Pretty picture: Vuylstekeara Melissa Brianne 'Shady Lady'

Boxing Day, at long last. In reality, there are a couple more weeks of Christmas-related events and music, but in my mind, Boxing Day is when stores and advertisements stop playing Christmas music, and the poinsettias get thrown out, and the Schlumbergeras get put on clearance if they're going to be, and the whole world just returns to normal after three months of force-feeding me red-and-green glittery holiday cheer. So Boxing Day is, like, the most wonderful day of the year to me. Hope everyone else is enjoying it too.

Oh! Speaking of force-fed glitter -- you know those spray-painted poinsettias, that have blue bracts, or purple, or whatever, usually liberally sprinkled with glitter besides? I saw green ones this year. Seriously. Someone went to the trouble of growing up a bunch of poinsettias, kept them under darkness for the prescribed number of hours per day so they would flower and their bracts would turn red (or possibly white: it's hard to tell for sure), and then spray-painted the bracts green. The color they would have been anyway.

This is a terrible picture; I was trying to get a couple photos and then get away as quickly as possible, because it was crowded and busy and I felt really self-conscious. In reality, the spray-paint was a slightly bluish, deep emerald green, which the color settings on the camera completely failed to capture properly: the photo makes the coloration look a little more realistic than was actually the case.
A line of some sort has been crossed, here.

But anyway. None of this is the point of the post; there is an orchid to be looked at. I don't have a lot to say about it, but I like the color. Comment or don't.


Meanwhile, all kinds of things have happened over the last week -- lots of random blooming going on, just like last year (also, also, also). Winter is a curiously eventful season for indoor gardening.¹ So I spent a lot of the hiatus writing posts in advance, and therefore haven't really had a winter break yet, but I will, eventually.

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¹ (Especially by comparison to outdoor. At least in Iowa it is.)

Pretty picture: Vuylstekeara Aloha Sparks 'Ruby Eyes'

I'm not impressed by these pictures. I don't know what went wrong here exactly, but they don't strike me as being . . . right, somehow. Still, they're the only pictures I've got, so I guess I have to use them anyway.


As is sadly typical with orchids, the name is sort of a word salad.


Vuylstekeara is also orchid-typical in that it's a three-genus hybrid (also called a trigeneric hybrid, which means the same thing), of Cochlioda, Miltonia and Odontoglossum.

This is the first Vuyl. I've seen, or at least the first one I've seen that was identified as such, and I'm a bit underwhelmed. The color's nice, but I also feel like I've seen this flower before. So whatever. Am I being too harsh?