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.

In Which I Lose All Respect for the Burgess Seed and Plant Co. of Bloomington, IL

The husband gets some outdoor gardening catalogs, which is a long story.

The two we've gotten so far (Gurney's and Burgess) each have a single page devoted to house plants, which in Gurney's case seems to mean mostly citrus and bananas. The Burgess catalog, though, is a little more experimental, and includes (in addition to the citrus and bananas) a few weirder things, like a yellow Schlumbergera, a Stapelia, and a Billbergia. And then we have this:


There are many, many things wrong with this ad, but I suppose one has to begin the critique with the observation that the plant in the illustration is not a prayer plant. I see a vague resemblance to Aphelandra squarrosa, or perhaps tobacco. I might even believe Aglaonema. But there's nothing called "prayer plant" that looks anything like this picture.

Unlike the descriptions of the Schlumbergera, Stapelia, and Billbergia, there's no botanical name included in the description, but the most likely plant being offered, if they're calling it a "prayer plant," would be a Maranta leuconeura: there are several varieties of those, and it's a little obnoxious that they don't tell you which one you're getting, but that's probably at least the species. It's not the only possibility, though: other plants in the Marantaceae also raise and lower their leaves, and a couple Calatheas were also called "prayer plants" in the davesgarden.com database. (Also, the sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, folds up its leaves at night and is therefore a remote possibility, though I've never seen it called a prayer plant.)

"Large, variegated, and several lovely shades of green" is about as useless of a description as I could imagine:

• That the greens are "lovely" tells you exactly jack and shit.
• "Large" isn't quantified, though if you were going by the illustration, I suppose you'd deduce that the leaves are about the size of a child's head, which is what, like, ten inches (25 cm) long? Give or take?
• "Variegated" means at least two colors, so "variegated" plus "several shades of green" is redundant and uninformative.

There's no way a person could deduce from the description and illustration that a Maranta is what's being offered, unless one knew about Marantas first.

The word "mystifying," in this context, gives me a sharp, stabbing pain behind my left eye. Or at least it did until I read the dictionary.reference.com definition of "mystify," which is:

1. to perplex (a person) by playing upon the person's credulity; bewilder purposely. 2. to involve in mystery or obscurity.

These are, of course, exactly the things being done by the catalog.

(It's not a mystery, by the way. We know what's going on. As mentioned in the profile for Maranta leuconeura, the raising and lowering of the leaves are accomplished by the plant pumping water into, then out of, specialized structures at the base of the petioles, in response to changes in the amount or color of the light. I mean, there's no shame in being mystified when you first hear about it, but if you let it stop there. . . .)

"In the solitude of evening" is also problematic, if you try to figure out what it means. The plant will only raise its leaves if there are no people nearby? Evenings are solitary? I suppose that's technically true, in the sense that you never have more than one evening happening simultaneously -- there are no gangs of evenings roaming the streets of Los Angeles or anything -- but "solitude" is meaningless in this context. Which I could forgive if it were evocative or poetic, but it's the sort of cliche that belongs in angsty 14-year-olds' poetry and Nine Inch Nails lyrics (But I repeat myself!), not in gardening catalogs.

"Thrives anywhere" is of course not true for any plant, which sort of calls into question "you'll receive strong, well-established plants" as well.

And then there's the weirdness of the little girl praying to the plant. I mean, I know that it's not supposed to be the girl praying to the plant. It's supposed to be a rebus. Prayer + plant = Prayer plant. But still. It's a little girl praying to a plant.

"Screw your 'Jesus,' mother! This Ficus is my god now!"
All of which, taken together, raises the question: why? It's not like it's hard to get a picture of a plant, in these days of digital photography. I could see it, maybe, if this were a case where the original illustration's just getting copied over from year to year, but you would think that at some point, someone would have pointed out that this isn't a very accurate picture of the product, and that better illustrations would be easily and cheaply available. Like, maybe a customer might have said something about expecting a plant with child-head-sized leaves and not getting one. It just seems dumb, to misrepresent your product like this. Hell, it's not even an attractive picture of the plant in question. It'd be understandable (if not forgivable) if it were an unrealistic illustration that made the plant look better than it is. But, y'know, this is a Maranta:


Tell me that isn't a better-looking plant than Burgess' green-brown Aphelandra-tobacco thing.

This picture makes me even more wary of ordering anything from Burgess than I would have been anyway. Sure, the blue spruce looks blue (practically cobalt, actually -- subtlety, thy name is not Burgess Seed and Plant Co.), but how do I know what color it really is, if they're going to pull crap like this with the prayer plant?


And then I saw their "3-in-1 angel trumpet," which looked . . . troubling, in a way I couldn't quite pin down. All I could tell was, some amateurish photo manipulation had happened, but it wasn't clear exactly what. So I took pictures of the catalog, uploaded one to the computer to use for this blog post, and was cropping and adjusting the color and all that when I figured out how I knew it was photoshopped.

Not only is it really unrealistic that a plant like this could produce three different colors of blooms, evenly distributed, all over the plant (it's surely got to be grafted, right? So there's a white branch, and a yellow branch, and a peach branch, but not white, yellow, and peach flowers arising from any one particular branch. Either that or the flowers change color with age, which is probably a much less dramatic color change than peach to yellow to white), and not only are the flowers never overlapped by leaves, yet often obscured by one another, but many of the flowers are exact copies of one other.

You'll probably have to open this in a separate window to see that they're duplicated. I've helpfully circled some sets of copies. In the gray-circled and pink-circled sets, they've tried to disguise the copying by making some of them mirror images.
Deception is bad enough, but this is incredibly lazy deception.

So, in conclusion: not if you were the last plant-related business on earth, Burgess. Not if you were the last plant-related business on earth.