Saturday morning Sheba picture

No big Sheba news. No little Sheba news either, as far as that goes.

Unrelated: I noticed yesterday morning when I was out with Sheba that we had a volunteer Petunia in one of the beds (the one that never got weeded or watered and was full of whiteflies for the last month and a half of the summer because I am a bad outdoor gardener and because whiteflies like Cannas).

I like Petunias quite a bit, but we've never actually grown any here, or even attempted to, so this was a happy surprise. (Also a happy surprise: it color-coordinates with the blog.) We had a tiny peach poppy appear out of nowhere in early August, as well.

We might be able to explain the Papaver, as there's a chance it might have been in an old packet of "wildflower seeds" that we threw around the lawn just to see what would happen, but the Petunia is a mystery. Maybe seeds got blown through the fence from the neighbors' garden?

Pictures: Petunia 'Phantom'

I took these photos in April, and by now everybody's already blogged about how they do or don't like them, and quite a few people don't approve of Petunias under any circumstances, so nobody's going to care about this post, but it's late on Saturday night and I don't have a post yet and this was the best I could do, so.


I think I have to come down on the side of not liking them. One of the churches in town planted some in a small bed, and from a distance, they don't read well. The black basically disappears, and all you're left with are five narrow slashes of pale yellow, which to my eye looks a lot like five chlorotic, withered leaves. (And sometimes the actual leaves are chlorotic and/or withered, which doesn't help.)


Not saying I couldn't maybe like them in a different context -- a yellow container? against a red wall? -- but so far I'm not impressed. The only thing I'd like less in a Petunia would be solid black, and I hear they have a pronounced tendency to revert to solid black.

Pretty pictures: Red

Three different takes on the idea of "red" today. I tried to come up with something to say about working in the garden center at this time of year, but even as a PG-13 blog, there are limits to how much obscene language I'm comfortable using here. So I won't. Instead, I will point out how the three red flowers in question sort of represent winter, spring, and summer, even if they do happen to be blooming all at the same time (all three pictures were taken on the same afternoon, at my former job), and we'll let that be the point of interest for this particular post.

Hippeastrum NOID.

Petunia NOID.

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis NOID.

[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.

Pretty picture: Petunia 'Potunia Strawberry' flower

The plugs are beginning to come in, and for me, lately, everything's been about trying to squeeze the tropicals into smaller and smaller spaces so we have room for the plugs we're transplanting. This is difficult.

The plugs really ought to be too young to try to flower, but they do anyway. The lighting was weird on this one (yellowish, from one of the grow lights: the flower is really more of a bubblegum-wrapper pink, not the orange it appears to be in the photo). This is a new variety for us, or at least it's a variety we weren't carrying last year: these 'Potunias' look pretty normal so far: if there's something special about them, I haven't seen it yet.


But still. It's the first Petunia of the year, and (unlike many people) I like Petunias, so it's noteworthy to me.

Random plant event: weird Petunia behavior

At work recently, we have had a few petunia flowers do this:



It's only on the blue Tidal Wave plants, and only a few flowers. The flowers that are doing it are also on kind of sickly-looking, yellowish stems, which makes me think this is probably not a good thing for the plant. But it's pretty anyway, I think. I'd probably encourage it, if I knew how to make it happen. Anybody know what's going on here?

Pretty pictures: Petunia cvv.

Petunia 'Burgundy Madness.' The color on this is as close as I could get it, but the real thing is considerably more impressive.

I get colds so infrequently that I'm always surprised, when I get one, at just how much they suck. I mean, I get a lot of sinus infections, and I think I have a touch of hay fever, and I'm accustomed to thinking of those as being more or less the same as a cold because some of the symptoms overlap, but colds are so much worse. Today's the second day I've called in sick to work, and presumably there will be people there who are upset with me over this. It's not a good time of year to be sick, a point which the boss hammered into me over and over again in the months leading up to spring (I think she even mentioned it at my interview.). But I really would be as useless there as I am if I stay home, so wev. (See sidebar for definition of "wev.")

Petunia 'Tidal Wave Pink'