Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Queen Diamond

This was a lot nicer in person; the lighting kind of screwed with it, alas.

Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Queen Diamond = Phalaenopsis Chian Xen Queen x Phalaenopsis Haur Jin Diamond (Ref.)

This particular grex hasn't been on the blog before, but its seed parent (Phal. Chian Xen Queen) has, under the incorrect name of "Phal. ChAIn Xen Queen." That one is also a bad picture, on top of being misnamed. I feel like I should send the plant an apology card or something? (In fairness to myself, I was using the name from the tag -- it was only my second year with the orchid show and I hadn't yet learned to distrust the tags.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis [probably not] Minho Princess

Of all the reasons not to go to the orchid show this year, I think the one closest to my heart is that it will prevent me from seeing a new batch of incorrectly-spelled orchid ID tags.

It's not that misspellings are traumatic in themselves. This one isn't even that bad, all things considered: a simple transposition of two vowels from a combination which doesn't appear that often in modern English (AE) to a combination that does (EA). Totally understandable. What really gets to me, though, is the lack of proofreading. You've already made the sign, it's sitting there right in front of you, you're looking at it -- how do you not pause for a fraction of a second to ask yourself, does this look right?

Or maybe it did look right. Which is perhaps even more upsetting.

Anyway. Thank you for indulging me in one more grumpy orchid-proofreading ramble before I stop doing the orchid posts. To reward you, I will tell you that the letters of the word "Phalaenopsis" can be rearranged in 59,875,200 distinguishable permutations,¹ including "a snail shoppe," "a posh spaniel," "hapless piano," and "polishes a pan."

So this is the plant in question. I think there's a pretty good chance that it isn't Minho Princess. Why? I couldn't find any photos of Minho Princess on-line that looked like this. I mean, I suppose it could just be a really variable grex, but the photos I found all showed a mostly white flower, with a little pink-purple along the largest veins, and some more pink-purple at the margins. (Example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6²) The online photos for a highly-variable grex shouldn't be this uniform. So I conclude that somewhere along the line, the wrong ID became associated with the plant, probably at the original seller. Sellers don't think their customers give a crap about IDs, so they don't feel like they have to give a crap about IDs either.

I like the plant. The blooms are obviously pretty striking close-up, but the contrast was visible from surprisingly far away, too. I wish there was some way of, you know, learning the name of this plant that I like.

[Phalaenopsis Minho Princess = Phalaenopsis Sun Prince x Phalaenopsis Ta Lin Freeds (Ref.), though that doesn't matter because this isn't Minho Princess.]

In (now somewhat-old) Anthurium news, I purged the Anthuriums in the living room, the ancestral varieties that produced all the original seedlings. 'Pandola' is gone. The NOID red is gone. The NOID dark red that never bloomed is gone. 'Gemini' is gone. 'White Gemini' is gone. 'Peppermint Gemini' is gone. 'Orange Hot' is gone. All three copies of the NOID pink are gone. 'Krypton' is gone. The NOID red-violet that might or might not have also been 'Krypton' is gone. All four of the 'Florida's are gone (though I'm pretty sure they never contributed anything genetically. Moral support, perhaps.).

There were also a couple ancestral plants in the basement, pre-purge. The NOID pink-green is gone. 'Joli' is gone. The small pot of salvaged cuttings from the NOID purple, which had only just gotten old enough to bloom, is gone.

My goodness. So what isn't gone, Mr. S.?

The NOID purple, and two backup copies of 'Red Hot.' And one 'Red Hot' is looking a little shaky, to be honest.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, in theory, the genes from the founding generation are present in the surviving seedlings; the founders had already made themselves redundant. Not to mention that there were ghost mites, Xanthomonas, or both, on all the plants I threw out, and it's good to get rid of pest/disease reservoirs. On the other hand, this means that if I were to decide to start over with the seedlings, I'd have to buy new Anthuriums to start over with. And, as it happens, the ex-job is now even more of an ex-job than it used to be, because they're no longer in business, so I'm not even sure where I'd get the replacement Anthuriums from.³

In any case. The founding-Anthuriums purge is upsetting, and also it's not.⁴ Just like the ex-job closing is both upsetting and not. Ditto the really big plant-related thing I've alluded to a few times now but haven't been able to bring myself to name and describe yet, which was both devastating and an enormous relief. The last three months have been fucking weird.

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¹ Assuming that my math is correct. A twelve-letter word in which no letters are duplicated should have 12! (= 479,001,600) different permutations; since "phalaenopsis" has three letters duplicated (a, p, and s), I think the number of combinations should be 12!/(2^3) = 59,875,200.
² In March or April last year, I found two more sites which showed Minho Princess with the same coloration as the others; those links have since 404ed. But six examples should be enough to get the idea.
³ They announced this in mid-November. I think this was a deliberate decision to retire, rather than the owners finding themselves forced out by the economic climate or whatever. But they'd been talking about closing or relocating since at least 2008, and since I didn't go back to chat with them or anyone else who worked there, I'm not sure that it wasn't motivated by declining sales.
I never understood how they could price plants at triple the big-box and grocery-store prices and stay in business in the first place. But then, I don't have a keen business mind.
Should note that I don't feel particularly upset about the ex-job being gone. I rarely visited anymore; when I did, I didn't generally buy anything. There are also some not-great memories associated with the place, which time has faded but not eliminated entirely: although things weren't super-ugly when I left, the bad was outweighing the good by that point. (Some of this was my fault, some of it wasn't. Somewhere in my various files is a draft for a blog post titled "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Garden Center Workers." Which is still good advice. Eight years since I left, and I still can't look at poinsettias without a small jolt of dread.)
Still. End of an era, and all that. I don't entirely understand why I didn't go back to see the place one last time, or talk to the people who still worked there. Had I visited early enough, I could even have picked up some new houseplants for a mere 2.25 times the big-box price. It wasn't that I didn't care, but -- the idea of going back to see the store gradually clear out made me uneasy in some difficult-to-explain way, so I never did. And now it's gone. Or gone-ish, anyway.
Also: if a family-owned garden center in the area had to close down, why couldn't it have been Pierson's?
⁴ Watering the living room for the first time, post-purge, took me 3.7 hours. That no doubt sounds like a lot of time to spend watering, but the most recent five pre-purge waterings took 4.3, 5.1, 5.4, 5.5, and 6.4 hours. Not only do I save time watering, but I no longer have those periodic pangs of should I throw this one out? Is that Xanthomonas? Are those ghost mites? to deal with. It's definitely not all bad.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Norman's Jade

By now, the reader will have noticed that PATSP has been nothing but orchids for the last six weeks or so, and I feel like I should explain. The plants, led by the Anthurium seedlings, chose November to try to break my heart. It's not yet clear whether they succeeded in breaking it, exactly, but it's at least pretty damaged. And this is on top of the episodic panic attacks and what have you; the plants waited until I was weak to strike. As they do.

November was shitty.

How did they try to break your heart, you may be asking. Well, on top of the scale that I've been trying to get rid of for the last five years or so, which I periodically get really close to eliminating via imidacloprid and then discover that nope, it's still here, and on top of the thrips, which have been uglifying the Anthurium flowers and leaves for nearly as long, and for which the only remotely effective cure is "white oil," which not only makes the whole house smell like rancid vegetable oil for weeks afterward but also causes all the Anthuriums to drop any flowers or buds they might have, and doesn't even eliminate the thrips, I've added two new ongoing and ineradicable¹ plagues to the Anthurium seedlings.

The Xanthomonas infection has been spreading through the Anthuriums for most of this year (also likely before this year -- I suspect it came in on the NOID pink/green Anthurium -- but bacteria that spread via water droplets really go nuts when you start spraying all the foliage with water every time you water, in an attempt to blast off the thrips, which didn't even work), and is now uglifying some of the seedlings which had remained more or less pristine through the thrips and scale. There's also, as far as I can tell, nothing I can actually do about it, save for throwing out all the affected seedlings. I'm aware of a treatment that places beneficial, or at least non-harmful, bacteria on the leaves, making it harder for Xanthomonas to establish itself, but as far as I can tell, that's only a preventative measure, and doesn't do anything to cure plants once they've been infected. If there's a way to cure infected plants, I haven't run across it yet, and if I did run across it, odds are good that I wouldn't be able to afford it. So it's possible that the only option I've got is to throw out all the affected plants and hope to outrun the Xanthomonas, which I'd be more optimistic about if that had worked for me with any plant pest or disease ever.

And then in just the last couple months, the mysterious unidentified mites from this post in 2014 have made their way to the Anthuriums downstairs. (They'd been on the upstairs ones, intermittently, for longer, but I hadn't made the connection between the mites and the leaf damage until the last few weeks: I'd been assuming thrips. The ghost mites² prefer to feed on larger leaf veins, and appear in such numbers that affected leaves wind up looking like they've been hit by especially anal-retentive thrips: dead brown streaks that follow all the large veins, with relatively little damage in the spaces between them. The ghost mites also seem to be perfectly happy hitting older leaves, as opposed to the thrips, which prefer new growth, so really there was no reason to ever think that this was thrips damage, but perhaps I can be forgiven for not being willing to believe that I had another plant pest in the house, given the circumstances.

And it hasn't just been the Anthuriums, of course. Had a scary bunch of defoliation happen on the Neofinetia falcata out of nowhere, which briefly had me convinced that it was in the process of dying. (It has since stabilized, or at least wants me to think it has. No doubt waiting until I'm weak again.) A number of Dracaenas have broken out in spots that remind me of pictures I've seen somewhere. I can't remember if the pictures were of a bacterial leaf spot disease or a fungal leaf spot disease, as if the distinction matters. A very tall Pilosocereus pachycladus fell into my shoulder during watering, which hurt (spines in the shoulder! Lots of them!) and then hurt (the part of the cactus that hit me the hardest hollowed out and turned blue, purple, and finally black -- it's not clear whether the damage is continuing to spread).

I had decided in the spring of 2016 that I was done with the Euphorbia grandicornis. It was a salvaged cutting from a much larger plant that had never done very well for me, due to inadequate light, but I couldn't quite bear to just throw it out, so instead I planted it in one of the Canna beds, figuring that it could live (for a while) if it wanted to, and we'd see how that went. Naturally it loved it outside, even after the Cannas grew over it and I forgot that it was even there. Saw it in the fall and was like, holy crap, that's pretty impressive, maybe it deserves a chance to live in the house after all.

So I pulled it up and brought it inside,

You can probably figure out which is this year's new growth, yes?
and gave it its own pot of fresh soil. Whereupon it immediately shriveled, blackened, and died, proving once and for all that the Euphorbiaceae is the least appreciative plant family. A Gasteria seedling (the last one in this post, the light green one with thin leaves) died on me without warning or explanation. Lost another Polyscias seedling (#10), and now #8 isn't looking so hot.

Even the Schlumbergera seedlings are letting me down a little bit this year. As predicted, I've finally seen some colors outside of the red / orange-red / red-orange / orange / light orange spectrum, which should be good. But A) not nearly as many as I had expected, and B) the non-red/non-orange seedlings have been very similar to plants I already had: the NOID white seedlings have been either white/white or magenta/white, and the NOID magenta seedlings have been magenta/white, white/white, or in the red-to-orange spectrum. The three second-generation seedlings (all from 025A Clownfish) have been orange/white (239A), orange/pink (240A), and red/pink (244A). So I'm not breaking any new ground at all, color-wise.³ Plus, the most recent first blooms have been all chewed-up,

(Seedling 069A, first bloom)
because the thrips have finally eaten enough Schlumbergera petals from the early-blooming seedlings that they've multiplied and prospered. Now the thrips can start attacking the late-blooming buds, meaning the late blooms look like shit as soon as they open.

And this isn't even all; there's one plant-related thing from November/December that is literally still too painful for me to tell you about,⁴ there's the usual steady stream of Anthurium-seedlings hitting the walls and exploding⁵ (28 seedlings since mid-November), there are the mostly-disappointing new Anthurium blooms,⁶ there's the first scale sighting on a Clivia since I've had Clivias. And, mostly, there's the increasingly firm conviction that nothing I do is going to make any of these things go away. There are too many plants, too many hiding places -- the only way forward is to dump a bunch of them, cure the remaining ones, and then build back up again. Or maybe the smart thing would be not to build back up again.

So the reason I haven't been blogging about the plant collection is that the plant collection is horrible, and hurts just to think about, and I've been on the verge of throwing out like 95% of the Anthuriums for something like the last six weeks but haven't been able to bring myself to do it. Throwing them all out is clearly an overreaction, throwing none of them out is obviously an underreaction, throwing some of them out requires hard choices about who lives and who dies and why, plus if I keep a seedling I should have thrown out then I don't even get rid of the problem. So I've been continuing to water and despair, postponing the decision, while everything gets worse. I'm no longer starting new Anthurium seeds already, as of 23 October: the berries just wither and die on the spadices now. This wasn't originally a conscious decision, but once I realized I was doing it, I decided it was just as well, so it's a conscious decision now. Not sure whether I'm going to bother potting up all the seedlings that have already germinated: I'm postponing that decision too.

I'm toying with the idea of going on indefinite hiatus from the blog as of late March, when the last of the 2016 orchid photos is scheduled.⁷ This is more likely to happen than not, I think, because the plants have been steadily less and less fun over the last five years and there are things I would rather do with my time,⁸ but I do still want to get the Schlumbergeras named -- hardly urgent, but I've come up with some names I like and want to use them -- and although I'm not sure you need to see all ten, at least half of the Anthurium blooms since the last Anthurium seedling post are interesting in one way or another. So there will probably be some non-orchid posts coming eventually. We'll see how I feel about plants in March. (If you hear me humming "Freedom 90" a lot in February,⁹ brace yourself.¹⁰)

Almost doesn't seem worth bothering with the orchid, but I promised a Phalaenopsis in the title, so here you go.

*deep breath*

"Jade" seems like an exaggeration. I mean, yeah, yellow jade is a thing, as an image search will confirm for you, but it's not the color people think of when they hear "jade." I have a note here that the bloom closest to the tip of the spike was darker yellow than the others, but I can't remember whether that means it was the youngest bloom or the oldest bloom. Which direction do Phalaenopsis buds open, again?

I also noted that I got really tired of light yellow, when I was going through the photos from this year's show. Didn't notice it as a theme when I was taking the photos, though.

I found photos of a couple named clones of Norman's Jade ('Green Angel' and 'Montclair Canary'), the first of which seemed sort of green, but alas, both were on a site that sells orchids, and the pages have been taken down since I found them, presumably because they're no longer selling those particular clones.

I suppose in the abstract, this is a nice color,¹¹ but it doesn't do much for me as a Phalaenopsis.

Phalaenopsis Norman's Jade = Phalaenopsis Prospector's Dream x Phalaenopsis Norman's Mist (Ref.)

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¹ (?)
² (My own term; I still don't know what they are. I'm positive they're not cyclamen mites or spider mites, though. Or at least not the normal species of cyclamen/spider mites: they're not rounded and shiny enough to be cyclamen mites, and they're the wrong color, and not mobile enough, to be spider mites. They also don't produce webbing like spider mites. Therefore: ghost mites. Until I come up with an ID.)
³ It is beginning to seem plausible that the cross that started this whole thing, the 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach, was the only cross I could have made that would have resulted in anything new or interesting, and it's just dumb luck that it happened to be the cross I started with.
⁴ Q: well Jesus, Mr. S., if you're not going to tell us what it is then why even bring it up?
A: I don't know. I'm sorry.
⁵ Dramatization (you have to imagine that the cars are seedlings):
⁶ As well as two that weren't disappointing at all. Or, well, one that wasn't disappointing at all -- 0802 Dana International, my first dark(ish) purple -- and one that looks likely to be my first green seedling, provided that the bud doesn't drop (1268 Lil' Miss Hot Mess). It'll be a while before 1268 is officially not disappointing.
⁷ Why not immediately? Well, I made notes on the orchid posts when I uploaded the pictures, so I don't have to work as hard to come up with something to say about them. Schlumbergera- or Anthurium-seedling posts require more work. Posts about other plants are even more work than that.
⁸ Like what? I dunno. Maybe I'll dye my hair. Maybe we'll move somewhere. Etc.
More seriously, I'm working out a lot. Like, a lot. It helps with the panic.
⁹ (♫ Take back your pictured pollen grains / Take back your yellowed, dead dumb canes / I just hope you understand / Sometimes the plants do not make the man ♩♪)
¹⁰ Also, RIP George Michael. :^(
¹¹ I mean, if you get abstract enough, any color is as nice as any other. They're just varying proportions of photons, of different energies, hitting your retina and being interpreted as color by your brain. Seems silly to say this combination of photons is beautiful but that combination of photons is disgusting. But we say that. All the time.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis NOID

The tag said 'Phalaenopsis Gigantia "Sunshine,"' but there is no "Phalaenopsis Gigantia" in the IOR records.

There is a species, Phalaenopsis gigantea, which as its name implies is enormous (leaves to 2 feet (0.6 m) long!), with blooms that have dull red or maroon dots sprinkled liberally over a white, cream, or light pink background.¹ It sounds pretty incredible, and photos that include the leaves are pretty impressive, both in the size of the leaves and the number of individual flowers per spike.

However, basically none of that description applies to this plant. From the photo, I'm guessing it was in a 4 or 5-inch pot, which would make the leaves maybe 5 or 6 inches long. 2-foot leaves may not be required for blooming, of course, but if the leaves don't look like Phal. gigantea, and the blooms don't look like Phal. gigantea, I'm forced to conclude that either this isn't Phal. gigantea, Phal. gigantea is a lot more variable than Google lets on, or Phal. Gigantia is an actual plant that the International Orchid Registry has somehow just not heard of yet. And I trust Google and the IOR a lot more than I trust orchid show tags.

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¹ (Or so says Google Image Search, anyway. See also Wikipedia and www.bigleaforchids.com.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Fuller's Sunset

I'm a little confused by the name on this one; I suppose yellow sunsets do happen, but it's not the color I associate with sunsets particularly. Maybe that's the point?

The whole-plant photo below is crappy, but it does at least show that the bloom in the close-up above is a significantly darker shade of yellow than the other flowers on the spike.

The plant doesn't do a lot for me personally, but there's nothing especially wrong with it. Just not my taste, I guess.

Phalaenopsis Fuller's Sunset = Phalaenopsis Taisuco Date x Phalaenopsis Chian Xen Queen (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis NOID

This didn't photograph well; the flower spike was tall enough that it was higher than the display's background, so I caught a lot of greenhouse roof in the photos and it got kind of washed out. Which is too bad, because I was very impressed with it. Not only is the color neat, but I don't think I've seen this kind of patterning before.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what its name is, so that's all I can tell you about it.

In unrelated news, letting the dill go to seed in 2015 did finally get me some swallowtail caterpillars. I've been trying for at least a few years, and this is the first year I've spotted any.

I think, based on what I've seen flying around this year and what I've seen on-line, that this is probably a black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes). The caterpillars were only visible briefly; I don't know if birds got them or if they're pupas already. Happy to see them either way; it was maaaaaaaaaybe even worth all the dill seedlings I'm going to have to pull up next year.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Black Rose

I'm pretty meh about the actual flowers here, though I remember them seeming larger than standard, so that's something. And I can't deny that it's not well-grown. I just don't, you know, care.

The tag had "Jiuhbao Black Rose #1" on it, but I didn't see anything confirming the "#1" as part of the official name and am not sure what it's supposed to signify. A clonal designation, maybe?

Ran into a confirmatory image here, so I'm pretty sure the plant was accurately identified.

Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Black Rose = Phalaenopsis Lioulin Black Rose x Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Sweetie (Ref.)

In other news, as I write this on Tuesday morning, the U.S. has successfully passed through the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio with only the usual number of national shootings. It sucks that I've had to set the bar that low, but at least the RNC has managed to clear it.

I'm going to stop writing now, while the above is still true.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight'

The photos make this plant look a lot larger than it actually was. I was actually surprised by the size.

Last year's show had a Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle as well, with no varietal name; this is probably not the same specimen as that one, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Don't really have much to add to this; in February I said it was one of the few Phalaenopsis I would actually want to have personally, and that remains the case. My track record with orchids is bad enough that I'm not actually trying to locate one (I'm actually pretty desperate to get rid of plants right now: I need more space for Anthurium and Schlumbergera seedlings and have nowhere to put them.), but I'd have a tough time turning one down if I saw a reasonably-priced one in a store.

Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight' = Phalaenopsis schilleriana x Phalaenopsis Malvarosa Valentine Pearl (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Salu Peoker x Harlequin

Not a lot to say about this one.

The tag was typoed,

but that's orchid show tags for you.

I'm not crazy about the blooms. I don't mind the pattern: I might even sort of like the pattern. But the color combination doesn't really work for me.

Phalaenopsis Salu Peoker = Phalaenopsis Yellow Peoker x Phalaenopsis Golden Sun (Ref.)

Phalaenopsis Harlequin = Phalaenopsis Rosita x Phalaenopsis Grace Palm (Ref.)

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 Chiada Francis 'Picotee'

I have now been to the 2016 orchid show. I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that I enjoyed myself more than I usually do. We've been attending the shows long enough (since 2010) that I know more or less how to get in, get the photos, and get back out again with minimal trouble. Nobody from the Illowa Orchid Society ambushed me to chastise me for my complaints about the tags on the plants, and there were, as usual, a few plants that really impressed me. Maybe even more than usual.

The bad news is that it was overcast all day,¹ so the light was less than ideal for photos, and as a result, the photo quality suffered. I haven't edited any of the photos yet, so it's possible that I'll still be able to turn them into decent shots, but the initial impression after uploading them was pretty bad.

Also this year, I tried for the first time to get whole-plant photos of all the plants, instead of just the flowers, on the grounds that there are probably serious orchid people in the audience who are as interested in the plants as they are in the flowers. However, those were almost uniformly terrible. I mean, again, I may be able to edit some of those into something usable, but between the crappy lighting and the way the plants were displayed, I don't expect to post most of them, so it was mostly wasted effort. I recognize that the show probably can't use as much of the Wallace's Garden Center space as it would like, and that they don't have infinite amounts of money to work with either, but every year I get irked by the way that certain blooms and plants are impossible to photograph without also getting a bunch of garbage (show ribbons, name tags, other orchids, non-orchid plants that get thrown in for decorative purposes, garden center displays, spectator butts, etc.) in the photo as well.²

My point being, don't get your hopes up for the next year of orchid photos. Some of them still turned out fine, but I expect the overall quality is going to be lower than those from the 2015 show. Nothing I could do about it: I don't control the weather.³ Sorry.

I still have to get the photos edited and uploaded, names checked, posts scheduled, ancestries checked out, notes made, and previous appearances looked up: I hope that will be finished by the time you see this, but I kind of doubt it.

Meanwhile, we do still have an orchid from 2015 to look at.

I don't remember it being this dark of a yellow in person, say my notes from five days after the 2015 show. I could only find a couple other photos of it on-line, and they both indicate a lighter, less orangey yellow. (Only one photo is linkable, alas.) This is probably a photo-editing failure: the background looks a little redder than it ought to as well.

I'm impressed with these flowers to the degree that they're both an unusual color and an unusual pattern, but even at the show, I was kind of ennh about this one.

Phalaenopsis Chiada Francis 'Picotee' = Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Sunflower x Phalaenopsis Taisuco Firebird (Ref.)

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¹ On the way there, we occasionally saw some light sprinkles of rain or snow, but nothing too serious, and then out of nowhere there was this amazing patch of incredibly dense, wet, clumpy snow. The snow didn't accumulate; it was too warm for that. But there was enough snow in the air to limit visibility substantially, and it was bizarre and amazing. And then after about 3 minutes, it stopped entirely, and it was just a normal overcast spring day again. March!
² Also certain exhibitors use backgrounds for their displays that make it harder to make out the outlines of plants: there's a screen made of sticks that shows up every year to drive me crazy, as well as a shoji screen which is my personal photographic nemesis. (It doesn't always cause the photo to turn out poorly, but considering how much other clutter is present in the displays, I feel like it shouldn't be too much to ask for the background to be a single, unpatterned, neutral color. That said, I realize that they're not putting the show on for me, and I should just do the best with the backgrounds I'm given and accept that they're not all going to work out perfectly. Which is what I've been doing.)
³ (Yet.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight'

I loved this one so much. The photo disappointed me (especially the out of focus and overexposed flower in the top left), but it was gorgeous in person. Plus there's sort of a white-tie tuxedo thing happening with the labellum.

The closest I got to a jaw-drop moment from the 2015 orchid show was the black Paphiopedilum (Black Cherry x sukhakulii) I showed you last June, but I also really liked the Papilionanda Erika Cizek Dann from October, and this Phalaenopsis. I don't know whether it means anything that my favorite orchids from the show were all much darker than the typical varieties. Maybe I was just in a dark purple mood that day. Either way, this is one of the few Phalaenopsis varieties I've seen that I actually covet.

Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight' = Phalaenopsis schilleriana x Phalaenopsis Malvarosa Valentine Pearl (Ref.)

Phal. schilleriana is pretty consistently lavender/pink in photo search results (e.g.); Phal. Malvarosa Valentine Pearl doesn't seem to show up in searches (you get results, but they're all pictures of Phal. Kaoda Twinkle).

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Venus

I-Hsin Venus is another of the really pretty phals from the 2015 show.

I got curious about all the "I-Hsin" phals (I've only blogged about our good friend I-Hsin Balloon and I-Hsin Black Jack, but the International Orchid Register site lists another 380 Phalaenopsis hybrids, from I-Hsin Abby to I-Hsin Zoo.

The registrant name for some of these, including I-Hsin Venus, is "I-Hsin Biotech," and for the others it's "W. C. Chien." As best as I can determine from their website, I-Hsin Biotech started out as one guy doing some amateur Phalaenopsis breeding in Taiwan and has turned into an international family-owned phal-production juggernaut, with facilities in Taiwan and the U.S.

So if the I-Hsin plants are amazing, well, they damn well should be: they have 70,000 m² (750,000 square feet) of greenhouse space for mass production of their plants, and an additional tenth of that amount set aside for flasks. If I had 6300 times more growing space devoted to Anthurium seedlings, I'd probably come up with some pretty cool Anthuriums, too.^{1, 2} (Also I imagine I'd spend quite a bit more time watering.)

And I-Hsin turns out not even to be unusual, in the Phalaenopsis world. There's another company whose phals show up frequently at the orchid show, OX Orchid Farm,³ who are also based in Taiwan and the U.S. No doubt if I looked long enough, I could find half a dozen more enormous Taiwanese Phalaenopsis companies.

I'm not crazy about the implication. I mean, in theory, there's still nothing stopping an amateur from catching a lucky break and producing an amazing seedling on their own, using a flasking service or whatever. But if you had your own amazing registered hybrid, really all you could do with it would be to sell it to one of the big companies, right? I mean, you can't really do tissue-culture at home,⁴ and if you can't mass-produce your plants, you can't mass-sell them either.

Not sure there's anything to be done about this really. Capitalism's gonna capital. But I don't like it.

Even if it does result in some pretty amazing plants.

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Venus = Phalaenopsis Dragon's Gold x Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Viola Tris (Ref.)

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¹ I mean, not that some of my Anthurium seedlings aren't still cool. They're just maybe not this cool.
² I have approximately 120 square feet (11 m²) of shelf space devoted to Anthuriums at the moment, including seedlings, parent plants, and germination containers. The Schlumbergeras get about 54 square feet (5 m²).
³ OX Orchid Farm hybrids: OX Spot Queen 'OX1460,' OX Prince 'OX1480,' OX Golden Apple, OX Little Moon, and OX Firebird 'OX1495'
⁴ Technically, I think artisanal tissue culture is possible, and something people have done before, but because of the need for incredibly sterile facilities, equipment, and culture medium, one would need to be very lucky, skilled, or persistent. And a 70,000 m² greenhouse for growing out the plants after they're created would help too.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Purple Queen

This one was striking for the sharpness of the purple/white divide. I don't remember seeing that in any other Phalaenopsis. It's probably especially impressive when one gets a really big spike, with lots of individual flowers. There aren't a lot of phals I can imagine really wanting to own, but I wouldn't mind having one of these. (Or I-Hsin Balloon. I mean, if you want a list, I could come up with a list.)

Most years, I'm not impressed with the Phalaenopsis at the show, but I really liked most of the ones I got photos of this year. Whether this is because they're getting better, my standards are lowering, or I'm just not taking photos of the boring ones, I'm not sure, but if I had to guess, I'd guess the third option. I know there was at least one gigantic plain-white phal that I didn't bother taking a picture of.

Phalaenopsis Purple Queen = Phalaenopsis Regnier x Phalaenopsis schilleriana (Ref.)

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: Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Black Jack

Hey, so: I am still alive, but for various reasons haven't been able to post lately.

Or, technically, I suppose I'm able to post, in the sense that no one is physically preventing me from doing so, but I've found it difficult to post. That's probably going to continue for a while longer, as I try to process another large batch of recent photos, but I haven't forgotten about you or the blog, and semi-regular non-orchid posting will resume eventually.

Now then.

This is a very dark Phalaenopsis, but there's an even darker one coming up in February. I find myself surprisingly impressed with both. (Though while I was taking this photo, another show attendee was telling someone that they really preferred the white ones. Judging by what I see in the background while watching TV, everybody else prefers white too.¹ I think this is clearly wrong, on the grounds that all white phals look exactly the same and are boring, but nobody listens to me.)

And yes, I see that the tag has this identified as a Doritaenopsis, but neither Doritaenopsis nor Doritis even still exist, officially, so I fixed it.

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Black Jack = Phalaenopsis Golden Peoker x Phalaenopsis Leopard Prince (Ref.)

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¹ Since about 2010 or so, white Phalaenopsis have been taking up more and more "TV houseplant" positions, to the point where it's currently like 80% white phals in the stuff we watch around here. A startlingly large chunk of the remaining 20% is Ficus lyrata, which seems to be having a sudden cultural revival for no good reason I can think of.

Pretty pictures: Phalaenopsis OX Spot Queen 'OX1460'

A "Spot Queen" that . . . doesn't really have any spots to speak of. I wonder what that's about.

In orchid-related news: the Illowa Orchid Society's Show is being held March 21-22 this year. I'll be there, taking pictures, so if you'd prefer that I not take pictures of your orchids you should probably put "make a 'NO PHOTOS' sign for orchid show" on your to-do list now.

Phalaenopsis OX Spot Queen 'OX1460' = Phalaenopsis OX Honey x Phalaenopsis OX Black Jack (Ref.)

Pretty pictures: Phalaenopsis Madeline Hayden

Well, it's not orange. So that's something.

Initially, I was unimpressed with this one, but it seems pretty cool now. Maybe I'm drawn to the plainer, calmer Phalaenopsis varieties, as opposed to the ones with the wild dots and stripes and what have you. I mean, Phal. Mistral's Sunrise Flame 'Mendenhall' was one of my favorites from last year's show, and I had relatively nice things to say about Phal. (Sogo Yukidian x Brother Oxford) in October.

So maybe my problem with phals is not that I find them boring so much as I would like them to be more boring.

Phalaenopsis Madeline Hayden = Phalaenopsis Taisuco Carol x Phalaenopsis Taisuco Peace (Ref.)

Pretty pictures: Phalaenopsis OX Prince 'OX1480'

Not terribly excited about this particular Phalaenopsis, though a lot of that is because it's hard to get me excited about any Phalaenopsis.

Phalaenopsis OX Prince 'OX1480' = Phalaenopsis OX Black Jack x Phalaenopsis Leopard Prince (Ref.)

In other news:

There will be at least one more Schlumbergera seedling to talk about; #083 has a bloom that is almost but not quite opened as of the 16th, and at least so far looks like the sort of plant I would buy if I saw it in a store. (Would you believe magenta / orange, for a color combination? I'm not sure that it works, exactly, but I can't say I've ever seen it before.)

I also have buds on a number of others,¹ though there's always the possibility that those will drop before developing -- a lot of the first batch of seedlings (057 "Pyrotechnic," 024 "Bryce Canyon," 054 "Helpful Gesture," and so on) just dropped a bunch of buds on me, possibly because they got too dry, and don't appear inclined to make any more. But I'm pretty sure 083, at least, is going to finish building its flower in time for me to take a photo, and I'm interested in what y'all will make of it.

There will also be Anthurium posts soon. 040 "Ivy Winters" has finally gotten it together to produce a bloom (and followed that immediately with a second bud, which is kind of impressive even if the bloom itself isn't), and I've seen first-time buds on another four seedlings.² This is after a few months of nothing at all happening,³ so I'm relieved.

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¹ (008 "Frightened Dog," 012, 021, 023, 027, 028, 031, 056, 061, 079, 084)
² Namely:
132 "Eve Stropper" (light pink?)
241 "Megan Gigaterra" (white / cream right now, which probably means light pink eventually)
259 "Tasha Salad" (purplish pink?)
334 "Jean Poole" (red or dark red, with fantastic foliage)
³ Well. Lots of up-potting (including the first group of seedlings to advance to 6-inch / 15 cm pots), and lots of seed-starting. But that was all me: the plants weren't doing anything much, and hadn't been since June or July. Lazy freeloading bastards.

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.