Anthurium no. 1733 "Jayyvon Monroe"

Jayyvon isn't doing anything bizarre that needs explanation like 1332 Alexis Gabrielle Sherrington or 1715 Tyler Linoleum; I'm giving him a post anyway because he's so pretty.

Seed parent is 0108 Deena Sequins, who herself was descended from the NOID purple, so that might explain the color. 'Krypton' could be in the mix somewhere as well: Jayyvon looks a lot like 'Krypton.'

The leaves are decent so far,

and the plant as a whole is a bit leggy (like 0108 Deena Sequins), but some suckering might happen if I up-potted, which would make it look better. So much to do, so little time.

That's kind of all I can say about this one. Sometimes you just have to let the pictures speak for themselves.

Not sure how many Anthurium seedlings are left to write about before we head back into the Schlumbergera posts. At least one.

You can understand why I might not be excited about getting back to the Schlumbergeras, given how long it took to get through them all last year. This year seems to have a more manageable number, though (thirty, so far). Maybe it won't be that bad.

Anthurium no. 1332 "Alexis Gabrielle Sherrington"

And then I caught a cold, so there went another week. This year I seem to be catching every single illness that's going around: cross your fingers for me that the flu shot works this year.¹

So. Alexis. Alexis is mostly notable for being a color combination that I wouldn't have guessed possible and have never seen before: green and orange.

Which more or less speaks for itself, I think. I mean, I don't have any explanation for it. The seed parent was 0334 Jean Poole, which is red / pink, about as opposite as you can get from green / orange:

So where did the orange and green come from? [shrug] The pollen parent, I suppose. But I don't know which one that was.

As with previous green-blooming seedlings (1419 Maya Douglas, 1720 Mado Lamotte), the intensity of the green fades as the spathe matures. This is the same bloom as the one above, three days later:

Not a huge difference, but it just kept getting fainter from there; by the time it died, it was basically just white. Didn't get a photo of that, though.

The foliage is surprisingly large and abundant, which may not actually be ideal for a flower that blooms green. One does want to be able to see the flower among all the leaves.

Some thrips scarring, too, which isn't ideal. I've seen worse, I suppose. Though thrips damage shows up really well on the spathes, which makes me sad.

I don't know that I'd call it beautiful, but this is the sort of thing I had been hoping for when I started growing out the seedlings. I was never going to see this in a store; it's cool that it exists. I'm actually surprised that it's possible: I don't think I've previously ever had an orange spadix that wasn't accompanied by a red, pink, or orange spathe. What other combinations might be possible that I haven't seen yet? White/purple? Green/purple? White/orange?

The Anthuriums, as I mentioned in the last post, are kind of falling apart on me: I ran out of room to keep expanding, and I haven't been culling the herd on purpose, so I have lots of seedlings in spaces too small for them to fit, and a lot of seedlings that really need to promote to larger pots but can't because there's no space for them. At some point, I do intend to rearrange them all and promote a few and so forth, and when that happens, Alexis is a strong candidate to get promoted to a 6-inch / 15 cm pot, but there's so much competition that I can't promise her anything.

In unrelated news: I happened to be in a houseplant-related establishment this week and saw a Dracaena marginata variety I hadn't seen before: the shape and proportions were the same as any other D. marginata, but the coloration was dark green with a yellow-green stripe down the center, more or less the same as D. reflexa 'Riki,' but on thinner, lighter leaves. I didn't take a picture,² and I didn't buy it,³ but I still thought it was interesting enough to follow up on.

Best guess as to variety name: 'Ray of Sunshine,' per this, this, and this, though there's a 'Sunray' here that looks like basically the same thing. So much like the same thing, in fact, that I suspect someone's trying to steal someone else's patented plant by changing its name slightly.

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¹ According to the CDC website, the dominant strain this year is influenza A(H1N1)pdm09, the flu that caused the 2009-10 pandemic, which you may remember from all of the You Are Totally Going To Die Of The Flu stories you read that winter. My understanding is that it actually caused milder symptoms in most people than the average seasonal flu, but it also had the ability to infect cells deep in the lungs (normal flu viruses are limited to the nose and throat), and consequently resulted in a higher number of deaths among people under 50 than is typical, which is why the media freaked out so hard about it.
The vaccines available last fall were intended to protect against A/Michigan/45/2015 (H1N1)pdm09-like, so I'm not actually super-worried about getting the flu. It's just that I've gotten everything else, it seems like. Which is remarkable for someone who barely ever leaves the house.
Alarmingly, Wikipedia says that about 33% of people with influenza have no symptoms. (The source is this study, in which healthy volunteers were deliberately infected with the flu.) I wouldn't have imagined that that number could be so high. This is one reason why it's important to get the vaccine even if you "never" get the flu, or you've had it before but it was no big deal: if you get the vaccine, not only are you personally less likely to get the flu, but the people around you are also less likely to get the flu. I'll grant that getting a shot isn't as dramatic or emotionally gratifying as taking a bullet for someone or charging into a burning building to rescue a small child, but getting the flu vaccine every year may in fact save more lives. And we can safely assume that it's considerably more pleasant than either of those options.
² I didn't have it with me, because the camera gets dust behind the lens so easily that I don't take it anywhere.
³ $25 for three plants in a 6-inch pot, which maybe isn't outrageous, but that's a lot of money to spend on a plant I don't even particularly like, new color variety or no. Show me a Yucca guatemalensis with this coloration and I'd happily pay twice as much, though. Not kidding.

Anthurium no. 1409 "Ramona West"

From time to time, a seedling will do a little fake-out, making me think that I'm getting one kind of bloom and then actually delivering another. 0330 Faye Quinette was one of the first of these, producing a brown bud that became an orange spathe, and 1731 Robyn Millyonz was another (green bud became a beigey spathe), and now we have Ramona. This was the bud:

And here's what I got:

(And just to be clear that the sides really were different, here's a shot as the bud was opening that shows both at once:)

I'm not sure whether this was an intermediate stage in the process or looks green because of backlighting, but either way it's another photo so here you go:

Ramona isn't otherwise remarkable. One of two blooming seedlings from the 0594 Charity Case, the other being 1362 Jaymee Sexton. The foliage isn't terrible, but I'd be happier if the leaves weren't thrips-scarred at all:

And this photo makes the plant look a bit fuller than it actually is, but it's still of decent size, considering the pot (3 in. / 7.5 cm diagonal).

Not sure what to do with Ramona; the green / pink thing is interesting, but perhaps not quite interesting enough to keep. It'd help to make the decision if I knew whether it would do this consistently, but I've been very bad at taking photos of new blooms. (Bad at keeping up with the Anthuriums in general, actually. I think maybe I'm starting to lose interest? The ongoing thrips problem has ruined them for me a little bit.)

Anthurium no. 1715 "Tyler Linoleum"

So now I'm faced with a sort of problem. It's a completely optional problem, but it's still a problem.

The thing is that there's a completely unreasonable number of unblogged Anthurium seedlings,¹ and most of them are not interesting on their own, at all. I could possibly make them interesting by talking about some other, barely related thing and ignoring the seedlings entirely, but that's kind of exhausting to do, particularly if I have to do it dozens of times.

So the plan is to write about the five or six most interesting ones,² and see how I feel about the others once I'm finished. This will probably take a while, because having a new computer means I can have new games, and playing video games is a lot more fun than blogging about Anthuriums, even interesting Anthuriums.³ But we'll see how things shake out.

In the meantime, right at the moment, we have Anthurium seedling 1715, which is simultaneously one of the weirder, prettier, and more information-rich seedlings in a very long time.

"Pretty" may or may not be obvious from the photo, but Tyler is consistently right on the line between red and orange, which I don't think I've ever seen before. Previously, they've always fallen pretty solidly on one side or another; the in-between color is really striking in person. There's also some green on the back of the spathes, like we've seen with 0330 Faye Quinette (who I suspect of being the pollen parent), which is unusual enough to qualify for "weird."

"Information-rich" comes from the foliage. You may remember that there's been a long-standing puzzle about seedling 0115 ("Erlene Adopter") and her clones (0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, 0581 Adam All, 0586 Vera Special). All four of them, and none of the other 1500+ seedlings, will periodically and for no obvious reason go yellow at the veins, usually along the minor veins rather than the midrib or other larger veins. Sometimes it's only a couple spots, sometimes it's the whole leaf. It looks like this when it happens:

If I only had one Anthurium and it was doing this, I would assume a nutrient deficiency of some kind, but since I have lots, which are all in the same soil, all getting the same fertilizer at the same strength, etc., and only the ones that are clones of this particular seedling do it, I was thinking maybe it's genetic, or a virus or other disease which the original plant had, so all its clones did too.⁴

The virus theory's looking less likely now. I have thrips around, and thrips can transmit viruses, so if it were a virus, I should have seen this happen to other seedlings. But it's still only ever been the Erlenes.

And so now we have Tyler, whose seed parent was 0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, and look at his leaves. Mostly they're fine:

 

And they don't get gradually worse over time, as far as I can tell. The yellowing happens,

and then it stays. Doesn't reverse itself, doesn't get worse. The below photo is the same leaf, about a month after the above photo:⁵

I mean, that might look a little worse because of differences in how the photos were taken -- the latter was more strongly backlit than the former -- but if you look, the spots haven't gotten bigger, and except for a couple along the leaf margin at the top left, which possibly just didn't show in the first photo because of reflection off the leaf surface, there aren't any new spots, either.

Occasionally the colors are much more dramatic.

So now the situation is that all the clones of one plant, plus the offspring of one of those clones, does this. Which looks like support for the genetic theory, though the only other surviving seedling from the Erlenes (1727 Mercedes Sulay) has normal green leaves that stay green. And also I don't think any of the Erlenes ever produced a leaf that looked like the one in that last photo: that's pretty extreme.

Tyler would have been a keeper regardless, for the bloom color and suckering, but as the Erlenes are pretty robust plants in general,⁶ and I'm interested in whether the leaf weirdness will be passed to a third generation, it's really really a keeper. I doubt it has any commercial value: even if it's not sick in some fashion, it looks sick, which surely wouldn't sell terribly well. But I want it around at least until I understand it.

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¹ "Unreasonable" = 35.
² Definitely 1332 Alexis Gabrielle Sherrington; probably 1409 Ramona West and 1733 Jayyvon Monroe; possibly 0650 Phyllis Deen, 1438 Johnny Cockette, 1716 Tess LeCoil, 1718 Charo Beans DeBarge, and 1767 Constance Waring, depending on whether they still seem interesting to me later.
³ Dishonored 2 is incredible. There could be even more incredible games, I suppose, but my gaming tastes are very specific (single-player; realistic graphics or at least not blocky, pixelated graphics; interesting art; for shooters, I like stealth/nonlethal play as an option, if not the whole point of the game; multiple routes to the same end goal; high replayability), and Dishonored 2 sits exactly in the center of, like, all of them.
I've also recently gotten Prey, Thief (2014), Assassin's Creed, and Cities: Skylines, each of which fits my criteria at least a little bit, so I'm going to have something to entertain myself with between rounds of watering for a very long time. Though apparently the first Assassin's Creed is not great and I was supposed to have started with Assassin's Creed 2. I didn't know.
⁴ Also, for what it's worth, I have tried adding magnesium to the fertilizer, in the form of Epsom salt (MgSO₄), and that had no effect. I don't have element-specific sources of other nutrients to try to add, but the fertilizer I use does contain most of the trace elements plants need: boron, iron, copper, manganese, etc.
⁵ (31 October 2017 vs. 29 November 2017, for the record.)
⁶ (with the exception of the ghost mites, to which they seem more susceptible than average)

The 2017-18 Schlummies (Returning awards)

At long last, about six months too late, we have the 2017-18 Schlummies. This post will cover the awards for seedlings that bloomed in previous years, and then the next post will deal with 2017-18's seedlings. Sound good?¹

Most Improved Returning Seedling (2014-15 Season)
"Most Improved" has turned out to be a rougher category than I initially anticipated; I'm never sure whether to choose seedlings that used to be meh and improved to become awesome, or seedlings that used to be crappy and have improved to become mediocre. I think mostly I've gone the latter route, historically, but it's always tough to decide.

This year's winner, 024A Safety Vest, has never been amazing, but it was a serviceable orange / white when it first bloomed, and then it kind of disappeared for a couple years. (024B Bryce Canyon is a much larger and more floriferous plant.) So this year, Safety Vest was back again, hence the award. It's still not as big as Bryce Canyon, and probably never will be, but that's okay.

024A Safety Vest

026A Brick Wall

028A Phil Collen

035A Patito

078A Art Party
The other nominees were all seedlings which have always bloomed at least a little, but went particularly nuts this year; the only one I can explain is 078A Art Party: I turned one of the flats around, so the plant got much better light this year than it had previously.



Best Overall Returning Seedling (2014-15 Season)
The first three nominees are always stunning, though 021B Birthday Dinner and 025A Clownfish both have unfair advantages: Clownfish is in a 6-inch pot, and both of them have unusually good permanent locations. But this year the one that really impressed me was 057A Pyrotechnic / Oxomoco, less for its color² than for producing a lot of blooms, over a fairly long period, last fall. I suspect it's commercially more valuable to have a plant that produces a huge number of blooms and then is finished for a few months, than it is for a plant to bloom more moderately over a longer period, but I personally prefer the latter.

021B Birthday Dinner

025A Clownfish

057A Pyrotechnic / Oxomoco

078A Art Party

113A Helper Dog


Most Improved Returning Seedling (2015-16 Season)
Not a lot to say here; 013A Tantalus and 107A Nova Prospekt both got big enough to produce a lot more blooms than last year, which is nice, and 079B Haleakala had impressive duration and color. (It may have even been more impressive than its potmate, and three-time Schlummie winner, 079A Yayoi Kusama.) But 093A Flamingo Burlesque gets the win for having many, many, many more blooms than last year, and blooming before the thrips had a chance to build up their numbers, so the flowers produced were mostly clean and unscarred.

013A Tantalus

079B Haleakala

093A Flamingo Burlesque

107A Nova Prospekt

208A Raspberry Possum


Best Overall Returning Seedling (2015-16 Season)
Oh. Make that four-time Schlummie winner 079A Yayoi Kusama, I guess. Nice color, blooms reliably over a long period, not overly bothered by thrips, and so forth. Even if it wasn't as magnificent this year, compared to 079B Haleakala, it's still a very, very good seedling.

079A Yayoi Kusama

078B Haleakala

107A Nova Prospekt

208A Raspberry Possum

217A Blood Frenzy


Most Improved Returning Seedling (2016-17 Season)
This was probably the toughest category for this post, since there was a lot of dramatic improvement among last year's seedlings. 120A Barbara Jordan bloomed spectacularly in late January 2018, and then again for most of September and October. 080A Nichelle Nichols was a bit dissheveled last year, but produced a few really nicely-shaped flowers this year. 202A Joan Didion no longer has the distinctive shape of her first blooms, but has made up for it by producing a lot of normal-shaped ones.

077B Bad Reputation

080A Nichelle Nichols

120A Barbara Jordan

202A Joan Didion
271A Not Here To Make Friends has retained its unusual shape, as well as being incredibly floriferous and having the rounded stem segments of its buckleyi parent. (I actually very badly wanted to give Not Here To Make Friends an award, because it was all-around very impressive, to the point that I considered inventing an award for it, but gave up when I couldn't figure out what to call the new award.) But 077B Bad Reputation wins this year, because it produced a lot of blooms and has possibly out-competed the two other seedlings in its pot, 077A Grendel and 077C Flickering (Grendel had previously been the main seedling in the pot.). I hadn't expected much from Bad Reputation, so it was a surprise to see it doing so well this year.

271A Not Here To Make Friends


Best Overall Returning Seedling (2016-17 Season)
Again, the temptation to give the win to 271A Not Here To Make Friends was very strong, but I have to give the Schlummie to 070A Delia Webster instead. Great color, and a truly absurd number of blooms. This award wasn't even really even a contest.

070A Delia Webster

097A Ladybug Ladybug

271A Not Here To Make Friends

281A No Bad Vibez

283A Migaloo
I'm kind of short on time lately, so the post for new seedlings will probably not happen until around 12 December. And please note that I'm not promising 12 December.

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¹ Hope so, 'cause the post is already written.
² A difficult to pin down pink-orange / pink. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just more subtle than a lot of the seedlings.