size of bald eagles didn't strike me as peculiar until after I'd been out of school for a while. Fashion, I suppose.
³ Mainly the problem is that with the previous camera, I had a much smaller range of options. Basically I could shoot super close-up, kinda close-up, or far away, and I could do it with or without a flash. I mean, there were other options, but they rarely worked, so I didn't bother. The new camera, though, will let me darken or lighten the whole picture, and has a separate thing for sun, clouds, incandescent light, three different kinds of fluorescent light, plus the really-close, close, or far option. I can change the pictures after uploading them, somewhat, to adjust the color for occasions like when I have it set to sunny and it actually should have been set to fluorescent #2, but -- this is tedious to do when it works, and it doesn't always work. And red or purple things in super-bright sun always turn out badly and non-fixably no matter what the settings.

Pretty picture: Paeonia 'Hoki'

People seem to like peonies, and I guess I kind of understand -- the flowers are very big and showy -- but I'm not much of a fan personally. Our neighbor had one when I was growing up, and I found it kind of unnerving as a child to see ants crawling all over the unopened buds all the time. (According to the Heartland Peony Society, the ants are neither good nor bad, just attracted to small amounts of nectar produced by the flowers, which may or may not enlist the ants' help in opening the tight and petal-dense buds. When the buds are finished, the ants find new food sources.)

Still, though, there are worse things than ants. And the flowers are pretty.