Question for the Hive Mind, Dynasty Edition

A few weeks back, the husband and I started watching the original Dynasty¹ on Amazon. I don't remember wanting to watch it when it originally ran, but it wouldn't have mattered if I had, because I was a child and it was forbidden. I was nevertheless very aware of the show, because it was a big deal (Dynasty was the top-rated show across all networks in the 1984-85 season, and in the top ten for three other seasons). Without ever watching it, I would have been able to tell you that there were characters named Alexis and Krystle, and they fought with one another a lot, and that the show was sort of generally glamorous and soapy. It seemed like people took it sort of seriously -- I remember reading stuff about it being trashy and shallow, and yet also collected a lot of nominations and awards, so clearly people thought it was "good" TV for the time.

So watching it now has been really eye-opening in ways it couldn't have been if I'd watched it then, because it is terrible. Like, astoundingly so. I won't deny that it's entertaining (the outfits alone, my god), but the writing is frequently nonsensical. Like, characters who start at come on, unlock the door, we can't settle our problems if you won't even talk to me will, 15 seconds later, find themselves at fine, I hope you rot in your locked room, with no attempt on the part of the actor or writer to show any kind of thought process bridging the two. Just boom, 180-degree turn. Dynasty seems to be a TV show written by people whose only knowledge of humans is from watching other TV shows. It's amazing.

Also, a lot of the technical stuff is remarkably amateurish. Like, I don't remember which episode it was in, but twice now, I've caught the microphone boom dipping into the top of the frame and they used the shot anyway. There are occasionally shots of jewelry to which crude animated sparkles have obviously been added, and periodically the film quality gets abruptly worse for a single scene, presumably because a shot had to be redone with a different camera(?). "Romantic" scenes are designated as such by the addition of a filter that makes every point of light into an "x," as in this example:

State of the art at the time, I'm sure. But it hasn't aged well.

However! There are some moments that make it all worthwhile, which are highly recommended to any readers who want to watch on Amazon.

For the first big Alexis-Krystle catfight, check out season 2, episode 16, at 41:25.²

Joan Collins "singing"³ and dancing in leather pants: season 4, episode 15, beginning at about 28:30.

Have you ever wanted to see Linda Evans and Joan Collins fighting in a lily pond?⁴ Season 3, episode 23, beginning at 27:05.

To see the most hilariously awful sex scene I've ever seen (and be warned: it is really, really bad; I'm not exaggerating "most awful"), go to season 2, episode 22, at 43:36. There's a shorter version on YouTube, but watch the long version if you can, because part of what makes it so wonderful / terrible is that it goes until you're like okay, I get it, sexy sexy, let's move on and then it keeps going, and going, and going.

My younger siblings, when shown the sex scene, compared it to watching a box turtle eating a strawberry,


which is so precisely correct that it delights me each time I think about it, and cannot be unseen once seen.

And finally, how about a dull cameo from former president Gerald Ford and his wife Betty for no reason at all? (Season 4, episode 11, 25:51. Stick around until 29:55 and you'll get a bonus Henry Kissinger.⁵)

Anyway. So I wouldn't exactly say I'm enjoying Dynasty, but I'm not not enjoying it either. Nothing will convince you that the past is truly another country like watching their television programs will. Dynasty's treatment of Steven Carrington (only like the second gay main-cast character in U.S. television ever, I think I read somewhere) isn't up to modern standards, but it's pretty progressive for the early 80s. (On the other hand, he's only gay part of the time, and it was apparently acceptable to use a certain anti-gay slur in prime-time TV in 1981,⁶ which shocked me a bit.)

Another thing that would never fly today is the amount of fur being worn by the characters (mostly Alexis). I wasn't even looking very hard, and still managed to find these examples within like ten minutes:

More than anything else, though, I notice that the treatment of women is astoundingly bad by modern standards. Not just rape -- though Dynasty is in fact super-rapey⁷ -- but if you took a drink every time a male character grabbed a female character roughly by the arm, to stop her from going somewhere, force her to go somewhere, or demonstrate his manly man-ness, you would literally die of alcohol poisoning somewhere in the early to middle first season. It's alarming. I don't think Krystle changes rooms without male assistance once in the entire first season. Depending on how much of an optimist you are, this can be depressing or heartening; I choose to think of it as heartening. Sure, things aren't so great for women now, but they used to be so much worse that you could show characters doing this kind of shit on the most-watched TV program at the time and not have to worry about the audience losing sympathy for the grabbers and rapists. Change does happen sometimes.

ANYWAY.

The reason we are actually here, though, is plant-related. I am occasionally surprised by the plant choices the set decorators make,⁸ but I can at least usually determine what they are. And yet there are two I can't identify.

The first is obviously enough a bromeliad of some kind, but I can't even narrow down a genus for it. Closest thing I can think of would be a Guzmania, but it's awfully big for a Guzmania. Maybe they were bigger in the 80s?

UPDATE: Anonymous in the comments suggests Guzmania wittmackii. I'm not 100% certain on the species, but a Guzmania of some kind seems likely. See comments for links to photos.

The second plant has been driving me crazy for weeks, because the set decorator really likes them, and sticks them all over the place, but I can't figure out what it is; it reminds me variously of Schefflera actinophylla (compound leaves with large leaflets), Polyscias balfouriana and P. scutellaria (large leaves, produced from cane cuttings), and Ficus spp. (leaf venation, bark color) but doesn't seem to be any of them for sure. The bark is wrong for Schefflera; compound leaves are wrong for Ficus, it doesn't look like any Polyscias I've ever seen.

It's possible that the reason I'm finding it so difficult is that they're not all the same species of plant. The overall "tuft of large compound leaves at the top of a long, bare stem" appearance is consistent from specimen to specimen, but there are differences in leaflet angles and coloration that makes me unsure. In particular, I'm not sure if the two plants in this shot are of the same species:

Adam Carrington (played by Gordon Thomson), left, with Tracy Kendall (Deborah Adair). They're both more or less evil.

The guy here is Mark Jennings (played by Geoffrey Scott); he's the most pointless character and I hate every scene he appears in.

80s fashion!

Joan Collins, enjoying a morning half-grapefruit, as all Dynasty characters were apparently legally required to; it's rare when a breakfast scene shows them eating anything else.

I don't hate her outfit, though. I would totally wear something like that for all my personal grapefruit-eating scenes, if I ever ate grapefruit.

UPDATE: Pattock points out in the comments that it's actually a papaya, not a grapefruit. I don't like papayas, so I would not be willing to eat papaya while wearing Joan Collins' outfit. PATSP regrets the error.

More Adam and Tracy.

So what do we think? Any guesses on either plant ID? Thoughts on Dynasty? Anything?

UPDATE: David Gray, in comments, proposed Bombax, which after a lot of looking around in search engines got me to Pseudobombax ellipticum, a few photos of which look enough like the plants in question that I'm prepared to consider the plant definitely ID'ed. See comments for links to photos.

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¹ There is also a . . . severely unnecessary-sounding reboot on the CW, which I have not seen, and cannot imagine ever wanting to see. 1981 Dynasty or nothing. Accept no substitutes.
² This is especially delicious because while I'm not 100% certain, I think that for some of the fighting, Joan Collins' stunt double is a man on whom the producers have put a wig, a dress, nail polish, and maybe a little makeup. It doesn't show up well in screencaps, unfortunately, but:

If true, the likely real reason is that they were having difficulty finding a stuntwoman of Joan Collins' proportions, but I prefer the magical realist interpretation, that Alexis is so enraged that she physically transforms, à la the Incredible Hulk.
³ More "talking in a lilting way," really, though apparently Collins actually can sing: she just wasn't doing it for this particular performance.
⁴ (heck yeah, you have)
⁵ (Of course Alexis Carrington would know Henry Kissinger socially.)
⁶ Yep, it's the one you're thinking of. The really bad one.
⁷ Blake, Jeff, Mark, and Adam all either commit or attempt rape at some point, and all four of them are intended to be sympathetic characters at least some of the time. I'm probably forgetting some, too. Dex, maybe? Nick Toscanni?
⁸ Here's what was hot, plant-wise, in the 1980s, as best as I can determine from watching all of two shows (I'm also including data from our hernia-surgery-driven re-watch of Star Trek: The Next Generation), in order of increasing surprise (to me) when it showed up on screen:
• Epipremnum aureum (pothos)
• Syngonium podophyllum (arrowhead vine), though I think some of them were artificial so maybe it doesn't count?
• The presence of palms wasn't a surprise, but the number of them were. I'm not good at palm IDs, so the only one I'm sure about is Caryota mitis (fishtail palm). I feel like I've noticed Caryota being more popular on recent TV as well, which is interesting if it's true: I've never had great experiences with them personally.
• Strelitzia nicolai (white bird of paradise)
• Dracaena marginata, Dracaena deremensis 'Janet Craig,' Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana'
• Hedera helix (English ivy)
• Schefflera actinophylla (umbrella tree)
• Spathiphyllum cvv. (peace lily), though mostly only the big cultivars, and not nearly as often as I expected
• Codiaeum variegatum (croton)
• Ficus benjamina (weeping fig)
• Dieffenbachia cvv. (dumb cane)
• Yucca guatemalensis (spineless yucca)
• Monstera deliciosa (split-leaf philodendron)
• Aechmea fasciata (silver vase plant) and bromeliads in general
• There was actually a plot line involving African violets, starting in the middle of season 4, though the way the show dealt with them, I suspect the writers didn't know that African violets (Saintpaulia cvv.) and violets (Viola spp.) are different, so I'm not sure this one should count either.
• Maranta leuconeura erythroneura (prayer plant)
• Pachira aquatica (money tree)
• Araucaria heterophylla (Norfolk Island pine)
• Fittonia albivenis (nerve plant)
• orchids in general, but mostly genera that aren't Phalaenopsis (in particular lots of Cymbidium)
• Philodendron erubescens 'Red Emerald' and the occasional self-heading Philodendron
• Cissus rhombifolia (grape ivy)
• large columnar cacti (e.g. Cereus peruvianus) and Euphorbias (e.g. E. ingens, E. trigona); presumably this is part of the 1980s southwestern obsession even though neither of these are native to the U.S. southwest
• Pachypodium spp. (Madagascar palm), in both Dynasty and ST:TNG
• Gynura aurantiaca (purple passion plant)
• Dynasty had a few Chamaedorea metallica, which surprised hell out of me, because I would definitely have remembered it if I'd seen any in stores or books at the time, and yet I'm positive I didn't encounter the species until the late 2000s.

Plants I expected to see a lot, based on my memories of the 1980s, and either didn't see at all or saw only very occasionally:
• Ficus lyrata (fiddle-leaf fig) and Ficus elastica (rubber plant)
• Crassula ovata (jade plant)
• Anthurium andreanum hybrids (there are some, but almost always as cut flowers, rather than entire plants)
• Strelitzia reginae (orange bird of paradise) (again, always as cut flowers)
• Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant, airplane plant, mala madre)
• Aglaonema cvv. (Chinese evergreen) (though there were a few)
• Tradescantia zebrina (wandering Jew)
• Asparagus cvv. (asparagus fern) (though Dynasty has a few in exterior shots, and there is an A. plumosus in an interior shot early in season 5)
• Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant) (there are a couple in Dynasty, just not many; Star Trek: TNG has several)
• Philodendron bipinnatifidum (split-leaf philodendron) (though Dynasty has some in outdoor landscaping shots because they filmed in California, where P. bipinnatifidum can grow outdoors, instead of Denver, where they cannot, even though the story is supposedly set in Denver)
• Cordyline fruticosa (ti plant)
• cane Begonia cvv.

Question for the Hive Mind: Hippeastrum NOID

A reader sent me this photo of a bloom stalk on their unidentified Hippeastrum.

That sure looks like the plant is building full-sized leaves under the flower buds. I did an image search that turned up a few sort of similar things, but I didn't find any photos that showed anything quite as large and leaf-like as this. Most of the Hippeastrum photos out there don't show anything remotely leaf-like at all.

So I guess the question for readers is just, what exactly is going on here? I know what it looks like -- it looks like this plant is trying to build a plantlet on its bloom stalk, like it's a Phalaenopsis or Agave or something -- but that's not something Hippeastrum actually does, is it?

Question for the Hive Mind: Unknown Weed

This plant had leaves similar to those of the strawberries it was growing among; I didn't realize it was something else until it had gotten noticeably taller than the strawberries, and started blooming. I suppose I don't actually have to know what it is, but I'm curious, and a bit of poking around online didn't help. Anyone know?

Question for the Hive Mind: Purple Flower

My mother would like to know what this is, and I have no idea:

Location: shady yard, Iowa. She didn't plant it deliberately but would like more of them. Anybody recognize it?

UPDATE: Thanks.

By the way: Mom acknowledges that it maybe isn't the healthiest larkspur in the world, but considering that she's done nothing to care for it (she never even planted it there in the first place), she figures it's doing pretty well for itself.

Anthurium no. 0501 "Freddie Prinze Charming" / Question for the Hive Mind / New Plant

I have news and a question, so let's zip through the critique of Freddie as quickly as possible:

Freddie's pink/pink, which is boring, but still maybe worth a second look, since he appears to be more thrips-resistant than average, and is much more resistant than his siblings. This is particularly the case with the spathes,

but the leaves are less terrible than usual as well.

Don't know if this will be enough to keep him around over the long-term, but he'll survive the next purge or two.

The news: for reasons I may or may not ever explain, I've bought a new houseplant book last week, and in the course of reading it to determine whether I approve of it or not, the bit about calla lilies (Zantedeschia cvv.) jumped out at me. I've long admired Zantedeschias, but had been under the impression that they wouldn't be good plants for me to try, because of the dormancy period and general fussiness, so I've never attempted it, but the author of the new book is very enthusiastic and encouraging about them. And I've been doing okay with a few winter-dormant plants lately (Amorphophallus,¹ Eucodonia), so when I saw one I liked at the ex-job last Friday, I went ahead and bought it.

Since the purchase, though, I've noticed a few things that make me wonder whether this was a bad idea. First, the author of the book is pretty enthusiastic and encouraging about everything. As far as I'm concerned, it's irresponsible to suggest that anyone grow Hedera helix indoors, and recommending Selaginella or (oh my goodness) junipers (!) is criminally so, so I probably should not have trusted the author's judgment on this to the degree I did.

On-line advice about growing Zantedeschia indoors comes from sources I consider questionable as well, but they can't agree on whether it's a good idea: advice ranges from yes, it'll live for years and produce breathtaking long-lived blooms every time you sneeze, they're wonderful, go for it to it's absolutely not worth the trouble, throw it in the garbage when it goes dormant.

So I'm looking for advice from people who have actually grown Zantedeschia before. Could you overwinter one and get it to resprout in the spring? What about reblooming? Will it work if they're indoors all year, or do they need to be outside during the summer? Was your plant(s) prone to pests?² Rot? If it's dead, what killed it? Etc.

Whether it's a permanent resident or not, it's lovely. I just need to know how low to set my expectations.

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¹ Though I'm beginning to worry about the Amorphophallus bulbs now. I dumped them out of the pots a couple months ago to divide them, and there were five bulbs total, so I gave them each a pot of its own and have had them outside for a while, figuring that the heat would encourage them to get moving, but we're about a week late now, so I'm worried that they've all rotted.
² My plant, unfortunately, has spider mites or thrips or both, because it did not occur to me to check inside the flower until I'd already brought the plant in the house. I have some optimism that it might be possible to end this with frequent soapy-water sprays, since the infestation appears to be pretty small and isolated to the bloom.
Then I remember how frequently I've been optimistic about thrips before, and how that optimism has never not even once been justified, and . . . well, you know.

Question for the Hive Mind: Trifolium pratense

There's nothing new going on here at the moment -- believe me, I tried to find something better than this to talk about¹ -- so I thought this might be a good moment to ask a question that's been rattling around in my head for a couple years instead.

Why do people not deliberately cultivate red clover (Trifolium pratense) in their gardens?

I mean, yeah, I get that it's weedy and would tend to take over, given enough time, but gardeners overlook that in other plants, so it doesn't seem like that would be enough to disqualify it. And rabbits like it, but again -- that doesn't stop anybody from growing lots of other stuff. And it has good points. The flowers are pleasant, and numerous,

and even mildly fragrant. Bees love them. They improve the nitrogen content of the soil. There's a medicinal use for them.² The plants quickly reach a mature height of about two feet tall and then stop getting taller, which seems to me like it should be a good quality for an outdoor plant.

So I'm just wondering. Last year, I let a couple grow in the Portulaca bed, and that seemed to work out fine for me,³ so I'm just wondering why nobody else does it. I assume there's a reason. Or several.

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¹ There have been a few new first-time Anthurium blooms (0335 "Donna Fanuday," 0346 "Lois Carmen DiNominatre," 0360 "Heidi Gosique," 0373 "Shangela Laquifa Wadley," 0597 "Raven"), but Shangela is hideous, Donna, Lois, and Raven aren't fully opened up yet and have so far photographed terribly, and Heidi is basically a repeat of 0357 "Rhea Litré." I mean, I'll get to all of them eventually, I'm sure, but as a group they're kind of underwhelming. And in any case I'll have to sort through a bunch of photos first.
² I'm not generally that impressed by claims that a garden plant can be used medicinally, because I really kinda feel like people are better off not gambling with self-administering unproven chemicals they don't really understand, at an unknown dose, with no supervision by a medical professional, but some people consider it a point in a plant's favor if it's "useful" for something, so that seems like it should be a point in favor of deliberate cultivation.
³ Didn't this year, because they were getting so big so early that they threatened to shade out the reseeded Portulaca grandiflora before it even had a chance to germinate. And yes, that means I've had a lot of seedlings to pull up. But the Trifolium is a much easier weed problem to deal with than, say, dandelions, maple tree seedlings, Oxalis, lamb's quarters, or crabgrass. If not for the Portulaca, I would have been perfectly happy to let the clover have the bed this year.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum bellatulum

I really like this flower, but I'm not going to talk about it because there's something else on my mind.

About a week ago, I received this comment on the "Comment Policy" page:¹

Please do not post pictures of my plants unless you ask my permission...owner, Phrag. Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane' AM/AOS CCM/AOS

Which refers to this post from 2012.² This confused me on multiple levels, since the plant's owner was not being disparaged in any way (indeed, the photo contained no text which could have identified him³ as the owner), and since I felt like the term orchid show sort of implies that people might, you know, look at the orchids.⁴ Photography is not discouraged at the show, and it could hardly be a surprise to the orchid's owner that people photographed his plant, since at least a third of the people at the show, every year, are walking around with cameras and sort of obviously taking pictures of things. The way the comment was phrased, it seemed like the objectionable part was the posting of the photo, but the photo -- that specific arrangement of pixels -- belongs to me, legally, and I can do whatever I like with it, regardless of who the subject belongs to, so if that's the problem then somebody's just going to have to deal.⁵

I spent a few days being kind of riled up about this, and then I remembered something. Rarely, I get comments on the orchid picture posts complimenting me on my beautiful orchids or whatever, in the sort of way that implies that the people leaving the comments believe -- in spite of comments to the contrary and tags like "Wallace's Orchid Show 2014" -- that the orchids in the photos belong to me. So perhaps the person leaving the comment believes that I'm misrepresenting the orchid in the photo as being my own plant, rather than his. I don't think that would technically be illegal to do, but obviously it'd be kinda douchey of me if I were.⁶

So. For the record.⁷

• Displaying pretty things in public, at a show, where photography is not only not prohibited but actively encouraged, is likely to result in people taking photos of the pretty things. If this is a problem for you, you should probably stop entering your orchids in shows which are open to the public.
• Photographs legally belong to the photographer who takes them unless / until the rights to the photo are sold or the photos specifically placed in the public domain. I don't have to ask anybody's permission to post my own photos on my own blog, no matter what the photos are of.
• All the PATSP posts tagged with "Wallace's Orchid Show [year]," where "[year]" = 2010 or any year after 2010, do not depict my own plants and were never intended to imply that they did depict my own plants.

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Photo credits: mine, mine, all mine (though the plant is not mine)

¹ Which I published and then accidentally deleted, so you won't see it if you go there. For future reference: there is a "Delete forever? (Cannot be undone)" checkbox on the comment-deletion screen, but whether you check the box or not, there is no way to recover deleted comments. The only difference checking the box makes is that if you check the box, it will be as if the comment never existed in the first place, and if you don't check the box, the comment will be replaced by a line saying "This comment has been removed by a blog administrator."
So if you publish a comment and then have second thoughts about it, your options are between having it publicly readable forever, or having it publicly unreadable forever -- there's no option to take it down temporarily but preserve the option of restoring it later, even if "cannot be undone" implies that there is a way to undo the deletion.
² And this photo, specifically:


³ Pretty sure it's a him, based on blog statistics from the same time, the members of the Illowa Orchid Society named at its home page, and Google. And the sense of entitlement the comment projects.
⁴ I mean, it's not the 2011 Illowa Orchid Society Describe, now, is it?
⁵ In the U.S., at least, people can apparently take a photo of you whenever you're in public and reproduce it however they like, with certain exceptions made for context. Like, you can't use a random photo of some guy to illustrate a newspaper article about alcoholism without getting the model's permission, lest it appear that you're saying they're an alcoholic. But otherwise, there's a general assumption that being in public means you've implicitly given permission to have your picture taken. And that's for people. (Ref.) I imagine there's probably even less of an expectation of privacy when you're a plant. And less still when you're a plant that has been entered in a public orchid show.
⁶ (It's maybe worth pointing out that the original comment doesn't say that. This is just my guess as to what's bothering the guy. A literal reading of the comment implies that he believes that he owns any photos taken of his orchids, and that he should be consulted before anything's done with said photos.)
⁷ As far as I can tell, the guy who left the comment hasn't come back to the blog and will probably never see this defense of mine anyway. I suppose if the situation comes up again, I at least have the defense all written out and linkable now.

Question for the Hive Mind: Amorphophallus

The Amorphophallus konjac is back for another year, and for the first time has produced multiple leaves, which is exciting. The main leaf is at least double the size of last year's.

In addition, 2014 is seeing the premiere of Amorphophallus bulbifer, which I got from a reader. Its leaf came up first, before there was enough light for it, and as a result the petiole was stretched and floppy. It also had a mysteriously bad spider mite infestation flare up just before I put it outside for the summer. But these things do happen, and it didn't seem likely to affect the plant in the long term, so I was willing to roll with it.

Last year, there had been a problem with the A. konjac blowing over in the wind, so this year, I prepared for that by setting both plants in tall, heavy cachepots. And that lasted for maybe four days.

Left: A. konjac. Right: A. bulbifer.
And then there was some wind one evening, not even very strong wind, really, and I awoke the next morning to this:

I guess the leaves are going to die then. I suppose that means the tubers are gone too. Oh well, I thought, suddenly nonchalant at the prospect of losing plants I'd been very happy about a few days prior.

Except that the leaves haven't died. The petioles are still bent, but a few days after bending, they still appear to be functional, even after a second evening of wind blew them back the opposite direction. Which leads to the questions:

1) If the leaves did die, does that automatically mean that the tubers will die too? Will they try to make replacement leaves? If so, should I be cutting them off now so that the tubers can send up a (hopefully sturdier) replacement before the summer's over?
2) Should I be trying to, I dunno, put a splint on the petioles or something? I figure sticking in an actual stake is probably no good (since any stake shoved into the soil next to the petiole will hit and maybe damage the tuber), but I could surely find something to attach to the petiole to keep it straight, if that's something I should be doing.

EDIT: The species name is actually A. bulbifer, not A. bulbiferum. PATSP regrets the error.

Random plant event: Huernia oculata, Plus an Outdoor Question

I realize that I just posted about Huernia oculata a month ago, and it wasn't that interesting then either, but not much is going on with the non-Anthurium plants lately. This is also the first bloom I've seen on this particular specimen of H. oculata, which presumably makes it at least a little newsworthy even if it isn't fully open yet.

On an unrelated note: when we first moved to this house, I had bought a bunch of plants from the ex-job. Planted most of them in containers, because we didn't have beds established yet (and, five years later, we still mostly don't, though we're working on it), and I remember being struck by one color combination in particular -- Geranium 'Rozanne' (blue-violet) and some unnamed red-orange Zinnia. (See the last picture on this post.)

I'm wanting to do something like that again somewhere, eventually, though maybe with something more of a true blue and true orange. Would anybody want to recommend some plants for me? Ideally, they would:

1) Be reseeding annuals (preferred) or slowly-spreading perennials, that
2) bloom at more or less the same time (ideally over a long period of time),
3) either aren't fussy as to soil type or could live together in the same soil type, whatever the ideal type might be,
4) could coexist for a reasonably long time without one crowding or shading the other out,
5) would survive a very windy, bright location in zone 5b.

The idea got re-sparked when I ran across the Annie's Annuals page for Nigella damascena 'Miss Jekyll Dark Blue'; I'm also possibly interested in thoughts on Lobelia erinus 'Monsoon', Eschscholzia californica, orange Tagetes patula cultivars, Zinnias, or whatever.

Question for the Hive Mind: Blog Subscriptions

For unknown reasons, I've gotten two e-mails in the last week that asked how to subscribe to PATSP, and . . . well, I have no idea how to answer them, aside from telling people to find a feed reader and subscribe to the PATSP RSS feed. It's not a problem I've had to deal with personally, because Blogger comes with a feed reader and has not yet given me any reason to look for something else, but if people are going to keep asking, I suppose I should try to figure out a good answer. People especially seem to want to know how to get new posts sent to e-mail. (I'm kind of against that, since I want you to have to come here to read it -- if you don't visit the page, I have no way of knowing you ever read anything. But I can't make you come here if you don't wanna.)

So: how do you keep up with new PATSP posts? Feed reader? Just check in every so often? Something else? What should I be answering, when people ask how to subscribe to PATSP?

Question for the Hive Mind: a new bug

I did not ask for a new bug. And if I had, I would have been asking for a new bug to replace the scale, not a new bug to add to the scale, much like Huey Lewis wanted a new drug to replace the problematic drugs he had previously tried, not because he wanted more variety in his drug use.¹ And yet.

The problem is that I don't actually know what new bug I have, nor how to make it go away. So I'm asking y'all for thoughts.

Relevant details:

It seems exclusively interested in Aglaonemas, and only two or three varieties of Aglaonema to boot.²

It looks basically like household dust. In fact, it looks so much like household dust that I've been assuming for quite a while that that's what it was.

The overall orange/red tint to the photo is because of the light source I was using, and is not the actual leaf color.
The dust hypothesis didn't actually make that much sense, because it was only ever on certain specific leaves, and was sometimes accompanied by weird brown-orange discoloration at the leaf margins.

When I tried to find an unaffected leaf for comparison purposes, I noticed that all the leaves seem to be doing this to some degree or another, but I think the picture above gives the general idea. They all eventually wind up looking like the leaf on the left, but are supposed to look more like the leaf on the right.
I don't know why the margins would be discolored, though, as the bugs seem pretty evenly distributed across the whole upper surface of the leaves.

There were also frequently sticky droplets of something or another. The droplets didn't alarm me terribly, because a lot of my Aglaonema varieties produce sticky droplets on the outside of the spathes when they produce flowers, and I first noticed the "dust" as the first affected plant was flowering. I'm still not 100% convinced that the droplets are related to the bugs, actually.

It doesn't seem to be particularly harming the plants, aside from the marginal discoloration, and the margin thing has really only been going on with 'Emerald Bay.'

So why do I think there's even a problem? Because I checked the leaves out with the microscope. As usual, getting decent photos with the microscope is nearly impossible, so forgive the quality, but you can see a couple mite-like things in the center of this photo, a relatively in-focus third one just above and barely to the right of those, and pieces of blurrier ones here and there around the periphery of the photo.

Which, it looks like an arthropod, not an insect: blurry though the picture is, it's pretty clear that they're holding four legs in front of the body, and either one or two pairs behind it. Plus there's that overall tick-/ mite-shape going on.

Obviously there are many, many species of mite, but the only ones I know of that make a habit of attacking houseplants are the two-spotted spider mite and the cyclamen mite, and I don't think these are either of those two species. Under the microscope, spider mites are 1) much larger, 2) yellowish and opaque, instead of translucent white, 3) inclined to stay mostly on the underside of leaves (these mites are almost 100% on the upper leaf surface), 4) detectable by the visible webbing they create, and 5) will move while you're looking at them under the microscope. I've never directly observed cyclamen mites under the microscope, but the pictures that come up in Google are of rounder, smoother creatures with stubbier legs. Cyclamen mites mostly look like white jellybeans, as far as I can tell, which these do not.

It's conceivable that I'm actually seeing the dead skins left after the mites molted.³ That's happened before, with the deep-sea crab/skeleton/spider/ghost things (probably actually aphids) I talk about at the end of this post, and would explain the translucent whiteness and lack of movement. I am also willing to entertain the possibility that my Aglaonemas are being haunted by the ghosts of deceased spider mites, because that likewise explains the translucent whiteness and makes about as much sense as anything else.

Of course I've Googled. There's plenty out there about spider mites and Aglaonemas, but nothing about any other kinds of mite.

So far, I've tried imidacloprid (when I was putting imidacloprid in all the plants), which definitely did not get rid of the infestation, and wiping the leaves with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel, which I did too recently to know about its effectiveness. (My guess: yeah, it'll probably work, but I'm going to have to do it several more times.)

So what about it? Anybody seen anything like this before? Have any suggestions for what I could do to find out what I've got, or how to make them go away? Suggestions for dealing with spider mite ghosts are especially welcome, since Google is as silent on the topic as you'd expect.

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¹ Side note: it's a little peculiar that he's asking for "one that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with you." 'Cause, you know, if you've got that in drug form, then you don't actually need the girl anymore, right? I mean, wouldn't it make more sense to just spend a lot of time with her, since she already exists and makes him feel exactly like he feels when he's with her, rather than asking the world's chemists to go to the trouble of inventing a whole new drug with these super-specific effects? I think about these things. Maybe Huey Lewis should too.
² Almost all of it has been on 'Emerald Bay,' which is in my office. Also affected: 'Golden Bay,' 'Diamond Bay,' and 'Brilliant,' all of which are in the living room. 'Gold Dust,' which sits right next to 'Emerald Bay,' and has been for quite a while, doesn't seem to have the problem at all, though.
³ If you're into video of spider mites running around and molting -- and who among us isn't? -- check this out:

Six Plants I'm Not Currently Mad At / Poll for the Hive Mind

Oh, Mr. Subjunctive, you silly goose, why do you have to be so negative all the time? Why phrase it as "plants I'm not currently mad at," instead of "plants I love," or "plants that are doing well," or something along those lines?

That's . . . a really good question. I'm pretty sure some of it is just that I'm a relentlessly negative person.¹ And there's also the issue that lots of other blogs use phrasings like "plants I love," and I'm trying to be different.

But there's also the issue of plant betrayal. In the seven or so years I've been doing this, I've been deliriously happy with any number of plants that later turned on me. Euphorbia trigona, once a darling, is now a constant struggle with fungus. Hoyas always seem to succumb to some kind of dramatic and sudden collapse.² Cordyline fruticosa never quite shook the spider mites. I miss one watering and the Episcias all collapse on me, or get devoured by caterpillars, or turn brown and dry out. That sort of thing. And I occasionally wind up looking at one of those older posts, where I'm talking about how delighted I am with a plant, and feel stupid, because I know that a few months or years later, I couldn't stand that plant anymore, or it was dead, or whatever.

Therefore, it needs a qualifier. I'm not mad at them at the moment. Three months from now? Anything could happen. This is a terrible attitude to have, but . . . .

I guess I have no conclusion to that sentence; it's just a terrible attitude. (I never promised to be inspirational.)

These six plants are also the leading candidates for the next plant profile, by the way. I have no strong preference about which I want to write about, so I figured I'd put it up for a vote. So be ready for that, at the end of the post.

Here we go. In no particular order:

1. Breynia disticha 'Roseo-Picta'

Breynia disticha turns out to be a very different plant if you let it spend a summer outside than it is if you make it stay indoors all summer taking violin lessons, or whatever it is you make your Breynias do. It's not that it was growing poorly for me inside, exactly, but it wasn't getting enough light to produce any variegated leaves, the branches were flopping over into all the plants around them,³ and it wasn't branching very much.

Once it went outside for a summer, though, all that changed. Faster growth, all sorts of color, branching -- almost everything turned around. The floppy branches are apparently just Breynia's thing, because that part didn't get any better. But still.

It had been a pretty good plant for me before this, too, as far as that goes. Aside from a brief and easily-won bout with spider mites, there have been no pest problems, and although it wilts dramatically whenever I'm the slightest bit late with the water, it always bounces right back once I give it a good soaking. I've propagated from cuttings a few times (difficult, but doable), humidity seems not to be a big issue, and it's even flowered for me once, not that the flowers are a particularly big deal.


2. Philodendron mexicanum

My original cutting of Philodendron mexicanum got too long to be manageable, so I chopped it up into two-node cuttings and rooted them in water. They all got busy building roots immediately, so now I have a pot with three plants in it, which is the one in the picture.

Like some other vining Philodendrons, P. mexicanum is maybe a little too enthusiastic for its own good (I'm already contemplating chopping up the original cutting again, and it hasn't been that long. A year, maybe?), but the leaves are really lovely (I neglected to choose a photo that shows the red-brown undersides, though if you're interested you can check out this post.), and it's easy to grow, as far as I can tell. Fairly weak artificial light, normal indoor temperatures and humidity, water every two to four weeks.

My only problem to date has been with thrips, of all things. They weren't that hard to get rid of, but they were surprisingly fond of the plant, and apparently used it as a species headquarters, from which they launched expeditions to the neighboring plants.


3. Beaucarnea recurvata

This is probably the most unexpected plant to land on this list. It's not that it was ever doing poorly, exactly; it's more that it's never done much of anything at all. The reason turned out to be pot size and light intensity: after five and a half years of leaving it alone, I repotted it and gave it some direct sun, and bam, new growth. Quite a bit of it, even. (I'm sad to think of how disappointed it will be this winter: I doubt I'll be able to spare a direct-sun spot once all the plants come in from outside.⁴)

Even without new growth, though, it was one of those plants I could depend on not to give me any drama. It was fine with the variable temperature in the plant room, it never got any pests, and if it was unpropagatable, it was at least durable.

The propagation thing is likely to continue to be a problem in the future, but otherwise, I feel like I may finally have figured Beaucarnea recurvata out.


4. Polyscias fruticosa

And then Polyscias fruticosa is probably the most obvious plant to go on the list. I've even been publicly happy with it in the past. I have some pretty serious concerns about it for the future,⁵ but right now, at this particular moment, all is well, and it's been thriving. I'm also pretty pleased with the cultivars I have ('Elegans' and 'Snowflake,' which is just variegated 'Elegans'), and have managed to propagate 'Elegans' a few times, albeit with some difficulty. They're all perfectly happy, and even pest-free (knock wood), so long as I give them some direct sun every day and don't get too unpredictable with the water (both too much and too little leads to defoliation, though too little seems to be worse).

The best part is that as it ages, the plant is developing a sort of Cousin Itt (or possibly Gossamer?) look, which I enjoy.


5. Scindapsus pictus

I have one main problem with Scindapsus pictus, which is that I tend to forget that it exists. Which is to say that whenever I'm listing plants in my mind, in whatever category, I never remember to include it.

It's a perfectly nice plant, as plants go. I treat it horribly: it's on a shelf a couple inches below other plants, which block most of the light. It gets air-conditioning blasted directly at it during the summer. I'm pretty sure the soil hasn't been changed since I bought it in July 2008. But no worries! Scindapsus just keeps plugging away, slowly building leaf after leaf, without complaining or getting bugs. It's the damnedest thing.

I've had an S. pictus many years ago that wasn't nearly as forgiving; this is far enough in the past that I couldn't guess what the problem might have been. So it's possible that I've just been bizarrely lucky for five straight years.

I have yet to attempt propagation, because it's not necessarily a plant I want more of. Maybe someday.


6. Stromanthe sanguinea cvv.

Finally, I continue to be impressed with Stromanthe sanguinea. I have two varieties of it, 'Triostar' (shown) and 'Magicstar,' both of which are much easier to grow than anything from the Marantaceae ought to be.

It's not perfect. There's an unfortunate tendency to develop spider mites, and there are limits to how large of a pot I can use here in the house, because the root systems are relatively shallow and rot-prone, so I can only up-pot for just so long before it's time to start over again with a freshly-propagated plant. Even so, being able to grow something this attractive at all is awfully cool. And when I need to propagate, it's always been game, which is a definite bonus.


So see? I can say nice things about the plants sometimes.




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¹ No. Really. I am. It's okay. I don't mind. Usually.
² Though it's possible that I'm on the verge of figuring that one out. All the Hoyas that have succumbed to Sudden Hoya Death Syndrome were also not getting any direct sun at the time of death. The cause-and-effect relationship is murky, but in the absence of any other leads, I'm thinking this must be the key, somehow.
³ Which was a problem, because the plants around the oldest and largest Breynia were mostly Euphorbia trigona. Top-heavy thorny plants shouldn't be placed next to floppy-branched leafy plants, as a rule: you wind up losing hours of your life trying to untangle them from one another.
⁴ Next summer, though: look out! I'm putting the Beaucarnea outside, and fully expect it to grow substantially before autumn arrives. A friend in town has a Beaucarnea that she puts outside every year, and it is amazing. (Had I been thinking, I'd have gotten a picture for you, but I wasn't.)
⁵ It's 1) a very big plant, with 2) brown, woody stems and 3) lots of delicately-cut leaves, living 4) in a room where scale has recently been discovered. If scale decided to take up residence there, I stand very little chance of catching the infestation early. I've added some pre-emptive imidacloprid to the soil, as well as to the soil of some of its neighbors, but if you look closely at the photo, you may be able to make out a faint aura of doom around the plant.

Pretty picture: Aphelandra squarrosa

I hear they're not particularly satisfying houseplants, in the long-term, but I do sometimes feel mildly bad about never having tried an Aphelandra squarrosa. This one was at the ex-job, quite a while ago.

I'm not sure exactly why I feel like I should have attempted it -- it's not as though there's a list of Houseplants You Must Try If You're Going To Be Into Houseplants. (And if there were such a list, Aphelandra probably wouldn't be on it.¹) But that's sort of what it feels like.

So what about it, readers? Have I been missing out on something awesome? Or is A. squarrosa as disappointing as I've heard?

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¹ What would be on that list? Well, pothos, obviously. Codiaeum. Sansevieria trifasciata. Dracaena fragrans and D. marginata. Schlumbergera? African violets? Peperomia obtusifolia. Araucaria heterophylla / A. columnaris. Dieffenbachia. Phalaenopsis. Crassula ovata. Spathiphyllum. At this point I suppose I'm just listing plants I see for sale a lot. And some of those wouldn't actually be fair to inflict on someone who was new to houseplants. (Codiaeum wouldn't be fair to inflict on someone experienced, as far as that goes.)

Question for the Hive Mind: Roadside Weeds / Wildflowers

The second and third of these are technically not roadside plants, but the first one is:

I don't recall ever seeing it before, but they're everywhere all of a sudden.

UPDATE: it's a Vernonia (ironweed), possibly V. baldwinii. Thanks to Claude and joeym.

The other two plants were in a heavily wooded park in Iowa City about a week ago. The first, I'm fairly sure, is some kind of Arisaema. I don't know if it's possible to narrow it down to a species from these pictures or not.

UPDATE: Everybody seems pretty convinced that this is Arisaema triphyllum (jack in the pulpit). Thanks to Ed Kramer, joeym, and anonymous.

The other plant from the park has flowers reminiscent of both chicory (Cichorium intybus) and meadow campion (Silene latifolia), but it's not either of those. Something related?

UPDATE: Looks like this is a Lactuca sp., possibly Lactuca floridana. Thanks to The Phytophactor and Review for their help.

Any guesses on any of these?