Announcements

One: the article I mentioned writing last year for the Old Farmer's Almanac Garden Guide is out; print copies have been available on their website for a few months. I've also heard of print copies being available in actual stores, though I have yet to witness this in the wild.

Two: you've probably figured this out already, but I think I'm done writing the blog. Or at least I'm going to stop feeling bad about not writing posts, which probably amounts to the same thing in the long run. (It leaves the door open in case I later decide that there's something I just have to share with the world.)

There are multiple reasons for this, but the two biggest are 1) plant-writing burnout and 2) discovering that I am substantially happier when I spend less time on the internet.¹ Despite 1), I am still going to have and grow way too many plants; despite 2), I am still going to approve comments² and respond to e-mails and update photos and names in the seedling galleries (because sometimes I have found the galleries convenient for my own purposes). Blog-adjacent stuff will all probably happen much more slowly than it used to, though, and some of you know that I'm already wildly inconsistent when it comes to e-mail. If I manage to name the Schlumbergera seedlings from the 2018-19 season, I will probably post to let you know what those are, though I don't promise to explain the names.

It's also possible that a few older posts may be edited or deleted from time to time, as I'm increasingly uncomfortable with having so much personal stuff on here. (I know nothing ever goes away completely on the internet, but it seems like there'd be no down side to making some things more difficult to find.) Changes to the archives, if any, will likely be so minimal that you won't notice them,³ and to be honest, combing through it all and editing stuff feels like it would be a lot of work, so I'm not sure this is likely.

I wish I had other houseplant blogs to point you to, but I don't. I don't encounter very many to begin with; I can only remember seeing three actively-updated ones in the last two or three years. Of those, one is primarily interested in showing you Instagram-worthy photos of plants, without much actual information. The other two offered information, but it was the same information you could get by doing a search on-line: they weren't bringing personal experience or "here's what the books don't tell you:" or trivia about the plants. I mean, goodness knows it didn't always work, but I did try to throw in something that wasn't just "water when dry; bright indirect light; propagate by cuttings; watch for scale, mealybugs, and spider mites."

Though I suppose sometimes you just want to know when to water your Aloe, and digressions about artificial insemination of sheep and rants about the herbal supplement industry only get in the way.

If readers want to suggest some other houseplant blogs for other readers to look at, please, leave a link in the comments. I promise not to say if your blog is one of the ones I refused to endorse above.⁴ Though I also don't promise to publish your comment: see footnote 2.

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¹ This piece (probably NSFW) by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books, which I strongly encourage you to read even if the internet seems fine to you, is the best description I have yet found of the way being on the internet has become unpleasant to me personally. (It won't necessarily help you understand what I mean; I just don't have anything better to point you to.)
² (Though some of you will have noticed that I am getting a lot pickier about which blog comments I approve, in ways which probably feel arbitrary and ridiculous to you but make sense to me. Though they are actually probably just arbitrary and ridiculous. But perhaps adding an element of gambling to blog commenting will make it more exciting?)
³ (assuming you ever look at the archives anyway, which I doubt)
⁴ Oh, and -- if you have a houseplant blog and you know that I've looked at it in the last two or three years, you shouldn't feel offended that I've declined to endorse it. Choose whichever option makes you feel better:
A. Mr. Subjunctive looked at my blog and then forgot about it; he's declining to endorse other blogs, not mine. Probably blocked it from his mind because he was jealous of my brilliance.
B. I don't give a fuck about whether my blog meets Mr. Subjunctive's criteria for being a good houseplant blog, because it's mine, and the only person who has to be happy with it is me. Which I am.

Explanation

Intended to be posting Anthurium photos by now, but I got sick, then my computer monitor died and had to be replaced, then I got sick with something else that was worse than the first thing, then the computer's power supply blew up and the computer was dead and had to be replaced, and so on. So posts are coming, but I'm going to have to get my life back to normal first; it's unclear how long that will take.

Anthurium nos. 0818 "Miss P" and 1541 "Miss Bounce"

Oof. Where to begin?

I'm not saying I'm back yet, because I don't think I'm quite up to that, but it's been almost a month now and I figured I should check in. What happened was: camera died, and then I spent about two months trying to get a suitable replacement, which took enough time and energy that I was constantly feeling like things were never going to get back to normal. And then the non-routine doctor's appointment I alluded to on 6 November was a consultation about an inguinal hernia, which meant that the first half of December was about trying to get things done in advance so that I could spend the second half of December recovering from inguinal hernia surgery.

As far as I understand these things, the surgery went the way it was supposed to. My life is now about 80% back to normal, the main differences being that I still can't work out at all, and I still have more pain than I was expecting to have at this point, though I no longer need to take acetaminophen to cope with it so maybe it's not as much pain as it seems. Walking around is fine, and watering plants works out okay except for the very heaviest plants, in which case the husband does the lifting.

So. Not back to normal posting, which is a shame because now we're up to a truly staggering number of unblogged seedlings¹ and getting further behind every day, but since you're here, and since I'm here, we may as well take a look at a couple plants, right?

0818 Miss P is one of only two surviving seedlings from the NOID pink,² and looks exactly like it. Same bloom color, and very similar foliage -- the NOID pink's leaves were similarly broad and flat, with a texture in between matte and glossy.

The leaves are fairly unbothered by thrips, as well, though the spathes have more trouble. Here's the first bloom the seedling produced:

Something that's not apparent from the photos, because they're pretty old, is that the seedling is a strong offsetter: it's much fuller-looking now than you'd think possible from the whole-plant photo above, even though that photo is only four months old. And there have been at least three, maybe four, full blooms since September as well, though none of them have been what you'd call pretty, because of thrips damage.

Miss P isn't really doing anything all that special; I like the foliage, bloom rate, and the habit (so far), but I don't really need another pink/pink. So probably not a keeper in the long-term, though I have no immediate plans to discard her.

Pretty sure there's an actual queen performing as "Miss P," but I declined to take the time to look her up.

1541 Miss Bounce is roughly equal in quality, but for more or less opposite reasons. Where Miss P has a boring color,³ Miss Bounce is an unusual light orange:

Miss P blooms a lot; Miss Bounce has only produced one bloom so far. Miss P produces leaves which are broader than average, with rounded lobes; Miss Bounce's leaves are narrow, and pointier.

Miss P offsets a lot; Miss Bounce has produced only one sucker, and it's not very big yet.

Miss P is all but indistinguishable from her seed parent, while you couldn't guess Miss Bounce's seed parent from looking at her. (It's the NOID red.⁴)

Miss Bounce has a big family, with 15 siblings from the FK sibling group; only two of her siblings have bloomed, though, and only one bears any family resemblance (1546 Gia GiaVanni; the other one to bloom is the dark red / yellow 1547 Shavonna Brooks).

I'm more interested in keeping Miss Bounce around, for the interesting color if nothing else, though I'd be more certain about keeping her if she would rebloom.

There will be new posts, but I make no promises about when. Probably in less than a month, though.

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¹ (39 Anthuriums and 29 Schlumbergeras, as of Sunday morning)
² The other is 0596 Alisa Summers, who has looked better, but is still with us. Alisa's main trouble is a lack of compactness: the stems have gotten really long, and are constantly threatening to tip the pot over or cause other mayhem.
³ Not that there's anything inherently boring about pink; it's just that pink/pink and red/yellow are the two most common color combinations from the seedlings, so I'm tired of them.
⁴ The foliage is a bit similar to the NOID red, in that it tended to have longer, pointier leaves than most, but the NOID red's leaves were also usually darker and glossier. And the NOID red's inflorescence is nothing like Miss Bounce's: hers is both a different color and much smaller.

Anthurium no. 0446 "Venus Xtravaganza"

If you've seen the documentary Paris is Burning, you're familiar with the real-life Venus Xtravaganza. It's been a long time for me, so I don't remember much in the way of details, but I can at least recall that she seemed sweet. Not innocent, but . . . I don't know. Quiet. Vulnerable. Like someone you'd want to be friends with, maybe. See for yourself (*may not be safe for work*):

It's easy to forget, looking at Paris is Burning from the perspective of 2016, how terrifying it was to be gay back then sometimes.^{1, 2} How lonely. I'm approximately Venus' age, and in 1990 I couldn't have imagined there even being a place I could have gone where people could know I was gay and like me anyway. Where people would look out for me like family. So, when I watch that video, I'm slightly jealous, on the one hand, and on the other, I just ache to protect Venus. So tiny, so fragile, so sweet.

Which means that the ending, where you find out that she died shortly after her part had been filmed, and in a particularly ugly and horrible way,³ it hits you like a truck.

I didn't actually know her. Documentaries are shaped and framed to make people look one way or another way. I might not actually have liked her; she might not have liked me either. Who knows. But her story is tragic all the same, and while acceptance of gays is a lot further along in 2016 than it was in 1988, when Venus died, acceptance of transgendered men and women has barely begun to shift, in the last 10 years or so. And while it's appalling how comfortable Americans are with seeing one another killed, period, it's especially appalling that the justifications are so often explicitly bigoted.

After saying all that, I realize there's some mood whiplash in switching to talking about an Anthurium seedling, and even more whiplash involved when it's not even a particularly good seedling.⁴ But the seedling's the reason we're here, so let's just do the pictures:

Boring color, thrips damage, no reason to keep. A pretty typical seedling from the BF group.

I hope the next Venus Xtravaganza seedling will be more worthy of the name.

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¹ Though Venus was transgendered, not gay, some of the others in the documentary identified as gay. They're very different things, but in 1990, when Paris is Burning was made, not many people bothered to make the distinction.
² One of the startling things about watching Six Feet Under for the first time, in 2014, was recognizing myself in David's whole first-season dilemma about where to be out and where not to, the constant worry about what would happen if someone found out, and so on. Living where and when I do, I don't really worry about being out of the closet, even with people I don't know very well: there just aren't that many dangers anymore. But Six Feet Under started in 2001, and watching those first few episodes brought it all roaring back -- I started a new job in the middle of 2001, and spent a tremendous amount of time trying to decide who I could trust and who I couldn't, worrying about whether it would be a big deal or not, talking to friends in other states on the phone about whether to do it or not. It was intensely preoccupying, not to mention that it distorted my relationships with co-workers and casual acquaintances in ways which were probably not helpful.
³ I won't describe it here, but it's not hard to find out. Pretty much anything you read about her mentions it at some point or another. And violence against transgendered people is still appallingly common, as Wikipedia attests.
⁴ Just a reminder: the names are assigned well before I have any idea what the blooms will look like. Having one's name associated with a good or bad seedling is entirely the luck of the draw, and unless there's some compelling reason to keep a bad seedling around (e.g. unusual spathe color), I recycle the names.
The least lucky name so far is "Dawn Kekong," who's died five times -- 0102, 0315, 0664, 1054, and 1696. The name will come up again somewhere around seedling 2500, if I keep going that long.

Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum lobbii

I responded to some of the comments people left on the previous post, but if you don't feel like checking on them:

The U.S. has not devolved into a Mad Max-style wasteland full of people shooting at one another, as it appeared might be the case following Dallas. So we have that going for us, at least, and I'm genuinely a little surprised. I remain really anxious about next week's Republican National Convention -- it would be difficult to create a more powder-keggy situation on purpose -- but maybe that, too, will pass without the country falling to pieces. Maybe there will even be no bloodshed. We can hope, at least. 2016 really should throw us a break sooner or later.

And as far as taking comfort from nature goes, of course that's a good thing. Election years are always¹ hard on me, but this year has been especially bad. It's much easier for things like Orlando / Philando Castile / Alton Sterling / Dallas to knock me off balance if there's also an election happening. And things get even worse if I start making weird assumptions like "calm" = "unconcerned," as I was kind of doing in that last post. So if looking at pictures of orchids is part of how you manage to stay functional, I apologize for making it more difficult to do that.

At the moment, I would really like to find something to do, but either don't have the resources or the temperament or both for most of the Black-Lives-Matter-related things I can think of, and to be honest I'm probably not in the right frame of mind to be useful at the moment even if presented with something useful to do.²

But we have an orchid, at least. And it's a pretty nice one, even. Bulbophyllum lobbii is apparently another really variable orchid species; the previously-seen B. lobbii specimens haven't looked much like this at all:

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Kathy's Gold' (2013)

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Sonoma Gold' (2015)

I suppose the other possibility is that some of these are misidentified, but on-line image searches show a lot of different-looking plants. I'm assuming it's probably just that variable.³ This year's plant is easily the prettiest of the three. Lucky for us.

In other news, I can now report that all five Amorphophallus are alive and working on leaves (or maybe blooms, but I'm assuming leaves):

It's still ridiculously late for this to be happening, and some of the leaf buds are still so short you can barely see them in the picture, but everybody's accounted for, and at least I don't have to worry that they've rotted. Hopefully they'll have time for photosynthesis before fall arrives.

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¹ (For values of "always" greater than or equal to 1998.)
I paid attention to elections, and cared who won, prior to 1998, but it became personal in '98 because that was the year that all politicians of both parties ran against Ellen DeGeneres, and I was pretty newly out to people myself, and it was really, really tough to hear some of the things people were saying about LGBT Americans.
2004 and 2010 were also unusually difficult -- '04 because that was the year of "maybe we need a Constitutional Amendment to prevent the gays from getting married," and '10 because that was the year when Iowa's elections were partly focused on recalling the judges who had ruled in favor of gay marriage in 2009. So every six years, I guess, is an especially bad election for me, but none of them are ever actually good. And none of the especially bad ones were competitive with 1998 until this year.
² But e-mail or comment anyway, if you hear of something.
³ Like Rhynchostylis gigantea, it has a pretty large natural habitat -- Borneo, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines -- which probably explains a lot of the variation. It's also possible that they look different depending on growing conditions; I believe the 2015 and 2016 specimens were entered in the show by different exhibitors, based on how they were tagged and displayed.

Anthurium no. 0589 "Hetty King"

Just in case you were under the impression that drag kings were a new thing, Hetty King (born Winifred Emms) was performing as a male impersonator before World War I. She even got decently famous at it, along with several other male impersonators from around that time (two of the bigger names being Vesta Tilley and Ella Shields). I mean, male impersonation then didn't mean quite the same thing that drag kings do now, obviously, but it's clearly in the same neighborhood, and I don't get the impression that it was considered particularly shocking and immoral. At least no more shocking and immoral than the music halls they would have been performing in, anyway.

Shamefully, I didn't do as much research into King as I probably should have if I'm going to talk about her.¹ But there's a nice long article/interview with King here, and YouTube has some relevant videos as well.

Hetty King's seedling namesake is, alas, much less interesting. She's yet another in a long line of LPAs,²

and although the foliage is pretty nice,

the only notable thing about her, really, is that she produced a second bud really quickly. Lots of pent-up blooming energy, perhaps: she was 39 months old before making a first bloom.³ The overall plant is fine,

but the spathe flipped backward after opening, and I have plenty of pink/pink Anthuriums already. Hetty's not so terrible that I need to go out of my way to discard her, but she's not so good that I'm going to feel bad when I eventually do.

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¹ What with watering, trying to blog every day, Anthurium-taping, e-mail, trying to sell plants on Craigslist, trying to make sure Sheba takes her Benadryl every morning, getting pictures of the plants and sorting through them, and physical therapy exercises, I've been perpetually exhausted.
Notes and explanations:
• trying to sell plants on Craigslist hasn't actually resulted in any sales yet. It almost never does. Craigslist is the worst. Sadly, it's also the only. So I keep trying.
• Sheba's been chewing holes in her fur, especially the fur on her feet. We think this is probably an allergy (it's happened in other years; also my allergies have been acting up intermittently during the same period), and giving her Benadryl twice a day, and spraying her feet with a lidocaine-based spray, seem to keep it under control better than anything else we've tried, but she doesn't actually like the Benadryl or the spray, so it's a little bit of a hassle to administer them, and they aren't able to stop her from doing it altogether, just enough to keep her from chewing actual wounds into her skin.
• I have been having trouble with my right shoulder, off and on, since the spring, which got bad enough that I saw a doctor about it a month ago. Got a referral to a physical therapist, who I like and who I believe knows what she's talking about, but she gave me exercises and stretches to do twice a day, which was tough to fit into my schedule but I (mostly) kept up with.
Then at the follow-up appointment, it turned out that I had been doing the exercises mostly wrong, partly because I was finding it so difficult to fit them into my day that I was trying to rush through them, taking shortcuts, etc. My shoulder got somewhat better anyway, but an elbow started hurting instead, so the only thing I accomplished was moving the pain from one joint to another.
And then the physical therapist, at the follow-up, assigned me a set of new exercises that take just as long to do as the old exercises did, plus I'm supposed to continue the old exercises. The one time I attempted to do all six things, I was trying to work out before watering plants, so I was in a hurry, and even though the correct way to do the exercises had been clarified for me at the follow-up, I was doing doing them all wrong anyway, and could tell I was doing them all wrong, but got frustrated with myself for not being able to do them right, and the whole situation was miserable. So, as I write this (26 October), I've more or less decided that I prefer the shoulder pain to the exercises, and I've stopped doing them entirely, which is obviously not a mature or productive reaction to the situation and will certainly not make anything better. But so my point is that time I might have spent researching early-20th-century male impersonators has been going toward hurting myself with poorly-performed exercises instead. For which I am doubly sorry.
² (= Little Pink Anthuriums)
³ The average length of time from sow date to first bud continues to increase, as some of the earliest seedlings get around to making buds, but it's still around the two-year mark. The mean is 28.5 months, and the median is 27.2 months. 39 months is really late, though the record at the moment for the latest bud belongs to 0045 "Lineysha Sparx," who finally produced a bud, after 47 months, and then dropped it.

Anthurium no. 0564 "Shannel"

From time to time, I get comments on posts, or e-mails, to the effect of, geez, your post today makes it sound like you must be [miserable, overwhelmed, depressed, stressed-out], what with all the [scale, thrips, fungus, ugly blooms, other disappointments or catastrophes]. I'm usually surprised to hear this, because however much complaining I may have been doing, I wasn't actually miserable. Then I wind up preoccupied for an afternoon: am I being too negative? Am I depressed and just haven't realized it yet? Etc.

It's also the case, a bit less often, that people will comment to the effect of wow, your place must be beautiful, what with all the flowers and stuff, I bet it's just AMAZING to live there. Which is also surprising to hear, because, you know, to me it's just my house, and the plants are just things in the house, like walls and doors and plumbing. I mean, sure, I recognize that this house is different from other houses I could be living in, and I could hardly forget about how much time it takes to maintain them all, but I'm not blown away by how amazing it is to have a house full of plants when other people don't, any more than I'm periodically blown away by how amazing it to have a toilet when other people don't, or stopped in my tracks by the overwhelming beauty of the front door or something. Toilets, front doors, and shelves filled with plants are all utterly ordinary things in my world, and it makes no sense to think that they might not be there.

The point being that what you, as a reader, might imagine a house full of Anthurium¹ seedlings to feel like is different from how it actually feels to me. I do still get depressed, frustrated, jubilant, or excited about things that happen here, of course, but the threshold for what's needed to trigger a feeling is really high. At least some of this is due to something I think of as the "Texas Effect."

The Texas Effect is so named because the first place I remember hearing it articulated was in a column by the late, wonderful Molly Ivins. I don't have the exact quote on hand, but it was something to the effect of Texas being so big that it was not at all unusual for the state to be both flooding and in a drought at the same time. In the same sort of way, it's perfectly normal for my plant collection to leave me despondent and jubilant at the same time. There are occasional moments when most of the news has been consistently good for a week, and some seedling or another has done something particularly surprising and wonderful, and I think I'm finally on top of the scale situation (and the other situations) and I'm fairly happy; there are more frequent moments when most of the news is consistently bad for a week, and all the blooms are coming up pink / pink,² and I truly am mildly depressed and discouraged over how I'm never going to get rid of the scale (and the other things). But my moods are mostly, if not completely, divorced from what the Anthurium seedlings are doing. Seeing scale on one plant is nothing. Even throwing out one plant is nothing. Having one nice new bloom is very nearly nothing.

With that for context, let's look at Shannel.³

Shannel is not a keeper.

The bloom started out tiny, and ragged around the base. It's not an interesting color. There are thrips scars.

As it ages, the spathe flips backwards, curls under in the ugliest possible way, and tears itself some more.

The internodal distance is long enough to make it awkward to move around, as well⁴ --

-- though the leaves are fine, maybe even pleasant, individually.

The most attractive things about Shannel, actually, are her buds. I don't ordinarily bother to provide photos of the buds in these posts, because . . . well, because you can usually guess what the buds look like pretty easily from looking at the finished bloom. Red blooms have red buds. Pink blooms have pink buds. Big blooms had big buds. Sometimes the color might change (at least one pink bloom, 0040 "Ivy Winters," consistently had orange buds, and I've seen an orange bloom with pink buds very recently), but had you asked me what makes for an attractive bud, say, six months ago, I wouldn't have even really understood the premise that buds can be attractive. But of course they can.

And if Shannel's spathes only stayed white at the bottom, with a red tip (like some of the A. kamemotoanum hybrids I mentioned a while back), I'd be excited about keeping her around, but sadly, that's not the case.

So, she's most likely a failure, though she was exempt from round 1 of the (just-completed) Anthurium-seedling purge because of the developing flower. I would not bet on her to survive round 2.

The point, though, is that this -- crappy bloom, throwing out seedlings -- is balanced out by other blooms that look good and are doing interesting things. I guess it's about time I showed you another one of those then, right? So I'll do that on Wednesday.

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¹ and Schlumbergera! Let's not forget about the Schlumbergeras! (To be perfectly honest, I think I may actually like the Schlumbergeras better than the Anthuriums. They're at least a hell of a lot less trouble.)
² I shouldn't complain about the pink / pinks as much as I do; they're perfectly nice on their own terms, and it's totally a case of familiarity breeding contempt. They're not even all bad: 0241 "Megan Gigaterra" is a pretty nice pink / pink, for example. I just get bored.
Also, a lot of the smaller and more thrips-ravaged plants in fact are pink / pink, which is possibly making me like the bigger, cleaner blooms less by association somehow.
³ (pronounced the same as "Chanel," FYI)
⁴ Shannel was divided from 0050 "Roxxxy Andrews," and so is either identical to, or siblings with, Roxxxy. I should probably say was identical to or siblings with: Roxxxy was thrown out in the first round of the 4-inch seedling purge, a week and a half ago. Why? Almost entirely because Roxxxy had absurdly long internodes. (And then also because she was old and had not yet bloomed, but that was a prerequisite for getting on the list in the first place and so doesn't count.) So are we surprised by Shannel's internodal length? No. We are not.

Anthuriums no. 0219, 0220, 0330, 0556, and 0580

An unrelated note first:

About a year ago, when there was some big to-do about AOL accounts being hacked, I attempted to change my password. I didn't have any reason to think that my account was one of those affected, but it's the sort of thing you're supposed to do from time to time anyway, and it seemed like an especially good idea then, so I tried it. Put in my security question answers and the old password and typed in the new password twice and so on and so forth, and when I clicked the button to save the new password, I got the little spinny loading icon, but it never actually loaded a new page to tell me that the password had been updated, and the old password continued to work, so clearly nothing got changed.

I talked to someone at AOL about this, and he indicated that there were just that many people trying to change their AOL accounts at that time, so if I was just patient and kept trying, he claimed, sooner or later it would go through. So I spent about a week and a half periodically trying to change my password, but it always ended the same way, and eventually I just gave up and forgot about it.

Fast forward almost a year, and I have concerns about my AOL account again (I think my e-mail address is being spoofed, not hacked, but again, changing passwords is something you're supposed to do, so I tried it again, and it failed again, and I contacted AOL again. This time, AOL suggested trying to log in with a different browser, which I did (not helpful), and then said that the only thing they could do would be to give me a free 2 months of technical support, and tech support could log into my computer remotely and determine the problem and deal with it.

And I'm like, well, um, that sounds great and all, but you're not really giving me any reason to have confidence that, at the end of the free 2 months, I'll be able to get out of the tech support deal, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to pay for technical support. And the guy was like, no, it's actually really easy to get out of tech support on-line if you want to, you wouldn't have to pay. And I was like, yeah, but you guys think it should be really easy to change a password on-line, too.¹

So the upshot is that I'm looking for a new e-mail service. My ideal e-mail provider would look like this:

(highest priority)
1. Free
2. Not GMail
3. Reasonably secure for a user whose understanding of internet security is basically "don't click on suspicious-looking links" and "use strong passwords"
4. (optional) Simple to set up and use
5. (optional) No ads
(lowest priority)

Thunderbird fails condition #1,² GMail fails condition #2. I'm leaning toward Outlook.com at the moment, but I thought maybe one of y'all would have some warnings, advice, or alternatives that would be worth hearing before I make the final decision.


Now the Anthuriums.

What do these five seedlings have in common? None of them have bloomed yet. This isn't the complete list of plants with buds but no blooms, but four of the five also have in common that they haven't been mentioned here previously. Consequently, the photos aren't going to be terribly exciting. You've seen undeveloped Anthurium buds before. Really the e-mail stuff is probably more entertaining. But this is still news, so.

#0219 "Rhoda Horse"

Now there are two Rhodas doing things. (The other is #0232 "Rhoda Badcek," who first bloomed last April.) This is kind of bad news, because it's going to make it even harder for me to keep straight in my head which seedlings are doing what (like the Eliza / Elijah similarity wasn't bad enough). I suppose something like this was going to happen eventually.³


#0220 "Nora Morse"

Nothing terribly interesting about Nora yet, though it's interesting that she and her presumed sibling Rhoda both started buds at exactly the same time. I don't actually know that there's a way to induce Anthuriums to bloom short of giving them decent conditions and letting them make up their own minds about the timing, but stuff like this⁴ makes me think that there must be some kind of specific signal.


#0556 "Frank Lee Grande"

Had I mentioned previously that I'm including drag king names too? 'Cause I'm including drag king names too. Couldn't find a page for Mr. Grande to link to, alas.⁵


#0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha"

This is one of those names where I can't remember if I found it somewhere, invented it, or found it, forgot it, and reinvented it. Maybe the question is moot. Do people even get Brady Bunch references these days?


#0330 "Faye Quinette"

Faye's bud remains brown. I've noted before that photos of brown-spathed Anthuriums tend to look, to me, like someone just took a photo in bad light: my brain has a hard time accepting that the spathe actually looks like that. (My mother's reaction on seeing it: "You're sure it's not dead?") This also turns out to be the case when I'm looking at it with my own two eyes, strangely enough. But these photos (especially the first one) are pretty accurate w/r/t color.

Of course, the most recent bloom on #0334 "Jean Poole" also looked fairly brown⁶ and that wound up being dark red once it opened, so it's still possible that Faye will turn out to be not quite actually brown. But so far, so good, and although I can't imagine finding a brown Anthurium remotely appealing, the potential weirdness has me pretty excited. I'm hoping that if I just keep checking the bud daily, I might be able to convince my brain that this is its actual color by the time the bud opens.

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¹ (Left unsaid:) And anyway, in what universe does it make sense for me to, when having security-related problems with your e-mail service, grant you even more intrusive access to my computer?
² (the service itself appears to be free, but you have to pay to get an e-mail address initially, and it's not clear whether that's a one-time fee or an ongoing one. Also even if it were free, it didn't look like it met the "simple to set up" criterion, so.)
³ And it could get way worse than this: the combined list of already-named seedlings and potential future seedling names includes three Alexises, four Amandas, three Auroras, three Bobs, five Donnas, three Eves (plus two Evies), four Heathers, four Heidis, four Hollys, three Honeys, three Idas, three Jacks, three Ninas, three Reginas (naturally), three Sashas, three Sharons, three Veras, and three Wandas, and that's ignoring duplicate names where the spelling differs. That list also ignores the even more numerous cases where only two actual / potential seedling designations share a first name.
It's not yet as bad as, say, a preschool class, where there are eight Sophias and twelve Jacksons and everybody has to distinguish between Sophia H., Sophia R., Sophia A., Sophia J., and so on, and in any case something like this was bound to come up sooner or later because there are only so many common and familiar names, but it does complicate things for me. We're already at the point where I'm beginning to have trouble keeping track of how many seedlings have attempted to bloom (81, for the record; 60 have completed blooms), how many of those have died (8), where they all are down in the basement (which gets more complicated because sometimes I have to move them around), what colors they all are (especially complicated because some of them have only bloomed once, a while ago: obviously it's easier to keep up if they just bloom continuously, because I get reminded continuously), etc.
⁴ Other pairs of closely-related plants that have produced new blooms simultaneously after a long bloomless period: #0279 "Tristan Shout" and #0594 "Charity Case," and #565 "MysterE" / #0232 "Rhoda Badcek." This could be coincidental, but I'm betting there's something else.
⁵ It's possibly one of those names that gets used by several people at once. Certain drag queen names, like "Ida Slapter," are so old that they seem to be available to whoever wants to use them and don't necessarily correspond to any particular performer. "Frank Lee Grande" could be one of those. It is, of course, more likely that I just fail at search engines.
⁶ More of a red-brown, granted. Pretty much the color of old scabs, truth be told, though if you wanted to I suppose you could probably imagine it as surface-of-Mars-colored instead, which isn't a prettier color but is a little more poetic-sounding. Name That Color says the back of Jean's spathe is "Prairie Sand," which is arguably even more poetic-sounding, but I don't think of prairies as being especially sandy places so that mostly just confuses me.

Saturday Morning Sheba Picture

Due to unanticipated levels of family chaos, your regularly-scheduled Anthurium update post is postponed.

Here is a photo of Sheba in its stead.

Pretty pictures: Iris cvv.

So last year, as you'll remember, I got two stalks of Iris flowers, on the NOID blue-purple plants, and that was it. No other blooms, no other colors.

It's looking like that was mostly due to 2011's drought, because this year I got blooms on all the Irises except for the NOID blue-purple one.

(N.b. before we launch into the pictures: I request that the reader pay no attention to the dandelions and other weeds in the background. Or if you must notice them, at least don't judge us for them. Not that we don't deserve the judgment. I'd just rather you didn't, is all.)


'Reincarnation:'

'Reincarnation' bloomed last fall as well (it's a rebloomer), but I apparently didn't blog about that even though I took the pictures. Go figure.


'Shelley Elizabeth:'

'Shelley Elizabeth' previously: 2012


'Frivolous:'

I'm not sure I was aware, prior to hearing about 'Frivolous,' that yellow irises could be bright dandelion yellow, as opposed to pastel gender-neutral-nursery yellow. But they can. Oh, how they can.


All three varieties were gifts from Ginny Burton. (So was the NOID blue-purple that didn't bloom, as far as that goes.)


Bonus unidentified irises that aren't mine:

Spotted here in town. There was also a completely unreal number of orange poppies¹ in this yard, which may or may not get a separate blog post later.

This purple and white combo from the University of Iowa Hospital would have been much more impressive if I had been able to capture the whole planting at once. There were other priorities that day, though,² so the above are the only two shots I attempted.

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¹ Having trouble with subject-verb agreement here. Is it "was . . . a number" or "were . . . orange poppies?" I'm about 75% sure it's the former, but somehow both sound wrong. Maybe I still have enough of a cold that it's impairing my grammar. (Evidence in favor of this theory: in the previous sentence, I wasn't sure whether it should read "enough of a cold to affect my grammar" or "enough of a cold to effect my grammar," so I reworded it to get around the question. Though affect is right, isn't it?)
² Neither I nor my husband were the patient, and we're both fine as far as we know. The explanation for what we were doing there is long and complicated, has an unclear diagnosis and an ambiguous prognosis, and isn't something I feel like sharing with the whole internet, so that's all the explanation you get.

Saturday morning Sheba picture

It's Sheba!

Nothing new with her lately. She eats, she poops, she sleeps. Same as it ever was.

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.

Unfinished business: Hippeastrum, fungus, itching, Cyperus

Just picking up from the previous update: the Hippeastrum has bloomed. I got two flowers, both of them solid red, though they looked very orange-red right up until opening (and still look a little orange in some lighting). I don't know that this is going to turn me into a Hippeastrum devotee or anything, but they're self-fertile, and you know how I get with seeds,¹ so this will probably not be my last amaryllis.² This one was started in March 2010, so that means basically four years from seed to bloom. I have no idea if that's typical for Hippeastrums.

I don't know whether the white streaking on the back of some of the sepals here is normal for Hippeastrum, or an indication that there's some 'Apple Blossom' ancestry in there after all, or something else, but it seemed worth mentioning.

Less happily, about ten hours after "An Uncharacteristically Upbeat Post" published, I found the Euphorbia fungus on a plant that I thought had been cured, and then discovered it on at least three more plants that week. You'd think I would have learned by now never to think (much less to say) that any of my problems has ever been resolved.

Though shutting up about my problems doesn't seem to work that well either: the itching is still happening, albeit not as often. I've been using petroleum jelly after showering for about six weeks now, and although I'm not itching as often, I'm still itching. It's just that now I have maybe two bad days per week, instead of three. The itching is a little less life-consuming when it does happen, as well: shorter duration, responds better to benadryl. So there's been improvement on that, but less than I'd like. The next step in the process would be a referral to a dermatologist; so far I've declined to do that because 1) it's gotten somewhat better, and 2) my expectation is that seeing a dermatologist is a lot less likely to result in a cure for the problem than it is to result in more visits to a dermatologist. Nothing against dermatologists: I'm sure many of them are very nice people who are highly competent doctors. I just don't think this problem is a dermatologist kind of problem.³ If it gets worse, I'll reconsider.

Finally, just an update on the Cyperus alternifolius (original post from last July here), so I don't have to end the post on such a down note:

The third cutting did eventually sprout; it just took a really long time. It caught up to the size of the other two pretty quickly after I potted it up, which was surprising. I've since put all three together in a single pot (mostly for space-conservation reasons; I'm pretty certain the plants would have been fine where they were), and the resulting plant looks like this now:

So far, I'm pleased to make its acquaintance. It's been a while since I met a new plant that I got along with this well, actually.

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¹ There will be at least one more seedling-related post coming relatively soon, though in a surprise twist, it won't be about Anthuriums. And I'm pleasantly surprised and happy about it anyway.
² "Amaryllis" is the common name for Hippeastrum even though there's a genus called Amaryllis. Much like the way "pothos" is Epipremnum and not Pothos, "nephthytis" is Syngonium and not Nephthytis, or "coleus" is Solenostemon Plectranthus and not Coleus. Even when common names are scientific names, you still can't trust 'em.
³ So what kind of problem is it, then, if not a dermatologist problem? I don't know. Maybe it's a ghosts-of-dead-spider-mites problem.