Pretty picture: Vanda Princess Mikasa

I prefer the "blue"¹ version of Princess Mikasa, but they're both nice. Previously:

2013 (blue), 2014 (blue), 2015 (pink)

The tag had this identified as Ascocenda, not Vanda, but when I last checked on it, last March, the seed parent of Princess Mikasa (Royal Sapphire) had been changed from Ascocenda to Vanda, making Princess Mikasa officially also a Vanda. It's been six months, so who knows if that's still correct, but when it comes to orchid taxonomy, I feel like as long as you've been accurate once, you can call them whatever you want to. It's like the orchid-taxonomic version of once saved, always saved.

Vanda Princess Mikasa = Vanda Royal Sapphire x Vanda coerulea (Ref.)

-

¹ The "blue" Princess Mikasa is in fact actually purple, but because certain plants like roses and petunias don't naturally produce flowers that are at all blue, and because the very unusualness of a blue rose or blue petunia would make it enormously valuable, the horticultural world has embraced the collective delusion that the closest reachable shade of purple to blue may be called "blue" for marketing purposes even if it is obviously and unambiguously purple in every other conceivable context.
This naturally leads to absurdity. Like, on patriotic holidays in the United States (e.g. Memorial Day or the 4th of July), one will frequently see for sale hanging baskets of petunias which are obviously red, white, and purple, adorned with ribbons and flags and whatnot which are obviously red, white, and blue. No one comments on it; we all just pretend that they match. In some cases, people will even go out of their way to argue with you that purple is actually blue, so strong is the desire to have a genuinely blue-flowering plant. It's all very The Emperor's New Clothes.
If genetic engineering accomplishes nothing else, my hope is that it can create actual blue flowers on plants not naturally inclined to grow them, so we can stop the travesty of horticultural blue. Hasn't happened yet (even when you can get a plant to produce the pigment naturally responsible for the true-blue color of certain flowers, it won't necessarily appear blue, because the pigment changes color depending on the pH of its environment. Which is how the genetically engineered "blue" rose linked above can produce a blue pigment and yet still appear purple: at the pH in rose petals, the pigment is purple.), but perhaps someday.
Also genetic engineering might kill off the practice of injecting blue dye into white orchids once and for all. Which I am still angry about, for the record.

Pretty picture: Papilionanda Erika Cizek Dann

This was tagged Vanda at the show, and I really want it to be a Vanda, but technically it's a Papilionanda. Which shouldn't matter at all, because it was marvelous.

I really loved this one in person, just because it was so different from anything I'd ever seen before. Objectively, I know that a sort of desaturated gray-purple isn't going to impress many people, but it was so new (or I'm so jaded, whichever), that it kind of blew me away.

Papilionanda Erika Cizek Dann = Vanda Gordon Dillon x Papilionanda Arjuna (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Vanda Rachadaporn

I just straight-up hate this one. That color! Ugh.

I'd blame it on the photography, except that I remember being unimpressed in person as well. It's different, and, well, respect for being different, but this does not do it for me at all.

Vanda Rachadaporn = Vanda Thananchai x Vanda denisoniana (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Vanda Princess Mikasa Pink

I mentioned in a post last year that Google said V. Princess Mikasa can also be pink, but that I hadn't seen it personally. And now I have.

I can't figure out from the available information whether this is from the same cross that produced the original blue-violet Princess Mikasa, or if it's a different cross that someone just named the same. The International Orchid Register doesn't have a separate entry for Princess Mikasa Pink (so that's probably not even its name, technically: it's probably just Princess Mikasa), which makes me think it's probably a sibling of the blue-violet Princess Mikasa, but the world of orchids is often illogical, redundant, self-contradictory, or counterintuitive, and I gave up on it making sense a long time ago, so bear in mind that that's only a guess.

If the pink Princess Mikasa is from the same cross as the violet Princess Mikasa, its ancestry is:

Vanda Princess Mikasa = Vanda Royal Sapphire x Vanda coerulea (Ref.)

Previously: 2013, 2014 (both are the blue-violet version)

Pretty picture: Vanda Pakchong Blue

We've seen this variety before, pretty consistently from year to year, even (2010, 2011, and maybe 2012), which makes me wonder if it's not just the same plant coming back over and over.

I mean, the only other explanation that would make sense would be that maybe there are just a lot of them out there. But I've only ever seen one per year at the show. So it's probably the same plant over and over.

Vanda Pakchong Blue = Vanda Doctor Anek x Vanda coerulea (Ref.)

Other news: I'll have two more Schlumbergera-bloom posts eventually (021 and 083, and you will definitely want to see 083: it's the best Schlumbergera seedling to date) for sure, and possibly several more (008, 012?, 019, 023, 027, 028, 030, 031, 061, 078, 084, 088) if buds don't drop first.

Anthurium #334 "Jean Poole" is developing nicely but has still not opened yet.

The other three new Anthurium buds (#132 "Eve Stropper," #241 "Megan Gigaterra," and #259 "Tasha Salad") are all still doing okay, but are so far from being ready to open that I'm trying not to get too excited. There's a first-ever bud on #594 ("Charity Case") as well. (Light to medium pink so far: nothing too exciting.)

First-generation berries: Anthurium 'Joli' (medium-sized, lavender to hot pink to orange-red) has in fact been pollinated. Still can't tell about 'Florida.' (huge, orange) Should have seeds to sow from 'Midori' (large, green) just any day now, as well as six spadices' worth of seeds from 'Pandola.' (large, pink)

Second-generation berries: nothing much on the horizon at the moment save for #203 "Anna Mae Hemensouz" (medium, dark red) and #231 "Rhea Listick" (medium, purple-pink). #234 "Ross Koz" (medium, purple-pink) has some berries forming but it seems like I've been waiting on them forever; ditto for #245 "Sawyer Ad" (medium-large, red) and #276 "Zach Religious" (medium-large, pink/red). I'm getting ready to move another set of seedlings into 3-inch pots soon, to make more room to start seeds, so expect the plant census to make another big jump. I could well wind up with 2000 by the end of 2015, if this sort of thing keeps up.

Pretty picture: Vanda Doi Inthanon

I know, I know. Mr. Subjunctive, what happened? You were doing so well there for a while, a post every single day for like ten days in a row, and then suddenly you fall off the face of the Earth!

Yes. Well. Some of the deal is that now I'm stuck waiting for new things to happen, having blogged about most of the bloggable things. I also discovered a sale on Sims 3 expansion packs on Origin, so now I'm back playing the Sims again. And there's a grocery store in Mount Pleasant that puts the Ball potting mix that I like on clearance late in the summer, so we made a special trip there so I could buy what will hopefully be enough potting soil to satisfy my needs until about July 2016. (I spent $94; the same thing at the ex-job would have cost me $203. So it was worth making a special trip.)

So, you know. Stuff happens. Sometimes that stuff is blogging, and sometimes it's not. In any case, I'm fine, there will be blog posts again someday, and in the meantime we have an orchid.

Tracking down the ancestry information on this one was a hassle. The actual plant's tag read "Doi Inanthond," and identified this as an Ascocenda. Google sent me through multiple combinations of letters (Inanthon, Inanthond, Inthanon, etc.) before I finally figured out that it was named for a mountain in Thailand, which led to confirmation from the orchid registry, who told me that it's not even an Ascocenda at the moment, technically, but a Vanda. So there was like one correct word on the tag out of three.

In fact, I should probably just let tracking down the Doi Inthanon stuff be my excuse for not posting more.

Anyway. So the ancestry, then, is:

Vanda Doi Inthanon = Vanda Thonglor (1974) x Vanda Yip Sum Wah (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Vanda Princess Mikasa

Google tells me that Princess Mikasa can also be hot pink, though I've never seen that personally.

Previously (as Ascocenda Princess Mikasa): 2013

Vanda Princess Mikasa = Vanda Royal Sapphire x Vanda coerulea (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Vanda Blaupunkt

The tag said "Vandofinetia Blaupunkt," but the International Orchid Register says both parents are Vandas (Vanda coerulescens x Vanda falcata).

"Blaupunkt" means "blue dot" in German, and is also the name of a German electronics equipment manufacturer. I'd argue that these flowers are not blue, dot-like, or electronic equipment, but I gave up long ago on expecting orchid names to make any sense.

Pretty pictures: Vanda cristata

I seem to have accidentally fallen into a blogging-hiatus hole. Among other problems to be detailed below, I'm really coming to despise the plant collection:¹ they appear to be playing a game of chicken, to see which of them can have the most and largest problems without getting thrown in the trash. (Currently neck and neck for the lead: Agave desmettiana and Agave americana.)

Meanwhile, we've progressed from The Week of Sheba's Unexplained Itching to The Week of a Grandparent's Funeral to The Week of Contractors. A plan that was started roughly two years ago has finally started being executed, so we're getting some work done on the house, but our influence over which repairs, when they happen, and how they're performed is very minimal.² So there are early-morning noises, and strange people coming in and out, and at one point the plant room door was replaced.³ The whole thing's been disruptive and unpleasant. It surely says something that the high point of the last three weeks was a funeral.

As for Sheba, she's back to normal amounts of scratching and biting since she started the flea treatment, which is great. Unfortunately, the improvement was accompanied by an ear infection⁴ and fantastic, amazing dandruff,⁵ so we don't seem to be winning on that front either.

The reader may recall that I've been itching quite a bit myself lately, and that it got dramatically worse at about the same time that Sheba's latest outbreak began, so it'd be logical to think that when she's doing better, I'm also doing better. But no. My problem was apparently never the fleas.⁶ The itching is pretty terrible on its own, but it also wakes me up at night sometimes, or keeps me from getting to sleep, which amplifies all the previously-mentioned minor annoyances. And of course I have no idea what is causing it or how to make it go away; so far, all I can really do is take Benadryl, which may or may not do anything for the itching, but at least knocks me out to the point where I don't have to be consciously aware of the itching anymore.

As I write this on Monday morning, this week has not yet made its particular flavor apparent. Depression? Loss of internet service and/or electricity? Bureaucratic runarounds? Car trouble? Whooping cough? Sinkholes? Plague of frogs? Robot uprising? Time will tell. Posting is expected to stay confined to once-a-week orchid posts for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, here are some bad photographs of a not-particularly-photogenic orchid.

-

¹ Not hyperbole. I know I've said things like this before and then come back around to liking plants again, but it feels like we're surely coming to the climax of . . . something. Two years is a long time to keep a hobby that's costing more in aggravation than it's giving you in pleasure, and it's getting harder to believe that stuff might get better.
² In mitigation: we're not paying for any of it, so it feels churlish to complain. (Not that that stops me, because since when have I minded being thought of as churlish?)
³ Not so terrible in and of itself, but they started when it was 39F / 4C outside, and involved a lot of people just standing around while there was a giant hole in the wall of the plant room, cold breeze blowing freely in and out, so I was understandably worried. (I spent the majority of that day in my office with the door closed trying to pretend that it wasn't happening.) It doesn't appear to have harmed any of the plants yet, but this wasn't that long ago, so they could just be slow to react.
⁴ Not diagnosed by the vet, but the smell is awfully familiar, and obviously emanating from her ear, so.
⁵ If I were a dandruff connoisseur -- and you know that one has to exist, somewhere -- this would be the best week of my life. Right up there with the first time I ever saw The Breakfast Club, probably.

^ This .gif is also a pretty good representation of how I feel when my itching gets really bad.
⁶ (which might explain why I never saw any)

Pretty pictures: Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips

It kind of bugs me when people name non-red things "cherry" something. Not bothered a lot, but it does seem sort of exceptionally wrong.

I can't tell whether these pictures turned out well; I'm still getting used to having an LCD monitor. From some angles they look washed-out, and from other angles they don't. In either case, they do an admirable job of matching the blog's current color scheme, so there's that.

Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips = Vanda Doctor Anek x Vanda Antonio Real

Pretty pictures: Vanda Wirat Blue

I couldn't find anything about Wirat Blue at the International Orchid Register, which makes me question if it's a real name or not.


There's a Vanda Wirat, for example, and if you do a Google search for Vanda Wirat, you get a lot of hits for both Wirat Blue and Wirat Pink, neither of which are in the IOR. Could it be that the Wirat cross produced offspring which were blue (or at least "blue," the aspirational name given to certain shades of purple in the horticultural world) and other seedlings which were pink? Or is it more complicated than that? I don't know.


I suppose the important thing is that Vandas are pretty.

Pretty picture: Vanda NOID

Quick sell/trade note:

Three more plants have been added to the officially-available list. They are the Anthurium mongrels, the "speckled" Philodendron hederaceum, and the Stapelia gigantea, and are priced at $3, $3, and $5, respectively.

The tag just said "VANDA." It's not wrong, technically, and it's not completely unidentified, so I can't really count it along with the other errors and missing tags, yet it's hard not to feel that there's something missing, informationally speaking.

It looks more or less exactly like V. Pakchong Blue, which we've seen twice before at the show, (2010) (2011) and which I suspect has been the same specimen both years, so I'm just going to assume that this is the same specimen, back for a third year, because why not.

Pretty picture: Vanda Pakchong Blue

One of my favorite photos from last year was of this same variety of Vanda. Indeed, since both photos were taken at the Quad Cities Orchid Show on consecutive years, there's a good chance it was even the same individual plant.


I don't know that either of these photos are better than the one from 2010 -- part of the pleasure of the 2010 photo was the surprise at how well it had turned out -- but they're pleasant enough. It's hard to go too wrong when you're working with a subject like this.

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 picture: Vanda Pakchong Blue

Yet another orchid picture. I wasn't terribly impressed with the Vandas we had at work. The flowers were very pretty, but the plants . . . not so much. And they were really expensive too, for flowers that looked an awful lot like just another Phalaenopsis.

The disappointment was mutual: most of the Vandas didn't last long enough to be sold, which is why I don't expect to see any Vandas there for the next three to five years.

That said, when it comes to the blue-violet ones like Pakchong Blue, I understand why people would bother. That color! That pattern!

For this one, I wanted to get a shot that was backlit, so I was having to take the photo from a point almost underneath the plant. Given that it was at an orchid show, and I couldn't touch the plant, or even get very close to it, and there were people everywhere, I wound up aiming the camera in the general direction of the flowers, hoping to catch something reasonably interesting and focused. Lots of failures, but I kind of liked the way this one turned out, off-center though it may be.

And the more standard face-on view, where I didn't have to contort myself quite as much.

Pretty picture: Vanda NOIDs

These poor things have been, in WCW's words, "to hell and back." Mostly they've just been too wet, off and on, but they've also fallen out of their pots a number of times, and their roots have been injured, and all manner of other problems. We've put a pretty insane amount of work into them and still haven't sold a one, because of their price. (Either $70 or $80; I forget which. It's high, yes, but it is reflective of the cost we paid to get them here in the first place.)


Fortunately, the Vandas seem to be forgiving us. Or at least the one in the pictures is: it's the only one to rebloom so far. It's being a much better sport about it all than I would have been, if I were an orchid.


I don't actually care for Vandas that much: they're pretty, certainly, and I like the subtle pattern in the petals, but the shape doesn't really do much for me, they're not as big as some of the orchid flowers I've seen, they don't seem to appear in particularly large number, and for being that pricey, I'd think they'd be proportionately awesome. But there is one thing:


The color isn't quite accurate, but it's close: this one at Lowes (many months ago) was a very un-orchidy color. Which does impress me. So few flowers are blue to begin with, and blues are nearly nonexistent among houseplants, aside from some Saintpaulias and the occasional flash of color among the other orchids (e.g. Zygoneria). So they do have good qualities.

Any thoughts or experiences re: Vandas that anybody wants to share? (Particularly comments of the, well that one's nice and all, but to really dig Vandas you've got to see _________ variety.)