Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis [probably not] Minho Princess

Of all the reasons not to go to the orchid show this year, I think the one closest to my heart is that it will prevent me from seeing a new batch of incorrectly-spelled orchid ID tags.

It's not that misspellings are traumatic in themselves. This one isn't even that bad, all things considered: a simple transposition of two vowels from a combination which doesn't appear that often in modern English (AE) to a combination that does (EA). Totally understandable. What really gets to me, though, is the lack of proofreading. You've already made the sign, it's sitting there right in front of you, you're looking at it -- how do you not pause for a fraction of a second to ask yourself, does this look right?

Or maybe it did look right. Which is perhaps even more upsetting.

Anyway. Thank you for indulging me in one more grumpy orchid-proofreading ramble before I stop doing the orchid posts. To reward you, I will tell you that the letters of the word "Phalaenopsis" can be rearranged in 59,875,200 distinguishable permutations,¹ including "a snail shoppe," "a posh spaniel," "hapless piano," and "polishes a pan."

So this is the plant in question. I think there's a pretty good chance that it isn't Minho Princess. Why? I couldn't find any photos of Minho Princess on-line that looked like this. I mean, I suppose it could just be a really variable grex, but the photos I found all showed a mostly white flower, with a little pink-purple along the largest veins, and some more pink-purple at the margins. (Example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6²) The online photos for a highly-variable grex shouldn't be this uniform. So I conclude that somewhere along the line, the wrong ID became associated with the plant, probably at the original seller. Sellers don't think their customers give a crap about IDs, so they don't feel like they have to give a crap about IDs either.

I like the plant. The blooms are obviously pretty striking close-up, but the contrast was visible from surprisingly far away, too. I wish there was some way of, you know, learning the name of this plant that I like.

[Phalaenopsis Minho Princess = Phalaenopsis Sun Prince x Phalaenopsis Ta Lin Freeds (Ref.), though that doesn't matter because this isn't Minho Princess.]

In (now somewhat-old) Anthurium news, I purged the Anthuriums in the living room, the ancestral varieties that produced all the original seedlings. 'Pandola' is gone. The NOID red is gone. The NOID dark red that never bloomed is gone. 'Gemini' is gone. 'White Gemini' is gone. 'Peppermint Gemini' is gone. 'Orange Hot' is gone. All three copies of the NOID pink are gone. 'Krypton' is gone. The NOID red-violet that might or might not have also been 'Krypton' is gone. All four of the 'Florida's are gone (though I'm pretty sure they never contributed anything genetically. Moral support, perhaps.).

There were also a couple ancestral plants in the basement, pre-purge. The NOID pink-green is gone. 'Joli' is gone. The small pot of salvaged cuttings from the NOID purple, which had only just gotten old enough to bloom, is gone.

My goodness. So what isn't gone, Mr. S.?

The NOID purple, and two backup copies of 'Red Hot.' And one 'Red Hot' is looking a little shaky, to be honest.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, in theory, the genes from the founding generation are present in the surviving seedlings; the founders had already made themselves redundant. Not to mention that there were ghost mites, Xanthomonas, or both, on all the plants I threw out, and it's good to get rid of pest/disease reservoirs. On the other hand, this means that if I were to decide to start over with the seedlings, I'd have to buy new Anthuriums to start over with. And, as it happens, the ex-job is now even more of an ex-job than it used to be, because they're no longer in business, so I'm not even sure where I'd get the replacement Anthuriums from.³

In any case. The founding-Anthuriums purge is upsetting, and also it's not.⁴ Just like the ex-job closing is both upsetting and not. Ditto the really big plant-related thing I've alluded to a few times now but haven't been able to bring myself to name and describe yet, which was both devastating and an enormous relief. The last three months have been fucking weird.

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¹ Assuming that my math is correct. A twelve-letter word in which no letters are duplicated should have 12! (= 479,001,600) different permutations; since "phalaenopsis" has three letters duplicated (a, p, and s), I think the number of combinations should be 12!/(2^3) = 59,875,200.
² In March or April last year, I found two more sites which showed Minho Princess with the same coloration as the others; those links have since 404ed. But six examples should be enough to get the idea.
³ They announced this in mid-November. I think this was a deliberate decision to retire, rather than the owners finding themselves forced out by the economic climate or whatever. But they'd been talking about closing or relocating since at least 2008, and since I didn't go back to chat with them or anyone else who worked there, I'm not sure that it wasn't motivated by declining sales.
I never understood how they could price plants at triple the big-box and grocery-store prices and stay in business in the first place. But then, I don't have a keen business mind.
Should note that I don't feel particularly upset about the ex-job being gone. I rarely visited anymore; when I did, I didn't generally buy anything. There are also some not-great memories associated with the place, which time has faded but not eliminated entirely: although things weren't super-ugly when I left, the bad was outweighing the good by that point. (Some of this was my fault, some of it wasn't. Somewhere in my various files is a draft for a blog post titled "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Garden Center Workers." Which is still good advice. Eight years since I left, and I still can't look at poinsettias without a small jolt of dread.)
Still. End of an era, and all that. I don't entirely understand why I didn't go back to see the place one last time, or talk to the people who still worked there. Had I visited early enough, I could even have picked up some new houseplants for a mere 2.25 times the big-box price. It wasn't that I didn't care, but -- the idea of going back to see the store gradually clear out made me uneasy in some difficult-to-explain way, so I never did. And now it's gone. Or gone-ish, anyway.
Also: if a family-owned garden center in the area had to close down, why couldn't it have been Pierson's?
⁴ Watering the living room for the first time, post-purge, took me 3.7 hours. That no doubt sounds like a lot of time to spend watering, but the most recent five pre-purge waterings took 4.3, 5.1, 5.4, 5.5, and 6.4 hours. Not only do I save time watering, but I no longer have those periodic pangs of should I throw this one out? Is that Xanthomonas? Are those ghost mites? to deal with. It's definitely not all bad.

Walkaways: Citrus edition

Okay. So there's this disease, called citrus greening or (in Chinese) huanglongbing. It's caused by a bacterium, and spreads between plants via insects (the Asian citrus psyllid or the African citrus psyllid). And it is a big deal.

Plants affected by huanglongbing produce stunted, inedible fruit, and a lot less fruit than usual, so the disease makes plants economically worthless. Then it kills them. Affected plants typically die within 3-5 years after infection. Infected plants can also spread the disease to other plants before they die (if the psyllids are present to transmit the infection between plants), and don't always show symptoms immediately. Huanglongbing is also, at the moment, incurable. So this has some obvious bad implications for the U.S. citrus crop.

I tried pretty hard, but was unable to figure out from the USDA site exactly what products are being quarantined, where cases of citrus greening have actually been reported, or how long the quarantines have been going on. It looks like the first U.S. cases of the disease were in Miami-Dade County, Florida, in 2005, and the disease then spread to basically the entire state by 2008. Citrus fruit itself is not considered able to transmit citrus greening, so the fruit can still be shipped around the U.S., so long as it's been carefully inspected for leaves and stems that could conceivably spread the disease.

Currently, the only thing anybody's really able to do is try to prevent the disease from spreading, by quarantining states in which the disease has been found. There's also increased pesticide use, as people try to pre-emptively wipe out any populations of the psyllid before they manage to spread the disease. Neither of those are great long-term solutions, though.

As for a cure, well, we don't have one yet. They're experimenting with antibacterials like penicillin, so we should have penicillin-resistant huanglongbing bacteria any day now. I don't get the impression that that's been working out terribly well so far. Adding systemic pesticides to affected plants doesn't work so well either.¹ There's a more promising-looking plan to genetically engineer citrus plants with genes from other species (spinach was the one mentioned on the one page I saw), which would render them resistant to the disease and make the whole problem commerically irrelevant.² There have been some promising results from growing guavas in the same fields as the citrus; the theory is that the guavas may produce compounds that confuse the psyllids and leave them unable to locate new citrus plants to infect. There is also a parasitic wasp, which has been introduced in some citrus-growing areas and seems to be potentially useful for keeping psyllids in check. So one way or another, we should have this problem solved eventually. And maybe guavas will suddenly be abundant in the stores as a side benefit.

However, this has caused a few troubles in the tropical plant industry as well. Our supplier, at the garden center where I used to work, is based in Florida. So when the quarantine went up in January 2008, we lost the ability to bring in pretty much anything from the whole citrus family (Rutaceae). So no Citrus, no Fortunella, no Murraya, and that was still the case when I quit working there. Customers didn't like that at all, so the garden center scrambled to find replacements. They got a few citrus plants from California, through the outdoor shrub and perennial suppliers, but not very often, and the ones they did manage to get were often more expensive than the Florida ones had been.

I've also seen citrus a few times at Lowe's, though I assumed that those were probably also from California or Texas.

But the point is, I had more or less given up on seeing anything citrusy in the garden centers up here, and especially anywhere that I knew got most of their plants from Florida. And yet, a month or two ago --

Citrus x meyeri, Meyer lemon.
I'm left scratching my head over what this might mean, though. I'm pretty certain the quarantine on Florida citrus plants hasn't actually ended; the text of the regulations (or what I think must be the relevant text, anyway) is pretty opaque to me. It appears that there are new exceptions made for certain facilities if they're inspected often enough and found to be pest-free on each inspection. And possibly the ultimate destination for the plants is also relevant.

Citrus aurantifolia (lime)? It was identified as a lime, but there turn out to be a lot of different species called limes, and I don't know which one this is.
It's hard to see how citrus greening could get much of a foothold in Iowa, for example, even if somebody screwed up and sent infected Floridian plants here. There aren't that many susceptible plants in the first place, the plants we do have don't generally stay close enough to one another to transmit diseases, and the odds of transporting the psyllid and an infected plant at the same time, and having them wind up in the same place, seems like a long shot. On the other hand, people do move south from Iowa, all the time. So I just hope the USDA knows what they're doing.

Citrus x meyeri (mis-saved as C. aurantifolia; ignore the file name)
In any case, it's nice to have them around again. I don't have any particular desire to own one, and couldn't afford the money or space for one even if I did, but considering that I never expected to see them for sale again at the ex-job, this was a pleasant surprise all the same. And it's also nice to have a chance to smell the blossoms again -- Murraya paniculata is similar, but it's not the same.

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¹ Not for the reason you might think. Remember, if a plant has huanglongbing, it's not going to be producing usable fruit in the first place, so nobody's going to be eating the fruits that are full of insecticide. The depressing truth is that the imidacloprid doesn't work fast enough to kill the psyllids before they jump to another tree, so it doesn't actually stop the problem.
² Though if you've got a citrus tree growing in your backyard, you'd still be totally boned. I imagine regular citizens aren't going to be able to get the transgenic trees.

Work-related: everybody looks bad

This post is a little over two years old. I ran into it during the recent blog maintenance, and I was initially surprised that I hadn't posted it, because it looked like it was more or less complete: the pictures were already present, the code for the footnotes (usually the last thing I do with a post, because it's awkward to change once in place) had been done. It's rare for a post to reach this stage without getting posted.

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Zinnia 'Profusion Mix.'
Ouch. The first Saturday of May should not be sunny. It brings out too many customers all at once. It wasn't necessarily terrible to be busy, though I did something to my back early in the day, which hurts, and which would probably heal up just fine if I could rest it, but I've got (as I write this on Sunday morning) two more days of work, and then I have to water all the plants at home, so that's not looking too likely.

(Just FYI, though: the first Saturday in May is probably the weekend you want to show up to shop, if you live around here: our actual last frost date is May 15, give or take, but if you want to be able to buy before we're sold out of things, a couple weeks earlier is about ideal. And actually the first Friday is probably even better, if you can manage it.)

For as many as there were, the customers on Saturday were very well-behaved (better than the co-workers, anyway: one of the co-workers is closer than s/he realizes to being beaten to death with a shovel¹), with one exception:

One lady waved me over to the succulents while I was watering and asked for a price on a $9.95 Adenium obesum.

I told her $9.95.

Tagetes patula 'Little Hero Yellow.'
Oh, she said, well someone told me it was only $5.99.

I don't know what to tell you, I said back. The prices go by pot size, that's a 4-inch pot, therefore it's $9.95.

CUSTOMER: But someone said $5.99.

MR_S: Well, um, we do have $5.99 plants, but That. Is. Not. One. Of. Them.

[long pause]

CUSTOMER: Okay, well, thank you.

Euphorbia 'Diamond Frost.'
So then a couple hours later, one of the front counter people comes back to the greenhouse for something or another, and while s/he's back there, s/he says, so -- what's the price on those plants that have the big bulb thing at the base? Are those succulents or tropicals or what?

MR_S: Which ones? These? [pointing to a Beaucarnea recurvata]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Maybe. I'm not sure.

Then it dawned on me why s/he was asking, and I pointed to the Adeniums, and s/he was like, yes, that one. What price are those?

MR_S: $9.95.

Osteospermum 'Summertime Red Velvet.'
FRONT COUNTER PERSON: 'Cause I had a customer insist that somebody had told her $5.99.

MR_S: Yeah, I know which customer you're talking about. I told her $9.95 repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Wait -- you'd told her $9.95?

MR_S: Repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: [Expletives]²

Bracteantha bracteata 'Firey Orange.'
MR_S: Why? What price did you give her?

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Well she kept saying someone had told her $5.99, so we wound up giving it to her for $5.99. [pause] You know, I don't mean to talk bad about [customer's ethnic group],

MR_S: [cringes in anticipation]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: but . . . [proceeds to talk bad about customer's ethnic group]

MR_S: *facepalm*

Only 20 days left.³

Osteospermum 'Summertime Sunshine.'
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¹ Exaggerated for dramatic effect, but s/he has about a 50-50 chance of getting the verbal equivalent of being beaten to death with a shovel, whatever that would be, before I'm done with the job. S/he would be wise to stay out of my way. Tragically, s/he is not a particularly wise person, and probably will not stay out of my way.
² Also exaggerated for dramatic effect. I don't remember exactly what s/he said.
³ Unless I come back for June. Which I said I might do. Not looking real probable at the moment, though.

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For what it's worth, the one problematic co-worker didn't get beaten with a shovel. Still deserves it, though.

I'm not certain which front counter person was in the story -- my personal journal doesn't record the interaction -- but if it's who I remember it as being, then yes, s/he still works there.

Pretty pictures: Mandevilla cvv.

All my experience with Mandevilla/Dipladenia cvv. to date has been work-related. I haven't tried growing one at home because the experience has also all been neutral to negative. They entwine themselves in support beams, neighboring plants' hanging baskets, and one another; they get bugs (especially spider mites) really easily; the spent flowers are always falling off (awkward, for hanging baskets); customers ask for one or the other and won't believe you when you tell them they're the same plant. (According to GRIN, "Mandevilla" is the correct one at the moment.) Things like that.

But they are pretty, in the right circumstances.





I seriously doubt that I'll be trying a Mandevilla anytime soon, at least not indoors. The shelves are already pretty full of plants; there's nowhere to put a new one. Worse, Mandevillas grow fast and grab on to anything they touch, which means that I'd have to try to untangle them every time I did a round of watering. That doesn't sound like a good time at all. And then there's the spider mite thing, which, I already have enough trouble with spider mites.




On the other hand, when you search for Mandevilla on-line, you find frighteningly enthusiastic praise. A lot of it. I don't get the impression that the Mandevilla enthusiasts are trying to grow it indoors, aside from maybe a couple months here or there during cold weather, but maybe I'm wrong. Have any readers tried a long-term indoor Mandevilla? How'd it go? Should I reconsider my position?

Pretty picture: bumblebee on Gaillardia

We went to Iowa City yesterday. I'd hoped to find exciting new stuff to show y'all, but instead it was just the same old stuff, and so now here I am again, trying to write a blog post at the very last possible minute. (Seriously, folks: this never happens. Two trips outside the house in one week? Craziness. Total granny-slapping insanity.)


So that's why I didn't reply to anybody yesterday. On the plus side, I saw the above little vignette of bumblebee and Gaillardia 'Oranges and Lemons.' I'd heard of 'Oranges and Lemons' somewhere (someone else's blog, probably, or else Twitter) but hadn't seen it personally before yesterday. The ex-job didn't carry it when I worked there. It seems nice. And obviously the bumblebees approve.

I also reached the end of a watering cycle yesterday, so I now have maybe two days in which to really buckle down on the writing. Wish me inspiration, 'cause things will get crazy again around Sunday and Monday.

6 Things They Don't Want You to Know About the Plants

Assorted Guzmanias at Pierson's, in Cedar Rapids.
"What they don't want you to know about the plants" is a verbatim Google search that brought some anonymous (and, presumably, disappointed) person to PATSP many months ago. The idea tickled me, and I've wanted to write a post on the subject ever since, but it was obviously a problematic topic while I was working -- it's not a good idea to blog about what "they" don't want "you" to know about the plants when "you" are the "they."

Now, though, "they" are "they" and "you" is "me" and "scare quotes" are "scare quotes" and the post seems much more writable. It feels a little weird: though most of this is stuff I've talked about on PATSP at one time or another, this is the first time I've collected it all together. When I was actually in the business of selling plants, these weren't things I necessarily shielded all customers from knowing about -- if it was relevant to the situation, I'd generally let you know -- but I also didn't rush up and give everyone unsolicited lists of reasons to take their business elsewhere, either. And most of these things would apply anywhere a customer could go anyway, so telling people about it wouldn't have benefited anybody.

1. The soil is probably crap.

This was really not our fault at all, and it's not likely to be different anywhere else, but it's true: most of the time, the potting mix the plants were in was what they'd been shipped to us in, i.e., mostly peat moss, which is unsuitable for most indoor plants: peat holds water too long, and then becomes water-repellent when it dries, making it too wet when it's wet and too dry when it's dry. It also tends to lead to fungus gnats. I assume the growers use it mainly because it's cheap, but I'm not sure: in the warmer climates where tropical houseplants are produced, it may be that you actually need something that will hold a little water on the plant, lest you be forever watering.

A fungus gnat, as close-up as any of my cameras have yet been able to manage. I think it's kinda cute, though admittedly they're cuter when you can't see quite as much detail.
Anyway. Bad soil is not a particularly good reason not to buy a plant. One, it's fixed easily enough by repotting, which you may need to do regardless. Two, everybody's plants come from the same places and are potted in the same mix.

2. We sprayed pesticides in here less than a week ago.

Where I worked, we sprayed pesticides every week, usually on Saturday night after the store closed.¹ The specific pesticides in question changed from week to week, but the spraying itself was a constant.

We used what was basically a very large fogger, so nobody needed to be present when the actual spraying was happening, but I still had to measure and mix the pesticides du jour before leaving for the day, and although all the relevant safety precautions were taken, and I had the very best protective equipment that an extremely small amount of money could buy, I still figured this was probably not doing me any good, especially doing it weekly, and then being around the residue afterwards.²

This might be a legitimate reason not to buy a plant, if you know you're sensitive to certain kinds of chemicals, though most people don't handle, lick, or consume their plants enough to where I can see it making any kind of difference, and even if you do, plants can also absorb dangerous chemicals from indoor air. I'm on record as believing that the air-purifying qualities of houseplants have been criminally oversold and probably don't matter in most home situations,³ but a very tiny absorption of toxic chemicals from the air would more or less balance out any very tiny release of pesticides that happen to be on the plant when you buy it. Also, even the most chemically-fertilized, pesticide-drenched houseplant will become an organically-grown plant if you grow it organically, so in the long run, you're probably ahead, chemical-exposure-wise, to buy the plant anyway.

Big box stores like Lowe's and Home Depot do not, as far as I'm aware, spray their plants while they're in the store, though they'd generally have been sprayed before they were shipped, so you can't expect to avoid pesticide exposure by shopping in those sorts of places.

Organically-grown houseplants do exist, but I'm only aware of one location in Iowa that ever sold them. It's in Ames, I've only been there once, it was three years ago, I don't know the people who ran it, I don't know if it still exists,⁴ and I was a little uneasy about buying stuff when I was there because I saw bugs in the sales area. So the idea might still need some work. However, organic produce is mainstream(ish) now, and people have been generally anti-pesticide for a long time, so one might see organic houseplants in stores in the future. The first person who figures out how to grow houseplants organically, for prices comparable to conventionally-grown houseplants, and is able to advertise the fact effectively, stands to make a lot of money. I don't know whether anybody's trying yet.

3. It may be cheaper somewhere else.

There are many good reasons to buy your houseplants from a locally-owned garden center, as opposed to a large chain store like Wal-Mart or Lowe's, but price is not one of those reasons. From what I've seen, the prices on small, non-succulent plants (in 3- or 4-inch pots⁵) tend to be approximately the same anywhere you look, but cacti and succulents, or large tropicals, get considerably more expensive at independent garden centers. Seasonal blooming plants like Cyclamen or poinsettias also tend to be cheapest at box stores, and even grocery stores, though you take more of a gamble on the quality of the plant itself and the advice you receive about its care. Florists are potentially better on the advice, but also the most expensive places to buy plants, from everything I've seen.

Bromeliad-and-Dracaena display from the ex-job.
I wish this weren't the case. I wish that local places could offer the sorts of prices that the big chains can. I also wish I had a magical, talking unicorn that granted wishes and pooped gold coins.⁶

I don't patronize local places exclusively, though when I checked it out with the spreadsheets, I was a lot closer to doing so than I would have guessed.⁷ It wasn't a deliberate, principled decision to keep my money local. That's just where the selection is broader and weirder, so that's where I've tended to look. Lowe's has better prices, but they also have the same twenty plants over and over and over again.

4. Some of the plants are not good long-term prospects.

I've covered this already in a separate post, pretty much, but it turns out to be true of outdoor plants as well: this post at Bloomingwriter talks about plants being sold in garden centers despite not being hardy for the zone, or despite being extremely invasive, or otherwise inappropriate for your situation. Doing a little research before you shop will help, but people who aren't into houseplants (or plants in general) don't necessarily know that they have different requirements and will buy whatever first gets their attention. And I think all beginners get cacti wrong the first few times.⁸

The industry could provide better information on this point than it actually does, but they don't have a lot of incentive. The most demanding plants are also often the prettiest, with a few exceptions, and people impulse-buy pretty things a lot more than they impulse-buy plain things. It doesn't pay to put obstacles in the way of these impulse purchases by, for example, telling customers something about the plants. So if there's anything at all, it's probably just a name and "easy-care." I've seen so many plants called "easy" and "low light" that were definitely not, that I consider claims like this to have no meaning whatsoever. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose; easy-care/low-light's just another word for for-sale.

Alocasia amazonica 'Polly,' which I've seen called easy-care but not, yet, low-light.
It's unfortunate but true that retailers run the risk of making no sales at all, if they try to steer customers away from potentially bad experiences. Not every customer is willing to listen to the how-to-grow, once you've said a plant is difficult. I know I had more than one customer who put down bad choices readily enough, but then never picked up a better one: sometimes it might have been better for the business (if not the plant or the customer) if I'd just told people what they obviously wanted to hear.

Because of this, any plant seller immediately jumps up several notches in my estimation if they'll admit that a plant is difficult, and immediately becomes a favorite place to shop if they can tell me in what way it's difficult and how to grow them successfully. This is vanishingly rare anywhere, but it's more common at independent, local garden centers.

5. Some of the plants are barely rooted.

This took me a while to clue into, but one day a customer wanted to buy a Yucca guatemalensis, and have us repot it, and when I took it out of the grower pot to put it in the new pot, I discovered that it barely had any roots at all. This is mainly only a problem with plants grown by sticking a section of mature cane into a pot until it starts to sprout new foliage, something that gets done a lot with Yucca guatemalensis, Dracaena fragrans (there's a reason why they're so often damsels in distress), and Polyscias species. My recommendation would be, don't buy sprouted-cane sorts of plants unless you can see some roots coming out of the drainage holes, or sticking a finger down into the soil hits some roots. Tugging the plants to see if they shift or pull out is also a method, but obviously the retailer's not going to be happy with you if you pull all the Dracaenas out of their pots.

Barely-sprouted cane sections of Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana,' as they are usually sold.
Where I used to work, we propagated some of our own plants, and it did occasionally happen that plants would take off growing new leaves before they'd really gotten a decent root system, and they got put out for sale and then people brought them back, angry, because they weren't particularly rooted yet. I mean, they would have gotten there eventually if the customer hadn't, you know, tried to fiddle with them. But that was my fault; I don't think it's a common occurrence. (It wasn't even a common occurrence with us. Maybe it happened twice.)

6. Some of the plants have bugs.

I am convinced that if you start out with one plant, and add one at a time to any given location, be it a personal collection or a sales floor or whatever, once you reach some critical number of plants, you are guaranteed to always have some kind of bug problem happening at any given moment. I'm not sure what the critical number is: personal experience tells me it's higher than 15 and lower than 850. I realize that doesn't really narrow anything down.

Now, you'd think that being sprayed with pesticides weekly would fix this problem, and make the bugs go away, this being what pesticides are supposed to do. They don't. Bugs come in from the suppliers, they wander in from outside, they find places to hide from the pesticide and then re-emerge when the spraying is over, they evolve resistance to the sprays. There will be bugs. Somewhere. Lurking. Knowing what they look like, and checking a plant carefully before you buy, is important.

This isn't really fair to beginners, who won't know what the common plant pests look like. In a perfect world, you could rely on the employees and the cashiers to tell you if you've chosen a plant that has bugs,⁹ but A) sadly, many of them don't know what bugs look like either, B) even if they did know, bugs are small, and they hide, and can be missed, and C) even if they did know, and did see them, they wouldn't necessarily tell you about it, unless it was to upsell you on a bug spray of some kind. (I honestly only recall one particular time when I saw a possible pest problem and didn't say something to the customer, and that was a very special case where the customer was being an extreme asshole and needed to be punished.)

Still. Forewarned is forearmed. At the very least you should learn what the more common insect pests look like, so you can reject plants for yourself instead of having to rely on strangers being such great people that they'll act counter to their self-interest. In brief:

Aphids: sometimes they'll be big enough to see actual bodies, but I've also seen them looking like a sprinkling of sand or dust on the surface of a leaf. They can be green, yellow, whitish, black, red, and probably other colors I've forgotten.

Aphids on a Brugmansia. You may have to open the picture in a new window to see them.
Mealybugs: resemble gray-white fungus or cotton on the plant, especially under leaves and where leaves join stems (the axils). They're tricky because some plants naturally have fluffy white cottony bits on them, so it can be difficult to tell if you've got a mealybug or if that's just how the plant is. When in doubt, don't buy. Watch for mealybugs everywhere, but especially on cacti and succulents.
Scale: scale are really hard to identify, especially when they're on woody stems, because they look like the natural bumps of the stem. If they're on the underside of a leaf, or on an otherwise-smooth surface like a Cereus peruvianus stem, they're easier to detect. Scale will come off if scratched with a fingernail; natural bumps and pits won't.
Spider mites: spider mites give leaves a dusty or slightly bronzed appearance that doesn't clean up when wiped with a finger. They also spin webs under leaves and around leaf axils, which are easily seen since the mites themselves often live and poop in the webs. They favor Hedera helix, Codiaeum variegatum, Musa spp. (banana), Calatheas, and Schefflera species, among others. (More comprehensive list here.)
Fungus gnats: tiny, blackish, slow-moving flies that fly around when you bump the plant. They're most common in peaty, overwatered soil, whatever the plant is. I don't personally consider fungus gnats a big enough problem to reject a plant, since they're not that harmful, really, but your tolerance may vary.
Whiteflies: also tiny, but in this case white. Sometimes when they fly around, they look a little bit like cigarette ash floating around in the air: they have that same erratic movement. You'll notice them if you bump a heavily-infested plant, but smaller infestations are easier to miss. Check the underside of leaves, especially on thin-leaved tropicals. They're especially fond of Hibiscus, Abutilon, poinsettias, and basil.

Whitefly on Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. It's not usually quite so obvious.
And remember: at least one of these bugs is somewhere in the store with you. You can just about count on it. So be vigilant.

I don't mean, with this post, to make it sound like buying a houseplant should be a particularly intense emotional experience for you. Most plant purchases work out just fine so long as you have #4 and #6 covered: know what you're buying, and check it for bugs. But the other things are still occasionally relevant, and in any case, this is the best answer I can give for "what they don't want you to know about the plants." So, my mysterious Googler, I hope you see this someday. Sorry it's so late.

-

¹ Because we closed earliest on Saturday nights, and opened latest on Sunday mornings, so that was the longest period during which no one would be in the greenhouse.
² Perhaps it's self-centered of me, but I think the pesticide residue was a bigger issue for me and the other employees than it would have been for customers. I mean, I wouldn't have eaten our herbs, most of the time, but we did only use stuff that was supposed to break down relatively quickly, that was safe to be around once the greenhouse was reopened, and very little residue would have been left on any specific plant. Plus some more would have washed off once we watered the plants on Sunday morning. So the exposure a person could get by walking through the house would have been minimal (one might take a bigger risk eating an apple), and it would have been just the one time, too. But for those of us being exposed day in and day out, the risk didn't seem as trivial. I worried about it; I did.
³ Though in cities and buildings with very poor indoor air quality, having plants is surely not going to make the situation any worse. I just don't like the tactic of manipulating people to buy plants based on air-quality issues that plants may not improve or that aren't even problems, like when people talk about plants oxygenating the air, like low air-oxygenation is a common problem in our modern world.
There is a word for not having enough oxygen in the air: it's called suffocation. If your bedroom gets life-threateningly low oxygen levels at night, one, you'd already be dead and therefore not in a position to be buying plants, and two, having a peace lily in the corner wouldn't save you anyway: houseplants don't grow fast enough to make a significant difference. The same thing goes for people who worry about their plants releasing carbon dioxide at night (which most of them do, though there are exceptions): there isn't enough of it to make a difference, and it's not worth factoring into your decision to buy or not buy a plant.
Possibly if you had seven or eight hundred of them in a small house, someone with an finely-calibrated oxygen meter might be able to tell the difference, but what kind of nutbar is going to fill their house with hundreds of houseplants? I mean, seriously, you'd never be finished watering. It'd be insane.
⁴ (Much of Ames being under water right now.)
⁵ Metric equivalents not provided because I'm not even sure if this is true throughout the U.S., much less being true around the world.
⁶ Actually, the talking bit would mostly depend on what it had to say. I mean, suppose I got a talking unicorn that was really into football or Twilight or something, and that's all it ever wanted to talk about. Also it wouldn't have to be a unicorn. A horse would probably be fine, if it granted wishes and talked: the horn's really more just decorative. But the gold coins thing sounds nice. Perhaps I should think about this a bit more.
⁷ The graph of how it breaks down:


"Big box" stores cover nationwide chains like Target, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Lowe's, etc. "Chains" are stores which are also widespread networks of stores, but which don't have national coverage or gigantic stores: I think the only ones that apply are Earl May, a local garden-center chain, and Ace Hardware, which might be national but tend to be physically small stores. Part of the "Grocery" category is also chains (Hy-Vee, which is local to the Upper Midwest U.S.), and part isn't (the now-defunct grocery where I worked for a while a long time ago), which in retrospect I probably should have divided that up differently. "Free from businesses" is mostly stuff I salvaged from the ex-job; a solid chunk is also from Wallace's, the Begonia leaf they gave me (I had permission) a couple years ago and have since propagated the hell out of.
But the point stands: of the plants I have at the moment, only 11-18 percent of them are from any kind of chain, 48% are from small businesses (mail order counts) and 47% are from local, independent area businesses.
I honestly would have thought I'd bought more from Lowe's than that, but the spreadsheet says only 46 plants, out of 867, and the spreadsheet knows all.
I'm also shocked at how many of my plants are here via trades. Would not have guessed that, either.
⁸ (HINT: They do need to be watered sometimes, and more than just a teaspoon.)
⁹ Actually, in a perfect perfect world, there wouldn't be insect pests in the first place, I suppose.

(Really late) Counter-rant: "Green Plant" tag

Preamble

As regular readers know, I am very -- indeed, almost frighteningly -- interested in trying to get plant names right. Sometimes they're wrong anyway, but this is never from laziness or disinterest. As proof, for anyone who may be unconvinced, I offer this recent post, which was all about announcing that I had taken most of a day to correct spelling and IDs on plants mentioned in the blog since the very first post, and defending myself for not changing other designations I know or suspect to be wrong.

I yield to no one in my ability to nitpick and make trivial plant-identity-related distinctions.

And the reason why I do this is not so much that I believe it matters in and of itself what a thing is called -- a rose by the name of "child-eating skunk vomit plant" would smell as sweet¹ -- but because you can't talk about a plant to other people unless you're sure you're both using the same name to speak about the same plant. If I'm telling you how to care for the drought-hating, cold-sensitive, mite-prone, humidity-loving "zebra plant" Calathea zebrina --

Calathea zebrina.
-- there will be no end of confusion and plant carnage if you think I'm talking about the succulent, summer-and-winter-dormant, rot-prone "zebra plant" Haworthia attenuata:

Haworthia attenuata.
And in the world of wholesale and retail plant-selling, it's even more important that everybody's talking about the same thing, which is why botanical names tend to be specified in commercial settings. They may not be strictly taxonomically up-to-date, but they're at least usually unambiguous.

So I appreciate the frustration in buying a plant where someone took the time to stick a tag on it, only to find that the tag says "Green Plant" or "Tropical Foliage" or "Cactus/Succulent" or what have you. It's nice to know specifically what you've got. If nothing else, it makes it easier to figure out how to care for the plant and what it's likely to do in the future, or recommend the plant to someone else, or whatever.


However, I run across a lot of complaints about these tags that go beyond just being frustrated at not being given a name, with which I sympathize, and cross the line into outright prickishness, with which I sympathize not so much. One of the first examples of the latter, and probably still the most irritating one I've run into, is this post by Steve Aitken more than a year ago at finegardening.com, who somehow manages to complain about a semi-legitimate problem in such a way as to sound like an ignorant, douchey, entitled asshole.

And maybe Mr. Aitken actually is an ignorant, douchey, entitled asshole.

Such people exist.

He might be one of them.

We don't know.

The post, just a series of questions, begins with "Couldn't you [the person who wrote the "green plant" tag] have at least tried to come up with a name?" and gets steadily worse from there. So here, for the record, are Mr. Aitken's questions, with the answers the tag's author might give, allowed the opportunity:

The "Interview"

1. Couldn’t you have at least tried to come up with a name?

That's actually not possible. The reason why "green plant" tags exist in the first place is because retailers need a way to provide care instructions for plants they don't sell many of. (Tags are not cheap, by the way.) The same company that makes "Green Plant" tags also makes tags specific to Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, Cyclamen, poinsettia, and other high-volume plants for which care questions are likely to come up a lot. If tags are sold in batches of 100, and you sell, say, six Asplundia 'Jungle Drum' plants a year, do you really need a Asplundia tag? Most customers don't care what they have or how to keep it alive in the first place. And the retailer should be able to tell the customer an ID and provide basic care instructions if asked. I mean, many of them can't, but that's not the tag-makers' fault.

So rather than have hundreds and thousands of plant tags sitting around, for each possible variety of each possible plant,² retailers sensibly buy tags for the plants they sell a lot of, and use generic "green plant" tags for the low-volume plants, as most tropical foliage plants want fairly similar care anyway.³ This is why "green plant" tags exist. It's not because somebody believes that "green plant" is the name of any specific plant.⁴

2. Couldn’t you have shouted to a co-worker, “Hey, what kind of plant is this anyway?”

See above.

3. Was the answer “A green one”?

Okay, now you're just being a dick.

4. Why don’t any of the numerous plants in the picture look like my Green Plant?

Because they're not supposed to look like your Green Plant. They're there to illustrate the general range of plantiness compatible with the care instructions on the back of the tag.

5. Some of the plants in the photo are actually green and white. Would they be considered Green Plants, too?

They sure would! Also, you're a dick.

6. If you couldn’t even bother to provide a name, how much can I trust your recommendation of “moderate light”?

You've got it backwards. Only plants that need moderate light should be wearing this tag. If a plant needed high light, it should have a different tag.

7. Isn’t “moderate light” just hedging your bet, since you don’t know what plant this is and couldn’t possibly know what it needs for light?

See above.

Dick.

8. Isn’t the information provided under “How to Care for your Green Plant” true for 90% of indoor plants?

So you're saying that you don't believe it matters, in most of the cases, what the plant's actual identity is, but you're busting my chops because the tag doesn't identify precisely what the plant is?

All the lesser dicks must just worship you.

9. Aren’t the “key tips for success” merely a restatement of the hopelessly general instructions that come first?

You'd be surprised how people often don't read things the first time.

10. Did you also want to include the following instructions: Plant in dark soil in a pot with the opening facing up. Do not bleach. Do not place in freezer. Water should be wet before applying to Green Plant.

Would you do any of these things if not specifically instructed not to? No? Then why would you assume that anybody else would?

11. Did you have a meeting to brainstorm other ways this tag could be less helpful?

No. My boss gave me a list of 100 plant names and said "I want you to write care tags for each of these 100 plants. We need them by noon tomorrow."

What's unhelpful about the tag as it now stands, anyway? What would you like to see included that isn't being addressed? Are you serious about the bleach thing?

12. Do you think people should get an “A” for effort?

No, but I don't see what that has to do with anything.

13. If so, what grade would you give yourself for this tag?

N/A, because I answered "no" for #12, but maybe a B-minus?

14. Is this a conspiracy?

[sigh] Would you like it to be? Would that make you happy?

15. Do you think you can get away with this?

I already have.

16. What do you mean “I already have.”? [punctuation sic]

[shrug]

17. Why do you hate me?

'Cause you're a dick.

In conclusion

Perhaps in the future, it will be possible for retailers to print out specific tags for any plant in creation. Maybe someone will start a business selling CD-ROMs and blank tags, so you can print tags as you need them (though someone would need to solve the problem of water-soluble printer ink first: plants and tags get wet sometimes). No tag wastage, pinpoint-precise plant tags, plant purists like myself could be satisfied that we had the right instructions at all times, and Mr. Aitken could focus his sarcasm more narrowly on things he understands⁵ instead of this embarrassing sarcasm-flailing he's doing.

It annoys me to feel compelled to defend the tag-writers: it's not like I'm normally a big fan of the instructions they provide (which usually strike me as encouraging people to keep their plants too dark and too wet). But talking to the writers as though they believe there's a plant out there called "green plant," and then mocking them for being so stupid as to believe that, is just mean-spirited, douchey idiocy.⁶ So I defend the tag-writers' collective honor. Such as it is.

-

¹ (Though I bet they wouldn't sell as well.)
² At one point, just for shiggles, I sat down at home and tried to come up with a list of every single species and cultivar of plant I could think of that we had in the tropical greenhouse right at that moment. I hit 275 before I quit, and because of my cactus blindness, I know I failed to include a lot of cactus species. Further, that was only at that particular moment, and in the particular establishment where I worked: it would be fairly easy for me to come up with a list of 500 plants that can be grown indoors.
³ It should be noted that I was never all that thrilled with the instructions on the "green plant" tags, and was occasionally moved to cross stuff out and write different instructions in for people. But that was also true of the specific plant tags. A plant's location, soil mix, pest infestations or lack thereof, etc., influence care requirements enough that you can only ever give people kind of a general idea of what to expect from a given plant.
Incidentally: if you have a plant you can't identify and need a best guess for what to do with it, I have a post about that. Though you should still try to figure out what it is as soon as you can.
⁴ Though the botanical name for Chlorophytum in fact does translate as "green plant," so one could argue that a Chlorophytum wearing a "green plant" tag is correctly-tagged both specifically and generally.
⁵ His author bio on this page actually says of Aitken, ". . . please hold the questions about houseplants, he openly admits to killing them." So maybe this is not an area of expertise in the first place, which makes the snotty attitude even more surprising.
⁶ I assume the defense, if anybody feels one needs to be made, will be something like geez, it was just a joke; lighten up, man. Which would be easier to believe had any of it been funny.

Unfinished business: Pseudorhipsalis, Monstera

A combination of unusually bad time management, a Flash-based online game, an upcoming plant profile that sometimes seems like it needs to be a two-parter and sometimes doesn't, a broken windshield, and probable but unconfirmed acute polyurethane-fume poisoning have left me with no pre-written posts at the same time as I need to start another plant-watering cycle, so the posts may be kind of lame for a while.

Before you ask: the windshield was self-broken on Saturday, from the inside, because it turns out that a space that should have been 8 feet long was actually more like 7 feet and 11.75 inches. And of course it happened at the stroke of 5 PM, when nobody was available to fix it or rent us a replacement.

Meanwhile. The husband has also been applying polyurethane to the floors in the house in small sections for a few days, which means we've been living with a low level of fumes for as long. Like most smells, you get used to it pretty quickly and then don't smell it anymore, but then on Sunday night he did the whole kitchen all at once and my eyes sort of felt burny, I had trouble concentrating, and I felt sick to my stomach though I didn't actually throw up. We'd go somewhere to escape the smell for a few hours, except the last time we did that, we broke the windshield. So.

Anyway. I mentioned a few posts back, in one of the transmitted light posts, that the Pseudorhipsalis ramulosas at work had been looking really huge and incredible (comparatively speaking) since we'd gotten them in almost two years ago, and promised to provide a picture, so here you go.


It may or may not be your particular cup of tea, but you can't deny that it's at least very large and colorful. I noticed that some of the branches seem to be drying up again -- this is something they also did last year, and we never figured out why that was or what we were supposed to do about it.

Also, I'd promised better pictures of the "Philodendron 'Cheesecake'" that was actually Monstera deliciosa, and I have delivered on half of that: I got more pictures. Whether or not they're better is debatable; it still might not be sufficient to prove that they aren't Epipremnum aureum, as was suggested in comments, but I think if you open them in a new window and inspect the petioles, you can at least see that they are not grooved from top to bottom, as they would be for Epipremnum.








I'm still not especially inclined to buy one, though the price is not terrible and I admit I did think about it a little. Instead, on this trip, I bought a three-inch cactus that I hope is a Pachycereus marginatus and then, at a different place, a four-inch Zamia NOID. Pictures of which may wind up being tomorrow's post.

They're coming. . . .

So brace yourselves.

Where I used to work, mid-October was about the time when the poinsettias arrived. There's a long list of things about the job I am happy to be rid of, but the points are somewhere in the top five, maybe even the top two. Miserable, wretched things.

Walkaways Part 3

The term "walkaways" officially replaces "stuff I didn't buy" for the posts about interesting plants I didn't purchase. This kind of makes it sound like the plants walked away from me, instead of me walking away from them, but we'll let that slide: it's snappier, doesn't take nearly as long to type, and describes the situation well enough for my purposes. Thank you to N.N., who suggested the term by e-mail. (I'd use your full name, but I thought maybe you'd rather have the anonymity. Let me know.)

These are all from my ex-work.

First up is Agave geminiflora. Not a terrible-looking plant, though also kind of plain. And the tips of the leaves are in fact really sharp, and it was $25. So I didn't buy, though they had several of these so I can change my mind later if I want to.


The resemblance to a Koosh Ball (do they still make those?) is amusing. Though you wouldn't want to play catch with one of these.


Next up, Pachira aquatica, which for some reason we had a lot of trouble getting in while I worked there. Not that I tried that hard: it wasn't like the customers were demanding them or anything. (In fact, I don't think I ever had one single request for a Pachira, in a year and a half of working there.) But it didn't matter, because when we did try to bring them in, we didn't get them for one reason or another: failure to make a minimum order, trucking company error, or whatever. I don't remember everything that happened.

Anyway. Lowes had them often enough that if I had wanted one, I could have gotten one, and I am apparently just not that interested. I'm partly put off by the number of Pachira-related posts at Garden Web, which make them sound difficult. I don't know if they are or not, but Schefflera arboricola covers similar ground and I know how to care for Schefflera already, so who cares about Pachira?


And then finally the real reason for the post, Alocasia rugosa melo, which WCW was so enthusiastic about that she all but dragged me into the back room to show it to me:


The leaves are approximately the weight and consistency of non-corrugated cardboard. Like, cereal-box cardboard. And the texture is . . . I'm at a loss for words to describe the texture. My mother had a 1960s hard plastic suitcase that came close.

I took these pictures a couple days after they got the new order in, and when I went back a couple weeks later, it was nowhere to be found, which makes me 1) glad I took the picture on the first visit and 2) suspect that WCW has a shiny new Alocasia melo at home now. I wasn't especially tempted by this either, having heard enough stories about indoor Alocasia catastrophe to fill a book, and anyway if I were going to throw away money on an Alocasia from this last order of theirs, it would be 'Frydek.'

Surprisingly, I've mentioned 'Frydek' in three posts now without ever having posted a picture of it. I haven't even taken any pictures of 'Frydek.' I will try to remedy this the next time I get out there.

Mr_Subjunctive Explains Modern Retail Horticulture to a Time-Traveller From the Year 1860

Preface from August 2009: This post is kind of old: I put a really huge amount of time into writing it almost a year ago and then decided that I didn't like the way it was turning out, so I set it aside and went on. Then yesterday, I woke up feeling really unwell (sick to my stomach, or something) and didn't have it in me to try to write anything new from scratch. I was looking through the old posts for something that I could maybe just polish up a bit and post without expending too much effort, and read this again, and decided that it didn't seem that bad. I think originally I wasn't happy with it because I was hoping for more of this to be about plants. And I would still like for more of it to be about plants, but there's just sooooo much to explain, as you'll see, that it's impossible to stay focused on plants for very long.

Pictures are recycled from earlier posts, intended for decorative purposes only, and not necessarily meant to relate to what's going on in the text. The reader is asked to please appreciate them, as they took a fair amount of time to dig up and relocate.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Preface from October 2008: I actually spend a completely ridiculous amount of time, in my day to day life, imagining situations like this one. If someone were to travel forward in time from 1860 to 2008, how much of what happens in an ordinary person's life would they understand? How much stuff would you have to catch them up on in order to explain something as simple as listening to Justin Timberlake singing "Sexy Back" on the radio, while driving to the grocery store to get some frozen pizzas to cook for dinner? Marconi, pizza, boy bands, internal combustion engine, refrigeration, electronic music, The Pill, rock-n-roll, plastic, Madison Avenue . . . it'd be never-ending.

And then this makes me wonder if we'd be in the same boat, if we were to jump ahead to 2158. Would we have any idea what was going on? Would it even be possible for us to understand everyday life in theory, if we were immediately transported there? Would it just be terrifying? Would we think they were ridiculous? Would they think we were? And what kind of future can we expect to have anyway, given how things are going at the moment?

So I invented a time-traveler guy and wrote down a conversation. In reality, I think we'd have a much tougher time understanding one another than this, but I smoothed over some of those issues here because . . . well, we can't get sidetracked on every remotely slang word or phrasing I use, and I don't want to do all the research that would be necessary to make sure that his vocabulary is historically appropriate. (I did do some research, though!) The explanations about various things herein are, I hope, basic enough science that they won't come as news to my readers, but if anybody should happen to learn something along the way, well, so much the better, I guess.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Mr_Subjunctive Explains Modern Retail Horticulture
to a Time-Traveller From the Year 1860

by Mr_Subjunctive

The greenhouse. Mr_Subjunctive is hard at work watering the ferns when there is a loud BANG! from the general vicinity of the bromeliads, and a flash of light. Dropping the watering wand, Mr_Subjunctive runs through the greenhouse to see what is the matter. He sees a large, steampunkish contraption, with a moustached man standing inside it, dressed in a charcoal gray frock coat, squinting through his glasses at part of the machinery, as if it were telling him something unpleasant. The man straightens up and looks around. Mr_Subjunctive and the man see one another.

MAN: Do not be ALARMED, o citizen of the future! I mean you NO harm!

MR_S: Okay. That's, um, nice --

MAN: What is this place?

MR_S: "This place?" You mean the greenhouse?

MAN: I mean this place. [gestures] Where we are standing.

MR_S: It's a greenhouse. Hey, are you all right? You look a little --

MAN: Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Doctor Horatio Phillip Ketchum. I assume you've heard of me.

Beallara Marfitch 'Howard's Dream.'
MR_S: [shrugs]

KETCHUM: But I've created the world's first time machine! Surely there is no more monumental achievement in the nineteenth century!

MR_S: I don't know, guy. Sorry. Maybe you don't get written into the history books until you go back. What year did you come from?

KETCHUM: I have traveled from the year 1860. What year is this?

MR_S: 2008.

KETCHUM: Really? My calculations said 2010. Are you quite certain?

MR_S [raises eyebrow]: You want me to go check what year it is?

KETCHUM: .

MR_S: So why were you going to 2010?

KETCHUM: I thought one hundred fifty years sounded like a nice round number.

MR_S: No, yeah, I suppose I can see that. Makes sense.

Clerodendrum thomsoniae.
KETCHUM: Might I trouble you to fetch me a scientist? I would like to talk to someone about my discovery, and repeat my calculations, in order to find out why I am two years early. You do have scientists in 2008?

MR_S: Oh sure, sure. Lots of them. And I'm sure they'll have some questions for you. Try not to let the government find out you've got a time-machine, though, or they'll take it away to some secret U.S. military base and you'll never ever get it back.

KETCHUM: The Republic has endured, then?

MR_S: Oh sure the Republic endured. Sorta. It's been better, though. And there was a Civil War. That hadn't happened yet when you left?

KETCHUM: No.

MR_S: Oh. Well. There was this whole war about slavery, like, 1861-1865 or something, and lots of people died. But then eventually the country came back together again and all was well. Except that they shot Lincoln.

KETCHUM: No! Who shot Lincoln?

MR_S: Which reminds me! I bet money's changed quite a bit in fifty years. [opens wallet, pulls out a $5 bill] Here's a $5 bill. Check out who's on it.

KETCHUM: Lincoln is on your money?

Passiflora coccinea.
MR_S: Yep. He's pretty popular, what with saving the Republic and everything.

KETCHUM: But who shot him?

MR_S: Some guy. John Wilkes Booth.

KETCHUM: Why?

MR_S: I don't know. I guess he really wanted to keep his slaves. Or he was crazy. Maybe both. I don't remember. I could check Wikipedia if you really want to know.

KETCHUM: So you no longer have slavery?

MR_S: Well, not the way you'd remember, no. Actually, you might get a kick out of this -- our current election is between an African-American named Barack Obama, who also happens to be a Senator from Illinois, and a 109-year-old man named John McCain, who was born in Panama. The election's on Tuesday.

KETCHUM: "African-American?"

MR_S: We don't use "Negro" anymore. Or especially -- and I cannot stress this enough -- anything that sounds like "Negro." It's "African-American" or "Black," period. But as it happens, "African-American" is especially appropriate for Obama, since his mother is a white woman from Kansas and his father is an actual African from Kenya. And he was born in Hawaii.

KETCHUM: In where?

MR_S: Never mind.

Aechmea 'Del Mar.'
KETCHUM: Your current election is between a mulatto and a 109-year-old?

MR_S: Sorry, that was me having fun with you: McCain's not really 109. He's old, though. Seventy-something. Also, point of interest, we don't use the word "mulatto" anymore either.

KETCHUM: Why not? Why have you discarded so many perfectly useful words?

MR_S: It's complicated. Basically it's like Lincoln freed the slaves, so now they have the same rights as anybody else. They go to school, they vote, they have jobs, they marry. A lot of the words you used for them are considered offensive now. I guess mostly 'cause nobody wants to be reminded of when their people were forced into involuntary servitude. Understandably.

KETCHUM: The, ah, African-Americans vote?

MR_S: Oh sure. Women vote too.

KETCHUM: [blinking]

MR_S: And they wear pants. Er. Trousers.

KETCHUM: Who? The African-Americans?

MR_S: Well, I meant the women, but yes, the African-Americans wear trousers too. Pretty much everybody wears trousers.

KETCHUM: You're having me on again.

Thelocactus setispinus.
MR_S: All true, actually. But I'm sorry. I've overloaded you, I can see. A lot has happened in the last 148 years; I shouldn't try to tell you about all of it all at once.

KETCHUM: No, no, it's perfectly fine. I came to the future to learn, after all. I have been training my brain to retain facts for many years. It's just that so many of these ideas are so unexpected and queer.

MR_S: [facepalm] Um. About "queer." We don't really say that anymore either. Or, um, I guess we do, but the meaning has changed a lot. Also "gay" has gone through some changes, you should know.

KETCHUM: Why? What do those words signify?

MR_S: Well, they both refer to men who, uh, who have relations -- sexual relations -- with other men. Or women with women, though for women you usually say "lesbian" instead of "gay." "Queer" is either a noun or an adjective, and "gay" is usually an adjective but is occasionally a noun.

Belamcanda chinensis cv.
KETCHUM: I see. Perhaps there is some more neutral topic we could converse about, instead of these horrifying social developments. Although I can see how your men might be confused, if women are voting and wearing trousers. Perhaps your men can no longer tell the difference and engage in -- relations -- with one another accidentally --

MR_S: That's really not how it works. And it's not all the men, or even most of the men. If that makes you feel any better.

KETCHUM: Regardless. What of science? Is it equally depraved?

MR_S: Hmm. Well, some of it, yeah. I mean, don't go asking anybody about genetic engineering or stem cells.

KETCHUM: I certainly will not.

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis cv.
MR_S: Are you interested in botany at all? Botany's pretty safe.

KETCHUM: Ah. Yes. Yes, thank you. Botany. Let us talk about these marvelous specimens around us. You said earlier that this was a green house, did you not?

MR_S: It's "greenhouse." One word. It's like a really big, er, "Wardian Case," basically.

KETCHUM: And you have collectors around the world to bring back specimens for your sponsors?

MR_S: No, no, all of these are grown in Florida and sent up to us here.

KETCHUM: What? All of these species are native to Florida?

MR_S: Oh no. They're from all over. They just . . . I guess you'd say they farm them in Florida. And then we call them up and say, we want six of these, and thirty of these, and so on, and then they ship them up to us on trucks and we sell them.

KETCHUM: You . . . "call" them?

MR_S: Oh, right. There's this thing called the telephone. You can dial a series of numbers that tells the telephone systems who you want to talk to, and then the system makes their telephone make a sound that tells them that there's someone wanting to talk to them, and then they pick up a mouthpiece and talk into it and the two of you have a conversation.

Zantedeschia 'Picasso.'
KETCHUM: How long does this take?

MR_S: Um. I dunno. Maybe a minute?

KETCHUM: Marvelous.

MR_S: Yeah, I guess so.

KETCHUM: And these "telephones," how do they operate?

MR_S: Not sure what you mean.

KETCHUM: You just speak into a long hollow tube and the sound comes out the other end thousands of miles away, or --

MR_S: Oh. Duh. No, the sound is converted to electrical signals first, and then the electrical signals are transmitted to the other telephone, and the other telephone translates them back into sound. Basically like a telegraph, I think, just with the ability to send complex sounds instead of just dots and dashes.

Dendrobium NOID.
KETCHUM: I see. And are we any nearer an explanation for electricity?

MR_S: Um. Yeah. It's sort of related to magnetism. Electrons flow --

KETCHUM: "Electrons?"

MR_S: Yes. Electrons. It turns out that atoms aren't solid, indivisible little balls after all. They're made up of three smaller particles called electrons, protons and neutrons. Electricity happens when the electrons are all moving in the same direction through a motor or something. I'm a little unclear on the specifics.

KETCHUM: So the telephone you use to speak with Florida is powered by the movement of these electrons, and then Florida puts the plants on a ship and sends them to you?

MR_S: More or less. Now that I think about it, the telephone signals are probably more fiber-optic now than electrical. And that's leaving out cell phones, which is a whole other thing. Also Florida sends stuff to us by truck, not by ship.

KETCHUM: And what is a "truck?"

MR_S: It's like a large carriage, I guess? Or a covered wagon? They're very large, wheeled vehicles, but instead of being attached to horses and pulled by horses, they're self-powered.

KETCHUM: And what do you do with all your horses?

MR_S: [blinks]

MR_S: .

MR_S: I really don't understand that question.

Eucharis grandiflora.
KETCHUM: No matter. Continue. Where does the power to move the trucks come from, then?

MR_S: The truck contains an engine, which burns gasoline --

KETCHUM: "Gasoline?"

MR_S: It's from petroleum? Flammable liquid?

KETCHUM: Oh, for lice!

MR_S: [blinks]

MR_S: Very possibly. Anyway. There's a thing called an internal-combustion engine, which converts the power from the burning gasoline into motion of a motor. I don't really know how that works; I've never been all that interested in finding out. But so then they put the plants on the truck, and the truck travels along the roads to us, here in Iowa, where we take the plants off and send it back.

KETCHUM: It all sounds very exciting. This is exactly the sort of discovery I had hoped to make with my time machine. You're quite certain you've never heard of me?

MR_S: [shrugs]

KETCHUM: Then you keep the plants here and sell them.

MR_S: Yes.

Degarmoara Flying High 'Stars and Bars.'
KETCHUM: [looking at a price tag]

KETCHUM: In what units are these prices?

MR_S: Dollars.

KETCHUM: Your customers must be extremely wealthy!

MR_S: Not especially. Money has, like I said before, changed a lot in the last hundred and fifty years.

KETCHUM: Hundred and forty-eight.

MR_S: My bad. Hundred and forty-eight.

KETCHUM: These plants are available to all, then?

MR_S: Well sure. Anybody who has the money.

KETCHUM: And then the money goes back to Florida?

MR_S: No. Or: well. Some of it does. Most of it stays here. The boss covers her costs, and then whatever is left over is profit. I'm sure it was the same in your day. Some of the costs are probably different.

KETCHUM: Like what?

MR_S: Well, um, she has to pay her employees, and pay the electric bill and the phone bill, and --

KETCHUM: The electricity and telephone aren't free?

MR_S: Oh my no.

Goodaleara Pacific Truffle 'Surrogate Star.'
KETCHUM: Hmm. [gestures] Do go on.

MR_S: Plus she has to pay for gas for the trucks, and the fertilizer and soil we use to pot the plants in, and the pots too, as far as that goes. And she has to pay taxes on the land, insurance for the business, poisons to kill the greenhouse pests, and so on. It does add up.

KETCHUM: Greenhouse pests?

MR_S: Yeah. Some of the plants we bring in have bugs on them, and the bugs can make the plants look bad, or kill the plants, so we spray the plants with poison once a week to kill the bugs.

KETCHUM: And then you bring in new plants, with new bugs?

MR_S: Well, yeah.

KETCHUM: Would it not be more sensible to have the Floridians, the farmers, spray the plants with poison before sending them?

MR_S: [sighs] You'd think so, wouldn't you? I think it's a cost thing. If they did it, then they'd charge us more money for the plants they sell us, and we'd make less of a profit.

KETCHUM: But you're spraying the plants every week. Doesn't the poison cost money as well?

MR_S: Yes. [pause] I guess the real reason why we don't have them do it first is because some of the bugs live outside, here, and could get into the greenhouse and cause trouble even if the plants were completely clean when they arrived.

KETCHUM: This sounds like a poor system.

Tillandsia NOID.
MR_S: It really is. But it works well enough. Mostly. It doesn't have to be perfect.

KETCHUM: Why not just grow the plants for yourself, here in the . . . "greenhouse?"

MR_S: We don't have the space, for one thing: I mean, we do a few things from seeds or cuttings, but it'd be impossible to grow everything we needed on our own without having a lot more room to lay it all out. And then we'd have to heat it all during the winter, which costs a lot of money, and someone would have to water it all, and with some of these plants, it'd wind up being a good seven years before we got anything big enough to sell, and even then it wouldn't look as good or be as cheap as something that had been grown outdoors in Florida and shipped up here. It's too bad, though, that we can't do that with citrus.

KETCHUM: Why?

MR_S: They're not sending citrus out of Florida anymore, because the state's being quarantined for a citrus disease. We could take on a new supplier, from California or Texas, but that's a hassle, or we can wait for Florida to get the situation under control, or we could grow our own, or we could just not have them.

KETCHUM: And for right now?

MR_S: We just don't have them. Though maybe I could go to the supermarket and buy some oranges or lemons or something and we could try planting seeds. I've never done that before; I don't know how well it'd work, or whether the plants would be pretty when we got them.

Cordyline fruticosa.
KETCHUM: "Supermarket?" What about them is superlative?

MR_S: Mostly that they're very large, and many products are available. Lots of produce, actually, fruits and vegetables. Any time of year, you can go to the supermarket and buy bananas and apples and grapes and strawberries and what have you.

KETCHUM: Any time of year? How is this possible?

MR_S: Well, I'm not saying it works out that great. Some stuff is grown in the Southern Hemisphere -- Chile is a good one, for example, on the I think west side of South America. They grow a lot of our off-season grapes and ship them up here. Other stuff is grown in greenhouses similar to this one, but much larger, in other parts of the country.

KETCHUM: And when you say the grapes are "shipped," to you, you mean trucks?

MR_S: Well, no, I think I mean ships sometimes. Probably mostly airplanes. I've never really thought about it much.

KETCHUM: Airplanes?

MR_S: Oh. Right. We can fly now. Planes are basically hollow metal tubes with wings; when they go fast enough, they can lift off the ground and then fly to wherever they're going.

KETCHUM: How fast do they have to go? Do the wings flap, like birds' wings?

MR_S: No, no flapping. I don't know how fast. It's something to do with the air pressure over the top of the wing being different from the air pressure underneath the wing. But anyway, the planes or ships or whatever have refrigerated compartments --

KETCHUM: "Refrigerated?"

MR_S: Like an icebox? Did you have iceboxes?

KETCHUM: [blank stare]

Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica.
MR_S: Um. Well, okay. When you compress a gas, it gets hot. When you expand a gas, it cools down. Refrigerators work by compressing a gas, blowing away the heat, and then expanding it in a different chamber to cool that chamber down. Then it's moved out of the chamber and compressed again, until the compartment has been cooled to a specified temperature, which is usually around 34 or 35 degrees Fahrenheit, because cooler temperatures slow down the rate at which food rots.

KETCHUM: And then it's brought to the "supermarket" and allowed to warm back up for purchase?

MR_S: Well, no, it's usually kept cool for purchase. The slower it rots, the longer they can keep it on the shelves, and the longer it's on the shelves, the more opportunity for the customers to buy it. All kinds of things are refrigerated in supermarkets: meat, milk, cheese, TV dinners --

KETCHUM: [questioning look]

MR_S: Maybe later, on explaining TV dinners.

KETCHUM: I see. You were saying something about citrus fruit, though.

MR_S: Oh. Um. [pause] Right, so -- I was just saying that we could try starting our own stuff, but it'd take so much time and effort that we're better off to just pay Florida to do it. But the other reason why we don't propagate our own plants more than we do is, a lot of the plants here are patented varieties. We can't make more of them to sell without paying the patent holders.

KETCHUM: So the patent holders own these plants even after you've purchased them?

MR_S: Partly. It's complicated.

KETCHUM: And you accept this?

MR_S: We don't have much choice. There are publications out there, magazines and such, that promote certain plants, and then our customers read about these plants and want them. So we have to buy them, because otherwise the customers will see that we don't have what they want, and they'll go somewhere else to get them. But, if the plant is a patented one, there's usually only one place we can buy them, and so the seller can name their own price, more or less. So we pay a lot of money for the patented variety, and then our customers pay us even more money, and eventually you see eight-dollar geraniums.

KETCHUM: Why, you're all mad!

Anthurium cv. 'Pandola.'
MR_S: [frowns] Well not really. You guys are pretty nutty-looking from our perspective, too, you know. Slavery and child labor and women not having the vote and all that. Slavery kind of in particular. Besides which, it's not my system. I didn't invent this.

KETCHUM: But how could you patent a plant in the first place? How could anyone prove that the plant had been stolen?

MR_S: Oh frak. We are going to have to do genetics. [sigh] Um. Okay. Well. In each of your cells -- you guys knew about cells, right?

KETCHUM: (impatiently) Of course.

MR_S: Well, in each of your cells, there is a chemical which is sort of a long thin line of repeating units, sort of like Morse code, which is called DNA. It contains the instructions for building a living body, more or less, but in a really abstract form. Scientists can now read the DNA from cells and compare them to one another. So not only could you demonstrate that the DNA from one plant was the same as the DNA from a second, patented plant, but if the patented plant were crossed with some other variety, you could determine that, too.

KETCHUM: How is the "reading" done? Are there microscopes involved?

MR_S: Well, potentially, I guess, but it's not that kind of reading: nobody's looking at the DNA up-close and seeing what it's saying; we have instruments that pull the DNA apart in various ways, and then the instruments can tell us whether they got the same pieces.

KETCHUM: I see. So you must be able to make any life form you want, then? If you can read the DNA, does it not follow that you may also write it?

MR_S: Yes, but in a very limited way. We only just found out what DNA was and what it did about fifty years ago. But yes, we can at least take certain pre-made pieces from one organism and insert them into another. It's called genetic engineering, and not everybody is happy about it.

KETCHUM: Are all of these [gestures at plants] modified in this way?

MR_S: Probably a few, but I think most of them were created from cross-breeding different species. Which I guess is sort of technically genetic engineering, though it's a really clumsy, time-consuming kind. Some of these are also probably the result of radiation treatment, which is . . . .

KETCHUM: Yes?

MR_S: Well, you remember I said that atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons? Certain configurations of protons and neutrons fall apart spontaneously, releasing energy when they do. Irradiating something involves exposing it to the energy produced by this falling-apart.

Portulaca grandiflora 'Tequila Yellow.'
KETCHUM: How do you make the atoms so they'll fall apart?

MR_S: They're that way naturally. Uranium, for example. Or radium.

KETCHUM: I am unfamiliar with "radium."

MR_S: Really? I would have thought -- well, but it doesn't matter. The point is that these natural elements are constantly in the process of breaking down, and the energy they produce can change DNA. So you might start with a plant with green leaves and yellow streaks, and then irradiate the seeds, and the seeds that germinate wind up being green leaves with white streaks. Or solid yellow leaves. Or leaves that are a completely different shape. It all depends on what kind of damage the radiation does to the DNA in the seeds. This gives us some of the varieties of plants that we sell.

KETCHUM: Then some of these plants must be producing radiation.

MR_S: No. Or, yes and no, but mostly no. All living things produce some tiny amount of radiation, because potassium, an important element in our bodies, is naturally slightly radioactive. Also carbon. But it's not being irradiated that does it; it's just a fact of having bodies that are partly made of potassium and carbon. Just because you irradiate something doesn't mean it's radioactive, any more than illuminating an object makes it luminous.

KETCHUM: I see.

MR_S: We should probably really find you an encyclopedia or something.

KETCHUM: (absently) Perhaps, perhaps. But I am curious on one more point: are people better-natured now, as in my time we all trusted they would be? Are they more intelligent? More courageous? Are your whalers, your clergy, your scientists, all sluggards, debased, greedy, braggarts, murderous, timid and foolish men like our own, or are they nearer the divine, slow to wrath, in control of their depraved instincts, compassionate, wise, lovers of God and mankind alike with all their strength and force of will?

MR_S: [looks at floor] No. I'm afraid human nature remains pretty much unchanged. They haven't really found a cure for that yet. I'm sorry.

KETCHUM: Perhaps then you would do me the honor of accompanying me further into the future. Say 2160?

MR_S: I guess. Are you pretty sure you can go backwards in this thing too? I don't necessarily want to get stuck living in 2160.

KETCHUM: Going backwards in time works as well. [frowns] Plus or minus two years, it would seem.

MR_S: [gulps] I may want to call the husband too, before we go.

KETCHUM: The who?

MR_S: [already leaving] Back in a second.

THE END . . . ?