[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XIII

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Peperomia clusiifolia cv. There's really no point to trying to do the transmitted light thing with Peperomias. Not that I won't probably try again anyway, but just -- it doesn't work. Leaves are too thick.

Pelargonium x hortorum cv. Sort of a lost-in-translation thing going on here: in person, this was a not-bad picture, but by the time it's cropped and shrunk, it doesn't look like much. Pelargoniums tend to be difficult anyway, because the leaves, annoyingly, try to curl, which makes it hard to get things properly in focus.

Plectranthus ciliatus. Doesn't make a very good houseplant, though it's a vigorous grower in the greenhouse, or outdoors. They get huge.

Hedera canariensis 'Gloire de Marengo.' Excellent focus, and it doesn't even have spider mites visible, so this is, like, the Platonic ideal picture of Hedera canariensis venation.

Lantana camara 'Landmark Yellow.' Good old Lantana.

Hosta cv. 'Orange Marmalade.' Is not even remotely orange, by the way. Not sure what sort of weird Hosta-grower logic was operating when the name was assigned.

Philodendron bipinnatifidum. Sort of mildly surprising: the venation here is very visible, but the plant is so huge that you're not looking for anything on this small of a scale.

Polyscias balfouriana (new leaf). I dislike this picture but can't pin down a reason why. Nothing obviously wrong with it. Maybe the focus could have been better.

Begonia NOID. Not the best of this particular batch, probably, but it's different from anything else I can remember posting before. It's a cane-type Begonia, maybe also an "angel-wing," but I really have a hard time understanding all the fine distinctions in the world of Begonias as far as which are fibrous, tuberous, angel-wing, dragon-wing, non-stop, and so on and so forth. I can more or less tell the rexes apart from everything else, but that's about all. A person could get a Ph.D. in Begonias, it looks like.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Gays Delight.' "Gays" may or may not have an apostrophe in it: the name doesn't really make sense without an apostrophe in there somewhere, but officially, there may not be one.

Amphibians

The move is accomplished. No plant casualties reported so far, though the husband tried to put all of his plants (two spider plants, Chlorophytum comosum; two pothos, Epipremnum aureum; and a corn plant, Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana') out in full sun on the east side of the house, with predictably ghastly results. I expect the Epipremnum and Dracaena to make full recoveries, but the Chlorophytums may be toast. Which I suspect was actually the (subconscious, passive-aggressive) idea in the first place, though he says otherwise.

Unrelated photo of a frog which may or may not be the gray treefrog, Hyla versicolor, which was spotted on a garage door a week or two ago. Even if it's not the gray treefrog, it's pretty inarguably a gray treefrog.
Everything in the apartment was cleaned. Everything in the new place, with a few exceptions, is still dirty and still needs to be cleaned. We also have contractors running all over the place putting in fences, replacing windows and doors, cutting holes in the floor for heat/AC vents, installing the heater and air conditioner (though we don't know if we can actually use them yet: they may or may not be done), and doing stuff with concrete, plumbing, and electrical wiring I'm afraid I don't even understand well enough to enumerate. Also we've had somebody in to hook us up to cable and internet. Obviously.

Yet to be done: harmful chemicals will be employed to remove carpet glue from the concrete floor of the plant room (at which point the majority of them will be relocated to the plant room, though the particularly fussy, decorative, or irreplaceable ones will likely remain in the house), three of the five (!) microwave ovens we now possess will be disposed of in some fashion,¹ the pink bedroom will have to be painted something a little less pink (assuming we can agree on a color which don't hold your breath), the other rooms will also have to be painted, the wall which was knocked out will have to have the studs removed and replaced with beams, which will then be painted (maybe) and have shelves put in them, everything will have to be swept and dusted and cleaned, the aquarium will have to be assigned a location and set up (ideally before all the fish die), plants in excess of requirements will have to be sold on consignment or given away or otherwise removed,² furniture will be lugged up and down stairs endlessly, the upstairs bathroom floor has to be redone, the downstairs bathroom needs to have walls and lights put in,³ books and clothes and suchlike all need to be unpacked and sorted and placed in appropriate locations, the downstairs non-bathroom area needs to have its carpet removed, its carpet adhesive dissolved away, and then get re-covered with epoxy or something, and all this while laundry continues to get done, plants continue to be watered, mail continues to be checked,⁴ bills continue to be paid, and so on. And then at some point in there we have to get married, I guess. And I may go back to work a day or two before June is over as well. And I think I was supposed to write a book proposal somewhere in there too, soonish, if not necessarily in June.

American toad, Bufo americanus. Also from the house.
So the point is that there's a lot of stuff to do. I do anticipate returning to a regular blog posting schedule at some point relatively soon (in the next couple weeks?), but we're not there yet. We'll aim for a post every few days until things have calmed down enough to resume daily posting.

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¹ How two people get five microwaves: 1 The husband had one when we met. 2 I had one when we met. When we merged households, neither of us was willing to give up our microwaves, so we kept them both, and it turns out that it's often surprisingly convenient to have two microwaves, so we got accustomed to having two and now couldn't imagine having only one. (Or, well, I could imagine it, but obviously it'd be totally impossible for someone to actually live like that.) Then 3 a microwave came with the house, and 4,5 the husband saw a couple stainless steel ones that he thought were cool a long time ago, and bought them, and they're still in storage (along with two of our four dining room tables and two of our three bicycles) because we don't have anywhere to put them right now.
² Which also means that some method of determining how many plants two people might reasonably be understood to require will have to be invented, obviously.
³ 'Cause right now it's just a toilet sitting on one side of the laundry room, next to an enclosed shower, which is kind of awkward. Particularly when there are contractors wandering, antlike, all over the house, for eight or nine hours every day, and one of them could pop out of a corner at any moment. Not that we don't have an alternate, less public toilet too. But it's upstairs, and sometimes it seems worth the risk if it means not having to make a trip up the stairs.
⁴ Less trivial than you would think: here, mail is only delivered to your home if you live on one particular street. If you live on any other street, you have to pay for a P.O. Box and go pick your mail up yourself, except that we can't do that yet because the town is out of P.O. Boxes at the moment. So they're just holding our mail somewhere back behind the counter, and we'll have to go during business hours and ask for it until somebody moves or dies or whatever and we can take their box. Upon first hearing this, the husband and I questioned whether it was even legal -- neither of us had ever heard of anything like this before, and I grew up in a town in Iowa about an eighth this size. So this is freaky and inconvenient and borderline, I don't know, communist or something. When asked, residents of the town just shrug and say that that's how it's always been. The postmaster said "maybe someday" they'll deliver mail to everybody, though according to the husband she said it in the kind of tone that indicates that you don't really think it's ever going to happen, like "maybe someday I'll take that trip around the world I've always wanted" or "maybe someday I'll resume those piano lessons I was taking when I was in third grade."

Pop Quiz: U-Haul Full of Plants

Moving is horrible, and goes on for much, much longer than is tolerable. Yesterday the husband rented a U-Haul truck, so that we could move the really big stuff that would never be able to fit in the car: two dining room tables (one of them had been serving as an office desk for the last couple years. I'm told that we have two more dining room tables in storage somewhere: it will be interesting to see where they all wind up, considering that we basically never eat at a table together: usually we eat in the living room while watching TV.), a couch, a set of box springs, and the two six-foot Cereus peruvianus of mine that I have finally, knock wood, gotten the mealybugs off of.

But then since we had the truck, you know, why not move everything else, too, so we spent Thursday, all day, hauling big, awkward, or heavy objects up and down stairs. Started at 9:30 AM, and didn't stop until about midnight. The below photo is from the last load of the night, and represents probably about 20-30 percent of the total plants (not as terrible as it sounds: the very large or problematic plants all got moved first, so much of what's left are mostly small and won't be a big deal to move). The Cereus peruvianus aren't visible, but they're in there: they're laying on the floor in the back left corner. Which turned out to work surprisingly well, as a large-cactus-transport method.


Internet access is likely to be spotty for a while, and new posts will not necessarily resume on June 1, though that's still kinda the goal. It's not that I'll actually be without the internet for much (or any) of this, it's just that there are likely to be more pressing things going on. If nothing else, many of the plants haven't been properly watered in a couple weeks, and I'll have to do that. (I expect to lose a few, though hopefully plants that were already not doing so hot will finally get pushed over the edge, as opposed to plants that were healthy suddenly deciding that they can't go on.)

Meanwhile, you can look at the photo and see how many plants you can identify. I have the unfair advantage of knowing what I have, and having foggy memories of where everything got placed in the truck, but I can see at least 23 distinct species in there. A key will be posted whenever I have the opportunity and inclination.

One nice thing about living outside of Iowa City: there are stars in the country! It'd been so long since I'd lived anywhere with actual dark skies (last occasion would have been around 2001), I'd kind of forgotten about stars. But there are a lot of them, and they're very nice. Hell, we both saw a satellite, even, and I saw, though the husband did not, a meteor. So that's a plus.

I also finally got to see what will become the plant room 1) in sunlight and 2) in the afternoon, so I have a better sense, now, of how much light that room gets. The large tree in the backyard actually blocks a lot of the sunset, but there's a period of decent brightness in there anyway. It should work out.

I was originally kind of disappointed with the town, specifically the landscape, which is really flat, for Johnson County. Most of the county is given to picturesque gently rolling hills, and I'd kind of hoped for that, but it turns out that flat land is okay too: you can see forever, which is good for tornado-watching (I waited for 32 years before seeing my first tornado, and it was a good time, and I'm hoping to see some more. This should be an excellent location.), and the sunsets are, I'm told, periodically breathtaking, and we have a cornfield abutting the back yard, so we'll get to watch (and maybe listen to) the corn grow. I also think I heard a cow yesterday, but the cow remains unconfirmed.

A garden of sorts was planted a few days ago: jalapeno peppers and corn, and that's it. The previous owners had an area already dug up, and it wasn't very big, but that's okay because I'm not hugely into vegetables anyway. Also the soil turns out to be really dreadful, even by local standards: it's basically 100% clay. As in, you can go into the back yard, stick your shovel anywhere, peel off a thin layer of grass and roots, and then mold little unicorn statues all afternoon. It's sort of appaling. So we don't have a lot of hope for the garden, really. Apparently if you live there, you learn to just take it for granted that the soil will have to be amended somehow.

Photos as time permits.

New cultivars of Epipremnum aureum and Syngonium spp.

Today, Saturday, is my last day at work -- it looks like I'm not going to be able to come back to work any additional days in June, which is more or less okay by me (I was pretty miserable from the heat on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.), though I had hoped to be able to do something to assist through the rest of the really really busy period. The reasons why I won't be able to are technical, and have to do with my income from work being theoretically able to mess things up with the funding for the house, according to the husband, which I figure I'll be all snarling and sleep-deprived after a week of moving / cleaning / heat / contractors / generalized disruption of everything, so probably not in the best mental state to be dealing with customers anyway, especially since customers at this time of year are frequently out of their damn minds. (I've had people get visibly angry with me because we didn't have any non-pink Lisianthus to sell them. Seriously. The tone was such that it seemed like the customer in question would rather we not have had any Lisianthus at all, than for us to have it but have it be the loathed pink, that the pink was just crossing a motherfucking line. I exaggerate, but not by much. It was weird.)

Anyway.

So I won't be posting for a while. I expect to start again on 1 June, but it could start up again sooner, or later. I really have no idea. E-mail may or may not be similarly shut down. Much is unknown about this post-work world.

Meanwhile, I leave you with a cool little pothos (Epipremnum aureum) that WCW brought in on Wednesday, having bought it at a competitor's store. Neither of us had seen one before, and she wasn't even sure it was a pothos, but it was shaped the same as pothos in every particular, down to the grooved petioles, so I was fairly certain that's what it was. (I have since managed to identify it as Epipremnum aureum 'N' Joy,' first by searching davesgarden.com, then by running across an availability list from one of our suppliers, who listed a pothos by that name.¹) It almost looks like the same kind of variegation I talk about in the second half of the Sansevieria trifasciata profile, with the three layers of cells being expressed differently at the leaf center and leaf margin. No word yet on whether that is, in fact, what's going on with 'N'Joy.'

Not-great photo of WCW's whole plant.

Close-up of a more or less typical leaf.
Anyway. WCW brought this plant in on Wednesday. On Thursday, I walked to the competitor (the husband had the car at the house²) and bought one of my own, along with a Syngonium NOID:



I haven't come up with a positive ID yet on the Syngonium. It resembles S. wendlandii, which is also a dark green, and has a similar velvety texture, though S. wendlandii has a broader white center, in the pictures of it I've found. Though that may be because mine was grown in lower light than the on-line specimens. Syngonium 'Green Velvet' and 'Southern Star' are also contenders, but both are only mentioned on one site, which suggests that they're maybe not official cultivar names, and might be synonyms for S. wendlandii. Whatever it is, I have no idea what it was doing in Iowa, and also it looks difficult, like every other velvety-textured aroid I've encountered to date save one.³ Perhaps it would be best to just give it to Nina immediately. For her to poop on.⁴

Then I found out yesterday that actually, WCW had intended me to keep the Epipremnum 'N' Joy,' so now I have two.

Anyway. See y'all in a week. Plus or minus.

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¹ Another confirmation of the ID led me to this page, with pictures from the 2009 Tropical Plant Industry Exhibition, so now I want: Anthurium 'Tweed' (though, one, I bet it doesn't do well indoors, and two, I really don't want to "fool the cops," if by "fool the cops" you mean "make them think that the harmless plant I'm growing is actually marijuana, which will get me arrested and lead to a long, unpleasant and expensive process of having to prove that it's not an illegal plant at all, at the end of which I will be traumatized and without legal recourse"), Cordyline fruticosa 'Antares,' Euphorbia punicea, Ficus dammaropsis, Ludovia integrifolia, Neoregelia 'Ardie,' Dracaena deremensis 'Hawaiian Sunshine,' D. d. 'Spearmint,' D. d. 'Malaika,' and D. d. 'White Surprise.' Your covetousness may vary.
² It occurred to me while writing the above fairly mundane sentence that, at one point not even all that long ago, I had gotten used to the idea that I would never have a husband, car, or house, and that it's quietly mind-blowing that I do. Er, sorta I do. (Technically, the car and house aren't mine, and I don't have a driver's license so I can't exactly use the car independently.^a)

^a Long story. It's not related to a DUI or anything -- I've never had one, so I've never had one taken away. I could get one, in theory, but that's a whole different long story.

³ Philodendron gloriosum is hanging in there, but is not an easy indoor plant. Ditto for Anthurium crystallinum 'Mehani,' which was doing fine until just recently, when I let it get too dry for too long. Alocasia 'Frydek' was breathtakingly gorgeous, but I didn't even want to try that one: it was damning enough that it was an Alocasia. The only velvety aroid I've been successful with so far has been Philodendron hederaceum micans.
⁴ Yes, it's a Triumph the Comic Insult Dog reference. Though also that's what she does. Mostly she poops on her rock, occasionally she poops on the Podocarpus. Probably there's other pooping I'm not aware of. In fairness, it's not like she has an exercise wheel or a plastic chew toy or anything: she's kind of hard up for entertainment. Spends a fair amount of time literally climbing the walls. Sometimes she hangs upside down from the wire mesh cover. Let's don't judge.

Random plant event: Susan fights back

Noticed one of the black-eyed susan vines (Thunbergia alata) at work doing something interesting the other day. Normally, the flowers are a bright yellow-orange, with a dark brown, almost black, center. This one lacked the brown center.

I tried to get a picture of the two of them side-by-side, for comparison purposes, but unfortunately, none of those pictures turned out very well: the normal flower's dark center wound up just looking like a shadow. So here's what the flower usually looks like:


And here's the weirdo:


I don't like the light-centered flower nearly as well as I do the dark-centered one. Not sure why. It's just somehow not as interesting.

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XII

Unlike most of the transmitted light posts recently, this one isn't because I ran out of time to write anything else and had to use one of the transmitted light stockpile. Having pre-loaded photos was still a factor, though, since I have to spend a lot of the next couple weeks packing, watering, working, and relocating, and so I'm trying to pre-write the blog, which means that even though I haven't actually run out of time and had to scramble for something to post, it still feels like I have.

On the plus side, this batch contains what is possibly my all-time favorite transmitted light photo to date. It's at least in the top ten.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Brassolaeliocattleya 'Helene Brown.' Sort of a cat's-eye effect, almost.

Guzmania lingulata NOID. Boring, but at least it's in focus.

Variegated Tradescantia pallida. This one didn't really work any better than the nonvariegated Tradescantia pallida photo, but it's a little more interesting to look at.

Philodendron hastatum. Much more impressive in person; I'm not sure if this is just a bad picture or if no pictures of P. hastatum by transmitted light turn out well. It seemed like a better picture when I took it originally. Maybe I screwed it up in the cropping somehow.

Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana.' More or less what you'd expect it to look like, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis NOID. Who knew?

Gynura aurantiaca. Better if opened in a separate window: the hairs show up well enough that you can tell which direction they're pointing.

Plumeria NOID. Nicely dramatic. This is another one that's better in a separate window.

Acer platanoides 'Crimson Sentry.' An actual tree for once. Not a particularly interesting leaf, but the color is pleasant.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Tilt a Whirl.' Very likely my favorite transmitted light picture to date. I had plans at one point to do an all-Solenostemon transmitted light post, but after spending hours rearranging all the pictures, I realized that if I took out all the Solenostemons and gave them their own separate post, then I wound up with one kick-ass, super-spectacular post and seven or eight really dull ones. So I won't be doing that, but instead you'll be seeing Solenostemon pictures scattered over the next seven or eight transmitted light posts. Though this has got to be the best, or maybe second-best (the 'Gays Delight' picture rocks pretty hard), of all of them.

Question for the Hive Mind: spontaneous terrarium plant

I've added a little bit to Nina's terrarium since the first pictures of it went up. I want it to fill itself in, and I don't want to have to get in there to prune stuff back a lot, so I didn't add much, but there's a Calathea in there now (it turned out to be Stromanthe burle-marxii, not Calathea), from work, and I've added a couple Cryptanthus pups (though she didn't like one of them, and dug it up repeatedly until I put it elsewhere), because my Cryptanthuses at home continue to produce pups and I don't know what else to do with them.

Somewhat clearer if opened in a new window, though none of this round of pictures turned out especially well.
So at this point, it looks like we have one relatively large Vriesea NOID, one Podocarpus macrophyllus, a Pilea depressa, a Peperomia caperata, four Cryptanthus spp., a Saxifraga stolonifera that came with the Pilea, and the new Calathea Stromanthe. (In the course of writing this post, I also added a cutting of Nematanthus sp. and a cutting of Cyanotis kewensis, though I don't necessarily expect either of those to take. Creepily, the crickets were fascinated by the Cyanotis, and crawled all over it endlessly. They didn't seem to be eating it: I don't know what they were doing.) Lately Nina seems to favor sleeping on the Calathea Stromanthe or the Vriesea, and has abandoned the Podocarpus to the crickets. I suppose the crickets don't really have a lot of options, but it still surprises me that they want to hide in the Podocarpus during the day.

None of which is my question. My question is, another plant has popped up in there, one that I didn't plant, and I'm not sure what it is, though I have a guess. It's the one circled in pink below:

Open in a new window for a closer look.
My guess is that it's an Impatiens. I don't have any Impatiens here in the apartment, nor have there ever been, but the Calathea Stromanthe was at one time sort of close to the Impatiens at work, so that's my best theory. It doesn't look like any of our normal weeds from work, and the only plants that ever pop up spontaneously in my plants at home are Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash,' which this is definitely not. So I'm looking for confirmation or alternate theories or something.

Random plant event: Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash' seedlings

I don't even remember when it was exactly, but at least three or four months ago, I had a bunch of 'Fire Flash' seeds sitting around, and decided I wanted to grow them. So I took a bunch of yogurt cups, and filled them with dirt, and worked seeds into the top of the dirt, and watered everything, stuck it on the back of one shop light (for bottom heat), directly under another shop light (for bright light), and waited for germination to happen. And nothing happened at all. In fact, so much nothing happened that I was thinking that maybe I'd let the seeds get too dry, and killed them all or something, by accident.

Eventually, after continuing to water the cups and having nothing happen, I gave up on the project, and dumped the soil, with seeds, back into the potting mix reserves for use in future plants. I didn't want any stupid Chlorophytum 'Fire Flashes' anyway. (Some of you will already see where I'm going with this.)

So time passed, and I had a bunch of Aloe aristata x Gasteria batesiana (?) offsets to pot up one day, so I apparently used that old dirt, and skip ahead a couple months, and suddenly I have Chlorophytum x 'Fire Flash' seedlings coming up all over the place in the Gasteraloes.


Not only that, but either I planted way more seeds originally than I remember, or I'm getting much better germination rates than I've gotten before with these seeds. I'm going to have, it looks like, about sixty of the damn things. Maybe more: seedlings are still coming up.

I'm not sure exactly what this signifies. I mean, if you're wanting to germinate your own plants, it doesn't really seem practical to plant them and dump them out and then plant them again in something else, only to pull them out of the something else later. And my original theory, that maybe I was letting the soil dry out too much, is kind of shot down by the fact that they came up just fine when planted with Gasteraloes, which aren't exactly aquatic plants. So perhaps I hadn't planted them deeply enough, or maybe the soil needed to be more firmed down, or something like that. Maybe I just hadn't given them long enough. Who knows. In any case, if you want 'Fire Flash' seedlings, try not to want them too much or try too hard, maybe, and don't worry too much about it if they don't all come up immediately. They'll still be there. Waiting.