Pretty pictures: unusual Tulipa flowers

I haven't been taking pictures in town so much this year, because I was only ever doing that on walks with Sheba, and Sheba and I have been doing a lot more walking on the gravel roads around town. Plus, it's mainly the same stuff that was there last year, which you've seen already. (If you were reading last year. Which I realize some of you weren't. But that's what the archives are for.)

I have, though, seen a couple tulips that were new to me this year, which I present for your consideration:

A NOID double yellow. I've seen very few double tulips around here. Mostly this year I've been noticing that there were lots of white ones. Were white tulips all the rage last summer and fall and I just didn't notice?

Okay, so it's not unusual. I really liked the picture and wanted to include it.

No clue. I looked around on line and found some photos of tulips that were similarly pointy, but nothing that was splayed open like this.

Same flower from a different angle.

Almost-opened buds from the pointy orange tulip.

Pretty picture: Tulipa NOID

Not really part of the orchid show, but these were also at Wallace's on Saturday. I thought the picture came out nicely.

[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.

Pretty pictures: Tulipa cvv.

I'd pretty much thought that the last batch of tulip photos would be it, but they keep coming up, and I keep taking pictures of them, so I have another batch to show. Plus, everybody likes tulips. So.

This first one I really like: it's pink and orange at the same time. I've seen them in a couple different places around town.


And then another flower of the same (?) variety, from a different garden:


It took me forever to get a decent picture of a yellow tulip. They're all over the place, but people have this thing about planting yellow tulips right next to their house, usually under a window, and I do not want to have any conversation which begins with the question "Why are you standing outside my five-year-old daughter's bedroom window with a camera?"


I see a lot of purple tulips around town too, but mostly they seem to be going for a darker, more somber kind of purple. Nothing wrong with that, but this guy's lighter hue stands out and seems somehow more appropriate to the season.


And yet another reddish one. It isn't the greatest photo; it was overcast when I took it, and the colors all wound up kind of washed-out. I did the best I could to get them more or less the way they appeared in person, but it kind of didn't work.


Only a couple houses have "black" (actually more of a very dark red-purple) tulips. This particular one is planted in a tire, which you can kind of see in the photo, along with some Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica). The combination works surprisingly well, in part because the color of the tulips and the color of their "planter" echo one another. This is possibly the first "black" tulip I've seen since reading about them in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. (I bought some 'Queen of Night' bulbs in the fall of 2007, along with some hyacinths and maybe something else, for a planter on the landing outside our apartment door, but nothing came up; I never figured out why.) They are, indeed, pretty dark.


"Parrot" "Fringed" tulips, those with fringed petals, don't seem to be very popular: this is the only one I've seen so far.


And, finally, another sighting of the highly-coveted (by me) viridiflora tulips. (I've actually seen one other one, a white one, but didn't take a picture because it was deep in someone's yard and Sheba can be trusted not to trample stuff only up to a point.)


In this particular case, I even know the cultivar name, because the tag happened to be there. This is Tulipa 'Greenland.' Of more interest to me than the name is how and why the tag happened to be there. (It looked like it was just lying there on the ground, not stuck upright into the soil. Except there's no way it could have just been laying there since last fall, not after the wind and the rain and everything. But if it had recently been dropped there, that doesn't make any sense either, because why would you put the identifying tag for a plant down after the plant had already come up and bloomed and was obviously whatever it was? Isn't that when you least need a tag telling you what the plant is? And even if you were going to try to mark the spot, you'd still want to push it into the soil vertically to keep it from blowing away, right? So it's a mystery.)

Bonus Afternoon Tulip, Just 'Cause I Like You

Test-drove the new camera this morning on the walk with Sheba. The verdict so far seems to be that yes, it does take better pictures, but the display shows them all as being much crappier than the old one did. So I'm more likely to get a good picture, but way less likely to know in advance whether any of the shots are any good.

Pretty pictures: Tulipa cvv. flowers

So I was all excited when I got up last Friday, because the next round of watering didn't start until Sunday (today), and I didn't have to buy anything, there were no repotting emergencies or pest emergencies to deal with, I had a ton of pictures already uploaded which could be used for blog fodder, the weather was forecast to be rain so I wouldn't have to walk Sheba -- in short, there was absolutely nothing standing between me and two days spent cranking out post after post after post for the blog.

But then the camera, or its memory card, or the card reader, stopped working, so I spent half of Friday and a good chunk of yesterday preoccupied with either trying to fix that or replace the camera. Which is of course very frustrating.¹

None of this has anything to do with the tulip pictures I promised in the title; it's just annoying and I wanted to complain about it to someone, and the husband has already heard the complaining so I couldn't complain to him about it again, and you didn't click or scroll away soon enough, so now you're stuck knowing about it.

But there are indeed tulips, including what I believe is the awesomest tulip I've ever seen in my life. So.

Keep in mind that all of these will open much larger in a new window, if you want to see detail:


I feel kind of weird, skulking around taking pictures of people's tulips like this. I hope it's at least obvious that that's all I'm doing. I'm sure I've been watched through a window more than once, by this point. But some of the pictures I get are worth it.



This one isn't that great of a flower, and there's a weird spot of something orangish on it that I didn't notice when I was taking the photo and can't identify, but I thought it was worth including anyway because the color and shape looked (to me) very much like a heart. Actually, now that I look, it's sort of right in between a cartoon Valentines heart and an actual, gross, meat-based heart. Hmmm.



Not the most elaborate bloom, but the picture turned out really nicely. I enjoy the color.



This one too, as far as it goes.



This looks more similar to the first photo than it actually was; the color on the first picture was a lot more pink and light yellow, and this one is a lot more red and yellow.

And then, the neatest tulip I think I've ever seen:



I can't really explain the appeal, I'm afraid, so if you don't get it, sorry to have disappointed you. It's just a color combination I've never seen before, and I like it. A lot.



The photos only sort of do it justice: the flowers are in dappled shade at the time of day when this was taken, which means the light levels are weird. But still, that's not a bad photo.



And, just because you were so nice, and read the camera-related whining, here's a bonus Iris, which I also deeply covet:



This may well be the first Iris I've liked enough to covet: Evil Grandma was big into Iris, and actually did some crosses of her own and stuff. She won a local Iris show one year, even. I've never hated them, exactly, but the association with her was sort of off-putting: this is the first one that made me stop and say wow in a very long time.



As with the special Tulip, the color combination is a lot of the appeal. I would never have thought to put those particular colors together in anything, much less expected that they would look cool. And yet.

UPDATED last night rather than rewrite the whole post:

I wound up buying a new camera at Target yesterday afternoon; it's an Olympus FE-4020, and charging up the battery took so much time that I have not yet tried taking any pictures with it, so I don't know whether I'm happy with it or not.

Buying electronics is a pain. I didn't like the process, and I didn't feel better when it was done. Normally if I spend that much money, I'm happier when it's done. And also usually I have a bunch of new plants.

Either the new camera will be so much better than the old one that the pictures will get noticeably better now, or having to start over on the learning curve for a new camera means much worse pictures for a little while. It will probably be one or the other. We'll know which in a week or two.

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¹ As I write this, it's early Saturday morning, and I don't know whether I'll be able to find a new camera I can afford in town or not. But just for the record, I'm not unhappy with the one I was using, exactly. It was an Olympus FE-170, which I got at Sears for $30 because it was an old floor display model. So it was already at least a year old when I bought it, it cost practically nothing, I had it for 2 1/2 years, got it wet frequently, and it still took almost 25,000 pictures in that time.
It's never worked exactly like it was supposed to: I've pretty much never been able to use the zoom (it'd let me zoom in with the viewfinder, but for more than a year now, if I press the button to take a picture with the zoom on, the camera will shut itself off instead), turning off the flash has become more and more of a hassle with time as the button responsible for doing this has gotten less and less sensitive (to the point where now I have to mash on it as hard as possible ten to fifteen times before one of them will take), and the lens turret stopped automatically retracting properly when I shut the camera off, so now the camera will only shut off when I press the turret in gently at the right moment (otherwise it'll sit there extending and retracting for a minute or so). But considering the price, it seems silly to complain about these things.

Pretty pictures: Tulipa NOID

I've been experiencing technical difficulties with the computer, so no commentary. Fortunately, I don't think these pictures need a lot of commentary anyway.

Pretty picture: Tulipa 'Svetlana'

Spring be sprung, yo.

Pretty pictures: Tulipa NOIDs

The forced bulbs march onward, I guess. Last year we tried forcing some of our own, not entirely on purpose (I forget what the deal was -- some unsold bulbs that got temporarily stashed somewhere and forgotten, that we went ahead and planted anyway?), and they didn't work out so well. I think I planted them too deeply, and maybe they also didn't get quite the full extent of the cold treatment that they wanted. They didn't open, or they opened before they emerged all the way, or I don't really remember what all went wrong. I just know it didn't work out so well. It's sometimes better for us to let the suppliers do the work.


I like tulips. They were one of the few outdoor plants my mom bothered with, when I last lived at home with them, is part of it, but I think I'd like them anyway. Don't know what it is exactly. It's sort of mysterious to me, what exactly the appeal is.


After all, I'm very clear about why I don't like certain other flowers. A lot of them look like they're trying too hard. A thousand petals, every variety rufflier than the next, six different colors at once, bizarre shapes, as big as your fist, as big as your head, as big as a beach ball -- tulips never look like they're overcompensating for anything. Which is reassuring sometimes.


Not that a person needs a reason to like a particular flower. (It's more the case that one needs a reason not to.) There's just something particularly attractive to me about tulips.