Schlumbergera seedlings: assorted

Two reasons for the recent long gap in posts: one, I got hung up on a name for seedling 226A (didn't like any of the four names that I'd come up with, couldn't find any names I liked better), and two, Japanese beetle season is upon us once again and it's way, way worse than previous years. Like, if someone told me that a count had confirmed that there were a hundred thousand individual beetles in our yard alone, I'd be like, only? Judging from my estimates of how many I'm catching in a jar of soapy water, the population is about ten times more than it was in 2015, and 2015 made me want to cry.

So I've been distracted and frustrated, is the point. Meanwhile, the Schlumbergeras continue to bloom (two first-time bloomers in July alone, and July isn't over yet), so the longer I stall on one seedling, the more work it's going to be to catch back up. (I am aware that I don't actually have to name the seedlings, but usually I like doing it.) So for the sake of making progress at all, I'm going to announce the names of a few seedlings I can assign names to, and we'll just have to come back around to the difficult ones later.

To begin, let me present Schlumbergera 382A Permanganate:

It's named for the chemical potassium permanganate,¹ a strong oxidizer that also happens to produce intensely-colored solutions in water. Concentrated solutions are a very dark purple, but more dilute solutions are sort of pink-magenta similar to the flowers, so it works for me.

Rejected names:
Calmth (a state of calmness, by analogy with heighth or breadth; from the dialect dictionary)
It Is To Laugh (382A is another non-yellow offspring from the NOID yellow parent. The failure of the NOID yellow to produce yellow offspring is not exactly funny, but it's not not funny either, see 369A Punch Line.)
Jellybread (also from the dialect dictionary; bread with jelly on it. Really only works if you're imagining grape jelly, and even then the color's not quite right.)


And 379A Can't Find The World:

This is a reference to a moment when I was playing around with Half-Life 2 developer console, so I could use the noclip cheat and look around at spots which are normally not visible within the game. I don't remember what I did, but at some point the game gave me the error message "can't find the world." I didn't know what that meant, but the idea pleased me somehow, and I wrote it down as a possible seedling name. Then this seedling started to bloom but never quite finished, and the seedling seemed to match the name. I still haven't found out what "can't find the world" means exactly.

379A is also another non-yellow seedling from the NOID yellow parent. It turns out that mostly the NOID yellow produces more oranges, though for some reason we also got a couple magenta/white flowers out of it, plus a couple new combinations.

Rejected names:
Dysphoria (not really a reference to anything in particular; the flower just kinda looks dysphoric)
Flea-Bit Dog (mostly a reference to thrips damage, plus the "dog" designation for seedlings that don't turn out very well)
Fools Rush In (not actually sure what this one's supposed to mean -- maybe I was thinking that the plant was trying to bloom before it was actually mature enough to do so?)


Here's 424A Speedrun:

Speedruns are where someone attempts to play through a video game, or a level of a video game, as quickly as possible, often using unintended bits of the game code to bypass certain time-consuming scenes, or to travel faster than the game normally allows one to go. It works for this seedling because, while it's not technically a record-fastest bloom, 424A was nevertheless very quick to go from seed to flower.

Rejected names:
Alexis Carrington (character / main antagonist from Dynasty. The husband and I can now say that we've seen every single episode of the original Dynasty, by the way. I tried watching one episode of the rebooted CW Dynasty and it is awful, please do not watch it. Somehow it manages to be just as nonsensical and over-the-top as the original series without ever being even a little bit entertaining.)
Flamboyant Tendency (basically just a description of the flower in general; not really any deeper meaning intended)
Prismatic (a reference to the number of colors in the petals, though obviously they're not arranged in rainbow order like a real prism would produce, and other seedlings have done better at keeping the colors prominent and distinct from one another. Don't mind the name, but this wasn't the best seedling to give it to.)


188A Freyja's Turkey:

This is another chemistry-related name, though in a more roundabout way. I remembered that the element vanadium was named for the goddess Vanadis, which was a reference to the wide range of colors produced by vanadium compounds (Vanadis being the goddess of, among other things, fertility and beauty), but I didn't remember that Vanadis was just another name for the goddess Freyja.

The "turkey" portion of the name comes from the way some of the photos had the petals fanning out like a turkey's tail.

Both 424A Speedrun and 188A Freyja's Turkey are offspring of the NOID magenta.

Rejected names:
Hetty Reckless (a runaway slave and abolitionist, who was part of Underground Railroad, fought against prostitution, worked toward improving education and skills in AA community, and just generally did impressive and good things. She's totally going to get a seedling someday, it's just not going to be this one.)
Rainbow Flag (another reference to the range of colors, though if we're speaking literally then it should be noted that like half the colors in the actual rainbow flag aren't found in the flower)
Vocal Fry (I think this was a reference to the slightly ragged edges of some of the petals? Or the way the thrips had chewed them up a bit? Mostly I just like having a term for the phenomenon, which I would probably otherwise never have even noticed.)


237A Neptunium:

Yet another chemistry name, though since I've talked about neptunium before (in the post for seedling 239A Plow The Seashore, specifically footnote 3), I probably don't need to explain it again. The short version is, this is seedling 237, and isotope 237 is the most stable isotope of neptunium.

237A is also another of the seedlings from 025A Clownfish, along with 239A Plow The Seashore, 240A Schwa, 244A That's My Purse, 250A Glede, and a handful of others that haven't been named yet.²

Clay Court (because it's approximately the color of clay tennis courts, and why not?)
Horseback Opinion (implying that the bloom wasn't well thought-out or well-planned; I found the idiom in the dialect dictionary, but it's apparently still known today, because The Free Dictionary has it. The implication is of an opinion offered so quickly and with so little thought that one hasn't even taken the time to get off one's horse first -- something unconsidered or off the cuff)
Snakeypoo (this one came from the random word combination "serpentine nickname." I asked myself what a good nickname for a snake would be, and "snakeypoo" is what came out. It amused me, so it went on the list. I don't think it signifies anything about this particular seedling: it's probably just that I was still finding it funny when I was generating the list of name candidates.)

The next post will happen when it happens.

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¹ Technically just the permanganate half; a positive ion has to be there to balance the charges, but it doesn't have to be potassium. Potassium is just a common counter-ion, for reasons I didn't bother to investigate. All my personal exposure to permanganate salts has been with potassium permanganate (KMnO₄) as far as I'm aware.
² (236A, 241A, 248A, and 252A)

More of the Same

A nice photo of Schlumbergera 070A Delia Webster. 070A appears to be campaigning pretty hard to win the Schlummy for Most Improved Returning Seedling, 2016-17 Season: it started blooming early (23 October), it's been blooming heavily and continuously since then, and the flower color seems a bit more intense this year besides.
The Canon is now officially mine, paid for and everything, and we are . . . getting used to one another.¹ I have some default settings to use,² and I (briefly) managed to get gallery photos for all the Anthurium seedlings that had bloomed up until that point. (Some seedlings have bloomed since then, so I'm not caught up anymore, but for a little while there I was, and it was glorious.)

Unfortunately, I feel like I'm not that much closer to resuming regular posting than I was a week ago; things keep coming up. Purged the 3-and 4-inch Anthuriums, moved a bunch of the survivors around, potted up 64 new seedlings, started a bunch of Anthurium and Leuchtenbergia seeds,³ replaced some light fixtures, had a (routine) doctor's appointment, another (less routine) doctor's appointment is coming up, I've been mildly sick (just a sinus infection; unrelated to the doctor stuff), I moved a batch of Schlumbergera seedlings into the plant room on 17 October,⁴ I still haven't found new places for the Coffeas that summered outside this year to live during the winter, there are a couple family visits coming up, and so on and so forth. Just a lot of stuff going on. None of it's a big deal, some of it's actually nice, but all of it takes time and energy to deal with, and the blog is the logical thing to drop while all this is happening.

So the good news is that everything is basically fine; the bad news is that I don't know how much longer it's going to be before I can start blogging like I was, because I don't know how much more unusual stuff I'm going to have to deal with. In the meantime, I'm still taking, sorting, and editing photos, and sooner or later posting will have to get back to normal.

Probably around Thanksgiving / Hanukkah / Christmas / New Year's when you are all too busy to read the posts.

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¹ (, he said, through gritted teeth)
² Not the same default for all photographic subjects, unfortunately: currently there's one group of settings for light orange, tan, beige, and brown; one for red-adjacent oranges; and one for everything else. Which still doesn't work all the time, but it's better than what I had before, and I don't have to take a dozen different sets of photos in the hopes that one of them will give me something serviceable.
³ I don't know whether the Leuchtenbergia seeds will be viable; they're from the cross-pollination in 2013. I mean, you'd think that a desert plant would be willing to wait around for a few years before germination, in case there was just no rain that year, but I don't know. Either way, I suppose the odds of germination were getting worse the longer I waited, so better this year than the next.
⁴ All of which are new, and a couple of which are definitely old enough to bud, because they started and aborted buds a few times while in the basement. They all got moved too late to be blooming now, but I'm guessing they'll start in mid- to late December. When that happens, the hope is that we'll see a bit more color variety from the Schlumbergeras: the seed parents of this batch include a few we've already seen (the NOID magenta and NOID white, both pretty boring seed parents last year), a couple we haven't seen previously but that aren't likely to give us anything terribly new (the red/white 'Exotic Dancer' and the red-orange/white 'Stephanie'), some second-generation seedlings from 025A Clownfish, 026A Brick Wall, 057A Pyrotechnic, 082A Strawberry Madeleine, and 088A Cyborg Unicorn, which might or might not do anything interesting, and then a solid chunk of NOID yellow seedlings, from two different batches, which are probably our best bet for something interesting to happen.
And so we wait to see buds.

Progress!

I am still here. I also keep having unusual, somewhat urgent things happen that are of higher priority than the blog.

Three camera-related developments:

1) The Amazon third-party seller has removed the camera I tried to buy from their list of products, demonstrating, I guess, that they can be communicated with. Not by me, apparently, but by somebody. Amazon continues to tell me that the order I've cancelled at least three times is being processed and should arrive by October 12;¹ since the order remains technically open, I cannot rate the seller.

2) I have started to deal with the enormous backlog of images on the computer (~2500 total; I hadn't done any photo-sorting or -editing since 1 September), and as a result am feeling somewhat better about the quality of the Canon images compared to the Olympus ones, in general, and

3) I have identified some Canon settings that produce more accurate colors than others, though there doesn't seem to be a single setting that consistently produces the best results, and the Canon remains bad for color reproduction in one particular group of subjects.

The way I achieved number 3 was through brute force, more or less: I took photos of two different Schlumbergeras using all possible combinations from the two menus having to do with color balance,² then compared the photos to one another and to the actual plant to see which combinations were most accurate, then worked backward from there to determine what settings were my best bets for a serviceable default setting.

For both photos:
Columns from left to right: automatic, sunny, cloudy, fluorescent, alternate fluorescent, "this is white."
Rows from top to bottom: off, vivid, neutral, "positive film," light skin, dark skin, vivid blue, vivid green, vivid red, custom.

The best settings for one bloom weren't the best settings for the other, of course, but this does at least narrow it all down to something like a manageable number of options.³ So that's progress.

I get poor color reproduction, even with those settings, from Anthurium blooms in the peach / tan / brown area. Anthuriums 1299 (Sinthia D Meanor) and 1727 (Mercedes Sulay) in particular always come out bafflingly green and terrible. I plan to try all 60 combinations on those soon, though I'm worried that I'm going to find out that no combination of settings results in accurate colors for those particular plants. Which would be upsetting.

My hypothesis is that the Canon is confused by colors which are basically [skin tones + green], and decides to amplify the green as a way of coping with the confusion. Just a guess, though, and if true it doesn't really suggest a way to compensate.

In the course of trying to deal with a mix of Olympus and Canon photos all at once, I've done a lot of comparing of the image quality, and the Canon really is better at everything except color: the pictures are much sharper, the colors more vivid (sometimes too much so, but that's easy to fix), it takes photos much faster, and it gives better results in low light. Also the Olympus had a lot of crud behind the lens, that gave every bright object in a photo a halo, which I guess I had just gotten used to because it happened gradually and more or less disappeared if I turned the brightness down enough. The halos are really noticeable in comparison to the Canon pictures.

So if I can just find a way to cope with the skin tones problem, then we're back in business, more or less. I could even wind up happy with the new camera. I mean, don't hold your breath or anything, but . . . eventually. Maybe.

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¹ (fingers crossed!)
² One menu: automatic, sunny, cloudy, fluorescent, alternate fluorescent, set white balance by pointing camera at something and telling it "this is white." There's also an incandescent option that I left off because it has always been obviously terrible and I'm not sure we even have any incandescent lights in the house still.
Other menu: off, vivid, neutral, positive film, light skin, dark skin, vivid blue, vivid green, vivid red, custom settings.
The second menu's custom settings option includes seven sliders (contrast, sharpness, saturation, red, green, blue, skin tone) each with five options. If I ran through all the possible combinations there, I'd end up getting 4,687,500 different images of the same bloom to compare to one another (4,687,500 = 6 * 10 * 5⁷), which seemed a little too thorough, even for me.
³ The orange bloom, 101A Julius Erving, was closest to reality on cloudy + positive film; the NOID yellow looked best with cloudy + custom. The differences aren't huge, though, so I think I can probably get away with any combination of (sunny, cloudy, "this is white") x (off, vivid, positive film, vivid red), for subjects in the magenta-pink-red-orange neighborhood. Which is like 90% of the Anthuriums and Schlumbergeras.

Still ugh.

Looks like we're headed for either Plan B or plan G, as the person who offered to send an unused but functional camera (Plan D) has not responded to e-mail asking if the offer was still open. As it was a generous offer when first made, and I felt a little uncomfortable about considering it then, I feel like it would be bad of me to pester them with more inquiries, so I'm just going to let that option die, scratch my head about what happened, and hope that the person in question is okay.

Amazon is still claiming that my order (for the Olympus which would exactly replace the camera that just died; this was Plan C) is being processed, and I should expect it to be delivered by October 12. I don't care about the order still being open in and of itself: clearly there is no camera, and my credit card hasn't been charged and it feels safe to assume that it won't be. However, I'm really pissed about the order still being open, because while it's open, I can't rate the seller. And I really, really want to rate the seller.

Saturday is the last day I could return the Canon to Target. In theory, I could still work my way through the other four to six models of camera in my price range that Target sells, using each one for two or three weeks and then returning it until I luck on a camera I like, but if I'm honest with myself about it, I don't actually believe that I'm likely to find a camera I like better than the current Canon, even if I don't actually like the current Canon. And the idea of dragging this out for another three months because maybe one of the unexplored options is exactly what I'm looking for, is just . . . I can't. I don't have the energy to keep caring about this. Caring about things is exhausting. The amount of time and energy the stupid camera replacement has taken from me already is ridiculous; why through good energy after bad?

So Plan G (end blog, become Amish, die in threshing accident) is looking better and better all the time.

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UPDATE 10/22/17: A reader e-mail made me realize that I've been keeping you in suspense, which I didn't mean to.

Elected to keep the Canon. Didn't really expect another camera to be any better, didn't have the emotional energy to keep trying and returning them anyway, and didn't have the physical energy to return one even if I'd decided to. It's been a rough month.

I've also realized, kinda, that the timing (camera dies right as we're headed into Schlumbergera season again: camera died on September 19, first Schlumbergera bloom was 069A Sweetie Darling, on September 25) made this all much harder to deal with than it would have been if the camera had died in, say, June. If there's any time a person needs a camera with accurate color reproduction, it's at the beginning of Schlumbergera season.

The newer photos have been better than the earlier ones, partly because I found the color-balance settings menu (none of those options seem to work by themselves, but some may give more easily-edited images than the default automatic white balance) and partly because I figured out that the camera has been trying to tell me that images aren't in focus all along, it's just that it did so with a rectangle in a different shade of green than the green rectangle that means the photo is in focus. (The Olympus used orange-red and green for the same messages.)

So. Not going to begin my farrier training right away, I guess, though I'm not ruling it out, either.

Blog posting will likely resume soonish, though I do need a little time yet to get my feet under me again. There have been sixteen (!) new Anthurium blooms and one new (?) Schlumbergera just since the camera died, so I have a lot of catching up to do. You'll never guess what color the Schlumbergera is.



Kidding. Of course it's orange.

Ugh.

Still no acceptable camera replacement. It turns out that if an Amazon third-party seller doesn't feel like responding to any of your messages, and doesn't provide Amazon with tracking information for their package, there's not really any way to find out if they actually have the product they're offering, or whether it's been shipped, or whether it might be shipped in the future. And you can't exactly cancel an order either, because both parties apparently have to agree to cancel. If your seller just declines to respond to all communication on all topics, it seems they can hold an order open indefinitely.

(Amazon claims to have spoken to them on my behalf, but I'm basically positive that Amazon just sent the seller a message which will be ignored, as all the messages I've sent them have been ignored. And although I've been assured that the whole thing will be over by next Monday, there have already been multiple points in this story where Amazon's solution was to message the seller and wait two business days for a response, and then no response happened so there was no resolution.)

I've had good third-party Amazon transactions before (mostly books), but it's going to be a very, very long time before I ever try this again.

In the meantime, I don't know what to do. I have made a little progress on the Canon color balance problem, but it's still right on the edge of what I can realistically afford, and it isn't producing photos of the desired accuracy even with the progress, so I'm inclined to want to return it. And by the time you read this, the deadline to return the Canon will only be 7 or 8 days away. So now we're on Plan D. I also have Plans E, F, and G, but none of us will like Plans F or G.¹

PROTIP: It would probably have saved me a lot of grief if I'd looked more closely at the seller's profile, and/or tried to contact them before placing my order. Though they had a high satisfaction rating (94% overall, out of 165 ratings) compared to the other sellers offering the same camera, and a lot of the reviews specifically praised the speed with which items shipped (part of the reason why I chose them in the first place, and paid extra for "expedited shipping on top of that), 164 of those 165 ratings happened in or before October 2015:

Which makes me think I was dealing with a zombie account: still technically active on Amazon, but no longer actually filling orders, checking e-mails, etc.

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¹ Plan A: the cheap but terrible Sony.
Plan B: expensive Canon with bad color reproduction.
Plan C: third-party Amazon seller to exactly replace the Olympus that just died.
Plan D: used Fuji, offered by a blog reader some time ago but postponed in hopes that the Olympus was going to work out.
Plan E: cheaper Canon from a local, non-chain business which was, itself, more money than I had intended to spend, and that I disliked the first time I saw it, but which is probably better than the terrible Sony, definitely cheaper than the expensive Canon, and much more likely to exist than the duplicate Olympus.
Plan F: abandon photography entirely; continue blog by describing blooms in exhaustive detail; lose mind during Schlumbergera season due to insufficient English synonyms for "orange."
Plan G: end blog, never photograph anything ever again, renounce all technology, locate nearby gay-friendly Amish colony, die in grisly and horrifying threshing accident.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Norman's Jade

By now, the reader will have noticed that PATSP has been nothing but orchids for the last six weeks or so, and I feel like I should explain. The plants, led by the Anthurium seedlings, chose November to try to break my heart. It's not yet clear whether they succeeded in breaking it, exactly, but it's at least pretty damaged. And this is on top of the episodic panic attacks and what have you; the plants waited until I was weak to strike. As they do.

November was shitty.

How did they try to break your heart, you may be asking. Well, on top of the scale that I've been trying to get rid of for the last five years or so, which I periodically get really close to eliminating via imidacloprid and then discover that nope, it's still here, and on top of the thrips, which have been uglifying the Anthurium flowers and leaves for nearly as long, and for which the only remotely effective cure is "white oil," which not only makes the whole house smell like rancid vegetable oil for weeks afterward but also causes all the Anthuriums to drop any flowers or buds they might have, and doesn't even eliminate the thrips, I've added two new ongoing and ineradicable¹ plagues to the Anthurium seedlings.

The Xanthomonas infection has been spreading through the Anthuriums for most of this year (also likely before this year -- I suspect it came in on the NOID pink/green Anthurium -- but bacteria that spread via water droplets really go nuts when you start spraying all the foliage with water every time you water, in an attempt to blast off the thrips, which didn't even work), and is now uglifying some of the seedlings which had remained more or less pristine through the thrips and scale. There's also, as far as I can tell, nothing I can actually do about it, save for throwing out all the affected seedlings. I'm aware of a treatment that places beneficial, or at least non-harmful, bacteria on the leaves, making it harder for Xanthomonas to establish itself, but as far as I can tell, that's only a preventative measure, and doesn't do anything to cure plants once they've been infected. If there's a way to cure infected plants, I haven't run across it yet, and if I did run across it, odds are good that I wouldn't be able to afford it. So it's possible that the only option I've got is to throw out all the affected plants and hope to outrun the Xanthomonas, which I'd be more optimistic about if that had worked for me with any plant pest or disease ever.

And then in just the last couple months, the mysterious unidentified mites from this post in 2014 have made their way to the Anthuriums downstairs. (They'd been on the upstairs ones, intermittently, for longer, but I hadn't made the connection between the mites and the leaf damage until the last few weeks: I'd been assuming thrips. The ghost mites² prefer to feed on larger leaf veins, and appear in such numbers that affected leaves wind up looking like they've been hit by especially anal-retentive thrips: dead brown streaks that follow all the large veins, with relatively little damage in the spaces between them. The ghost mites also seem to be perfectly happy hitting older leaves, as opposed to the thrips, which prefer new growth, so really there was no reason to ever think that this was thrips damage, but perhaps I can be forgiven for not being willing to believe that I had another plant pest in the house, given the circumstances.

And it hasn't just been the Anthuriums, of course. Had a scary bunch of defoliation happen on the Neofinetia falcata out of nowhere, which briefly had me convinced that it was in the process of dying. (It has since stabilized, or at least wants me to think it has. No doubt waiting until I'm weak again.) A number of Dracaenas have broken out in spots that remind me of pictures I've seen somewhere. I can't remember if the pictures were of a bacterial leaf spot disease or a fungal leaf spot disease, as if the distinction matters. A very tall Pilosocereus pachycladus fell into my shoulder during watering, which hurt (spines in the shoulder! Lots of them!) and then hurt (the part of the cactus that hit me the hardest hollowed out and turned blue, purple, and finally black -- it's not clear whether the damage is continuing to spread).

I had decided in the spring of 2016 that I was done with the Euphorbia grandicornis. It was a salvaged cutting from a much larger plant that had never done very well for me, due to inadequate light, but I couldn't quite bear to just throw it out, so instead I planted it in one of the Canna beds, figuring that it could live (for a while) if it wanted to, and we'd see how that went. Naturally it loved it outside, even after the Cannas grew over it and I forgot that it was even there. Saw it in the fall and was like, holy crap, that's pretty impressive, maybe it deserves a chance to live in the house after all.

So I pulled it up and brought it inside,

You can probably figure out which is this year's new growth, yes?
and gave it its own pot of fresh soil. Whereupon it immediately shriveled, blackened, and died, proving once and for all that the Euphorbiaceae is the least appreciative plant family. A Gasteria seedling (the last one in this post, the light green one with thin leaves) died on me without warning or explanation. Lost another Polyscias seedling (#10), and now #8 isn't looking so hot.

Even the Schlumbergera seedlings are letting me down a little bit this year. As predicted, I've finally seen some colors outside of the red / orange-red / red-orange / orange / light orange spectrum, which should be good. But A) not nearly as many as I had expected, and B) the non-red/non-orange seedlings have been very similar to plants I already had: the NOID white seedlings have been either white/white or magenta/white, and the NOID magenta seedlings have been magenta/white, white/white, or in the red-to-orange spectrum. The three second-generation seedlings (all from 025A Clownfish) have been orange/white (239A), orange/pink (240A), and red/pink (244A). So I'm not breaking any new ground at all, color-wise.³ Plus, the most recent first blooms have been all chewed-up,

(Seedling 069A, first bloom)
because the thrips have finally eaten enough Schlumbergera petals from the early-blooming seedlings that they've multiplied and prospered. Now the thrips can start attacking the late-blooming buds, meaning the late blooms look like shit as soon as they open.

And this isn't even all; there's one plant-related thing from November/December that is literally still too painful for me to tell you about,⁴ there's the usual steady stream of Anthurium-seedlings hitting the walls and exploding⁵ (28 seedlings since mid-November), there are the mostly-disappointing new Anthurium blooms,⁶ there's the first scale sighting on a Clivia since I've had Clivias. And, mostly, there's the increasingly firm conviction that nothing I do is going to make any of these things go away. There are too many plants, too many hiding places -- the only way forward is to dump a bunch of them, cure the remaining ones, and then build back up again. Or maybe the smart thing would be not to build back up again.

So the reason I haven't been blogging about the plant collection is that the plant collection is horrible, and hurts just to think about, and I've been on the verge of throwing out like 95% of the Anthuriums for something like the last six weeks but haven't been able to bring myself to do it. Throwing them all out is clearly an overreaction, throwing none of them out is obviously an underreaction, throwing some of them out requires hard choices about who lives and who dies and why, plus if I keep a seedling I should have thrown out then I don't even get rid of the problem. So I've been continuing to water and despair, postponing the decision, while everything gets worse. I'm no longer starting new Anthurium seeds already, as of 23 October: the berries just wither and die on the spadices now. This wasn't originally a conscious decision, but once I realized I was doing it, I decided it was just as well, so it's a conscious decision now. Not sure whether I'm going to bother potting up all the seedlings that have already germinated: I'm postponing that decision too.

I'm toying with the idea of going on indefinite hiatus from the blog as of late March, when the last of the 2016 orchid photos is scheduled.⁷ This is more likely to happen than not, I think, because the plants have been steadily less and less fun over the last five years and there are things I would rather do with my time,⁸ but I do still want to get the Schlumbergeras named -- hardly urgent, but I've come up with some names I like and want to use them -- and although I'm not sure you need to see all ten, at least half of the Anthurium blooms since the last Anthurium seedling post are interesting in one way or another. So there will probably be some non-orchid posts coming eventually. We'll see how I feel about plants in March. (If you hear me humming "Freedom 90" a lot in February,⁹ brace yourself.¹⁰)

Almost doesn't seem worth bothering with the orchid, but I promised a Phalaenopsis in the title, so here you go.

*deep breath*

"Jade" seems like an exaggeration. I mean, yeah, yellow jade is a thing, as an image search will confirm for you, but it's not the color people think of when they hear "jade." I have a note here that the bloom closest to the tip of the spike was darker yellow than the others, but I can't remember whether that means it was the youngest bloom or the oldest bloom. Which direction do Phalaenopsis buds open, again?

I also noted that I got really tired of light yellow, when I was going through the photos from this year's show. Didn't notice it as a theme when I was taking the photos, though.

I found photos of a couple named clones of Norman's Jade ('Green Angel' and 'Montclair Canary'), the first of which seemed sort of green, but alas, both were on a site that sells orchids, and the pages have been taken down since I found them, presumably because they're no longer selling those particular clones.

I suppose in the abstract, this is a nice color,¹¹ but it doesn't do much for me as a Phalaenopsis.

Phalaenopsis Norman's Jade = Phalaenopsis Prospector's Dream x Phalaenopsis Norman's Mist (Ref.)

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¹ (?)
² (My own term; I still don't know what they are. I'm positive they're not cyclamen mites or spider mites, though. Or at least not the normal species of cyclamen/spider mites: they're not rounded and shiny enough to be cyclamen mites, and they're the wrong color, and not mobile enough, to be spider mites. They also don't produce webbing like spider mites. Therefore: ghost mites. Until I come up with an ID.)
³ It is beginning to seem plausible that the cross that started this whole thing, the 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach, was the only cross I could have made that would have resulted in anything new or interesting, and it's just dumb luck that it happened to be the cross I started with.
⁴ Q: well Jesus, Mr. S., if you're not going to tell us what it is then why even bring it up?
A: I don't know. I'm sorry.
⁵ Dramatization (you have to imagine that the cars are seedlings):
⁶ As well as two that weren't disappointing at all. Or, well, one that wasn't disappointing at all -- 0802 Dana International, my first dark(ish) purple -- and one that looks likely to be my first green seedling, provided that the bud doesn't drop (1268 Lil' Miss Hot Mess). It'll be a while before 1268 is officially not disappointing.
⁷ Why not immediately? Well, I made notes on the orchid posts when I uploaded the pictures, so I don't have to work as hard to come up with something to say about them. Schlumbergera- or Anthurium-seedling posts require more work. Posts about other plants are even more work than that.
⁸ Like what? I dunno. Maybe I'll dye my hair. Maybe we'll move somewhere. Etc.
More seriously, I'm working out a lot. Like, a lot. It helps with the panic.
⁹ (♫ Take back your pictured pollen grains / Take back your yellowed, dead dumb canes / I just hope you understand / Sometimes the plants do not make the man ♩♪)
¹⁰ Also, RIP George Michael. :^(
¹¹ I mean, if you get abstract enough, any color is as nice as any other. They're just varying proportions of photons, of different energies, hitting your retina and being interpreted as color by your brain. Seems silly to say this combination of photons is beautiful but that combination of photons is disgusting. But we say that. All the time.

Unfinished business: Clivia seedlings

The picture is six months out of date, and I've up-potted these since it was taken. The basic information -- that the self-pollinated Clivia 'Aztec Gold' seedlings are still alive -- remains true, though.

The seeds were sown in August 2013, and there was an update on them in April 2014.

My other Clivias -- the parent 'Aztec Gold' and a plain-orange offset from WCW in October 2007 -- are still around. The latter is fighting a scale infestation at the moment, which is upsetting,¹ but 'Aztec Gold' has continued to offset well since it started in January 2014, and the offsets are now large enough to consider potting up separately. Though I'm probably not going to, because it turns out that I like the fuller look one gets with multiple plants in the same pot.

The seedlings will probably not bloom light yellow like their parent did; I assume it's a hybrid. Not really concerned with it either way: I've had Clivias since 2007, and have only seen one bloom in that time. I mean, I'd eventually like to know what the blooms look like, but I'm not necessarily expecting to find out.


P. S.: In the course of trying to locate patent information for Clivia 'Aztec Gold,' I ran across a blog that consisted solely of two blog posts of mine, which had been copied almost completely -- photos, title, captions, and text -- though for some reason not the tags. The internet is infuriating, and full of terrible people.

I've submitted a takedown request to Google,² and I imagine it will be granted, but so much stuff of mine has been duplicated in one place or another (as I discover when I search for information about one of my plants) that it would take me a lifetime just to fill out the requests for getting it all taken down. This is not a good system for preventing content theft, and I am angry.

I'll let you know what happens. (It has probably already happened, by the time you read this: I'm writing on 20 August.)

UPDATE (22 Aug.): Google had taken the posts down by August 22nd. The blog still exists, which is mildly irritating to me, but at least it no longer has any posts.

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¹ This is the first time I've had a pest problem with Clivia, I think. I knew they could get scale and mealybugs, but since it hadn't happened before, I sort of thought that maybe my personal pet scale wasn't compatible with Clivias. So it's been disappointing to learn otherwise.
I removed a couple leaves and dosed it with imidacloprid. Ordinarily, throwing it out would have made more sense, but it's not like Clivias are widely available around here, and besides, this particular one has some sentimental value. So we'll see how far the imidacloprid gets me.
² Which is one reason why I'm not linking to the posts in question -- the links would soon be dead, assuming Google does the right thing and deletes the blog. And I have every reason to think they will. The other reason is that if Google doesn't delete the blog, then I'm loath to give the thief any credibility with search engines by linking to them.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 005

The plants will just not give me a break. The latest "fuck you" from the plants came from my Schlumbergera 'Caribbean Dancer,' seed parent to all of the Schlumbergera seedlings that have bloomed so far. I've had the plant since December 2008, and the photos I have of it vary wildly in quality, but I'm sure you'll get the idea anyway.

Top to bottom: November 2009, May 2010, November 2013, November 2015.
and now May 2016:

And I don't expect that the existing branch is going to remain for very long.

The decline was quick: it takes eight and a half years to grow a plant out that big, but they only need a week to disintegrate. I don't know what I did. It's been in the same location, receiving the same light, in the same pot, getting watered in exactly the same way and at the same times, for at least the last four or five years.

People occasionally say to me things like, oh, it must be wonderful to have so many plants, to be surrounded by all that LIFE and GROWTH and BEAUTY all the time. It's never actually felt that way to me, but people say it. Lately, though, it actually has been feeling like I'm surrounded by death, disease, and ugliness all the time, and it's right there in my house so I can't even get away from it. Just in the last three months:

I had a gigantic and lovely variegated Beaucarnea recurvata, which spent last summer outside and grew rampantly. It was amazing. Then I brought it in for the winter and it spent several months continuously defoliating, because (I eventually learned) its roots had all rotted out, probably because I'd up-potted it before moving it outside, and so it got thrown out in mid-January.

Before the 'Caribbean Dancer,' the salmon-peach NOID (likely pollen parent for all/most of the seedlings) suddenly shriveled and turned red. Nothing dropped off: it just kept getting more and more slumped and shriveled, and then the fruits started drying up and falling off. Threw it out at the end of April, when it finally became clear to me that the reason I hadn't seen any new growth was because the plant was in fact genuinely dead.

My surviving Eriobotrya japonica has always had a problem with spider mites to some degree or another, but they'd stayed more or less manageable, enough that I figured it was worth holding on to and just spraying with soapy water from time to time or whatever. And then at about the same time it had finally gotten large enough to start branching, the mite population exploded and I was like, do I really want to be fighting spider mites for the rest of my life? So it was gone in late January.

The Yucca guatemalensis in the plant room, multiple pots of a yellow-margined version I've had since 2001, had gotten scale in 2013 or 2014, I can't even remember which, and after trying to get rid of the scale with rubbing alcohol and various other things, I finally just cut the heads clear off and made them start over. Which worked! Kind of! As of last fall, they'd resprouted and grown enough new leaves to reach the point of kind of looking like plants again, and, well, you know how this story has to end so I'm not even going to bother finishing the sentence. (February or March, I can't remember)

An Aloe variegata from May 2008, and a Sansevieria hargesiana from May 2010, both given to me by friends from my days back at Garden Web, had both quietly been letting their roots rot away below the soil without saying anything. I'm trying to reroot both of them, on the grounds that even though I don't feel like it now, I may someday be happy that I did it anyway, but it feels pointless and I'm not necessarily going to stick with it long enough to recover the plants. (late March / early April)

Both specimens of my Columnea orientandina are falling apart all of a sudden; one is probably too dry, but the other one I have no idea what its problem is.

Every remaining division I had from an Agave victoriae-reginae I bought in April 2010 turned out to have scale and had to be thrown away. (mid- to late March)

The Murraya paniculata seedling (previously) has thrips, which makes a 1) new species with a problem, 2) new genus with a problem, and 3) new area of the house confirmed to have thrips. (late April?)

And those are just the high points. (Low points? Main points.)

I've talked before about the Texas Effect and how it's not necessarily a huge deal for things to be going badly with the plant collection, since any plant collection this size is going to have good things and bad things happening at the same time and mostly they cancel out. Well, they're not cancelling out anymore. The 'Caribbean Dancer' collapse is the last straw. I haven't figured out what "last straw" means, precisely, but . . . something. There will be changes.

Anyway. So there's also a Schlumbergera seedling to name today.

Obviously I don't feel like putting a ton of effort into the naming process at the moment. My first thought was Last Straw, but I had left a note for myself earlier that the previously-considered Circus Peanut would work well for this one, it being a lighter orange than most. So I'll say Circus Peanut. But my heart isn't in it.

Anthurium News: The Bad News

Most of the Anthurium news in the last month or so has been disappointing. Nothing catastrophic or particularly depressing, just a lot of hope-raising, followed by disappointment.

#040 "Ivy Winters," 14 August 2014.
#040 "Ivy Winters" has now produced and aborted two separate buds (March, then August). The second one got closer to maturity than the first, which may count as progress, I suppose. It's just that I'm especially interested in seeing how it turns out -- the color on the buds has been starting out pink and then slowly turning more to coral; I'd like to see how orange it will get before opening. And, you know, after opening.

#088 "Charlotte F. Babylon," 17 June 2014.
#088 "Charlotte F. Babylon" has now tried to bloom three times (March, May, July), then thought better of it. Maybe it's broken. I don't anticipate anything dramatic and different when it does bloom -- to all appearances, it's going to be some shade of red, and it's not as if I don't have plenty of reds. But even so. I don't think any other seedling's done this three times. Maybe it's mad about the name it drew. In which case I suppose I understand.

#281 "Laganja Estranja," 17 June 2014.
#281 "Laganja Estranja" tried once, from April to June, and then aborted. (Looked like a pink.)

#124 "Fox Saik," 17 June 2014.
#124 "Fox Saik" started a bud in May, and aborted in June. Also a pink, as far as it got, though it might have been another pink-to-orange, since 'Orange Hot' was the seed parent. Fox appears to be having a number of problems -- for a while, it was building weirdly distorted leaves like this:

Though it seems to be growing out of that. The most recent leaf was normal, anyway.

#248 "Sue Casa," 24 June 2014.
In June, #248 "Sue Casa" contemplated a bud, which was potentially interesting: it started out as pink, but was sort of lavender-pink by the end. Alas, it had decided not to bother by the end of the month.

#265 "Madame LaQueer," 26 June 2014.
#265 "Madame LaQueer" worked on a bud for almost two full months (early June to late July) before dropping it. The bud looked like it was going to be red, so no big loss, but it put a lot of work into it: it was really close to opening, and I'm a little disturbed by it giving up so late.

#236 "Roxanne Debree," 14 August 2014.
#236 "Roxanne Debree" spent about three weeks on a red bud (July to August), then dropped it.

It also looks like I'm about to have the first casualties from the 4" plants. I've been starting the seeds on vermiculite in a plastic clamshell container, then potting up the stronger seeds that germinated in 3" pots, then moving the better-looking seedlings into 4" pots after about a year. Because the ones that made it to 4" pots had already had to be doing well on two separate occasions in order to get there, they've been pretty healthy, but now I'm running into problems where flats aren't drying out evenly, and some plants are staying wet longer than others.

I should probably be checking them for dryness individually, rather than watering whole flats at a time, but that would add additional time and hassle to a process which is already pretty long and involved, so the result is that some of the plants have roots rotting out, because they're too wet, which leads to more rotting, which leads to more wetness, until I have plants with basically no roots at all. Most of the seedlings have seemed unbothered by the oil, but it's possible that that added some stress on top of the root rot.

Making this worse is that so far, all three plants this is happening to are plants that have either already bloomed for me, or are in the process of making a first bloom: #247 "Selma Carr," #238 "Rudy Day," and #095 "Clarice Fullhartz." None of the three are actually gone yet, but they don't look good, and I don't have a lot of hope. Insult to injury, #247 "Selma Carr" had even been pollinated, so not only do I lose the plant, I lose all the seeds she had been working on.

The only bright side of all this, I suppose, is that I can't breed for stronger, healthier plants if I don't throw out some weaker, sickly plants along the way. And #247's bloom was, as you'll remember, a little defective-looking to begin with.

This is probably the last picture of #247 "Selma Carr" we're going to see; it's from 14 August 2014.
#238 seemed pretty healthy and was a very early bloomer, but the flowers were small, and it was just another in a long line of red spathe / yellow spadix blooms. So perhaps nothing of any real value has been lost.

Also disappointing: no seedlings have completed a first bloom since the last update a month ago. Two seedlings have started their first buds, though: #279 "Tristan Shout" and #171 "Genevieve la Difference." Neither is looking terribly exciting so far, and obviously there's a good chance that they'll abort before the buds get anywhere anyway, but it's something. First blooms are also in progress on #237 "Roxy Casbah" and #095 "Clarice Fullhartz," should Clarice get her roots back under herself and decide to complete the bloom.

Happier Anthurium news will be posted shortly.

Unfinished business: Strelitzia juncea and Araucaria bidwillii, plus Something Personal-ish

Last September, I got 18 seeds from seedman.com: 5 Strelitzia juncea, 10 Calathea lutea, and 3 Araucaria bidwillii. Including shipping, I paid $16.80.

I knew going in that all three plants are slow and irregular germinators, but even taking that into account, I've been really disappointed. Two Strelitzia seeds came up in October and November, and those look like they're going to be reasonably healthy plants, knock wood. I also have an Araucaria seedling as of January, which appears to have survived being transplanted (did that on 10 April), and is producing new growth as you read this. But I had been expecting a lot more plants than three, and more species than two. If I want to pay $5 for a plant, there are plenty of garden centers around that would accommodate me.

The Strelitzia seedlings as of yesterday.
Also shown: Polyscias fruticosa 'Elegans' (upper right), Euphorbia leuconeura seedling (right center), unidentified Episcia (lower right).
I've purchased several other kinds of seeds from seedman.com,¹ and in most of those cases, I think it was my fault I didn't get any plants. Usually the problem was moisture, either too much or too little (or both). But I feel like I was doing everything right with these seeds, and I'm not getting any better results. So I'm pretty frustrated.

The Araucaria seedling, post-transplant. I was worried for a little bit, but the top third of the stem is all new since the transplant, so it's clearly fine. (Left: Tradescantia pallida; right: Ceropegia woodii.)
I gave up on the Calatheas, and the ungerminated Strelitzias, on Tuesday (20 May); the remaining Araucaria seeds are probably not going to do anything either, but they're in one of the pretzel containers and consequently require no maintenance, so they get a little while longer to try.² This is also probably the last time I buy anything from seedman.com. The service was prompt, as far as I know they sent me the things I asked for, and the prices aren't outrageous, but there's little point in buying the seeds if doing so doesn't eventually result in new plants.

In other news, on Tuesday morning I woke up with what was likely the worst pain I have ever experienced, just to the left of my spine, on my upper back. Well, upper back, shoulder, and neck. That whole area. It turns out that not only is it possible to whimper involuntarily, it's possible to whimper involuntarily without even being fully aware that you're doing it. The pain became, eventually, manageable with ibuprofen. Wednesday was less awful but still pretty bad.

I was worried enough about it to see a doctor late on Wednesday. The best-case scenario I was envisioning was that she'd tell me to just eat lots of ice cream and read my new book about Anthurium breeding,³ and that that would make the pain go away completely, and it would never come back again.

And, well, not quite. The diagnosis was that it was just a pulled trapezius, albeit maybe an especially painfully pulled trapezius. Which I suppose I'm glad that it's nothing serious (The worst case scenario was a slipped/ruptured/herniated disc, which seemed plausible when I was googling on Tuesday night.), and that it will heal. On the other hand, though, if this wasn't something particularly serious, that means that it could happen again. I could wake up shrieking in pain basically any day from now until I die, and there's apparently nothing to be done about it. So, going to sleep at night has just become that much more fraught.

Though I suppose in theory, anybody could wake up in staggering amounts of pain at any time, from one thing or another. The possibility was always there; it just wasn't real to me until this week.

In any case. I did at least get a prescription out of it, because my doctor has a sense of humor. (And because I asked.)

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¹ Pandanus utilis, Cissus rhombifolia, Cordyline fruticosa, Haworthia pumila, Ficus religiosa, Trichocereus peruvianus (possibly Echinopsis?), an Aloe assortment, Carludovica palmata, and a Schefflera of unremembered species (probably S. actinophylla).
² The seeds were still, in theory, capable of germinating, but the more time went by, the less optimistic I was that anything would happen. Also, the more time passed without any sprouts, the more cool things the Anthurium seedlings did, and the less exciting the prospect of having a Calathea lutea seemed when I could up-pot Anthuriums and watch them do cool things.
³ Oh! I have a new book about Anthurium breeding! (Breeding Anthuriums in Hawaii, Haruyuki Kamemoto and Adelheid R. Kuehnle, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1996, $7.81 used on Amazon and that included shipping) And if you think there are not eventually going to be blog posts about the things I am learning from the book, you are hilariously mistaken.

Random plant event: NOID NOID

The scale infestation continues. It is in fact looking like what people say is true: once you have scale, you always have scale. It's never very many insects, they're never on very many plants, I can occasionally even remove an infestation from an area entirely by repeated spraying with rubbing alcohol.¹ But it always seems to move somewhere else, and always seems to return to the plants I removed it from. Between the scale and the sunburn and rot caused by putting plants outside before they were ready, I'm on the verge of throwing out all my Agaves, Furcraeas, Manfredas, and Mangaves and being rid of those genera forever, the same way I abandoned Hedera and Codiaeum to the spider mites years ago. I mean, look what happened to my Agave lophantha 'Quadricolor' after two days outside:

September 2013:

April 2014:

I did salvage an unrotted offset from it, and I had a previous offset (taken over a year ago, when I'd thought the scale might lead me to throw the plant out), but that's small consolation for losing a specimen as large and pretty as it was. Especially since the offsets will likely die or get thrown out before reaching that size themselves.

But we're not here to mourn the Agave; we're here to marvel at the recuperative powers of my NOID fern.²

I discovered scale on several of the fronds around the beginning of March, maybe the end of February. I started cutting off any fronds that had obvious scale, and any fronds that were close enough to have had honeydew dripped on them. As I progressed, I realized that 1) this would result in me cutting off most of the fronds, and 2) any fronds that I left would probably have enough undetectable scale on them to launch a new round of infestation, so I'd have hacked my fern to bits but accomplished nothing. So, I cut all the fronds off down to the rhizomes. Maybe the plant would come back, maybe it wouldn't, but at least the scale would be gone.³

I'm not certain about the date, but my best guess is that I cut the fronds off on 28 February. By 18 March, new ones were coming up all over:

And by yesterday morning (26 April), it was back to what it had looked like before, pretty much:

That's an incredibly fast comeback.

I don't know yet whether this had the intended effect of getting rid of all the scale. I haven't seen any yet, but then I've also been too busy and too scared to look for it. I'm impressed with the plant's recovery either way, though.

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¹ If you want to recommend that I try pesticides, especially imidacloprid: been there. Done that. More than once. It costs too much for something that works as slowly and incompletely as it does.
² It was a hitch-hiker in a Rhipsalis I bought years ago. Took it out, nursed it along, and it is now much, much larger than the Rhipsalis ever dreamed of getting. Because the fern wasn't supposed to be in the pot, though, there was no ID for it. My best guess is that it's a Phlebodium of some kind, possibly P. aureum. When I expressed this opinion in a previous post, someone popped up to tell me that it was cleeeeearly a Hawaiian wart fern (Microsorum scolopendria or Phymatosorus grossus) and not a Phlebodium at all. Based on the lack of scent (M. scolopendria fronds are supposed to smell like vanilla.) and the less-orderly arrangement of its spores, I'm pretty certain it's not that particular Microsorum (or Phymatosorus). Though I don't rule out that it could be a Microsorum (or Phymatosorus).
³ In theory. I was assuming that the scale wouldn't be able to survive on the hairy rhizomes long enough for the plant to grow new fronds. This may or may not be a good assumption.