Work-related: everybody looks bad

This post is a little over two years old. I ran into it during the recent blog maintenance, and I was initially surprised that I hadn't posted it, because it looked like it was more or less complete: the pictures were already present, the code for the footnotes (usually the last thing I do with a post, because it's awkward to change once in place) had been done. It's rare for a post to reach this stage without getting posted.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Zinnia 'Profusion Mix.'
Ouch. The first Saturday of May should not be sunny. It brings out too many customers all at once. It wasn't necessarily terrible to be busy, though I did something to my back early in the day, which hurts, and which would probably heal up just fine if I could rest it, but I've got (as I write this on Sunday morning) two more days of work, and then I have to water all the plants at home, so that's not looking too likely.

(Just FYI, though: the first Saturday in May is probably the weekend you want to show up to shop, if you live around here: our actual last frost date is May 15, give or take, but if you want to be able to buy before we're sold out of things, a couple weeks earlier is about ideal. And actually the first Friday is probably even better, if you can manage it.)

For as many as there were, the customers on Saturday were very well-behaved (better than the co-workers, anyway: one of the co-workers is closer than s/he realizes to being beaten to death with a shovel¹), with one exception:

One lady waved me over to the succulents while I was watering and asked for a price on a $9.95 Adenium obesum.

I told her $9.95.

Tagetes patula 'Little Hero Yellow.'
Oh, she said, well someone told me it was only $5.99.

I don't know what to tell you, I said back. The prices go by pot size, that's a 4-inch pot, therefore it's $9.95.

CUSTOMER: But someone said $5.99.

MR_S: Well, um, we do have $5.99 plants, but That. Is. Not. One. Of. Them.

[long pause]

CUSTOMER: Okay, well, thank you.

Euphorbia 'Diamond Frost.'
So then a couple hours later, one of the front counter people comes back to the greenhouse for something or another, and while s/he's back there, s/he says, so -- what's the price on those plants that have the big bulb thing at the base? Are those succulents or tropicals or what?

MR_S: Which ones? These? [pointing to a Beaucarnea recurvata]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Maybe. I'm not sure.

Then it dawned on me why s/he was asking, and I pointed to the Adeniums, and s/he was like, yes, that one. What price are those?

MR_S: $9.95.

Osteospermum 'Summertime Red Velvet.'
FRONT COUNTER PERSON: 'Cause I had a customer insist that somebody had told her $5.99.

MR_S: Yeah, I know which customer you're talking about. I told her $9.95 repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Wait -- you'd told her $9.95?

MR_S: Repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: [Expletives]²

Bracteantha bracteata 'Firey Orange.'
MR_S: Why? What price did you give her?

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Well she kept saying someone had told her $5.99, so we wound up giving it to her for $5.99. [pause] You know, I don't mean to talk bad about [customer's ethnic group],

MR_S: [cringes in anticipation]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: but . . . [proceeds to talk bad about customer's ethnic group]

MR_S: *facepalm*

Only 20 days left.³

Osteospermum 'Summertime Sunshine.'
-

¹ Exaggerated for dramatic effect, but s/he has about a 50-50 chance of getting the verbal equivalent of being beaten to death with a shovel, whatever that would be, before I'm done with the job. S/he would be wise to stay out of my way. Tragically, s/he is not a particularly wise person, and probably will not stay out of my way.
² Also exaggerated for dramatic effect. I don't remember exactly what s/he said.
³ Unless I come back for June. Which I said I might do. Not looking real probable at the moment, though.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
For what it's worth, the one problematic co-worker didn't get beaten with a shovel. Still deserves it, though.

I'm not certain which front counter person was in the story -- my personal journal doesn't record the interaction -- but if it's who I remember it as being, then yes, s/he still works there.

Open Letter to Pierson's Flower Shop and Greenhouses

ADDED 1/9/12: I found out today, more than a year after this post first went up, that a day after it went live here at PATSP, most of it was duplicated at Yelp.com as a one-star review.

I not the person who posted it to Yelp as a review. I don't recognize the name of the person who did. They did not ask permission to do it. I would not have given permission had I been asked. I've asked Yelp if the above is sufficient grounds to have the review taken down, and we'll see what they say.

It also happens that most of the criticisms I have for Pierson's in this post -- though accurate at the time -- have been addressed to some degree or another, which is also part of why it distresses me that this has been allowed to stand as a permanent (or internet-permanent, anyway) evaluation of their business. I wrote it because I was frustrated with them and wanted them to do better, not because I wanted to hang it around their necks forever.

ANOTHER ADDITION 1/11/12: Yelp did remove the review.

ANOTHER ADDITION 1/16/12: My more recent evaluation of Pierson's: The Brick Joke.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

17-18 October 2010

Dear Pierson's Flower Shop and Greenhouses,

I am writing this letter to let you know that I'm going to stop visiting your store at 1800 Ellis Blvd NW in Cedar Rapids, IA, for a while. This isn't over any one particular thing, just a lot of little things that have been going on forever, that I finally got fed up with on a visit to the store last Friday.

It started out looking promising. Your sign out front said houseplants were 50% off, which is usually the only time I can afford to buy any of your plants. So that was exciting. And when I looked around in your tropical greenhouse, I did find something I wanted to buy: you had two different Pedilanthus varieties that I'd never seen in person before. Although they didn't have prices on them (because you almost never have prices on anything), I figured they were probably something I could afford. This is an increasingly rare experience for me, finding a plant I haven't seen before, so I was briefly very pleased with you.



But when I checked the plants closer, I found problems. The stems and leaves were spotted with a gray-white, fuzzy fungus.


I realize you're selling the plant at 50% off, but the plants should still be healthy, no? I mean, this plant couldn't have been there very long; I'd last been there on August 15, and you didn't have them then, so at most it had been in your care two months. You guys are supposed to be in the business of keeping them alive, healthy, and pretty.

So what gives? It took me all of five seconds to figure out what was going on: you stuck Pedilanthus, a genus which is fairly prone to fungus if its leaves get wet, underneath hanging baskets. The baskets get watered, the water drips down, the Pedilanthus gets wet, therefore fungus.

And there was all kinds of stuff like that going on in there, that someone who knows anything about tropical plants should know better than to do. The Dracaenas were defoliating from the bottom: that means they're too wet. The cacti were standing in water, in the shady greenhouse, again, just like they were in May. You may as well not carry cacti at all, if you're going to keep them sopping wet and in the dark. That's the sort of thing I expect from Home Depot, not an independent garden center that's been in business for decades.

This picture is actually from May, but they still looked like this in October. Probably not the same specimens in October that were there in May, obviously.
You have a flat of 4-inch pots by the window that have been taken over by weeds. Whatever the plants in those pots originally were, they're not there anymore: why are the pots still there? You don't need that stuff on the sales floor. Some of your 3-inch tropicals were tangled up in one another so badly that I couldn't have pulled one out to buy even if I'd wanted to. Others of the 3-inch plants were dead because at some point they tipped over and nobody set them upright again, so they couldn't be watered. Five seconds to right a plant is too much effort? You have 4-inch ferns that are down to their last two fronds, and nobody's bothered to pull out the dead fronds. Whiteflies fluttered out when I bumped some of the Hibiscus. (Admittedly not entirely your fault: it's been a bad year for whiteflies in Eastern Iowa. But even so. You're thinking you'll cut the price in half and sucker some customers into taking these plants home? Shame on you.)

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis 'Enlightenment.'
The Brugmansias still have aphids, just as they did in August. Your Cissus rhombifolias and your Columnea hanging baskets were mostly dead, and where they weren't dead they were yellowing. There was a piece of Euphorbia lactea sitting on the table next to the plant; it looked like a customer or someone had knocked it off accidentally, but nobody's bothered to pick it up. And who, exactly, do you think is the market for a $30, bloomed-out, half dead Phalaenopsis? Why would I bother, when I can go to Lowe's and get a healthy one fresh off the truck for $15?

The list goes on and on and on like that. Which, if it had been the first time I saw fungus, or the first time I saw bugs, or if you always got everything right except tagging and pricing the pots, then I'd just assume that you were having a bad day, bad month, bad year. But these things have been going on forever. Eventually, I had an epiphany: y'all don't care about the plants. You might or might not know how to grow them, but it's obviously not a priority. Nor is scheduling enough hours for the employees to clean up the debris and the dead plants. Instead you put everything on sale at half price and hope that the customers will sort things out for you, while you focus your attentions on the poinsettias that just came in, because that's where the money's coming from this winter. And, okay, fine, but your tropical greenhouse currently has problems with overwatering, fungus, and whiteflies. Can you name three things that are especially likely to ruin the sales value of poinsettias, just off the top of your head?

I know you've had a rough last few years: the flood hit you pretty hard, and the economy crashed right as you were re-opening the store, which couldn't have helped. I know it's poinsettia season and the tropicals are not your priority. I know you're an independent garden center and you have a lot of competitors, some of whom can get better wholesale prices than you can. I know you're really more of a florist than a garden center anyway. I know it's expensive to have people on the payroll, especially in the fall when people are mostly not buying garden-related merchandise and there's not a lot of cash coming in. I know you've been in business forever, and you've always done things this way, and it's worked fine for decades so clearly you know what you're doing and if some blogger wants to tell you how to run your business then he can go fuck himself.

Maybe so. But you've lost this particular customer for a solid year or two, all the same.

6 Things They Don't Want You to Know About the Plants

Assorted Guzmanias at Pierson's, in Cedar Rapids.
"What they don't want you to know about the plants" is a verbatim Google search that brought some anonymous (and, presumably, disappointed) person to PATSP many months ago. The idea tickled me, and I've wanted to write a post on the subject ever since, but it was obviously a problematic topic while I was working -- it's not a good idea to blog about what "they" don't want "you" to know about the plants when "you" are the "they."

Now, though, "they" are "they" and "you" is "me" and "scare quotes" are "scare quotes" and the post seems much more writable. It feels a little weird: though most of this is stuff I've talked about on PATSP at one time or another, this is the first time I've collected it all together. When I was actually in the business of selling plants, these weren't things I necessarily shielded all customers from knowing about -- if it was relevant to the situation, I'd generally let you know -- but I also didn't rush up and give everyone unsolicited lists of reasons to take their business elsewhere, either. And most of these things would apply anywhere a customer could go anyway, so telling people about it wouldn't have benefited anybody.

1. The soil is probably crap.

This was really not our fault at all, and it's not likely to be different anywhere else, but it's true: most of the time, the potting mix the plants were in was what they'd been shipped to us in, i.e., mostly peat moss, which is unsuitable for most indoor plants: peat holds water too long, and then becomes water-repellent when it dries, making it too wet when it's wet and too dry when it's dry. It also tends to lead to fungus gnats. I assume the growers use it mainly because it's cheap, but I'm not sure: in the warmer climates where tropical houseplants are produced, it may be that you actually need something that will hold a little water on the plant, lest you be forever watering.

A fungus gnat, as close-up as any of my cameras have yet been able to manage. I think it's kinda cute, though admittedly they're cuter when you can't see quite as much detail.
Anyway. Bad soil is not a particularly good reason not to buy a plant. One, it's fixed easily enough by repotting, which you may need to do regardless. Two, everybody's plants come from the same places and are potted in the same mix.

2. We sprayed pesticides in here less than a week ago.

Where I worked, we sprayed pesticides every week, usually on Saturday night after the store closed.¹ The specific pesticides in question changed from week to week, but the spraying itself was a constant.

We used what was basically a very large fogger, so nobody needed to be present when the actual spraying was happening, but I still had to measure and mix the pesticides du jour before leaving for the day, and although all the relevant safety precautions were taken, and I had the very best protective equipment that an extremely small amount of money could buy, I still figured this was probably not doing me any good, especially doing it weekly, and then being around the residue afterwards.²

This might be a legitimate reason not to buy a plant, if you know you're sensitive to certain kinds of chemicals, though most people don't handle, lick, or consume their plants enough to where I can see it making any kind of difference, and even if you do, plants can also absorb dangerous chemicals from indoor air. I'm on record as believing that the air-purifying qualities of houseplants have been criminally oversold and probably don't matter in most home situations,³ but a very tiny absorption of toxic chemicals from the air would more or less balance out any very tiny release of pesticides that happen to be on the plant when you buy it. Also, even the most chemically-fertilized, pesticide-drenched houseplant will become an organically-grown plant if you grow it organically, so in the long run, you're probably ahead, chemical-exposure-wise, to buy the plant anyway.

Big box stores like Lowe's and Home Depot do not, as far as I'm aware, spray their plants while they're in the store, though they'd generally have been sprayed before they were shipped, so you can't expect to avoid pesticide exposure by shopping in those sorts of places.

Organically-grown houseplants do exist, but I'm only aware of one location in Iowa that ever sold them. It's in Ames, I've only been there once, it was three years ago, I don't know the people who ran it, I don't know if it still exists,⁴ and I was a little uneasy about buying stuff when I was there because I saw bugs in the sales area. So the idea might still need some work. However, organic produce is mainstream(ish) now, and people have been generally anti-pesticide for a long time, so one might see organic houseplants in stores in the future. The first person who figures out how to grow houseplants organically, for prices comparable to conventionally-grown houseplants, and is able to advertise the fact effectively, stands to make a lot of money. I don't know whether anybody's trying yet.

3. It may be cheaper somewhere else.

There are many good reasons to buy your houseplants from a locally-owned garden center, as opposed to a large chain store like Wal-Mart or Lowe's, but price is not one of those reasons. From what I've seen, the prices on small, non-succulent plants (in 3- or 4-inch pots⁵) tend to be approximately the same anywhere you look, but cacti and succulents, or large tropicals, get considerably more expensive at independent garden centers. Seasonal blooming plants like Cyclamen or poinsettias also tend to be cheapest at box stores, and even grocery stores, though you take more of a gamble on the quality of the plant itself and the advice you receive about its care. Florists are potentially better on the advice, but also the most expensive places to buy plants, from everything I've seen.

Bromeliad-and-Dracaena display from the ex-job.
I wish this weren't the case. I wish that local places could offer the sorts of prices that the big chains can. I also wish I had a magical, talking unicorn that granted wishes and pooped gold coins.⁶

I don't patronize local places exclusively, though when I checked it out with the spreadsheets, I was a lot closer to doing so than I would have guessed.⁷ It wasn't a deliberate, principled decision to keep my money local. That's just where the selection is broader and weirder, so that's where I've tended to look. Lowe's has better prices, but they also have the same twenty plants over and over and over again.

4. Some of the plants are not good long-term prospects.

I've covered this already in a separate post, pretty much, but it turns out to be true of outdoor plants as well: this post at Bloomingwriter talks about plants being sold in garden centers despite not being hardy for the zone, or despite being extremely invasive, or otherwise inappropriate for your situation. Doing a little research before you shop will help, but people who aren't into houseplants (or plants in general) don't necessarily know that they have different requirements and will buy whatever first gets their attention. And I think all beginners get cacti wrong the first few times.⁸

The industry could provide better information on this point than it actually does, but they don't have a lot of incentive. The most demanding plants are also often the prettiest, with a few exceptions, and people impulse-buy pretty things a lot more than they impulse-buy plain things. It doesn't pay to put obstacles in the way of these impulse purchases by, for example, telling customers something about the plants. So if there's anything at all, it's probably just a name and "easy-care." I've seen so many plants called "easy" and "low light" that were definitely not, that I consider claims like this to have no meaning whatsoever. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose; easy-care/low-light's just another word for for-sale.

Alocasia amazonica 'Polly,' which I've seen called easy-care but not, yet, low-light.
It's unfortunate but true that retailers run the risk of making no sales at all, if they try to steer customers away from potentially bad experiences. Not every customer is willing to listen to the how-to-grow, once you've said a plant is difficult. I know I had more than one customer who put down bad choices readily enough, but then never picked up a better one: sometimes it might have been better for the business (if not the plant or the customer) if I'd just told people what they obviously wanted to hear.

Because of this, any plant seller immediately jumps up several notches in my estimation if they'll admit that a plant is difficult, and immediately becomes a favorite place to shop if they can tell me in what way it's difficult and how to grow them successfully. This is vanishingly rare anywhere, but it's more common at independent, local garden centers.

5. Some of the plants are barely rooted.

This took me a while to clue into, but one day a customer wanted to buy a Yucca guatemalensis, and have us repot it, and when I took it out of the grower pot to put it in the new pot, I discovered that it barely had any roots at all. This is mainly only a problem with plants grown by sticking a section of mature cane into a pot until it starts to sprout new foliage, something that gets done a lot with Yucca guatemalensis, Dracaena fragrans (there's a reason why they're so often damsels in distress), and Polyscias species. My recommendation would be, don't buy sprouted-cane sorts of plants unless you can see some roots coming out of the drainage holes, or sticking a finger down into the soil hits some roots. Tugging the plants to see if they shift or pull out is also a method, but obviously the retailer's not going to be happy with you if you pull all the Dracaenas out of their pots.

Barely-sprouted cane sections of Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana,' as they are usually sold.
Where I used to work, we propagated some of our own plants, and it did occasionally happen that plants would take off growing new leaves before they'd really gotten a decent root system, and they got put out for sale and then people brought them back, angry, because they weren't particularly rooted yet. I mean, they would have gotten there eventually if the customer hadn't, you know, tried to fiddle with them. But that was my fault; I don't think it's a common occurrence. (It wasn't even a common occurrence with us. Maybe it happened twice.)

6. Some of the plants have bugs.

I am convinced that if you start out with one plant, and add one at a time to any given location, be it a personal collection or a sales floor or whatever, once you reach some critical number of plants, you are guaranteed to always have some kind of bug problem happening at any given moment. I'm not sure what the critical number is: personal experience tells me it's higher than 15 and lower than 850. I realize that doesn't really narrow anything down.

Now, you'd think that being sprayed with pesticides weekly would fix this problem, and make the bugs go away, this being what pesticides are supposed to do. They don't. Bugs come in from the suppliers, they wander in from outside, they find places to hide from the pesticide and then re-emerge when the spraying is over, they evolve resistance to the sprays. There will be bugs. Somewhere. Lurking. Knowing what they look like, and checking a plant carefully before you buy, is important.

This isn't really fair to beginners, who won't know what the common plant pests look like. In a perfect world, you could rely on the employees and the cashiers to tell you if you've chosen a plant that has bugs,⁹ but A) sadly, many of them don't know what bugs look like either, B) even if they did know, bugs are small, and they hide, and can be missed, and C) even if they did know, and did see them, they wouldn't necessarily tell you about it, unless it was to upsell you on a bug spray of some kind. (I honestly only recall one particular time when I saw a possible pest problem and didn't say something to the customer, and that was a very special case where the customer was being an extreme asshole and needed to be punished.)

Still. Forewarned is forearmed. At the very least you should learn what the more common insect pests look like, so you can reject plants for yourself instead of having to rely on strangers being such great people that they'll act counter to their self-interest. In brief:

Aphids: sometimes they'll be big enough to see actual bodies, but I've also seen them looking like a sprinkling of sand or dust on the surface of a leaf. They can be green, yellow, whitish, black, red, and probably other colors I've forgotten.

Aphids on a Brugmansia. You may have to open the picture in a new window to see them.
Mealybugs: resemble gray-white fungus or cotton on the plant, especially under leaves and where leaves join stems (the axils). They're tricky because some plants naturally have fluffy white cottony bits on them, so it can be difficult to tell if you've got a mealybug or if that's just how the plant is. When in doubt, don't buy. Watch for mealybugs everywhere, but especially on cacti and succulents.
Scale: scale are really hard to identify, especially when they're on woody stems, because they look like the natural bumps of the stem. If they're on the underside of a leaf, or on an otherwise-smooth surface like a Cereus peruvianus stem, they're easier to detect. Scale will come off if scratched with a fingernail; natural bumps and pits won't.
Spider mites: spider mites give leaves a dusty or slightly bronzed appearance that doesn't clean up when wiped with a finger. They also spin webs under leaves and around leaf axils, which are easily seen since the mites themselves often live and poop in the webs. They favor Hedera helix, Codiaeum variegatum, Musa spp. (banana), Calatheas, and Schefflera species, among others. (More comprehensive list here.)
Fungus gnats: tiny, blackish, slow-moving flies that fly around when you bump the plant. They're most common in peaty, overwatered soil, whatever the plant is. I don't personally consider fungus gnats a big enough problem to reject a plant, since they're not that harmful, really, but your tolerance may vary.
Whiteflies: also tiny, but in this case white. Sometimes when they fly around, they look a little bit like cigarette ash floating around in the air: they have that same erratic movement. You'll notice them if you bump a heavily-infested plant, but smaller infestations are easier to miss. Check the underside of leaves, especially on thin-leaved tropicals. They're especially fond of Hibiscus, Abutilon, poinsettias, and basil.

Whitefly on Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. It's not usually quite so obvious.
And remember: at least one of these bugs is somewhere in the store with you. You can just about count on it. So be vigilant.

I don't mean, with this post, to make it sound like buying a houseplant should be a particularly intense emotional experience for you. Most plant purchases work out just fine so long as you have #4 and #6 covered: know what you're buying, and check it for bugs. But the other things are still occasionally relevant, and in any case, this is the best answer I can give for "what they don't want you to know about the plants." So, my mysterious Googler, I hope you see this someday. Sorry it's so late.

-

¹ Because we closed earliest on Saturday nights, and opened latest on Sunday mornings, so that was the longest period during which no one would be in the greenhouse.
² Perhaps it's self-centered of me, but I think the pesticide residue was a bigger issue for me and the other employees than it would have been for customers. I mean, I wouldn't have eaten our herbs, most of the time, but we did only use stuff that was supposed to break down relatively quickly, that was safe to be around once the greenhouse was reopened, and very little residue would have been left on any specific plant. Plus some more would have washed off once we watered the plants on Sunday morning. So the exposure a person could get by walking through the house would have been minimal (one might take a bigger risk eating an apple), and it would have been just the one time, too. But for those of us being exposed day in and day out, the risk didn't seem as trivial. I worried about it; I did.
³ Though in cities and buildings with very poor indoor air quality, having plants is surely not going to make the situation any worse. I just don't like the tactic of manipulating people to buy plants based on air-quality issues that plants may not improve or that aren't even problems, like when people talk about plants oxygenating the air, like low air-oxygenation is a common problem in our modern world.
There is a word for not having enough oxygen in the air: it's called suffocation. If your bedroom gets life-threateningly low oxygen levels at night, one, you'd already be dead and therefore not in a position to be buying plants, and two, having a peace lily in the corner wouldn't save you anyway: houseplants don't grow fast enough to make a significant difference. The same thing goes for people who worry about their plants releasing carbon dioxide at night (which most of them do, though there are exceptions): there isn't enough of it to make a difference, and it's not worth factoring into your decision to buy or not buy a plant.
Possibly if you had seven or eight hundred of them in a small house, someone with an finely-calibrated oxygen meter might be able to tell the difference, but what kind of nutbar is going to fill their house with hundreds of houseplants? I mean, seriously, you'd never be finished watering. It'd be insane.
⁴ (Much of Ames being under water right now.)
⁵ Metric equivalents not provided because I'm not even sure if this is true throughout the U.S., much less being true around the world.
⁶ Actually, the talking bit would mostly depend on what it had to say. I mean, suppose I got a talking unicorn that was really into football or Twilight or something, and that's all it ever wanted to talk about. Also it wouldn't have to be a unicorn. A horse would probably be fine, if it granted wishes and talked: the horn's really more just decorative. But the gold coins thing sounds nice. Perhaps I should think about this a bit more.
⁷ The graph of how it breaks down:


"Big box" stores cover nationwide chains like Target, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Lowe's, etc. "Chains" are stores which are also widespread networks of stores, but which don't have national coverage or gigantic stores: I think the only ones that apply are Earl May, a local garden-center chain, and Ace Hardware, which might be national but tend to be physically small stores. Part of the "Grocery" category is also chains (Hy-Vee, which is local to the Upper Midwest U.S.), and part isn't (the now-defunct grocery where I worked for a while a long time ago), which in retrospect I probably should have divided that up differently. "Free from businesses" is mostly stuff I salvaged from the ex-job; a solid chunk is also from Wallace's, the Begonia leaf they gave me (I had permission) a couple years ago and have since propagated the hell out of.
But the point stands: of the plants I have at the moment, only 11-18 percent of them are from any kind of chain, 48% are from small businesses (mail order counts) and 47% are from local, independent area businesses.
I honestly would have thought I'd bought more from Lowe's than that, but the spreadsheet says only 46 plants, out of 867, and the spreadsheet knows all.
I'm also shocked at how many of my plants are here via trades. Would not have guessed that, either.
⁸ (HINT: They do need to be watered sometimes, and more than just a teaspoon.)
⁹ Actually, in a perfect perfect world, there wouldn't be insect pests in the first place, I suppose.

Unfinished business: Pandanus amaryllifolius

You may remember that last week I was very excited about receiving a Pandanus amaryllifolius I'd ordered from Gardino Nursery. I placed the order on a Friday, had confirmation it had shipped the following Tuesday, and received it in the mail on Friday again. Which, one week between placing the order and receiving the plant isn't bad at all.

And for about the first ten minutes, I was pretty happy. It was packed well, and the plant was a decent size:

The plant. Pot diameter is 5".
So naturally I set about trying to smell it, because smelling the plant and figuring out why anybody would want to cook with it was the entire point of getting one in the first place. And . . . nothing. The plant itself doesn't appear to have an odor. So I pulled off a leaf and sniffed the broken end. Nothing. Then I furiously ground the leaf between my hands and sniffed. I'd describe the smell as being about equal parts cut grass and mushrooms, but not the good, earthy, fresh-smelling kind of mushroom smell. It was more the musty, quiet-rot kind of mushroom smell.

So this was already pretty disappointing already. (The husband suggests that maybe there's no pleasant aroma until the leaves are cooked, that heat is a critical ingredient in the process. Which is possible. I won't know for a while, for reasons I'll get to.) I took some pictures to document the plant anyway, because even if it looks pretty much the same as P. veitchii, I like P. veitchii, and amaryllifolius at least has much tinier marginal spines on the leaves (they're still there, but only barely, and they don't hurt, plus amaryllifolius doesn't appear to have any spines at all under the leaves along the midrib, which is helpful). And I try to get pictures of all new plants anyway, in case I want to write a post about them later, or need to prove that they've grown, or whatever. And picture-taking went fine for a little while.

And then I turned the plant to get a different angle and discovered -- mealybugs!

See 'em?

How about now? Makes me shudder just to look at the picture.
So. More picture-taking, followed by an e-mail to Gardino, showing them the mealybugs and asking for a refund or replacement.

["Jeopardy" music plays]

A couple hours later, I got an e-mail back from Gardino, saying that of course they'd send a replacement, and they were very sorry for any inconvenience, and so on, which was both A) an impressively quick response and B) more or less exactly what I wanted to hear. I was told that someone would contact me within a couple days regarding the replacement.

On Sunday night, someone contacted me about the replacement. Specifically, he apologized, again, and said he could send a clean replacement but wanted to know whether I wanted them to treat the plant first for bugs, just in case some were hiding or whatever. (Which is fair: mealybugs will hide.) I e-mailed back Sunday night to say that I did want the plant sprayed. (I wasn't planning on cooking with it anyway: my interest had always only been in smelling the plant.) And that was the last of the communication, as of Wednesday (yesterday) night. I don't doubt that they're sending a replacement plant, but I'm surprised they didn't say when they were sending it.

I'm undecided about whether or not it's worth hanging on to the first plant. I can't imagine I'll ever trust it not to have bugs, but at the same time, throwing it out seems like an overreaction. So far, I've given it a rubbing-alcohol rubdown, followed by being neemed to within an inch of its life for three or four days in a row, and then I put it outside on the north side of the plant room, this being the only spot I had available for plants that couldn't handle full sun where it wouldn't get mealybugs on anything else I cared about.

The Neoregelia to the left is the same plant that had scale a while back, and then flowered. It still has scale bumps on it, but I'm not sure if those are actual living bugs, or just dead scale that just haven't fallen off yet. I couldn't find any on the tops of the leaves, or the undersides -- all I see are around the base. But I've decided not to continue taking the risk. The Neoregelia will continue to live outside until it burns up, cleans up, or freezes.
So overall, Pandanus amaryllifolius has been a disappointment so far, though very little of that is Gardino's fault, and they've been very nice about fixing the part that was their fault. So I'd buy from them again, why not.

The question remains: I would like to know how one is supposed to get a pleasant, edible-type smell out of the plant, 'cause musty grass doesn't really do it for me. James Missier? Autumn Belle? Anybody?

Have You Seen This Plant?: Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest'

The website for Twyford International, a tissue-culture company located in Florida, with a separate facility in Costa Rica, lists a large number of plants that are very familiar to me, that we got from Florida all the time when I worked in the garden center. Twyford produces and either holds the patent on, or has applied for a patent on: Aglaonema 'Golden Bay;' (Correction: Whatever Twyford's site may claim, they have not in fact applied for the patent on 'Golden Bay;' that belongs to Florida Foundation Seed Producers.) the Anthuriums 'Gemini,' 'Krypton,' 'Red Hot,' (Correction: Whatever Twyford's site may claim, they do not in fact hold the patent on 'Red Hot;' that belongs to Florida Foundation Seed Producers.) and 'White Gemini;' Microsorum musifolium 'Crocodyllus;' the Dieffenbachias 'Tiki,' 'Tropic Breeze,' 'Tropic Marianne,' and 'Tropic Rain;' and the 'Brasil,' 'Imperial Green,' and 'Imperial Red' Philodendron varieties.

Also Philodendron 'Xanadu,' but nobody's perfect.

I own, or have owned, all of the above plants except for Aglaonema 'Golden Bay,' and 'Golden Bay' is on my list to get at some point. So the point is that I'm generally happy with the plants Twyford puts out there, save for 'Xanadu,' which is Satan come to earth in the form of a plant,¹ plus a fair number of their plants were developed by Dr. Richard Jake Henny of the Plant Daddy blog (Sadly, there's a lot less plant-daddying there lately, and a lot more cars, fishing, and complaining about the weather, but the archives are still worth checking out.²), which makes them special just because I usually don't know anything about where my plants originated, much less their creator's feelings about cold weather.³

So I have been excited for quite some time, since discovering their website, about the possibility of one day owning a Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest,' which looks a lot like 'Tropic Rain' in the (blurry, low-res) photo,

Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest.' Photo from Twyford International and used without permission; I will take it down immediately if anyone at Twyford has a problem with this and says so.
but which has a different texture to the variegation which I find more appealing.

And I have waited to see one of these show up in my area, for a couple years now, without luck. Not only have I never actually seen one, but we never had them on the availability lists from Florida. They were never even an option. So finally, I e-mailed Twyford to ask them where they were, and why they had 'Tropic Forest' on their website even though they don't appear to sell the plant.⁴

The answer didn't help very much; the people who wrote me back basically said that they'd never seen it before either, and didn't think they've sold 'Tropic Forest' in the last two years, and they're sorry the website is so out of date (all the news-clipping and press-release pages end in 2004, and their availability list stops last August). They did suggest some wholesalers I could check with, and I appreciate their being nice enough to answer in the first place, because they didn't have to -- I'm just some guy with a blog who might, if he finds a source, buy a plant or two of 'Tropic Forest;' they didn't really stand to gain anything by writing me back. So this was very kind of them. But at the same time, I'm no closer to the goal of having one of the plants, either.

So the report, at least for now, is: 'Tropic Forest' is a real Dieffenbachia variety, patented and everything, originally created in Australia by Edwin J. Frazer, from a cross between Dieffenbachia 'Birdsey No. 4' and D. 'Marie Selby 79-92,' sometime before January 1995, when the patent application was first filed. Nobody has seen 'Tropic Forest' since January 2007 (the date on the picture in footnote 3) and Twyford, at least, hasn't sold it in the last couple years. Nor does anyone else appear to selll it either, at least not under that name. If you sell it, if you have one you might give me cuttings of, if you've spotted it somewhere, if you know Edwin J. Frazer or are Edwin J. Frazer or think you maybe once talked to someone named Edwin at a party who had an Australian accent and did something with German-sounding plants, for the love of all that is good and holy please e-mail me.⁵

PATSP Profiles for:
Aglaonema cvv. including 'Golden Bay'
Anthurium andraeanum cvv., including 'Gemini,' 'Krypton,' 'Red Hot,' and 'White Gemini'
Dieffenbachia cvv., including 'Tiki,' 'Tropic Breeze,' 'Tropic Marianne,' 'Tropic Rain,' and (hypothetically) 'Tropic Forest'
Philodendron hederaceum, including the cultivar 'Brasil'
Philodendron 'Xanadu'

-

¹ Not really. It's true that I have a problem with 'Xanadu,' but the houseplant incarnation of Satan is, I'm pretty sure, Ravenea rivularis, the majesty palm. Maybe poinsettias or Opuntia spp. 'Xanadu' maybe places somewhere in the top ten, though.
² Also: if the reader will take a close, full-size view of this photo from Plant Daddy, s/he will see some very interesting-looking yellow-speckled experimental pothos in the foreground. There's also an odd-looking vining plant of some kind which I think is either a Philodendron hederaceum or another kind of pothos, with sort of long, narrow dark green leaves and a bright white or cream-colored center, on the far right-hand side of this photo.
³ SPOILER: He's against it. Not overly fond of birds either.
⁴ (Indeed, the plant doesn't even appear to exist: when I Googled for it, the only hits that came up were for the Twyford site, multiple sites referring to the patent for 'Tropic Forest,' one really good picture, and PATSP, because I mentioned 'Tropic Forest' in passing during the Dieffenbachia profile. Davesgarden.com has a page for 'Tropic Forest,' but it's just a placeholder: there are no photos or comments.)
⁵ (See the sidebar and follow the directions.)

(Really late) Counter-rant: "Green Plant" tag

Preamble

As regular readers know, I am very -- indeed, almost frighteningly -- interested in trying to get plant names right. Sometimes they're wrong anyway, but this is never from laziness or disinterest. As proof, for anyone who may be unconvinced, I offer this recent post, which was all about announcing that I had taken most of a day to correct spelling and IDs on plants mentioned in the blog since the very first post, and defending myself for not changing other designations I know or suspect to be wrong.

I yield to no one in my ability to nitpick and make trivial plant-identity-related distinctions.

And the reason why I do this is not so much that I believe it matters in and of itself what a thing is called -- a rose by the name of "child-eating skunk vomit plant" would smell as sweet¹ -- but because you can't talk about a plant to other people unless you're sure you're both using the same name to speak about the same plant. If I'm telling you how to care for the drought-hating, cold-sensitive, mite-prone, humidity-loving "zebra plant" Calathea zebrina --

Calathea zebrina.
-- there will be no end of confusion and plant carnage if you think I'm talking about the succulent, summer-and-winter-dormant, rot-prone "zebra plant" Haworthia attenuata:

Haworthia attenuata.
And in the world of wholesale and retail plant-selling, it's even more important that everybody's talking about the same thing, which is why botanical names tend to be specified in commercial settings. They may not be strictly taxonomically up-to-date, but they're at least usually unambiguous.

So I appreciate the frustration in buying a plant where someone took the time to stick a tag on it, only to find that the tag says "Green Plant" or "Tropical Foliage" or "Cactus/Succulent" or what have you. It's nice to know specifically what you've got. If nothing else, it makes it easier to figure out how to care for the plant and what it's likely to do in the future, or recommend the plant to someone else, or whatever.


However, I run across a lot of complaints about these tags that go beyond just being frustrated at not being given a name, with which I sympathize, and cross the line into outright prickishness, with which I sympathize not so much. One of the first examples of the latter, and probably still the most irritating one I've run into, is this post by Steve Aitken more than a year ago at finegardening.com, who somehow manages to complain about a semi-legitimate problem in such a way as to sound like an ignorant, douchey, entitled asshole.

And maybe Mr. Aitken actually is an ignorant, douchey, entitled asshole.

Such people exist.

He might be one of them.

We don't know.

The post, just a series of questions, begins with "Couldn't you [the person who wrote the "green plant" tag] have at least tried to come up with a name?" and gets steadily worse from there. So here, for the record, are Mr. Aitken's questions, with the answers the tag's author might give, allowed the opportunity:

The "Interview"

1. Couldn’t you have at least tried to come up with a name?

That's actually not possible. The reason why "green plant" tags exist in the first place is because retailers need a way to provide care instructions for plants they don't sell many of. (Tags are not cheap, by the way.) The same company that makes "Green Plant" tags also makes tags specific to Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, Cyclamen, poinsettia, and other high-volume plants for which care questions are likely to come up a lot. If tags are sold in batches of 100, and you sell, say, six Asplundia 'Jungle Drum' plants a year, do you really need a Asplundia tag? Most customers don't care what they have or how to keep it alive in the first place. And the retailer should be able to tell the customer an ID and provide basic care instructions if asked. I mean, many of them can't, but that's not the tag-makers' fault.

So rather than have hundreds and thousands of plant tags sitting around, for each possible variety of each possible plant,² retailers sensibly buy tags for the plants they sell a lot of, and use generic "green plant" tags for the low-volume plants, as most tropical foliage plants want fairly similar care anyway.³ This is why "green plant" tags exist. It's not because somebody believes that "green plant" is the name of any specific plant.⁴

2. Couldn’t you have shouted to a co-worker, “Hey, what kind of plant is this anyway?”

See above.

3. Was the answer “A green one”?

Okay, now you're just being a dick.

4. Why don’t any of the numerous plants in the picture look like my Green Plant?

Because they're not supposed to look like your Green Plant. They're there to illustrate the general range of plantiness compatible with the care instructions on the back of the tag.

5. Some of the plants in the photo are actually green and white. Would they be considered Green Plants, too?

They sure would! Also, you're a dick.

6. If you couldn’t even bother to provide a name, how much can I trust your recommendation of “moderate light”?

You've got it backwards. Only plants that need moderate light should be wearing this tag. If a plant needed high light, it should have a different tag.

7. Isn’t “moderate light” just hedging your bet, since you don’t know what plant this is and couldn’t possibly know what it needs for light?

See above.

Dick.

8. Isn’t the information provided under “How to Care for your Green Plant” true for 90% of indoor plants?

So you're saying that you don't believe it matters, in most of the cases, what the plant's actual identity is, but you're busting my chops because the tag doesn't identify precisely what the plant is?

All the lesser dicks must just worship you.

9. Aren’t the “key tips for success” merely a restatement of the hopelessly general instructions that come first?

You'd be surprised how people often don't read things the first time.

10. Did you also want to include the following instructions: Plant in dark soil in a pot with the opening facing up. Do not bleach. Do not place in freezer. Water should be wet before applying to Green Plant.

Would you do any of these things if not specifically instructed not to? No? Then why would you assume that anybody else would?

11. Did you have a meeting to brainstorm other ways this tag could be less helpful?

No. My boss gave me a list of 100 plant names and said "I want you to write care tags for each of these 100 plants. We need them by noon tomorrow."

What's unhelpful about the tag as it now stands, anyway? What would you like to see included that isn't being addressed? Are you serious about the bleach thing?

12. Do you think people should get an “A” for effort?

No, but I don't see what that has to do with anything.

13. If so, what grade would you give yourself for this tag?

N/A, because I answered "no" for #12, but maybe a B-minus?

14. Is this a conspiracy?

[sigh] Would you like it to be? Would that make you happy?

15. Do you think you can get away with this?

I already have.

16. What do you mean “I already have.”? [punctuation sic]

[shrug]

17. Why do you hate me?

'Cause you're a dick.

In conclusion

Perhaps in the future, it will be possible for retailers to print out specific tags for any plant in creation. Maybe someone will start a business selling CD-ROMs and blank tags, so you can print tags as you need them (though someone would need to solve the problem of water-soluble printer ink first: plants and tags get wet sometimes). No tag wastage, pinpoint-precise plant tags, plant purists like myself could be satisfied that we had the right instructions at all times, and Mr. Aitken could focus his sarcasm more narrowly on things he understands⁵ instead of this embarrassing sarcasm-flailing he's doing.

It annoys me to feel compelled to defend the tag-writers: it's not like I'm normally a big fan of the instructions they provide (which usually strike me as encouraging people to keep their plants too dark and too wet). But talking to the writers as though they believe there's a plant out there called "green plant," and then mocking them for being so stupid as to believe that, is just mean-spirited, douchey idiocy.⁶ So I defend the tag-writers' collective honor. Such as it is.

-

¹ (Though I bet they wouldn't sell as well.)
² At one point, just for shiggles, I sat down at home and tried to come up with a list of every single species and cultivar of plant I could think of that we had in the tropical greenhouse right at that moment. I hit 275 before I quit, and because of my cactus blindness, I know I failed to include a lot of cactus species. Further, that was only at that particular moment, and in the particular establishment where I worked: it would be fairly easy for me to come up with a list of 500 plants that can be grown indoors.
³ It should be noted that I was never all that thrilled with the instructions on the "green plant" tags, and was occasionally moved to cross stuff out and write different instructions in for people. But that was also true of the specific plant tags. A plant's location, soil mix, pest infestations or lack thereof, etc., influence care requirements enough that you can only ever give people kind of a general idea of what to expect from a given plant.
Incidentally: if you have a plant you can't identify and need a best guess for what to do with it, I have a post about that. Though you should still try to figure out what it is as soon as you can.
⁴ Though the botanical name for Chlorophytum in fact does translate as "green plant," so one could argue that a Chlorophytum wearing a "green plant" tag is correctly-tagged both specifically and generally.
⁵ His author bio on this page actually says of Aitken, ". . . please hold the questions about houseplants, he openly admits to killing them." So maybe this is not an area of expertise in the first place, which makes the snotty attitude even more surprising.
⁶ I assume the defense, if anybody feels one needs to be made, will be something like geez, it was just a joke; lighten up, man. Which would be easier to believe had any of it been funny.

Seeing the Rabbits

Cymbidium NOID.
Oh, the sacrifices I make for my readers.

Convinced the husband to take me to see the rabbits¹ yesterday, in the hopes of getting interesting pictures of some kind from one of the garden centers there, to use as blog fodder. He had business at Lowe's besides, so the Cymbidium picture above was actually taken in the Coralville Lowe's, but it was the same trip so it still counts.

And I am here to report: everybody in the world has Schlumbergeras now. Also poinsettias. Prices vary enormously, though colors, strangely, do not. Poinsettias are pretty much restricted to red and pink; Schlumbergeras you can get in white, hot pink, and red, and if you're lucky enough to be in the right store, salmon. It seems like there were more choices, for both plants, this time last year. Am I wrong?

Also, most of the non-box store businesses are running sales now. That doesn't matter as much as you'd think it would, though.

Store A has 50% off houseplants and orchids, which might make their (ordinarily insane) prices borderline reasonable, though they were incredibly disappointing, for the second visit in a row. I went in hoping to see that they still had a variegated Agave I'd been interested in but declined to buy the first time (sadly, they didn't have it anymore).

Then there's the price tags thing. About 2/3 of the plants there aren't priced at all. No tags, no stickers, no signs, nothing. Sure, I could take the plant up to the front counter and ask the employees how much it is, over and over, for each plant I find interesting, but screw that. I'm the customer; I'm not interested in doing extra work in order to buy from you. I've already come 50 miles (80 km) just to stand in your stinking greenhouse; you could meet me halfway by letting me know your prices.

At the very least they could make signs ("6-inch tropicals $22.99," e.g.), if stickering everything individually is too much work. Unlike a lot of customers, I'm willing to read signs, and I'll even seek them out, sometimes, if I have a question about stuff. But no. Not even signs.

Also, Store A, as long as I'm here, it'd also probably be a good idea not to talk to your employees about spraying for whitefly when there's a customer in the next greenhouse over, with no walls between us. 'Cause I can hear you when you speak out loud, you know, especially when you're using your authoritative, booming boss voice, and I know what whitefly is. I mean, geez, guys, I want to support independent, family-owned businesses, and I know you've had an exceptionally rough last couple years, but remembering when you have customers in the store is really simple, obvious stuff, and this isn't the first time. Last time you made me listen to an extended, one-sided cell phone conversation with a lost delivery driver. And I haaaaaate listening to other people's cell conversations. Get it together already.

Store B, on the other hand, is slicker than a slug covered in vaseline, and have all their Christmas stuff laid out all nice and neat, everything sparkly and twinkly and covered in blinking lights to within an inch of its life. If a Cedar Rapidian volcano spewed Christmas, instead of molten rock, Store B looked like it'd been caught in the pyroclastic flow. Store B wasn't discounting houseplants at all, and in fact appear to have raised their prices since I was last there, which is an interesting choice during a recession.²

They also had Christmas music on already, which, as it always does, made me want to strangle puppies. We fled immediately, leaving only a cloud of red glitter where we'd been standing.

And then there is Store C. Store C is small, compared to the others, and has about the same floorspace devoted to houseplants that Store B does, and maybe 25% of the floorspace Store A has. They also occasionally have some bug problems (mostly mealybugs), so I've learned to check the plants pretty carefully before bringing them home.

However. They're also very very cheap (ordinarily about half the price of the larger garden centers), and, more importantly, they appreciate the value of bringing in weird plants, so they're the most likely, always, to have something I don't already have, at a price I can afford. Additionally, when I visited yesterday, they were running a 30% off sale, which they seem to be doing about every second time I visit.

And no Christmas music! and very limited Christmas decor! And they've never been pushy about "do you need any help?" or given me unsolicited, condescending advice about how to take care of what I'm buying.

So I bought two plants at Store C.³ And I would do it again. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth checking Store A anymore, when we see the rabbits. I ordinarily don't bother to check Store B (and now know not to again until January).

-

¹ (= go to Cedar Rapids)
² Is it okay to start calling it a depression yet? I mean seriously. We just found out yesterday that my mother-in-law was laid off from her job. My mother doesn't work, never has, and Dad told me last week that the orders at his factory are way down, compared to previous years. He's got decent seniority, so he's unlikely to be laid off, but they appear to be cutting everybody's hours back. And of course things can still get worse.
³ A 3" Haworthia NOID and a 4" Pellaea rotundifolia. I'm uneasy about the Pellaea, but I've considered buying one periodically and held off because of concerns about whether I would just be throwing my money away. This particular plant wound up costing me about $3.50, which I figure is roughly what it would have been from Lowe's, so it's a fairly small risk. We'll see. Pictures eventually, maybe.

New cultivars of Epipremnum aureum and Syngonium spp.

Today, Saturday, is my last day at work -- it looks like I'm not going to be able to come back to work any additional days in June, which is more or less okay by me (I was pretty miserable from the heat on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.), though I had hoped to be able to do something to assist through the rest of the really really busy period. The reasons why I won't be able to are technical, and have to do with my income from work being theoretically able to mess things up with the funding for the house, according to the husband, which I figure I'll be all snarling and sleep-deprived after a week of moving / cleaning / heat / contractors / generalized disruption of everything, so probably not in the best mental state to be dealing with customers anyway, especially since customers at this time of year are frequently out of their damn minds. (I've had people get visibly angry with me because we didn't have any non-pink Lisianthus to sell them. Seriously. The tone was such that it seemed like the customer in question would rather we not have had any Lisianthus at all, than for us to have it but have it be the loathed pink, that the pink was just crossing a motherfucking line. I exaggerate, but not by much. It was weird.)

Anyway.

So I won't be posting for a while. I expect to start again on 1 June, but it could start up again sooner, or later. I really have no idea. E-mail may or may not be similarly shut down. Much is unknown about this post-work world.

Meanwhile, I leave you with a cool little pothos (Epipremnum aureum) that WCW brought in on Wednesday, having bought it at a competitor's store. Neither of us had seen one before, and she wasn't even sure it was a pothos, but it was shaped the same as pothos in every particular, down to the grooved petioles, so I was fairly certain that's what it was. (I have since managed to identify it as Epipremnum aureum 'N' Joy,' first by searching davesgarden.com, then by running across an availability list from one of our suppliers, who listed a pothos by that name.¹) It almost looks like the same kind of variegation I talk about in the second half of the Sansevieria trifasciata profile, with the three layers of cells being expressed differently at the leaf center and leaf margin. No word yet on whether that is, in fact, what's going on with 'N'Joy.'

Not-great photo of WCW's whole plant.

Close-up of a more or less typical leaf.
Anyway. WCW brought this plant in on Wednesday. On Thursday, I walked to the competitor (the husband had the car at the house²) and bought one of my own, along with a Syngonium NOID:



I haven't come up with a positive ID yet on the Syngonium. It resembles S. wendlandii, which is also a dark green, and has a similar velvety texture, though S. wendlandii has a broader white center, in the pictures of it I've found. Though that may be because mine was grown in lower light than the on-line specimens. Syngonium 'Green Velvet' and 'Southern Star' are also contenders, but both are only mentioned on one site, which suggests that they're maybe not official cultivar names, and might be synonyms for S. wendlandii. Whatever it is, I have no idea what it was doing in Iowa, and also it looks difficult, like every other velvety-textured aroid I've encountered to date save one.³ Perhaps it would be best to just give it to Nina immediately. For her to poop on.⁴

Then I found out yesterday that actually, WCW had intended me to keep the Epipremnum 'N' Joy,' so now I have two.

Anyway. See y'all in a week. Plus or minus.

-

¹ Another confirmation of the ID led me to this page, with pictures from the 2009 Tropical Plant Industry Exhibition, so now I want: Anthurium 'Tweed' (though, one, I bet it doesn't do well indoors, and two, I really don't want to "fool the cops," if by "fool the cops" you mean "make them think that the harmless plant I'm growing is actually marijuana, which will get me arrested and lead to a long, unpleasant and expensive process of having to prove that it's not an illegal plant at all, at the end of which I will be traumatized and without legal recourse"), Cordyline fruticosa 'Antares,' Euphorbia punicea, Ficus dammaropsis, Ludovia integrifolia, Neoregelia 'Ardie,' Dracaena deremensis 'Hawaiian Sunshine,' D. d. 'Spearmint,' D. d. 'Malaika,' and D. d. 'White Surprise.' Your covetousness may vary.
² It occurred to me while writing the above fairly mundane sentence that, at one point not even all that long ago, I had gotten used to the idea that I would never have a husband, car, or house, and that it's quietly mind-blowing that I do. Er, sorta I do. (Technically, the car and house aren't mine, and I don't have a driver's license so I can't exactly use the car independently.^a)

^a Long story. It's not related to a DUI or anything -- I've never had one, so I've never had one taken away. I could get one, in theory, but that's a whole different long story.

³ Philodendron gloriosum is hanging in there, but is not an easy indoor plant. Ditto for Anthurium crystallinum 'Mehani,' which was doing fine until just recently, when I let it get too dry for too long. Alocasia 'Frydek' was breathtakingly gorgeous, but I didn't even want to try that one: it was damning enough that it was an Alocasia. The only velvety aroid I've been successful with so far has been Philodendron hederaceum micans.
⁴ Yes, it's a Triumph the Comic Insult Dog reference. Though also that's what she does. Mostly she poops on her rock, occasionally she poops on the Podocarpus. Probably there's other pooping I'm not aware of. In fairness, it's not like she has an exercise wheel or a plastic chew toy or anything: she's kind of hard up for entertainment. Spends a fair amount of time literally climbing the walls. Sometimes she hangs upside down from the wire mesh cover. Let's don't judge.