Top 18 PATSP Posts of 2012

2012 wasn't my, the blog's, or the plant collection's best year. I spent basically the entire year saying that I had too many plants,¹ and trying to reduce the collection to a more manageable size, and somehow managed to gain plants anyway (919 at the beginning of 2012, 1029 at the end). And then the scalepocalypse. And then I started having problems with fungus, a problem which is ongoing.² And then the scale came back.³

Also saying these are the top 18 posts is sort of misleading in two different ways: five of them are basically all the same post, so it's closer to the top 14 posts. Also "top" doesn't really mean anything except that I liked how they turned out and think you should see them if you happened to miss them the first time. They're not necessarily the most-viewed or most-commented or anything like that. Anyway.


18. Pretty picture: Cattleya aclandiae (16 April 2012)


I just liked how the photo turned out, basically.


17. Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica (4 September 2012)

Well, it was a big deal. You don't even know.


16. Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Peruflora's Cirila Alca (22 November 2012)


Also just a nice photo.


15. Random plant event: Spathiphyllum (5 December 2012)

In which I propagate a plant I don't even really like, at a time when I'm actually trying to reduce the number of plants I have, because I've realized propagation is possible. I still feel all conflicted about this.


14. Pretty picture: Rhyncholaelia digbyana (30 November 2012)


In which I attempt to liven up a dull blog post with an incomplete screenplay.


13. Random plant event: Aglaonema 'Maria,' with special guest star (8 March 2012)


The debut of the peat-bog-in-the-basement idea.


12. Cribplants, yo. (28 November 2012)

In which my thugged-out ass realizes that Snoop Dogg is a mothafuckin genius.


11. Elsewhere on the Web: Did We Win Already? (29 January 2012)

The sellers of the blue dyed orchids said, about a year ago, that they were going to admit on the tags that their plants wouldn't re-bloom blue. I wonder if that actually happened. Somebody should check.


10. Random plant event: Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold' (22 August 2012)

The rumors are true: Clivias actually can be induced to bloom. I was beginning to doubt.


9. The Very Slow and Occasionally Sticky Inferno (14 August 2012)

The scale outbreak depressed me. And led to all sorts of incidental badness. Which was also depressing. And is continuing to be depressing. And will likely be depressing in the future as well.


8. Pretty pictures: Masdevallia Sunset Jaguar 'Night Breed' (24 April 2012)


I really love this flower, though I'm unable to read the name without thinking about the "night cheese" joke on 30 Rock.⁴


7. Random plant event: Epiphyllum NOID (26 August 2012)

In which an Epiphyllum blooms in Iowa, and a family is brought together. (No, really.) Also there are many pictures.


2 to 6. Missing From Retail series
(Part 1, 25 November) (Part 2, 2 December) (Part 3, 8 December) (Part 4, 14 December) (Part 5, 20 December)

Sort of a weird choice, I guess, but it was nice to expand the horizons of the blog for a bit and talk about a new group of plants. Plus I learned some things about plants I was otherwise unfamiliar with.


1. The Brick Joke (16 January 2012)

And no, Pierson's Flower Shop and Greenhouses, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, never did contact me in response to the post, so I assume I'm still banned from the store. We never have occasion to go to Cedar Rapids anymore anyway (I'm sorry, Frontier! I miss you!), so this hasn't had much practical effect on my life. However, my initial feelings of well they kind of have a point and I understand why they might not want me there have had a year to . . . curdle.

And so now we have 2013. May I have less fungus and scale, fewer plants overall, and the same number of kidneys, next New Year's Day.⁵

-

¹ (Absolutely true, though!)
² The fungus story so far:
First I tried neem oil. That makes leafy Euphorbia and Pedilanthus types defoliate, and doesn't seem to have much lasting effect on the non-leafy stuff.
Then I tried spraying with basic copper sulfate in water, which seemed like the least nasty thing available for fungus control at the ex-job. Not only did that not help much, it clogged the sprayers almost immediately.
Then I asked for help from Cactus Jungle. They said hydrogen peroxide, so I've been doing that, but this doesn't seem to be helping either, especially since I can only do it every 14 days or so. And it makes the Pedilanthus defoliate.
The next thing to try is baking soda. That's not going to work either, but it's another thing I can spray inside the house that won't kill us all, so I'm going to try it anyway.
When baking soda has conclusively failed -- and it will -- only then am I going to allow myself to use an actual hardcore, mid-20th-century-type fungicide. I bought a bottle of chlorothalonil at the ex-job some time ago, then looked it up when I got home and kind of wished I'd bought something else, 'cause I don't want to use it in the house and it's too cold to use it outside.
If the chlorothalonil doesn't fix things -- and it's a polychlorinated benzene ring with two nitrile groups, so it ought to be able to kill everything -- I'm going to go back to the ex-job and buy some captan.
And if captan doesn't work either, I am going to burn the goddamned house down. THE MILDEW WILL NOT WIN.
³ (Truthfully, I'm depressed about all this. Probably going to take a hiatus for a while following today's post. I'd rather not think about plants any more than absolutely necessary right now. Plus, I have a bunch of plants in the basement that I need to dose with imidacloprid granules, and that's going to take some time.)
⁴ It's a throwaway gag where Liz Lemon is home by herself eating cheese. Getting the rights to use the song, even though it wasn't the whole song (or the right lyrics!), apparently cost the 30 Rock producers $40,000. That's some commitment to a joke, that is.
⁵ (For the record, I would also be okay with an increased number of kidneys, at least within reason.)

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.

Et tu, Kew?

Are the "Zantedeschias" featured in this post at Talking Plants actually dyed Anthuriums? [Yes. The post has since been corrected to Anthurium. -Mr. S.] And shouldn't the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens know the difference? And why is Kew dyeing/painting plants in the first place? And why am I weeping, piteously, on the floor like a newborn baby?

Elsewhere on the Web: Did We Win Already?

Greenhouse Grower has a couple articles up about the blue-dyed Phalaenopsis phenomenon, both of which contain some interesting quotes.


In the first, from January 6, Marcella Lucio, the marketing director of Silver Vase (who produce the 'Blue Mystique' non-variety), announces that Silver Vase will now inform consumers that their orchids will re-bloom white instead of blue, both in materials sold with the plants and on their website.

The actual Silver Vase website says something substantially different:

A new stem will probably bring white flowers, though it is too early to know for sure. It is assumed so, because Phalaenopsis orchids have a very strong natural ‘filtering system’ that protects them in the wild.

Silver Vase isn't assuming anything: they're well aware that new stems are going to be white, because they know they're starting from genetically white plants and injecting them with dye, and they know the dye doesn't last forever. So I'm unhappy about the phrasing there.

On the other hand, I enjoyed "[Lucio] says she expected the criticism from the very beginning," as it implies that they knew all along that they were giving customers impossible expectations, and just figured they'd wait until people started complaining to do what they should have done all along. Now that the expected criticism has arrived, and they've admitted that the color's not permanent, they get to look like they're being all responsive to the public. And if, in doing so, they just happen to get another round of publicity? Icing on the cake.

The second link, from January 19, is basically the same story, from a different producer. Plainview Orchids sells dyed phals called "Blue Diamond," "Purple Fusion," and "Lavender Mist," which appear to be produced in exactly the same way (though Purple Fusion begins with a phal which is already purple). According to this article, both Plainview and Silver Vase produce their orchids by permission of some other, unnamed, company, which actually holds the rights to the technique.

Plainview likewise has had a convenient change of heart and will now, they say, be including the rebloom color on their tags. The article includes a snarky, dismissive quote from Plainview president Arie Van Vugt:

At least [the information that it will rebloom a different color is] there as a disclaimer now. But believe me, maybe 1 percent of consumers will get it back flowering anyway.

I can't decide if the cynicism of that makes me like him more than I like Marcella Lucio, or less.

Unlike Silver Vase, Plainview doesn't have anything on their website about reblooming, or even anything about the orchids at all. I also couldn't find anything referring to a "Purple Fusion" Phalaenopsis anywhere on the internet, beyond the Greenhouse Grower article and a handful of photos. So for the moment, I guess we have to take Plainview's word for it.

But hey. We have promises of tags. Is this enough? Did we win?

I'm thinking no, we didn't win, but yes, it might be enough. When I first found out about all this, I was upset that these companies were pretty much just lying, as far as your average consumer is concerned, and presenting a plant for sale that would no longer exist once the plant broke down the last of the dye.¹

They are now lying a bit less. It's still a misrepresentation, I'd argue (particularly Silver Vase's maybe-they'll-come-back-blue-anything-could-happen line, which I'd argue is a good example of truthiness in advertising²), but adding fine print does sort of absolve them, even if they know most of their customers aren't going to read it. I certainly don't expect them to grab every potential customer by the shoulders and tell them, in short, declarative sentences, that the plant will rebloom white, not blue. The more serious growers, the ones who would be interested in reblooming the plant, are probably interested enough to read the tag before buying; the ones who just want something to match their sofa  birthday cake frosting  neon Budweiser sign  Patrick Nagel print³ don't care about the long-term future of the plant and intend to throw it out in three months anyway, so this is information they don't need to have.

Patrick Nagel. Blue Sweater. Image via Beyond Anomie. Included because it seems like it might match the "Blue Mystique" orchids at the beginning of the post. (Not quite, as it turns out. But close.)
So this is probably good enough, assuming that Silver Vase and Plainview are actually going to admit that they know what color the plants are going to bloom next time. We'll see. In the meantime, we can still point out the lurid colors and the way this whole dyed-phal thing is so 2010 whenever the subject comes up, and hope that the practice doesn't spread to too many other species of plant before people catch on and stop buying them. We'll see how long that takes.

-

¹ I'm also just sort of offended on an aesthetic level, but that's my own trip, and it would be unfair -- not to mention a little egomaniacal -- to expect Plainview or Silver Vase to care about that.
² "Truthiness" is, approximately, the truth one wants to exist, or something that seems like it's true. The sort of truth you feel in your gut, whether it has any relationship to reality or not. It was coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005.
³ I have this awful mixed reaction to Nagel images, because they were fashionable in the 80s when I was growing up, so I internalized that they were cool and still have a Pavlovian "cool" response when I see one. They're also so associated with the 80s in my mind that they now seem dated and embarrassing in the same way feathered hair does. So when I see one, my brain starts arguing with itself, which lasts until I am distracted by something else.
We can only hope that dyed Phalaenopsis will one day seem as firmly an embarrassing fad of the past as the cover for Duran Duran's Rio (also a Patrick Nagel work) does.

Unfinished business: Phalaenopsitrocity

Wound up back at the grocery store yesterday, where I first saw the blue-dyed Phalaenopsis flowers at which we all shuddered two months ago, and they still had them. (More accurately, they'd probably gotten new ones in: I can't imagine even long-suffering Phalaenopsis blooms hanging around for two months, looking exactly the same.)

Which means that I can answer some questions people had back at the end of March.

The bark in which they were planted was not blue; it was normal bark color. Most of the roots were normal gray-white also, though I saw a couple that were the same blue as the flowers. From this, I think we can conclude that the flowers aren't being dyed blue by watering with blue water.

I think I've found a smoking gun for the method, after looking around a bit:


I realize it isn't the best photo (bad lighting), but I think it's clear enough that you can see an injection site with a darker-colored ring around it (it may help to blow the picture up to full size by opening it in a separate window). Not sure what's going on with the leaf that's next to it, but it looks like it's been dyed a little bit too, or maybe bruised.

It's still a lie when you know how it's done, of course. And I'm still angry about it. But my curiosity is satisfied.

Dendrobomination

(EDIT: Sorry; the .gif didn't load properly the first time, but it's working now.)

Okay, for the love of all that is good in the world, someone needs to stop this crap. There must be someone who could stop this.

(Used by permission.)
This photo is from Ivynettle, at Letters and Leaves, which you should be reading already. I'm reposting the photo here at PATSP because I found a .gif that expresses my feelings about this sort of thing perfectly:


There are other pictures at the original post, including some hideous spray-painted Echeverias (possibly Graptoveria or Sedeveria or something like that; it's hard to make IDs on that kind of plant when they're their natural color). Ideas for what we should be doing to make this sort of thing stop are welcome. Obviously not buying them is an important first step, so if you have bought or ever will buy one of these dyed or painted plants, please never tell me.

Phalaenopsitrocity

From the store that brought you the spray-painted, glittered, green poinsettias:


Yes, they really looked like that. I haven't changed the colors.

I'd heard of this before, from Ivynettle, but this is so much worse than anything she described.

I emphasize that they really looked like this. April Fool's Day is still a few days away. This is a real thing, that exists in the world.

The husband had to draw my attention to them. ("Hey, did you see the blue orchids?") I had gone through the floral department (it's a grocery store), and had looked right at them, but apparently failed to recognize them as plants.

I didn't examine the stalks for punctures, but I assume that's how they made these: dye injected into the flowering stalks.

It makes the spray-painted points seem not so bad, right?

Somewhere, somebody is working on creating something even worse than this, and we're going to long for the halcyon days when people were injecting dye into Phalaenopsis flowers. What do you think it will be?