Pretty picture: Ascocenda Suksamran Sunshine

This was unfortunately destined to be a crappy picture -- the original was too washed out and blue, and my efforts to fix that only succeeded in making it too dark as well. But maybe this will help you appreciate the (mostly better) set from the 2012 show, which begin next Tuesday.


It's possible that the correct name is Sunlight, not Sunshine; Google has results for both, and the flowers look basically the same under both names, so after trying to figure it out for a while, I gave up.

Ascocenda is, as we all know, the name for crosses of Ascocentrum and Vanda. Google suggests that care for Ascocenda is basically the same as for Vanda.

Pretty picture: Cattleya Mary Lynn McKenzie

The best I could do for a genealogy here was a site that said Mary Lynn McKenzie is a cross between Cattleya Bob Betts and Cattleya Swan. This isn't especially exciting information to know, and this is the internet so it's always possible that it isn't even true information, but I'm including it in the post anyway because really, the only commentary about this flower I can come up with is that it's awfully white. Which you already know, having seen the picture already.

I also kind of approve of the weird white-daffodil impression it's doing. It amuses me when plants imitate one another.

Pretty picture: Baptistonia echinata

If everything went according to plan yesterday,¹ I now have about a million orchid photos to sort / crop / color-tweak, a task which could probably occupy me for the next eleven years or so. I only actually have two weeks before I run out of last year's pictures, though, so I'll have to go a little faster than that.


Meanwhile, this week, we have Baptistonia echinata, yet another in the very, very long line of plants that were mis-tagged: the tag said "Baptistonia echinacea," not B. echinata. I understand that it's easy to mis-write an uncommon word if there's a much more common, similar word already in your brain, but even so: does no one know how to proofread anymore? I was also disappointed because my first impulse was to hope that someone had named a species of Echinacea E. baptistonia, so as to confuse search engines, but alas.²


Couldn't find much specific information about B. echinata on-line. It's from Brazil, it's epiphytic, they like lots of humidity but are fairly temperature- and shade-tolerant; if I understand this post correctly, it's the only species in Baptistonia.

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¹ (I'm writing this on Wednesday the 7th.)
² Possibly no big loss: all available evidence suggests that search engines would cope just fine, it's people who would constantly be mixing them up.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum NOID

*sigh* Orchids just make me sad now.

Pretty rocking picture, though, if I do say so myself.

Pretty picture: Psychopsis Mendenhall alba 'Yellow Butterfly'

Since I last complained about my orchids, I've lost two more (both Potinaras). For those keeping score, that means I've attempted eleven orchids and lost six, with two more deaths likely by May:

Ludisia discolor. (Jun 2007 - Nov 2009; overpotted. There might also have been some problems with the mix I repotted it into.)

Dendrobium 'Karen.' (Oct 2008 - Dec 2011; potting medium likely too water-retentive)

Brassolaeliocattleya Helen Brown. (Oct 2008 - STILL ALIVE!)

Dendrobium "Humphrey Bogart"¹ (Oct 2008 - STILL ALIVE!)

Paphiopedilum Supersuk 'Eureka' x Paph. Raisin Pie 'Hsinying' x Sib (Nov 2008 - April or May 2012²)

Phalaenopsis NOID (Mar 2009 - STILL ALIVE!)

Oncidium NOID. (May 2009 - Aug 2009; attempted salvage of rootless plant from work that unsurprisingly didn't take)

Sophrolaeliocattleya Hazel Boyd 'Debbie.' (Dec 2010 - May 2011; thrown out due to scale)

Potinara Eye Candy 'Mellow Yellow.' (Dec 2010 - Feb 2012; slow death over a long period for no obvious reason)

Potinara Eye Candy 'Sweet Sensation.' (Dec 2010 - Feb 2012; also a slow death over a long period for no obvious reason)

Oncidium Tsiku Marguerite NN #1 (Dec 2010 - any day now; another long slow decline, and the plant is down to about 1/6 of its original size and number of pseudobulbs)

And the few plants that have survived aren't interesting to look at; the only orchid to ever rebloom for me is dead. So I am getting pretty disgusted with the Orchidaceae, to the point where I was seriously considering skipping the Illowa orchid show this year. It's just going to be all the same plants as last year, I can't afford to buy any of them, if I could buy plants they'd just die on me anyway, the pictures often don't turn out that well and need a lot of after-the-fact manipulation, and maybe I just don't want to look at fucking orchid flowers this year.

But. We're going to go anyway, assuming cooperation from the weather, vehicle, and venue, because:

1) I'll probably be less mad by then. (It's scheduled for March 10, at Wallace's Garden Center in Bettendorf, IA; see their website for directions.)
2) There will be other plants there too -- probably not very many, but enough. (Last year I saw my first Pinguicula!)
3) I haven't been to Wallace's in forever, and feel bad about it.³
4) I can't really pass up an opportunity to take 30-40 posts' worth of blog photos in a single day, however I may feel about the subjects.

So if you're there and you see a guy taking close-up pictures of the flowers with kind of a sour, contemptuous expression on his face, say hi! Just don't start talking about how wonderful and easy orchids are to cultivate, or I will have to kick you in the shins.

Unsolicited orchid-troubleshooting advice will also result in shin-kicking.

And I will probably be wearing boots.

In fact, you're probably best not to mention the orchids at all. I realize this will be difficult under the circumstances, but do say hi anyway.

-

¹ My name for it; it was a NOID.
² I know the approximate date because if it survives to April or May, I'm sending it to someone else. Details to be announced.
³ I like them; we just don't have compelling reasons to go to the Quad Cities very often.

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Caraway Moon

I don't really see what's caraway-like (or moon-like, for that matter) about this flower, but that probably just shows I'm a dull, uncreative person.


Google has no records of an orchid by the name of Masdevallia Caraway Moon. (Image searches for "Caraway Moon" bring up lots of images of shoes; I declined to investigate the reason, but I suppose someone might have named an orchid for a shoe? Or vice-versa?)

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Sweet Pinky 'Love'

This seemed like an appropriate orchid to post on Valentine's Day.

Google suggests that the name may be, more precisely, Dendrobium nobile Sweet Pinky 'Love,' though this confuses me: a species name, grex (cross) name, and a clone name? Surely a plant can't have all three of those at the same time, can it?

Possibly-Obvious Philosophical Musings on Plant Cultivation, and the Naturalness Thereof

Lyonara cv. (Schomburgkia undulata x Sophrolaeliocattleya Rojo)
I was reminded a couple weeks ago that there are people out there who have problems with hybrid plants (orchids in particular) just because they're hybrids. (See both the original post by The Phytophactor, and the comment by A. L. Gibson.)

In both cases, the objection seems to be that the plants aren't "real," by which they mean occurring in nature. (Whatever our other differences, I think we can all agree that hybrid orchids are not imaginary.) The Phytophactor calls them "unnatural contrivances," and points out that there's nothing particularly difficult about making a hybrid orchid: what keeps them from interbreeding freely in the wild is their requirement for very specific pollinators, so if people can bypass that requirement and create thousands of peculiar new crosses, it's hardly a surprise, and if I'm reading him correctly, he also considers the whole business unnecessary. We already have lots of pre-made orchids, just lying around on trees and growing in fields and what have you, that look all kinds of different ways and do all kinds of different things: what do we need with more of them?

Gibson is even less charitable, and says he's only interested in "the real, natural and purpose-driven species in our native soil," and thinks "our native species blow anything in your local garden/flower shop out of the water in both beauty and importance."


So okay. I'm going to just roll my eyes at the idea that the beauty of native wild orchids is relevant to the discussion. Beauty is famously subjective, for one thing, and it's really beside the point whether Phytophactor or Gibson see it in hybrid orchids, because thousands (millions?) of other people do. I mean, I don't really see beauty in Megan Fox's body, hear beauty in Rush's music, or find myself moved by the poetry of baseball games,¹ but I'm pretty sure I'm outnumbered on all counts, so I conclude that there's something pretty and interesting there that I am just not able to see.

Fredclarkeara After Dark 'SVO Black Pearl' FCC/AOS.
I think "purpose-driven" and "importance" are a bit off-target as well. Hybrid orchids have a purpose. It happens to be more economic than ecological: they have reshuffled their genes to appeal to human beings, to make us say ooooh, I want to buy that. But it's a reason to exist all the same, and by at least some objective measures, I'd say they're resoundingly successful.² If your primary interest in plants is ecological, I can see how hybrid orchids wouldn't strike you as important, but I submit that that says more about you than it does about them.

The reason for writing this, though, is because I saw The Phytophactor's post while working on the dyed-orchid post that went up on 29 January. And it occurred to me that objecting to the unnaturalness of dyed orchids is not that far from objecting to the unnaturalness of hybrid orchids. Both are creations of commerce, rather than creations of nature, both appeal to some people even if I may not see it myself, and all that. Which is fairly obvious in retrospect, but it's not a connection I'd made before. And I further realized that if I saw a hybrid phal that looked like "Blue Mystique," odds are I'd be pretty excited about it, even with the bizarre electric/toilet-bowl-water blue color. Even a hybrid phal that only bloomed once and then died, like most bromeliads do naturally,³ wouldn't bother me nearly as much as a dyed phal that blooms once in blue and thereafter in white. So clearly I've got some natural/unnatural hangups of my own.

Phalaenopsis WM Yellow.
This then led to the realization that I've seen people get upset about the "unnaturalness" of lots of different aspects of gardening. There are those poor delusional/demented souls who dislike indoor plants because plants are supposed to be planted in the ground, not in containers, not in a house. I've discovered in the course of writing PATSP that some people hate invasive plants so much they'll even yell at you for saying nice things about growing them indoors, where there's no chance of invading anything. Other people get upset with the (outdoor) planting of non-native species, invasive or not. Some want to talk your ear off about the ridiculous artificiality of perfectly-manicured green lawns.⁴ There's really no end to it. And my big epiphany was that of course everybody's got some kind of natural/unnatural snobbery that gets under their skin, because: plant cultivation is inherently an unnatural thing to do. Even though we have all agreed to treat it as being a part of nature, and talk about bringing a bit of nature indoors or maintaining a little bit of wildlife habitat in the backyard, there's nothing natural about a scenario where a person decides which plants will be planted, where they go, how and whether they reproduce, etc.

Lyonara cv. (Schomburgkia undulata x Sophrolaeliocattleya Rojo)
Now there's a whole big discussion to be had about whether the word "unnatural" can actually refer to anything, ever, which I will skip because that's headed toward stoned-college-sophomore territory.⁵ And I don't mean to suggest that because all plant cultivation is inherently unnatural, it necessarily follows that all the ways of cultivating plants are equally desirable. I'm just saying that calling something "unnatural" is not a good enough reason to disapprove of a practice, and maybe we should worry less about natural/unnatural and more about harmful/benign.

Which, honestly, hybrid orchids aren't harmful. And neither are dyed orchids. (Probably.⁶)

Fredclarkeara After Dark 'SVO Black Pearl' FCC/AOS.
It may be that none of the above is particularly revelatory for you, or that you disagree with it, or that you just can't bring yourself to give a shit one way or the other. Which is fine. But the above train of thought has given me a slightly different perspective about what I find distasteful and why.

I'll miss the stone-throwing, but hey, this is a pretty sweet glass house.

-

Photo credits:
Lyonara and Phalaenopsis: mr_subjunctive, taken at the Illowa Orchid Show, last March at Wallace's Garden Center in Bettendorf, IA.
Fredclarkeara: Taylor Holzer, at the Phipps Conservatory. Used by permission.

¹ Or, for the most part, by the poetry of poetry, as far as that goes, though there are occasional exceptions. I think this is mostly due to Sturgeon's Law, and not because there's anything wrong with poetry as an art form.
² Possible objective measurements of orchid "success:" amount of money generated from their production and sales, total biomass, total number of described species vs. named hybrids. I don't know that hybrids would beat species on all three (I'm not even sure where one would begin trying to estimate numbers for each), but I'm pretty sure they'd win the first.
³ (and like the majority of dyed Phalaenopsis do unnaturally)
⁴ (Which in fact are pretty ridiculous.)
⁵ But if you are a stoned college sophomore:
My position is that nothing human beings do is ever really "unnatural:" we're as much a product of nature as anything else. (This is one of the few things you can say that's true whether you're an evolutionist or creationist: either we evolved like everything else, or we were created like everything else. I understand that there used to be a middle ground of sorts, where people believed that everything evolved except humans, who were zapped into existence, but the fossil record shows plenty of progressively more human-like apes, and the Bible, taken literally, is pretty unambiguous about the zapping, so I don't know how anyone ever justified the middle position.^a)
Granted, even if the words "natural" and "unnatural" don't actually refer to anything when you look at them from a certain perspective, they're still useful in everyday conversation, and we generally all know what we're talking about when we use them, so I'm not saying the whole concept needs to be thrown out, just that I'm not sure it's a reason to object to anything, unless you're also prepared to dislike whiskers on kittens (animal domestication), bright copper kettles (copper mining, metalworking, fire), warm woolen mittens (animal domestication, knitting, possibly dyeing of yarn), brown paper packages tied up with strings (logging, paper mills, plant domestication), crisp apple streudels (domestication of plants and animals both, plus fire, plus international trade), doorbells (metalworking, mining), sleigh bells (ditto), schnitzel with noodles (plant and animal domestication), or girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes (plant or animal domestication, dyeing, weaving).

^a Also, while we're talking about Genesis, I'd just like to point out that according to the Bible, not only is the world's oldest profession not prostitution, as is commonly said, but a good argument could be made for it being taxonomy.

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. (-Gen. 2:19)

The sad part is that taxonomists still haven't managed to sort all this out yet even though they've had thousands of years to work on it. Tsk tsk.
(I kid the taxonomists! Ha!)
⁶ Except possibly to the extent that the extra production of dye (or the waste products thereof) might be an environmental hazard. Silver Vase's website says only "This technique has been perfected after many years of research and testing, using naturally derived elements and remaining environmentally conscious." Given that "using naturally derived elements" could be a modified version of anything that occurs on the planet, i.e., any chemical at all, and given that being conscious of the environment, as phrased, just means being aware that an environment exists, I'm not particularly reassured by this statement.
Not that I think Silver Vase is ruining the environment, necessarily: I just don't think we should necessarily take their word for it that they're not. Of course they're going to say they're not.
I have a theory about the exact identity of the blue dye Silver Vase is using for "Blue Mystique," based on the particular shade of blue and the length of time it persists before the plant breaks it down, but am hesitant to say so on the blog without more evidence. Suffice it to say that I suspect I could confirm its identity with materials I already have on-hand (except for the orchid: I'd need a "Blue Mystique"), and that the similarity of "Blue Mystique's" hue to toilet water may not be coincidental. Let me know if this is an experiment you feel like sponsoring; I'm sure I'll see another one for sale relatively soon.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Sargent Eric 'Timberlane'

And yet another case of a mis-tagged plant: the tag on this one was Phrag. Eric Sargeant 'Timberlane,' not Phrag. Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane.' So not only a misspelling, but also a word transposition as well. (EDIT: apparently this is just a really confusing situation; BrianO says in comments that it really was Sargent, named for one of the parent species, P. sargentianum. Which isn't what the tag said, and isn't what Google thinks -- Google favors "Sergeant Eric" -- either, but I'm going to stop complaining about this one being mis-tagged because clearly, no mere human could possibly have figured out the name of this hybrid on his/r own.)


There's also a lot of confusion regarding the proper spelling of "Sergeant," but that's not terribly surprising, 'cause it's a difficult word. One E sounding like an A, another E making no sound at all -- the whole word's just a madhouse, which is what we get for trying to take words from the French. Should have known the French would booby-trap their words to make them unstealable.

It took me long enough to figure out the name that I was left with no interest whatsoever in trying to track down the ancestry of this flower, but I did run into an interesting site in the process, which has pictures of quite a few Paphiopedilum hybrids. (Why a website about paph crosses should show up in a search for a particular phrag cross, I have no idea.) Lots of pictures isn't even the interesting part, though: the interesting part is that the flowers of the hybrids are sitting right next to pictures of the species that were crossed to produce them, so you can actually kind of see what characteristics came from which parent, and what happens when you swap one parent out and put in a different one, and that kind of thing. Our good friend Paph. St. Swithin is there (St. Swithin = Paph. philippinense x Paph. rothschildianum), and there's lots of great eye candy, whether you care about the genetics or not.

But you should totally care about the genetics.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Pixie Princess

This doesn't look very appealing, but I suspect the photography, not the flower, is at fault, since there are all sorts of neat pictures of this plant in Google Image Search.

Also, once again, the label at the show was misspelled -- it's Dendrobium Pixie Princess; not, as the tag had it, Pixy Princess.

It's like they're not even trying.

But the flowers are nice regardless. Look 'em up in Google yourself, if you don't believe me.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Lawless Zauberflöte

To answer the obvious question: Google Translate renders "Zauberflöte" as "The Magic Flute" in German.


I might have gone with something more like "Paphiopedilum Lawless Really Fucking Yellow," but that's me: no imagination.

Also I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if it were mislabeled, since 1) almost everything at the show was to some degree or another and 2) the coloration is similar but different on all the photos that Google Image Search comes up with. Specifically, the long, narrow petals (sepals? I forget which is which, on orchids.) to the left and right usually have some brown or pink streaks or spots in them.

Of course, those photos are posted by amateurs and/or eBay sellers, and can't necessarily be trusted either. So it may not be Paphiopedilum Lawless Zauberflöte, but there's a solid chance that it's at least a Paphiopedilum. And failing that, I'm like 95% certain it's an orchid.

Maybe only 90%.

On Expectations (What Just Happened)

Ahem.

So I said I would try to explain my 4-week absence from PATSP at some point. I realize I don't have to, but I wanted to, because I felt like I was failing to hold up my end of the agreement I think we have as blogger and audience. (We may not actually have an agreement like that, but it feels to me like we do.) Also I've been thinking about these things a lot -- rather more than I'd like, actually -- so this might be the only thing I can talk about anyway.

My understanding of our agreement is basically that I will try to provide something for you to read and/or look at, which relates to plants, on a nearly-daily basis, and in exchange, you agree to read and/or look at it, and attempt to find it interesting even if it's really not, occasionally providing feedback from which I gain egoboo, learn stuff, or whatever. So what got in the way from late November to early January? Four things:

Oh yeah. Since I had orchid posts scheduled for the days when I wasn't posting, and I didn't bother to write the posts, I have a backlog, so the illustrations for this post will be leftover orchids. This way even the people who don't give a fuck about why I stopped posting will still get some entertainment. First up is Phragmipedium besseae, which looks quite a bit like it did last time we saw it.
1. Blogging: Possibly Not Actually a Career?

The most serious of the four reasons is that although I didn't begin blogging with the idea that I would make money from it, that idea developed over time, as I 1) saw what other people were managing to do with their blogs and 2) quit the garden center job and had no money coming in anymore.¹ Which hasn't worked out the way I'd thought.

I've tried things, kind of haphazardly. Blog ads went fine until Google decided that they didn't have to pay me. Plant selling would have worked fine for a little extra money if I hadn't also been permitting trades -- as it actually played out, most of the profit I made from selling plants was immediately used to pay shipping for plants I was trading, and there was very little net benefit. (I'm not saying that's a terrible thing -- I got several great plants out of it -- but it wasn't what I'd hoped for.) Running sponsored posts didn't happen because 1) almost nobody was interested and 2) it just felt wrong. Getting free stuff to review did work out okay a couple times, but even if there had been more interest, that's a way to accumulate stuff, not a way to make money. (Also what I really wanted to review was plants, and nobody sent any of those. Or offered.)

The only thing that's worked at all, really, is asking for donations with the PayPal button: I've gotten about $300 since I put that up a year ago, most of it in the first four months after I put it up, and most of it from two particularly generous people. Which is good, considering that I'm asking people I've never met to give me money, and then they do, but $300/yr also isn't anything like a liveable income. Not that I'm owed a liveable income. I know. But still. As ways of turning the blog into something careery, asking for donations hasn't worked out either.²

Now okay. I didn't pursue any of these opportunities as aggressively as I could have, and it could be argued that however much work blog-writing might take, it's unreasonable of me to do it with the expectation that money's just going to fall into my lap. But whatever. The point is that I was feeling frustrated, around early fall, with how the plan to treat blogging like a job until it became a job was working out. And the only idea that I hadn't really tried yet was writing a book.

I'd already gotten a couple inquiries about writing a book, from real actual publishers with websites and reputations and everything. The first (fall 2010) would have let me write more or less the book I wanted to write,³ but eventually turned me down, because s/he talked to his/r marketing department and was told that people don't, you know, actually buy books about houseplants. At least they don't in large enough numbers to justify publishing one from me.

Which is okay. I mean, it didn't do much for my (already low) opinion of marketers, but at least there was an actual, fairly straightforward reason why it wasn't going to happen, and s/he had given me plenty of information about how the business works, so I figure I wound up ahead regardless.

The second (early-/mid-winter 2011) publisher basically had a book already in mind, and were just shopping around for someone to write it. I would have pursued this one harder had the book in question sounded like something I'd be interested in, but their idea⁴ sounded like the same houseplant book I've seen five hundred times already (the one nobody buys), and although I talked to someone about other ways the book might go, something more like what I'd been talking about with the first publisher, they didn't seem that interested in changing the concept, so I let that opportunity go. This was perhaps a mistake on my part, but it made sense at the time.

So but anyway. Everything else having more or less failed by the end of this summer, I started thinking about book-writing as a route to fame, fortune, and groupies again, and wound up talking to a couple other bloggers via e-mail about book-writing, and convinced myself in the process that: although writing a book would be easy, the subsequent promotion would likely all but kill me, so there wasn't any point to trying.⁵

So to sum up: the justification for the blog had increasingly become someday I'll be able to make money off of this, so I should keep doing it until something happens that causes money. Book-writing was the last idea I had for how to make that happen, so when I decided it wasn't going to be workable either, my motivation to continue took a huge hit. It's not like I especially wanted to stop blogging, necessarily, but at the very least I would need a new motivation.

Sophrolaeliocattleya Hermann Pigors.

And again.
2. Blogging is Frequently a Chore

(This is the reason why I thought I was taking a break, when I was taking the break. It's not untrue, but it wasn't the whole story.)

Blogging has always been, to some degree or another, a chore for me. That's not to say that I've always hated it, or that I ever hated it, just to note that it's something that I tried to do every day, along with brushing my teeth and taking Sheba out,⁶ and some days I didn't really want to. So, sometimes, I got stuck trying to throw a post together right before bed because I hadn't done one, which was occasionally stressful and unpleasant, but 1) there are worse things, 2) sometimes the thrown-together posts were inexplicably popular, or turned out in ways that pleased me, and 3) we have the unspoken agreement where I'm supposed to find you stuff to look at. Usually I was happy enough with what I'd gotten posted, so if there was occasionally a post that didn't quite meet my standards, well, nobody expects perfection.

But sometimes one does want to take some time off and flake out, also, especially coming on the heels of the Rumble Among the Jungle, when I'd been posting almost twice a day for a few weeks.⁷

That's pretty much all there is to this one. I mean, I think I need a vacation is a pretty broadly recognizable feeling.

Paphiopedilum Hsinying Rubywet '#13' x Paph. callosum '#1.'
3. The Internet is Full of Unpleasantness. (And Cat Pictures, for Some Reason.)

I don't have much in the way of money or power, but do have depressive tendencies, yet I read a lot of news. Bad combination. I kind of can't help it, though -- I feel sort of obliged to know what's going on, as a citizen -- so I visit a fair number of political/newsy blogs.

And I should totally stop. Especially going into an election year, I should stop, 'cause it's only going to get worse after the Iowa Caucuses on Tuesday, and it's not like I don't know who I'm going to vote for already. But it's hard to stop. I get bored or frustrated with whatever I'm writing, I wander around the net, and I wind up hearing about all kinds of people doing all kinds of awful things to all kinds of other people, or planning to, or just being dumbasses, and I get upset / frustrated / fearful / whatever.

One of the nicest things about going on a Sims⁸ binge is that the way things are set up here, I can't go on-line and play Sims simultaneously, so the more Sims I play, the less I know about what's going on in the real world. I mean, a few things slip through anyway, but it's much more manageable. Whereas when I'm working on the blog, I have to be on-line in order to post, and it's very easy to be exposed to some news accidentally. Then, suddenly I know even more stuff to make me hate humanity in general (Here is one of the hundreds of possible examples.), and have nowhere I can go, nothing I can do, except, you know, just . . . sit there. And hate humanity.

Which is definitely unhelpful for me; it has not, so far, had much effect on humanity.

In mid/late November, when I started the hiatus, the main news story was the unnecessary pepper-spraying of the UC Davis students by the cop, and I'd been hearing about various police abuses for weeks before this, in connection with Occupy Wall Street and its related protests. Which was all sort of distressing. Not having to hear any more about that seemed like a really good idea.

Dendrobium smilliae 'Lea' x Sib.
4. Am I Even the Person You Want to be Consulting About Houseplants in the First Place?

And then there was the Gardenia person.

Someone going by the handle "omnomnomsies" showed up on the Gardenia jasminoides profile in early November this year, with a five-steps-to-Gardenia-success checklist. Which is great, I guess. I mean, I have no reason to think that their advice is bad advice.⁹

The problematic part is what they said after the advice, which was

The above might sound complicated but it really isn't. It is the way nearly every indoor plant should be cared for. There might be minor differences in desired pH but gardenias are no more difficult to care for than any other plant. Control insects, fertigate properly, plant in appropriate soil, win.

Which I had a problem with, especially the first sentence. After mandating: a soil mix that most people would likely have to mix for themselves, adjusting the pH of the water one uses with every watering, plus mixing in fertilizer, a runoff basin for excess water, supplemental lighting, lacewing eggs to take care of pests, and possibly even an insect feeder, to feed the adult lacewings so they'll lay more eggs, plus "for lacewings to be successful one must also control ants --" after all that -- it "might sound complicated but it really isn't."

Seriously? 'Cause that sounds pretty goddamned complicated.

And the conversation kind of devolved from there. Omnomnomsies has a problem with me calling Gardenias exceptionally difficult, his/r reasoning apparently being that if you do all of the above, Gardenias will grow nicely for you, and doing all the above works for all other plants as well, therefore Gardenias are merely just as difficult as everything else. Which I think shows a peculiar understanding of the word "difficult." If you manage the light, temperature, water chemistry, insect population, soil structure, and every other aspect of your plants' existence to replicate ideal tropical conditions, then yes, you will probably find tropical plants a breeze to grow. But A) most people don't want to go to that much trouble (myself included), and B) there are plants that don't demand that much trouble.

The point of the difficulty scale -- which is only ever supposed to be sort of a rough guide in the first place, bear in mind -- is to point out that some plants are going to require more extensive rearrangement of your home than others, and the number is an attempt to quantify the degree of rearrangement necessary, and/or how narrow the acceptable range of conditions actually is for each plant. Then omnomnomsies was all like,

Your test seems to be: can I take it off the s[h]elf and grow it in a pot? My answer to that will always be: no. You might think the plant is doing ok but it almost certainly isn't living up to its potential unless you've gotten very lucky and picked a plant that meets the pH of your water and every other aspect of culture.

Oh.

.

Wait. WHAT? That's the standard we're supposed to be working toward? 'Cause if full genetic potential is the yardstick we're using here, then I've never grown a houseplant successfully, and neither, probably, has omnomnomsies or most of you.

And no lie, that whole conversation really threw me, for quite a while. 'Cause the idea that some people would consider a plant a success only if it managed to reach its full programmed potential just wouldn't compute.¹⁰ And yet people do think this way. I ran into someone at Garden Web expressing basically the same sentiment while the conversation with omnomnomsies was going on.

So then for a while whenever I was watering -- which is all the time, because I'm always watering -- I'd have fleeting thoughts comparing whatever plants were in the tub to what they could have been, if only I cared enough to grow them properly. Imagine that for one plant, multiply by 880 or so, and you can see how this might not be the best state of mind in which to go a-blogging. Add to this that some plants actually died while I was taking the blog break,¹¹ and I started to question whether I had any business writing about houseplants at all.

I got over it, at least partly. (If I think my plants are doing okay, then they're doing okay, whether they're growing according to their full potential or not. I'm the one who's responsible for caring for them, so I'm the one they have to please, and everybody else can fuck off. Damn it.) But there was still a bit of a crisis there, for a little while, anyway.

Ascocenda Sweet Pea 'Ruby.'
5. So Whither PATSP?

None of the above issues have actually been resolved, of course.

I still don't know what my motivation for continuing the blog is to be, exactly. Blogging will continue to take time I might prefer to use for other things. I'm nearer burnout on Sims than I was, but I haven't burned out yet.¹² The internet is still full of assholes and news about assholes. My plants still sometimes die, and those that live fail to grow to their full potential.

Nevertheless . . . it feels like time to return to blogging. I think. So . . . I'm going to try doing that again? Probably not daily, especially not at first? And we'll see?

-

¹ The husband's income keeps the lights on, more or less, but the budget is still tight, and things do happen. Plus anything plant-related, obviously, comes out of my money. It's more complicated than that, but that's the gist.
² Also please don't donate right now. If you do, then I'll assume it was because I made you feel guilty with this post, and that will make me feel guilty because, after all, this whole post is about how I've failed in my sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really obligation, to provide you with semi-diverting plant-related stuff on a regular basis, so it'd get dumb pretty quick -- me feeling guilty about making you feel guilty because of my post about how I feel guilty. So rather than put me through that, how about waiting a while to see if I'm even going to resume regular posting before you donate?
If you're going to donate at all.
Which you totally don't have to.
I now feel bad about having planted the idea.
Though not bad enough to delete it.
I'm serious about the don't-donate-now stuff, though.
³ Something resembling a collection of plant profiles, though they wouldn't be the same plant profiles that had appeared on the blog, because publishers aren't interested in republishing stuff that's on-line for free already. So if I profiled a plant for the book that I'd already written about for the blog, I'd have to come up with a whole new angle for talking about it. This wasn't a problem for me, since I am kind of itching for an excuse to re-write some of the profiles anyway, especially the older ones.
⁴ Something along the lines of "Impossible to Kill Houseplants." Which, taken literally, might have actually been interesting: I don't know anything about the people who design and manufacture artificial plants, and learning could be fun. Alas, they meant peace lilies and jade plants, etc. Not only are they mostly not plants I care about and want to spend a lot of time contemplating, but they are also -- as is sadly typical for living things -- totally killable.
⁵ During the break, a few people e-mailed to ask whether I was okay, and I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm fine, just want to play Sims and get away from the responsibility of the blog for a while, no big deal, but re-reading this post makes me think there was likely a depressive episode happening, if a pretty minor, low-level one. They don't always feel like depressions when they're going on (I know, that doesn't make any sense. It's hard to explain.), and the bupropion makes them less frequent and less severe, so it would have been easy to miss. This is especially likely in light of reason #3, which has been a fairly common feature of depressions in the past, and which we'll get to.
⁶ Though I found that it didn't work to try to do all three at the same time.
⁷ I'd like to point out, too, that according to the official tally in the sidebar, I put up 387 posts in 2011, only one less than in 2010, so you still got more than one per day, over the year as a whole. If you choose to look at it that way. Which if I were you, I wouldn't look at it that way. But you still could.
⁸ Technically Sims 2; I have the original, but haven't played it in years because 2 is far superior. I am aware of Sims 3 but haven't tried to buy it; it's pricey, and I don't know that I have a computer capable of running it anyway. What I've heard so far makes it sound like Sims 3 is essentially the same as Sims 2 anyway, as far as the stuff I find interesting about the Sims games.
⁹ You can read it at the original comment if you're interested, but my paraphrase would be: well-draining soil, hand-adjust water pH with vinegar before watering, feed with every watering, place near window, add supplemental artificial light on a timer, buy green lacewing eggs on cards annually when the plant comes in for the winter to keep pests under control. Nothing particularly controversial or unprecedented; I already do all those except the pH and lacewing things.
¹⁰ Among other things: why on earth try to grow plants indoors at all, then, if that's your objective?
¹¹ Some plants are always dying here, both because I have a tendency to declare them official plants too early and because I hang on to plants long after it's become clear that they're never going to do well for me. But, between November 22, when I started the hiatus, and December 23, when I'm writing this part, I lost:
• 2 Saxifraga stoloniferas, which have all been having a rough time over the last six months or so and I don't know why,
• 9 Abutilon seedlings (underwatered, and also I was just tired of them and their neediness so I let them die when I noticed they were wilty, rather than trying to save them),
• my original Pelargonium 'Mrs. Pollock' (A pair of cuttings I took from the plant have survived. I suspect the original plant failed because I took cuttings from it.),
• an Astrophytum myriostigma (which rotted and hollowed out: this was particularly painful because it was a gift from a reader who sent it to me because s/he felt like the plant wanted to come live with me. If this was ever the case, then it obviously changed its mind. I was also especially bummed out by this one because I thought I'd figured A. myriostigma out: the previous one, I thought, I'd lost because I watered when it was also cold. So this specimen, I stopped watering in like October, and the plant room has yet to get seriously cold this year. But no. Still dead. Don't think I'll be trying A. myriostigma again.),
• Kalanchoe prolifera (another example of a plant that didn't survive being cut back),
• Dendrobium 'Karen,' which hadn't been doing very well for a long time (Orchids can Suck. My. Balls. I'm not going to throw away the ones I've got until they die of their own accord -- and they will -- but I think I'm done buying more, ever.),
• 2 huge hanging baskets of Plectranthus verticillatus (not sure about the cause, but I suspect it's temperature-related: they were in a spot that's normally cold, but which is also indirectly in the path of a heat vent, so probably one or the other killed them),
• a Davallia tyermanii I started from rhizome cuttings (probably a watering/soil problem, but I don't know if it was too wet or too dry; 2 other Davallias are currently in the process of dying on me, in a similar fashion, but I have no idea why or how to respond.), and
• an Aloe 'Doran Black' offset which rooted and grew last winter but was clearly unhappy all summer and fall this year -- it died when I tried to pull off a dead leaf and snapped the stem instead.
¹² I like building the buildings. I mean, the whole business with sending Sims to work and having them make friends and buy things and what have you is sometimes mildly diverting, but the only reason I bother with those things is so they'll have enough money to build larger/cooler/weirder houses: for some reason I prefer the way houses turn out if I've slowly grown them by adding bits here and there, as opposed to the way they turn out when I start with a plan and don't worry about cost. I particularly like making buildings that look abandoned and filthy. Don't know why.

Pretty picture: Cymbidium Starbright 'Sirius'

Lots of Cymbidiums for sale lately in the stores here, but they're all super-expensive. (The cheapest I saw was $50.) This means I will probably never find out whether I can grow a Cymbidium, but that's probably okay: based on my experiences with other orchids, I suspect the answer is yes, but not well.

I really like the way they look, though.

Pretty picture: Miltoniopsis Arnold Linsman

The formal announcement of the Rumble winner goes up this afternoon (not that we don't all already know who won, but, you know, this makes it official, and I get to make a speech or something), so I've been working on a couple posts related to that. Plus some stuff going on here at the house for the last few days: I consider myself lucky to be keeping up with the plants, never mind the blog. Therefore, an orchid, even though we just had an orchid. It's a prettier one than the last one, at least:





When I googled the name, I got a hit for a video, which is unusual. This is not quite the same plant, but it's similar. (The video is for Miltoniopsis Arnold Linsman 'Hot & Spicy;' I didn't get a clone name for the plant in my pictures, and in fact all of the photos for Mltnps. Arnold Linsman I found through Google look like the flowers in the video, not the ones in my photos. It wouldn't be surprising if the plant were misidentified at the show -- indeed, it'd be more surprising if they had the right name on it -- but I only have the name I have, and am not enough of an expert on orchids to provide a better ID, so.)

Pretty picture: Dendrochilum tenellum

Dendrochilum tenellum is native to the Philippines, and grows in the mountains in the cloud forests.

There are some really amazing photos of them on-line, but the above is not one of them. (This one shows an amazing specimen, though.)

There's growing information here and here, and Hortus Botanicus sells them here. (Caveat emptor: I have no connection with HB, have never bought anything from them, and make no claims about their trustworthiness or the quality of their merchandise.) I doubt they're easy. If nothing else, the humidity requirements sound pretty extreme. But then, that's what you'd expect from a cloud forest plant.

Pretty picture: Phaius Microburst Octoberfest

I don't like the photo, but it's all I have. I've taken better Phaius pictures before.

I spent a lot of yesterday trying to deal with technical problems. (I couldn't access large sections of the internet -- some of the photos on Tumblr, the Polldaddy site I create the Rumble polls with, most/all Wordpress sites, etc.) In the end, I didn't actually fix anything: I never even figured out what had happened. Just, after about six hours of half the internet being gone, suddenly it was back again.

I'd probably have something funny and/or clever to say if I hadn't burned all my mental energy trying to figure out where the internet went. Sorry.

Pretty picture: Rhyncholaeliocattleya Sea Swirl

This orchid is neither marine nor swirly. Take it back and bring me another one immediately.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Hampshire White Light

Okay, well, the lead-ban post is going to be Sunday, I guess. I hope. However, this is a pretty awesome Paphiopedilum, I think:


It's a little strange that I think so, because this paph has most of the characteristics I find boring in Phalaenopsis (light color; rounded, flattish petals/sepals). But somehow what's tedious in a phal is awesome in a paph.

That would probably work the other way around, too. I'd love to see the Phalaenopsis version of this paph, for example. Or this one.

Ancestry: Paphiopedilum Hampshire White Light is the offspring of Paph. Shapelight x Paph. Skip Bartlett.

Pretty picture: Ascocenda Ram Indra Gold x Ascda. Fortune East

Ascocendas are crosses between Ascocentrum and Vanda. You can see the Vanda parentage pretty easily in the shape and size of the flowers; I can't quite figure out what the Ascocentrums are contributing. (Do a Google image search, if you're not already familiar with Ascocentrum.)


The tag ("Ascda. Raminda Gold x Ascda. Fortune East") was wrong on this plant; about 40-50% of the plants at the Illowa Orchid Show (Wallace's Garden Center hosts the show, but it's the Illowa Orchid Society's deal.) are mis-tagged in some way or another. "Raminda" should be "Ram Indra" or "Ramindra." Both the one- and two-word versions are common enough on the net that I don't know which is officially correct.

I like the flower, though. I mean, I tend to think Vandas are pretty anyway, but the patterning on this one is interesting. The Ascocendas to come (December and March) aren't nearly this neat, and photographed even less well than this besides.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum venustum 'Fox Catcher'

As usual: much to do, not quite enough time in which to do it. Not especially proud of this photo, but I have to go with what I've got. (The primary problem, if you care, is that I have a lot of recent photos to deal with before I can start writing posts about them, and I'm having trouble finding time to deal with the photos. Partly this is because dealing with photos is boring.)

P. venustum is from the Himalayas (East Nepal to NE Bangladesh). It's named for the goddess Venus. Some good information here.