Anthurium no. 0428 "Helen Bach" / Unfinished Business

Sometimes it's worth waiting for the second bloom before deciding what to do with a seedling, and sometimes it's not. Here was Helen's first inflorescence:

The second was a little less chewed-up, but otherwise indistinguishable:

Neither the leaves nor the plant as a whole are particularly interesting, either.

So Helen's probably gone in the next purge.

In other seedling news, we've gotten a second bloom from 0512 Landon Sky, which is decidedly worse than the original (and the original was pretty bad).

L: first bloom, 29 December 2015. R: second bloom, 26 August 2016.
The original assessment of Landon was that he was obviously not a keeper, but I'd probably keep him around out of laziness, unless he developed some sort of dramatic pest problem. Not sure that this quite qualifies, but he's basically daring me to throw him out.

Also testing boundaries: 0532 Amber Alert.

L-R: 25 October 2015, 6 February 2016, 1 September 2016.
I mean, none of those were great, but that last one is just pitiful. So, odds are, both Landon and Amber will be in a landfill shortly after you read this. Helen isn't fantastic, but she's at least moving in the right direction.

Anthurium no. 1038 "Adlai Lowe"

I swear that was the name 1038 got assigned forever ago; I didn't change it to fit this bloom. I just got really lucky, because the bloom is literally very close to the soil line, and also it's about as tiny and inconspicuous as an Anthurium bloom can possibly be.

Adlai is also noteworthy for blooming while in a 3-inch pot; it's not the first seedling to try (that'd be 0835 Brenda Dharling), but it's the first one to succeed (Brenda's first bud aborted).¹ If you call this "succeeding." It still hasn't unfurled its spathe all the way yet (because it physically can't), so it's maybe cheating a little bit to count this as a completed bloom.

In any case. I appreciated the enthusiasm, if not the results, so I moved Adlai up to a 4-inch pot in early April, and we'll see what he does with that. I don't expect the bloom to be especially exciting -- I mean, we can see that the spathe is red, so unless the spadix is bioluminescent or metallic or something it's not going to be anything we haven't seen before -- but it's earned the chance to try again, I feel.

The foliage is pretty typical, if on the small side:

The plant as a whole is unremarkable as well, though some of that's because there's so little plant there to remark on.² I mostly wanted to include this photo so you'd have more context for the size of the spathe:

(The sides of the pot are 2 in. / 5 cm long.)
Oh, and I suppose I should mention that if you count this as a bloom, Adlai is, technically, the first second-generation seedling to bloom. If you're holding out for a more traditional F2 inflorescence (visible to the naked eye, possessing a peduncle and a visible spadix, etc.), you'll have to wait until mid-June. Though that one's disappointing as well, in a different way.³ So far, the full list of attempted blooms from the F2s is:

The ones that are now dead because of scale
0687 Pauline Pantsdown: pink?, daughter of 0273 Wes Coast (pink / pink)
0654 Rosie Cheeks: no color recorded,⁴ daughter of 0276 Zach Religious (pink / orange)

The ones that aborted buds and haven't tried again yet
0721 Chandelier Divine Brown: red or pink-red, daughter of 0005 Chad Michaels (dark red / green)
0799 Hope Sandreams: pink-red, daughter of 0108 Deena Sequins (red / purple)

The ones that are still in progress
0805 Triana Hill: light pink or maybe peach?, daughter of 0234 Ross Koz (purple-pink / yellow)⁵
0694 Brad Romance: light pink?, son of 0005 Chad Michaels (dark red / green)⁶
0698 Landon Cider: red, son of 0005 Chad Michaels (dark red / green)
0855 The Very Miss Dusty O: light pink or pink, daughter of 0234 Ross Koz (purple-pink / yellow)
0811 Alma Children: red, daughter of 0234 Ross Koz (purple-pink / yellow)

Completed (more or less)
0716 Herbie Hind: pink / orange, son of 0239 Russ Teanale (pink / yellow)
1038 Adlai Lowe: red / ?, son of 0234 Ross Koz (purple-pink / yellow)

If I were heavily invested in the idea of getting pretty blooms from the seedlings, I suppose Adlai would be yet another disappointment to add to the list, but I'm less interested in seeing pretty blooms and more interested in seeing something new. And this is certainly new. Plus the bloom is surprisingly long-lived, considering its odd circumstances: at least two and a half months now, and it looks the same as ever. So Adlai gets to hang around for a while. Obviously he's no good for breeding if all the blooms turn out like this, but I'm betting that they won't.

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¹ A couple others have also tried, to varying degrees of success:
1232 Fiona St. James was felled by scale (what else) a month after I saw her bud, and didn't get a chance to complete it. It's not like me to throw out a plant that had a bud on it, especially one that had never bloomed before, so I assume what happened is that she dropped the bud and then got scale, but I don't actually have that information written down so it's just a guess.
0855 The Very Miss Dusty O [sic; the temptation to correct it to "The Very Dusty Miss O" every time I type it is nearly overwhelming] has a bud in progress now, though she may not get the chance to finish either; I saw scale on her the last time I watered. Tried to wipe it off, remove leaves that had visible insects on them, etc., but I don't know that that's actually ever worked so there's really no reason to think it will this time.
² It's gotten bigger since the move to a 4-inch pot, but not in any sort of meaningful way. More leaves, larger leaves, but they look the same and it's not that big of a difference.
³ (Look at 0716 Herbie Hind on the Anthurium seedling gallery, if you don't mind Anthurium seedling spoilers.)
⁴ (I'm guessing that the bud dried up and died before I could take its picture.)
⁵ Considering how things have been going lately, I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but Triana looks like our best bet for a nice F2 seedling at the moment: the bud is decent-sized, there are a reasonable number of suckers, and she's relatively low on thrips damage.
⁶ Brad might also have potential. Though his bud is significantly smaller, it's a similar color to Triana's, and his foliage is large and less scarred. We'll see.

Anthurium no. 0512 "Landon Sky"

Landon's an improvement on 0537 Bridgette of Madison County, though just barely. Tough to get excited about, unless you're a fan of tiny inflorescences in colors you've seen a thousand times before, in which case he's amazing.

The newer leaves are pretty good,

and they've always been at least okay,

though I'm not sure what's going on with the spotty leaves in that last photo (especially the one pointing to the top left corner). The slightly blue-gray cast to the leaves is the normal wax they produce,¹ but I don't know why there should be any spots where the wax is missing. I mean, sometimes I rub the wax off in the process of checking to see whether a bump is scale or not, but I'd never make such neat, small, spots by doing that. They could also be drops of something oily from above, but I can't come up with anything that might plausibly be dripping.

If nothing else, the Anthurium seedlings are an endless source of mystery. Fairly boring mystery, but still mystery.

Landon's not a keeper, but since he's not harboring obvious colonies of scale or thrips, he'll probably get to stay for a while.

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¹ Like every other characteristic, leaf wax production varies from seedling to seedling, though it shows up so much better on darker leaves that it's tough to get much of a feel for how common it might be. It also changes sometimes, in that plants which hadn't previously been very waxy sometimes suddenly start making a lot, but I don't have any evidence to suggest why. I have theories, but haven't put much energy into investigating them, because the only way wax production matters to me at this point is that high-wax leaves are much tougher to photograph.

Anthurium no. 0516 "Brooke Enhart"

I'm afraid there isn't a lot to be said about Brooke; she's only produced one bloom so far, which was of pretty lousy quality (small, half-dead, boring color).

The leaves aren't terrible, and the plant overall is fine (or at least fine-ish). It's possible that if I give her a second chance, the next bloom will be better, but she's hard to get excited about. So I won't ask you to. Instead, I had another thought about Cleve Backster's plants-have-feelings theory (previously covered at PATSP in a three-part post: one, two, three) recently, and wanted to bounce it off of you.

By the end of those posts, I had pretty much concluded that the whole "primary perception" thing was less about the emotional life of plants and the deep interconnectedness of all living things, and much more about human egos (particularly but not exclusively Cleve Backster's¹). The reader may or may not agree, but that's what it looked like to me.² The new idea is another bit of support for the all-about-ego hypothesis, which is:

If plants having feelings is evidence for some deep interconnected psychic link between all living things, why do signals from that link only ever go in one direction?

Which is to say, Backster claimed that plants were sensitive³ to the emotions of specific people known to the plant,⁴ over a relatively short physical distance,⁵ and they reacted to those emotions⁶ by altering the conductivity of their tissues.⁷ He took this to mean that human thoughts and feelings are capable of affecting plants and influencing their consciousness, or whatever the plant equivalent of consciousness is.

But as far as I can tell, Backster never attempted to see whether that worked in the opposite direction, whether something happening to a plant would affect a person. Which if primary perception is about the deep psychic interconnectedness of all life, there's no reason why it shouldn't work the other direction. Life is life, after all. No obvious reason why plant thoughts/feelings/actions shouldn't be just as important as human thoughts/feelings/actions. Backster should have done experiments where a person sat alone in a room, hooked up to a polygraph, reporting their feelings, while someone turned the lights out in another room containing a plant. Or waved caterpillars around near a plant. Insulted and threatened a plant.⁸ Whatever.

But, you know, I don't feel a sudden pang of irrational terror when I throw a plant into the garbage. I can turn the light off in a room with plants present without suddenly feeling hungry, or tired, or angry, or whatever plants should feel when lights go off. Not once has a panic attack tipped me off to a scale infestation. I don't feel sexually frustrated if a bee flies past the window; I am not terrified by butterflies.⁹ I can hold a plant upside down for repotting without feeling dizzy.

Why not? Well, it's possible that I am some kind of soulless golem who is forever cut off from the splendor of psychic communication with salads. It's also possible that everybody is theoretically capable of having this kind of response, but we all learn to suppress it over time because if we actually did experience all those feelings 24/7 we would be rendered unable to function, what with all the lawnmowers, forest fires, herbivores, and flower shops around. Not to mention shit like the EcoLog 590D:



¹⁰
So. Uh.

The third installment in the original Cleve Backster series concluded that Backsterism was about ego, in that it gives you credit for everything a cultivated plant in your care does right (it bloomed! It must love me!) without giving you any of the blame for anything that it does wrong (it died! Well, I guess the air was too dry.). This is just another angle on that same idea: primary perception gives you the chance to believe plants feel my pain! I must be really important! without having to believe at the same time I feel plants' pain! They must be really important!

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¹ Who, according to Wikipedia, died in June 2013. Which we all remember, because that was the month when all everybody's plants freaked out.
² If you want to disagree with me on the subject here, that's totally fine. I don't mind discussing it. However, if you're going to disagree, please do me the kindness of actually reading the posts in question first.
³ (except when they weren't)
⁴ (except when the test subjects were people not previously known to the plant)
⁵ (except when the people having the emotions were hundreds of miles away)
⁶ (except when they didn't react at all, reacted after a significant time delay, or reacted in advance)
⁷ (because that was the only thing Backster knew how to measure)
⁸ ("And your . . . uh, roots. Your roots are so puny. It's a wonder you even know what water is, with roots like that. And your foliage is not a deep and robust green. I bet your stomata are all like, duuuuuhhhhhh, all the time. If I was you, I wouldn't even bloom. You don't need to pass on your genes: you're so weak, all the other plants would grow taller and shade you out, if you were planted in the ground. Algae make fun of you. Pollinators say nasty things about you behind your back," etc.)
⁹ Butterflies would be a difficult and interesting problem for people studying plant emotions, were anyone still doing so (I'm not aware of it personally, but I assume someone must be: bad ideas never actually go away), since butterflies' and plants' lives are tangled in complicated ways. Some butterflies are pollinators, which the plants should like. But butterflies also lay eggs on plants, which hatch into caterpillars and devour the plants, which the plants should not like. Except that butterflies are usually pretty particular about which plants they lay eggs on, and ignore others. Can the plants distinguish butterflies that intend to eat them or pollinate them from those that would ignore them? And how could we tell the difference between increased electrical conductance caused by excitement at a potential pollination and increased electrical conductance caused by terror of being chewed by caterpillars? So an ideal test of plant feelings about butterflies, and their transference to humans, would be pretty complicated.
(Or, at least, it would be complicated if we assume that plants can tell different butterflies apart. It's possible that plants aren't that smart, in the Backsterverse. I mean, the claim is that they have feelings, not that they're geniuses. Nobody denies that 3-year-old humans have feelings, but we don't put them in charge of butterfly taxonomy, do we?)
¹⁰ Which in fact does inspire certain emotions. Admiration for the engineering, dark amusement at the name (I can see how a device like this might actually be ecologically preferable to constructing logging roads and whatever, but it's still hard not to see "EcoLog" as some kind of ironic black humor, given its purpose.), a bit of delight at the -- as a MetaFilter comment had it -- "casual, almost lackadaisical dexterity of the thing," and then, you know, the terror, horror, and revulsion.
Hypocritical terror, horror, and revulsion, 'cause it's not like I don't use lots and lots of paper products. Better tree harvesting than petroleum. And this is probably a tree farm in the first place (how else to explain the uniform spacing and trunk diameter?), so this is all those particular trees were ever destined to be anyway. But still.

Anthurium no. 0537 "Bridgette of Madison County"

One hundred twenty-eight seedlings have bloomed so far, as I write this, and there is a strong argument to be made that Bridgette is the very worst one. This is the prettiest photo I could get, of the prettiest bloom she's produced so far:

But this is a lot more representative of what Bridgette actually does:

The spathe never opens fully, probably because half of it is brown and dead by the time it's mature enough to try. I've seen thrips on it, though I'm not sure that they're what causes the dead patches on the spathes -- the thrips population has declined since I started blasting the plants with water, but Bridgette's spathes are still coming out partly dead.

Even if the spathe burn could be worked out somehow, the blooms are tiny,¹ and not a great color.² The plant is a relatively fast bloomer, but whatever it might gain in enthusiasm, it loses in follow-through.

The leaves have been variable in quality. Overall, they're better than you'd expect from the blooms, but they don't have any notable positive qualities: not shiny, pleasingly-colored, blemish-free, or large. They do tend to be longer and narrower than average. This one's pretty typical:

And the plant as a whole:

So, yeah. Pretty obviously not a keeper, and in fact probably in a landfill by the time you read this. My hope is that when I recycle the name, Bridgette of Madison County II will be prettier. 'Cause I do really like the name.

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¹ The scale is hard to determine from my closely-cropped photos, I realize. The bloom in the first photo of this post measures 1 1/8 inches tall by 5/8 inches wide (2.9 cm x 1.6 cm). Average size for one of the Anthurium blooms is roughly 2 inches tall by 1 1/2 inches wide (5.1 x 3.8 cm).
² In theory there's nothing wrong with a white to light pink spathe coupled with a lavender-pink spadix, I guess; it's not a combination that's appeared in the seedlings before. But combining one really common thing with another really common thing is hard to get excited about, even if the combination's never been seen before.
I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Michelle Obama eating a pie, but I've seen plenty of pictures of pies, and plenty of pictures of Michelle Obama. I think it's safe to predict that I would not be blown away by an Obama/pie combination, however unprecedented in my experience it might be. More so if the photo were half-burnt and tiny.

Unpretty pictures: Bulbophyllum oxypterum

Sometimes when I title a post "unpretty pictures," it's a little tongue-in-cheek, and the pictures aren't actually that bad. This is not one of those times, though.

I mean, not that it isn't still interesting. B. pterophyllum is actually sort of fascinating. But pretty it isn't.

It would be a very long project to try to determine whether this is the single strangest orchid I've ever seen, but it's surely a contender, at least. Sort of like an Epiphyllum, but somehow even uglier. At least Epiphyllum have nice flowers.

Sure, I've grown and enjoyed plants whose appeal wasn't immediately obvious, but damn.

Anthurium no. 0558 "Amber Waves"

Amber would bother me, due to the bloom/name color mismatch,¹ except that there is very little chance that she's going to stick around long enough to be a problem, so I'm not changing her name.

I don't know what happened here for sure. There are a number of bacterial and fungal infections that can hit Anthuriums, one of which (anthracnose, caused by the fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporioides) turns spadices black, but I don't think that's what's going on here, because anthracnose doesn't shrivel them up. Though you can tell from looking at the spathe that this bloom was likely having multiple problems, so I suppose we can't rule it out.

Also, while I realize that any bacterial or fungal problem would have to hit some seedling first, it seems like I've had enough Anthuriums here for long enough that if I had some sort of spadix-eating disease lurking around, I would have seen it hit before this. Amber's my 98th Anthurium seedling to produce a finished bloom, after all. That's a lot of spadices coming and going before this particular problem showed up. So I would be surprised to find out that it's a bacterial or fungal problem.

But you never know. I don't deliberately try to find pathogens to expose my seedlings to, but maybe I should: how depressing would it be to come up with a really pretty and interesting hybrid and then discover that it's commercially useless because it contracts a disfiguring disease at the drop of a hat? On the other hand, deliberately bringing diseases into the collection seems like it would impair my ability to create new seeds, and the fewer plants I can get seeds from, the lower my overall genetic diversity; the lower the genetic diversity, the harder it will be for me to come up with a seedling that is simultaneously pretty, interesting, disease-resistant, and not overly bothered by bugs. So maybe the best strategy is to make as many seedlings as I can, select out the prettiest ones, and assume that some of them are going to be nonviable for some reason or another, without worrying too hard about what that reason might be.²

Maybe Amber was just having a really bad day. I've said enough times that it's not a good idea to judge a seedling by the first bloom it produces. So we'll see if the next one is better. I'm not expecting it to be so much better that it saves Amber from the garbage can, but we'll see.

The leaves are at least okay, and the shape is slightly interesting:

Ditto for the plant overall (not crazy about that internodal distance, though):

Even the best-case scenario here has Amber as just another red or pinkish-red, so she's probably not worth waiting on, but I probably will anyway. If nothing else, I'd like to get a better photo to remember her by.

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¹ This wasn't a problem I'd considered, when I started out, and then a lot of the seedlings saddled with problematic names have died, so for the most part, it hasn't mattered. It's still potentially a problem for 0039 "Honey Mahogany," 0043 "Jade Jolie," 0084 "Chocolate Sunrise," 0490 "Rusty Ryan," 0532 "Amber Alert," 0605 "Rusti Fawcett," 0654 "Rosie Cheeks," 0691 "Jade," and 0949 "Cherri Baum," and so far only two of those (0039 and 0532) have even attempted to bloom, so I'm not going to bother renaming them just yet. Three (0490, 0605, and 0949) are even likely to bloom in name-appropriate colors, should they bloom, so they'll probably work out without me having to do anything.
The only reason this is an issue at all -- because, remember, these were only ever intended as place-holder names -- is that it's a lot easier for me to keep the names straight if they don't contradict the blooms. I still have a tough time with 0237 "Roxy Casbah," because my brain insists that any seedling named "Roxy" has to have red spathes, not pink.
² Though the don't-get-attached part is a problem.

Ambiguously pretty pictures: Neostylis Lou Sneary 'Colorful Blue' and Guarianthe x guatemalensis

These were actually perfectly nice plants and flowers (well, the Neostylis was maybe a little on the yellow side, but it was trying hard to be green, you could tell), but my camera just failed to get an in-focus, usable shot of them. Rather than discard the photos, I'm using them anyway, partly because I figure the photos will look more focused after they get shrunk down to fit the blog, and partly because I thought the Guarianthe was pretty, and an imperfectly-focused photo of it is better than no photo at all.

Guarianthe x guatemalensis = Guarianthe aurantiaca x Guarianthe skinneri (naturally occurring hybrid¹)

It appears that "Neostylis Lou Sneary" has become obsolete since I looked it up in March, and is now Vandachostylis Lou Sneary. Either that or the orchid registry where I look these things up only just got around to changing it. Or I was rushing through the process so much that I didn't bother to check whether the name was still current. Whichever of these three possibilities applies, my reaction's the same: *sigh*.

Neostylis Lou Sneary 'Colorful Blue' = Vanda falcata x Rhynchostylis coelestis (Ref.)

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¹ I don't have a reference recorded for this one, but I'm pretty sure I didn't just make it up. How badly do you want to know where it came from?

Anthurium no. 0416 "Holy McGrail"

Holy McGrail is an actual performer, though not a drag queen: she's a "faux queen;" i.e. a biological woman who takes on the general performance style of drag queens. Which is a whole scene unto itself, apparently, though my understanding is that there's a fair amount of drag queen / faux queen cross-pollination.

I no longer remember whether I knew Holy was a faux queen when I added her name to the list, but I've never been super rigid about categorizing, when it comes to the name list, because the borders between different categories (drag king, drag queen, female impersonator, transvestite, faux queen, genderqueer, genderfuck, trans man, trans woman, etc.) are all pretty fuzzy, and people identify in different ways at different points in their lives (sometimes), and so I've mostly just decided that if a performer is anywhere near this general cluster of labels then I'm adding them to the list. And faux queens are close enough. But it all gets really complicated, and I figure I'm bound to offend someone sooner or later, as not all of these groups like one another or necessarily want to be associated with the others (the border between "drag queen" and "trans woman" is sort of particularly fraught lately). So if you've got a problem with faux queens being included, or really anything else about the seedling names, um, I guess e-mail me about it or something.

In Holy's particular case, I think the question is ultimately moot. Because this is an ugly bloom:

With ugly leaves:

I'd have a tough time coming up with anything nice to say about the plant at all, frankly:

So probably the plant's going in the trash soon, and the name will wind up recycled for another seedling down the line somewhere.¹ I'm waiting to see whether the second bloom, currently pretty close to opening, will wind up being any better: if it is, then I might wind up hanging on to Holy a little longer. She could turn it all around and be awesome. In theory. I guess. But don't get attached.

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¹ This happens all the time. The next "Dawn Kekong" will be the fifth seedling saddled with that name. (#s 0102, 0315, 0664, and 1054 are all deceased; if I bother trying it again, the next Dawn Kekong should fall somewhere in the 1700s.)

Anthurium no. 0373: "Shangela Laquifa Wadley"

The less said about Shangela, the better, I think. Boring color, a spathe so pockmarked by thrips (or something) that it looked polka-dotted,

crappy foliage,

just an all-around mess.

The only nice thing I can think of to say about 0373 is that yes, it did bloom, and not all of the seedlings do. Which is practically the definition of damning with faint praise.

You'd think I would have thrown it out already, but, you know: inertia, the inexplicable hope that just maybe the second bloom will be awesome somehow, resistance to throw any seedling out until it's proven itself irredeemable, etc. It's definitely out of here as soon as I work myself up to a second purge, though. Earlier, if it gets scale. Which would be totally in character, so it'll probably happen.

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.

Anthurium 'Midori,' and nos. 0064, 0592

I sorta thought by this point that I would be up to writing new posts every other day, but every time I get close to being caught up, some new unusual thing pops up and I have to burn an afternoon on going to the dentist, buying potting soil, taking plants to the consignment store, mailing plants out, or catching up on the watering I didn't do the previous day because I was too exhausted to finish. Stuff like that. Consequently, I don't have time for the blog very often, and when I do, I usually don't have the photos ready for whatever post I want to write. So basically it's been six weeks of working as hard as I can and never quite getting caught up on anything, and I'm tired.

Quite a few Anthuriums have bloomed for the first time since I last blogged about 0112 "Dottie A. Rebel" way back on June 7,¹ and there have been new first-time buds on many more, though some of those subsequently failed to develop.² As usual, some of the new blooms are crap, most are boring, and a couple are very nice, but I won't tell you which are which because I'm still hoping to get actual posts written about all of those.

This post is not about any of those, though. This post is about the recent notable deaths.

[reader scrolls back up to the title, reads, scrolls back down]

Yeah, that's right. 'Midori' is gone, after about eleven months. I don't know what happened there, exactly: it was a watering problem of some kind, possibly exacerbated by excessively hot or cold temperatures, but by the time I realized that there was a problem, it was too late to determine what had caused it or do anything to bring the plant back. This is the first time I've completely lost a named variety of Anthurium in such a long time I don't even know how long it's been. (The NOID purple is kind of still on the ropes, but the original plant, after being cut back, has a single sprout, and I also rooted the cuttings I took off. One set of cuttings was potted up in soil and is living in the basement; the other is still in water and lives in the plant room. It's been a long time since I got a bloom, and will probably be a lot longer, but the NOID purple is not yet completely gone.)

'Midori' wasn't the best at producing seedlings, either, it turns out. I've potted up nine so far, of which four are still alive,³ and there are another 16 seeds in the cupcake containers in the basement, which may or may not ever get big enough to transplant, and may or may not survive transplanting. It sure feels like 'Midori' seeds germinate and grow a lot more slowly than seeds from my other plants, though I suppose I may just be impatient.

It turned out that I don't actually need 'Midori,' because at least one of my existing parent plants (probably the NOID red) already has genes for green blooms, but it was weird and I liked it and it makes me sad that it died.

The other two notable recent deaths ⁴ are 0064 "Augusta Wynndt" and 0592 "Tess LeCoil." Tess you'll probably remember from February, when I talked about her . . . unusual growth.

Photo: 22 January 2015.
It got bigger after that:

Photo: 11 March 2015.
For a while, the growth (one doesn't want to say tumor, though possibly it was) looked like it was even thinking of building some leaves -- you can see one in the above picture. I kept thinking, every time I watered it, oh, I should probably throw Tess away, there's no way that can be healthy, and if it's due to a virus or something I don't want it to spread to the other plants, but then I wouldn't throw it away because of the paperwork involved.⁵ Fortunately, it solved the problem for me, by spontaneously killing off that whole section:

Photo: 27 June 2015.
Though 1) by the time that happened, I'd thought maybe I should . . . enough times that I still felt sort of obligated to throw it out, and 2) it looked like possibly it was gearing up to do the same thing all over again -- that stumpy little green thing to the right in the picture seemed awfully familiar.

0064 "Augusta Wynndt" never built up her bizarre growth to the size Tess did, but only because I wouldn't let her. For a solid three years or so, Augusta grew normally, but at some point during this last winter (I think?), the growing tip started to do whatever Tess had been doing. So I cut it off, thinking that the plant might make new growing tips, which would have a normal shape to them, but apparently things don't work that way. (In particular, check out the larger lump on the left center, which may or may not be doing what Tess did but in any case is clearly not developing normally.) So Augusta and Tess were thrown away on June 23, and that is that.

So there you have it. The next Anthurium post will be happier. Or at least less morbid. Probably both.

-

¹ New first-time completed blooms:
0206 "Marcia Dimes"
0255 "Steph N. Wolfe"
0281 "Laganja Estranja"
0288 "Cookie Buffet"
0335 "Donna Fanuday"
0346 "Lois Carmen DiNominatre"
0351 "Pat McCooter"
0360 "Heidi Gosique"
0373 "Shangela Laquifa Wadley"
0564 "Shannel"
0597 "Raven"
² New first-time buds since 13 April 2015, with current bud colors (not necessarily the color of the completed blooms):
0147 "Denise O. Deanefew" (in progress, light pink)
0152 "Jay Love" (aborted)
0212 "Rogue" (in progress, pink-red)
0250 "Sheila Blige" (aborted)
0277 "Zach Treplica" (in progress, white)
0328 "Polly Esther Blend" (in progress, light orange-pink)
0338 "Anne Fibian" (in progress, dark red)
0361 "Willam Belli" (aborted)
0365 "Murray Hill" (in progress, red)
0371 "Deb Autry" (in progress, red)
0386 "Bjorn Innabarn" (in progress, purple)
0416 "Holy McGrail" (in progress, and "Holy" is not a typo for "Holly" -- light pink)
0467 "Regina Fong" (in progress, light orange-pink)
0487 "Polyfilla" (aborted, pink)
0488 "Regina the Gentlelady" (aborted, pink)
0558 "Amber Waves" (in progress, pink)
0561 "Belinda Chinashop" (in progress, red-pink)
0562 "Alex U. Good" (aborted, red)
0575 "D'Arcy Drollinger" (in progress, pink)
0586 "Vera Special" (in progress, red)
0595 "Josie P. Katt" (in progress, light pink)
0596 "Alisa Summers" (in progress, light pink)
³ Seedlings of 'Midori': (* indicates a seedling which is still alive)
1033 "Phoenix"
1092 "Mia Amor"
*1093 "Luna Stones"
*1094 "Ella Vawaydego"
1101 "India Vent"
1102 "Eden Fertu"
*1103 "Valeria T."
*1104 "Angel F. DeMornay"
1105 "Amy Vodkahaus"
The survivors are all still very, very young, and probably not all of them will survive long enough to bloom, but I'm really pulling for 1104 "Angel F. DeMornay," because she has the best name.
⁴ There are so many non-notable deaths -- 83 since May 1 -- that it's a huge pain in the ass to list them all. So I'm not gonna. And I think we can all be happy about that.
⁵ At this point, every time an Anthurium seedling dies, I have to update six different spreadsheets, and my Blogger profile, and pull a page out of the hand-written notebooks I keep for the Anthuriums. Which is my own fault, of course, for keeping so many different documents in the first place. They all have their purposes, though. I mean, I'm not sure there's any way to condense their information into a single spreadsheet and have it all still be accessible and useful.

Anthurium no. 0275 "Yvette Horizon"

Yvette has surprised me this winter / spring. She'd bloomed once before, a year ago, and while that bloom was nice enough --

-- it was still only a pink / pink, and didn't stand out from the other pink / pinks, so I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It tried to produce a second bud as the first bloom was dying, but that bud fell victim to The Great Droppening, when lots of plants threw buds at the same time, likely to protest being sprayed with white oil.^{1, 2}

But then this February, a new bud started to form, and I got interested in it when I noticed how large it was getting. Not long before the spathe started to open, an odd kink toward the bottom of the bud indicated that something was not quite right,

and then the bud actually did open, and it was an intense highlighter pink, as well as being bigger than most of the other seedlings' blooms, but that one corner really was screwed up so the whole thing was sort of a letdown anyway.

Worse, I don't know what caused it to do this in the first place. The kink appeared fairly early in the bud's development, so I'm inclined to blame drought stress, which is what I always blame for Anthurium problems I don't understand,³ but this is the first bloom I can recall getting holes in the middle of the spathe, and I know plenty of the other seedlings have been drought-stressed before, so that's clearly not the whole explanation.

Sort of waiting to see what happens with the next bud on Yvette, then. A new bud has just started developing, so by June or so, I should know whether this is something they're all going to do, or something peculiar about that particular moment.

It's worth noting, while I'm talking about Yvette, that she also has very nice leaves --

-- dark green, more or less flat, unblemished, interestingly veined, and so forth. And the spathe color is fading with time a lot less than many of the other pink / pink seedlings' spathes do.⁴ So there's definitely potential here, if future spathes can do a better job of holding themselves together.

-

¹ White oil: mix of water, vegetable oil (soybean in my particular case) and an emulsifier (dishwashing liquid), which is sprayed on plants with bug problems in an effort to suffocate the bugs by blocking their breathing pores with oil. In fairness, this really did make a big impact on my thrips problem here, for several months, but it did not actually eradicate them. Also, being an unsaturated oil, it goes rancid when exposed to air, which turns out to be a problem, and a few plants react very badly to being sprayed with oils of any kind, the worst in my experience being Cordyline fruticosa, Euphorbia milii, and Breynia disticha. Ask your horticultural professional if white oil is right for you.
² Though the cause / effect relationship is only speculation, until / unless I try spraying everything with white oil again. Which I'm hesitant to do. See above re: rancidity and not eradicating things.
³ (and you'd be surprised how often that turns out to be the correct answer)
⁴ Both 0241 "Megan Gigaterra" and 0126 "Erin Dirtylondry" get much lighter as they age. This looks better on Erin than on Megan even though they both lighten to about the same color; I haven't been able to put a finger on why that is. Curiously, Yvette's first bloom got very light within a couple months, so it's possible that there's a seasonal or cultural factor to work out too.

Cactus Abuse

Don't buy your cacti from places that do this:


Yeah, that's about half an inch (1 cm) of water standing in the bottom of a plastic tray that apparently has no drainage holes in it. I've seen the same trays at Home Depot before. I do not understand why anybody thinks this is a good idea. I mean, for fuck's sakes, they're cacti -- they'd need to be watered eventually, but if they have to wait two or three weeks to get it, it's not going to kill them. And not watering at all would be kinder than making them stand in water.

I expect there's a logical reason for this, but I don't care what it is. Don't buy cacti if they're standing in water at the store. It's the only way they'll learn.

Unpretty pictures: spider mites and scale

WCW told me once that if you want to, you can overwinter Hibiscus by letting them go dormant: you stick them somewhere cool, let all the leaves drop, and then only give them just enough water to get by until the spring. And then in the spring you put them outside and they leaf out quickly and then you go on.

It seemed like a sound enough idea, and WCW said she'd done it herself, but I wasn't quite ready to commit to it. I figured if I could keep them growing and flowering happily through the winter, then there was no reason not to, so I'd only let them defoliate if it turned out that I couldn't keep them growing happily.

So I stuck them in front of a small window in the basement, and waited to see what would happen.

For the most part, nothing happened. Some sporadic blooms at first, then they settled down and just sat there. I gave them full, thorough waterings when the soil got dry, but they didn't seem to be doing anything with it.

Then, beginning in maybe mid-December, specific branches would defoliate rapidly from time to time. Like, everything would be fine, and then suddenly all the leaves on one branch would go yellow and drop overnight, and the house would rattle as all the leaves hit the floor at once.

There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the plant otherwise: I saw a little webbing, but it looked like fairly coarse webbing, the kind that spiders make cobwebs from, and they were in the basement, where there are often spiders, so I didn't suspect spider mites at first. Plus I didn't actually see any mites, ever. But it kept happening, and I got kind of worried. Plus it sucks to get woke up in the middle of the night by the house rattling because your Hibiscus just had a massive defoliation.

Maybe I didn't want to let them go dormant after all. Maybe they were defoliating from lack of light, and if I just put them somewhere brighter, this would all stop.

So. They came out of the basement to the living room, and I gave them a spot on the floor near the big window. Plenty of light there. (Also a heat vent, but -- not a very big one! And it wasn't blowing directly at the plants!) Looked the plants over, didn't see any webs or any mites.

Imagine my surprise when a whole branch defoliated again, and, upon examination, turned out to be completely swarming with spider mites.

This is much more terrifying full-size. You can actually make out individual little legs on one of them. [shudder]
Then imagine my depression, frustration and rage. Next, imagine my inebriation, as I drank to try to forget about the mites.

(You're really very good at imagining my mental states! Good job!)

So. Both Hibiscus got a prolonged bath: dish soap, shower, more soap, more shower, and now they're back in the basement again. Where, to their credit, no branches have gone suddenly nude again. But still. Spider mites are despicable. In that I am completely able to despic them. I despic them so hard, y'all.

So that was a bummer. Then, a few days after the Hibiscus returned to the basement, I was watering the big purple Neoregelia when I noticed some spots on the leaves that rubbed off, when I tried to rub them off. Which is a bad sign.

Roundish green dots: part of the natural variegation. Roundish tan dots: scale. White crusty stuff toward the right side of the picture: mostly hard-water spots, I think. Though there could be some immature scale running around in there, I'd never know.
Further inspection revealed that I had scale. And they were everywhere. Leaf surfaces, leaf undersides, the inaccessible spaces at the base of leaves -- everything. It didn't appear to be too far gone, but it was still a surprisingly advanced infestation to be catching for the first time.

The long-term solution was to add imidacloprid granules to the soil. I don't know if this will necessarily help, but I had them already, and in theory they should work. Eventually. (I have yet to be particularly impressed with systemic pesticides, actually. This is maybe something we could discuss in the comments.)

The short-term solution was to get a wet paper towel or two, or ten, or fifty, and try to wipe off as many of the bastards as I could. The only problem with that is -- well, look up at the first Neoregelia picture again. See the spines all along the leaf margins? Yeah. They're actually kind of sharp. And pieces break off in your skin sometimes. So it's not that easy to get a hand down in there, never mind trying to do any serious leaf scrubbing once it's in.

So that was also a bad day. I haven't had any issues with scale in something like ten years. (I bought a Caryota mitis, fishtail palm, without noticing that it had a serious scale problem. I kept waking up to find the floor beneath it sticky, but somehow didn't put it together that there might be a bug problem for a really long time. When I did figure it out, the plant was thrown away.) I have little itchy cuts all over both hands, and down the back of my right arm, and this is something I'm going to have to do repeatedly for a while.

The slightly-raised tan circles are, again, scale. The small, white, elongated things scattered around them are probably baby scale. The babies are actually so small that I can't see them with my naked eye; I can only see them after taking a picture, uploading it to the computer, and looking closely at it.
For some plants, I'd just throw the thing out, rather than try to undertake an extermination program. I'm willing to try extermination in this case because the plant would be expensive to replace, I've already had it a long time, and the scale doesn't appear to have done much permanent damage to the plant yet. It has spread to one other plant, also a Neoregelia, but as far as I can find (and I looked pretty hard at everything in the vicinity) it's only the one, and the infestation on the second plant was very, very light. So I'm sort of optimistic that this can be dealt with in a way that permits me to keep the plant.

And it could always be worse. It's not mealybugs.

Still, though. Depressing.