Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis NOID

Basically no information to go along with this one. I don't remember what was on the tag you can see in the photo, but whatever it was, it wasn't an ID. It could have been a price tag; I'm pretty sure this was on one of the sale tables.

No flowers, either, though one could argue that a flower spike on these leaves would be Too Much. (Are those unusually wide marginal stripes, for a variegated Phalaenopsis, or do I just not have much experience with them?)



And it's not like the flowers would necessarily make it possible to identify the plant anyway. I assume there must be tons of different variegated phal varieties out there.

So, we can add another one to the running totals:

wrong tags: 7
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 10

Random plant event: Spathiphyllum

Hey, remember last Friday, and the post about houseplants that may or may not produce seeds? And how I said I'd tried with a Spathiphyllum but wasn't sure if I was actually going to get anywhere? Well, we still haven't gotten anywhere, but we're one step closer.

While working on that post, I went downstairs to look at the plant in question. Spathiphyllum spadices are full of a bunch of individual little bumpy bits, which there's probably a botanical term for but I don't feel like trying to figure it out now. One of the bumpy bits had changed color from green to a dull orange, which you saw in the list on Friday if you read the footnotes.¹

In this picture, it looks like there's more than one successful pollination, or at least potentially more than one, but only the one in the center of the shot seems to have been fertile.
Naturally, I wondered how this was going, and whether anything was going to be ready anytime soon. I'd been expecting that Spathiphyllum fruits would work more or less the same way that Anthurium ones do: Anthurium spadices begin to swell up in a bunch of little bumps, and then the bumps get bigger, and change color, and eventually you wind up with a bunch of little rubbery, slightly translucent berries, each containing one large green seed (occasionally two) suspended in a sort of thick goopy pulp.²

So, I poked at the one bumpy thing that had changed color, figuring that I'd just try to rock it back and forth slightly to see whether it was properly rubbery or still hard; I was hoping to get some idea of how close it was to being ripe.

But this happened instead. It could hardly have been more different from an Anthurium fruit. The bumps didn't really swell that much. They did change color, but it was a lot more subtle than the bright orange most Anthurium fruits turn. Instead of a rubbery skin over raisiny pulp, the skin on this remained hard, and just kind of broke when touched; it's not flexible at all. The pulp was nearly nonexistent -- there was just enough there to keep the seeds slightly stuck to one another, but not enough pulp for me to be able to discern a color. I didn't even try to wash the seeds off, as there didn't seem to be anything to wash. Also, instead of one or two seeds, this produced eight.

(Photographed on a paper plate, if the background texture gives you any sense of the scale. If it doesn't, my best guess would be that they were about 3 mm / 0.1 in long.)
As this is a new experience for me, I had no idea how one is supposed to germinate them. I decided to drop them in damp vermiculite and see what happens.³ They were planted on 26 October; nothing visible was happening as of 29 October, but obviously that's still way early. Rumor has it that germination takes about ten days, so nothing ought to happen until 5 November at the earliest.

Even if nothing comes of this and they don't germinate, it was totally worth it just to see what the seeds and fruits look like. I'd always assumed that they must exist,⁴ but it's not really the sort of thing one dreams of seeing. If they do germinate, well, I'm a little worried, considering how excitable I can be when it comes to aroid seedlings.

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¹ Which you should always do.
² The best description I can give for the texture is that it's somewhere between the flesh of a plum (a little stringy and wet) and the flesh of a raisin (thick, sticky, semi-solid). Closer to the raisin.
³ Which turns out to be approximately correct: some too-late-to-be-useful googling suggests that mixing in some chopped sphagnum moss would probably have been better than straight vermiculite, but this will probably be fine. It might even be preferable, since I don't actually have chopped sphagnum on hand, and wouldn't have an easy way to sterilize it if I did.
⁴ It turns out that there is one photo available through Google image search. Apparently I'd been so satisfied with assuming their existence that I'd never bothered to look. (By the way: the seedlings in the bottom right of that page look adorable. Maybe I do hope I get lots of germination after all.)

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Lady Isabel 'America' x Paph. sukhakulii 'Big Guy'

So I recently discovered the blog Fashion It So,¹ which fills a part of my life I didn't even know was empty by supplying snarky recaps for episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that focus primarily on what everybody is wearing. There is a surprising amount of weird late-80s fashion going on in TNG, it turns out, and although a lot of the outfits look like crap, one respects the costume people for attempting to do something interesting, instead of just dressing everybody in whatever was actually fashionable at the time and pretending that 80s fashion was timeless.

(Sample snark: "Cable-knit sweaters: Ireland’s lingerie")
I bring this up partly because it's an exciting new time-wastey thing for me, and partly because the orchid of the day has a certain Next-Generationess about it.

Paphiopedilum Lady Isabel 'America' x Paph. sukhakulii 'Big Guy.'
I'll grant you that the costume department at TNG was not much into burgundy-on-mustard-yellow pinstripes, or stripes in general, actually. This is about as stripey as things got, in the handful of pages I've read so far:

(There's actually a really good reason why a TV show costumer might want to avoid closely spaced stripes, which I will put in a footnote for you.²)

But, anything as shiny and lavender-pink as the orchid's labellum is going to make me think of TNG. Lavender-pink was such a hot color in the late 1980s. E.g.:

Tell me you don't see a resemblance there.
This doesn't have a lot to do with the orchid, I know, but there's very little to say about the orchid. I mean, the parentage is right there in the title, and both parents seem to exist. (Google doesn't turn up much about the clone names 'America' or 'Big Guy,' but the grex Lady Isabel exists, as does the species Paph. sukhakulii, so I'm satisfied.) Also everything was spelled correctly, so I don't have that to complain about. Therefore, digressions about 25-year-old television shows.

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Photo credits:
TNG: from Fashion It So, though photos have been altered in size, sharpened, and color-tweaked.³
Voyager sickbay: Memory Alpha.
Orchid: me.

¹ (Thank you, IO9.)
² Closely-spaced stripes, when translated to a TV screen, will produce strobey Moiré patterns instead of looking like stripes. Sometimes this can be cool, but usually it's just annoying.
The husband and I have been watching "Star Trek: Voyager" lately, because neither of us cared enough about it to have ever watched when it was actually airing and because we occasionally need something to watch that we don't have to think too hard about, and the Sickbay set in "Voyager" has this insane black and orange stripe pattern in the background a lot of the time, which means that about half the Sickbay scenes are basically unwatchable.

Every time the camera moves, the background pulsates orange. Whoever designed that shit should never be allowed to work in television again.
³ Screencaps of TV shows are always ridiculously dark, for unknown reasons.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Most of the pet news belongs to Nina at the moment. Her special UV-making light bulb burnt out about a week ago. It got replaced on Wednesday, but there were a good four or five days there where she was sitting alone in the dark, making passive-aggressive comments about how she was fine, no need to worry about her. So that kind of sucked.¹

There's nothing big going on with Sheba, aside from an isolated case of donut theft on Thursday morning. She's normally very good about not eating people-food unless we specifically offer it to her, but this doesn't seem to apply to food on the husband's desk, for reasons neither of us understand.

(The husband was able to locate a replacement donut, and the remainder of the morning passed without incident.)

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¹ The burn-out was premature, and probably caused by me trying to get more light on the other side of the terrarium. The placement of the hinge in the top of the tank makes it more or less impossible to light both sides of the terrarium at the same time, but putting any strain on the base of the compact fluorescent bulb makes it burn out. So I'd tried to get some light to the plants on the unlit side of the tank, and shortly thereafter the bulb burnt out. Lesson learned, at least for a little while.
Really, we should never have been using a gooseneck desk lamp for the terrarium in the first place, but I wasn't expecting her to live this long (3 1/2 years!), either. Had I known, I maybe would have tried harder to find a more durable lighting system.

List: Houseplants That Can be Propagated Within the Home From Seed or Spores

I couldn't think of a better way to phrase the title. This list is for plants that are either 1) self-pollinating, or 2) easy for an amateur to cross-pollinate. In the first case, you only need a single specimen; in the second, you need two (which will probably have to be of different varieties).

For the main list, I'm restricting myself to plants I have personally gotten actual seeds from, instead of anything that's potentially self-fertile. (At the end, there will be supplemental lists for plants I've not personally been successful with and plants I've not attempted.)

The amount of trouble it takes to get seedlings varies. With some of these, seedlings will just start growing in the pot (or sometimes in a neighboring pot) without any effort on your part. With others, you may have to get lucky on the timing, or perform precise actions at precise times in order to get fruit. When possible, I've linked to other PATSP posts that describe the process in more detail.

Abutilon cvv. (flowering maple)
(shown: 'Bella Pink')
I don't know if Abutilon cvv. will pollinate themselves or not; I never tried to find out. That said, crossing two different varieties within the 'Bella Mix' group worked pretty reliably for me, back when I still had them,¹ and there's no reason to think other combinations wouldn't work too.²

A single seed pod has maybe 20-30 seeds in it, if I remember right.

Seedlings are old enough to bloom in about a year, indoors; outdoors they might progress faster.

• Collecting seeds
• Germination speed and percentage
• First flower buds
• First open flower
• Multiple flowers


Aglaonema cvv. (Chinese evergreen)
(shown: 'Maria')
I've definitely gotten fruit from an Aglaonema cross once, and the seedlings have been doing fine in the basement for a while now.³ I don't know the parentage; it might have been 'Maria' x self, but I had other Aglaonemas flowering at around the same time, so it could have been 'Maria' x something else.

It wasn't easy to do; you have to have flowers that are shedding pollen and flowers that are receptive to pollen happening at the same time, and most of the crosses I've attempted have failed.

Often, the flowers emerge, but the spathe remains so tightly wrapped around the spadix that it's not possible to remove or introduce pollen without destroying the flower. This has especially been a problem with 'Brilliant,' which sucks because I would very much like to propagate it. ('Maria' is different in that its spathes tend to open wider and stand away from the spadix.) It's possible that this would be less of a problem if I had higher humidity in the house.

Each fruit contains a single large seed. I have no idea how long it takes to grow a seedling to blooming size, but I'd guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-7 years.

• Developing fruit
• Ripe fruit
• Removal of seed from fruit
• Germination


Anthurium, flowering hybrids (flamingo flower, peter on a platter, oilcloth flower, tail flower)
(shown: 'Sensa')
I don't think these are self-fertile, though I haven't actually tested that. I have about ten different varieties here, so whenever an inflorescence is shedding pollen, I run around dusting all the other inflorescences just in case, which means I never know who the male parent was for any of the crosses.

Some varieties are easier to cross than others.⁴ The main obstacle with Anthurium is that the flowers are very long-lived, but have very short periods of pollen shedding, and somewhat brief windows for accepting pollen, so it's hard to get the timing right. (This is why when there's pollen to work with, I just try to cross everything: if I waited until the timing worked out to make a particular cross, I'd never have any seedlings at all.)

I've never bothered to try to count how many seeds you can get from a single inflorescence, but working solely from memory, I think the fewest I've gotten is like 3, and the most might be around 25-30.

Starting seeds once they've formed isn't difficult, but it is more complicated than just opening up the fruit and dumping seeds on some soil.

Plants reach blooming size in three to five years.

• Cross-pollinating
• How to start seeds from the berries (also how to start Schlumbergera)


Ardisia elliptica (shoebutton tree)
Ardisia elliptica is self-fertile, and requires no special meddling on the growers' part to produce berries. My plant was a few years old before it produced flowers, and then only about five (three of which produced seeds); however, the species is capable of blooming earlier than that, or more flowers than that, in good conditions. The progression from flower to seeds was pretty slow for me (several months), but germination is very fast (a few days). Each flower only produces one seed.

• Flowers (not from my personal plant)
• Unripe berries (not from my personal plant)
• Ripe berries (not from my personal plant)
• Removing seeds from berries and how to start them
• Just-germinated seedlings
• Very young seedlings


Chlorophytum 'Fire Flash' (fire flash, green orange, mandarin plant, Sierra Leone lily, fire glory)
My 'Fire Flashes' bloomed two Januarys in a row when I first got them, and haven't bloomed since. This suggests that blooming is related to day length; during the first two years, they were getting only natural light, and since then have been getting natural light supplemented with artificial. Individual flowers only last a day or two, but they don't all open at once, so a flower spike maybe lasts 7-10 days. (It's been a while; I don't remember exactly.)

'Fire Flash' is self-fertile; you only need one plant. Each flower will become a triangular pod containing three rows of seeds, with an average somewhere around 300 seeds per flower spike.

Seed germination requires patience, but not really any special skills. I've gotten the most seedlings by giving up on the seeds and dumping them into potting soil that I used to pot up other plants: seedlings kept coming up for months after that, and they're pretty easy to pull out and pot up separately.

• Flowers
• Flower and developing seed pods
• Seedlings coming up after I gave up on them

Columnea orientandina (no common name?)
I have not yet figured out how to make it happen, but Columnea orientandina will self-pollinate and form purple fruits occasionally. The fruits contain several tan or brown seeds, which can be removed from the flesh of the fruit, dried overnight on a paper towel, and then sown in vermiculite. Germination is high (about 55 seeds per fruit, the one time I've tried this so far), though I've had trouble keeping seedlings going after transplant. Only about 25% of the seeds I started are still growing; the main cause of death has been getting washed out of the pot, or washed under the soil, during watering. I'm not sure if this is going to be a viable propagation method for me.

• Flowers, berries, seedlings, overall process


Hypoestes phyllostachya cvv. (polka dot plant, freckle face)
If allowed to grow unchecked, Hypoestes will eventually produce leggy stems with smaller and smaller leaves. These stems aren't particularly attractive, which is why people generally keep the plant pruned back, but if you let them grow, they will produce tiny, self-fertile lavender flowers. I've yet to actually see the seeds, but I know they're there, because seedlings occasionally pop up in neighboring plants' pots.

I do not know: 1) how to collect the seeds before they wind up in a neighboring plant's pot, 2) how many seeds each flower produces (I'd guess one.), or 3) whether plant color comes true from seed. I have seen a white-spotted plant come from white-spotted parents once, and if memory serves, we used to get pink-spotted strays at work, where most of the plants were pink.

• The Hypoestes phyllostachya profile contains pictures of the flowers and seedlings.


Justicia scheidweileri (also Porphyrocoma pohliana, purple shrimp plant, rose pine, South African acanthus)
Flowers are self-fertile, and expel seeds hard enough that they can wind up far from the plant. (I've found seedlings in pots that were 6-7 feet / 1.8-2.1 m away from the parent before.) Seedlings generally transplant successfully, though they often go through a scary wilted period before recovering. I've collected plenty of seeds from the plant's shelf, with a dustpan: they're heart-shaped, rough in texture, and brown. Each actual flower only produces one seed, but a single flower spike can produce about 40 flowers.

Plants from seedlings can be large enough to bloom within a year.

• Spontaneous seedlings, seeds
• Seed propulsion (also Hypoestes phyllostachya)


Murraya paniculata (orange jasmine, orange jessamine, mock orange⁵)
Murraya paniculata is self-fertile, though only a tiny percentage of flowers end up producing fruits, and not all fruits have viable seeds. I've experimented with using a paintbrush to transfer pollen from flower to flower, but it doesn't seem to affect how often pollination succeeds, so I'm kind of stumped.

Each fruit contains a single seed, though two is not unheard of, and zero happens occasionally too, for some reason.

Seeds usually germinate in a month or two for me, if they're going to; I have no idea how typical that is. I start them in soil and water as if there were a plant in the pot: vermiculite hasn't worked.

Cuttings rooted from Murraya paniculata will bloom pretty much right away (in fact, if they were blooming when you take the cutting, they'll try to bloom while they root, too); I'm not sure if I've seen blooming on plants grown from seed or not.

• Fruits, seedling
• Newly-germinated seedling (item 5 in the post)

Rhipsalis NOID (maybe R. rhombea? No common names.)
The tiny white flowers self-pollinate and become small white oval fruits; fruits are ripe when they become partly translucent. Separate the seeds and let them dry overnight, then sow on vermiculite. They'll all germinate. Each fruit produces maybe 20 seeds, I'd estimate.

I haven't transplanted any yet, so I don't know how that goes.

• Flowers
• Seedlings


Schlumbergera cvv. (Christmas cactus, holiday cactus, Thanksgiving cactus)
You'll need more than one variety of Schlumbergera in order to get crosses, for reasons which are addressed in the profile. Once cross-pollination has been achieved, though, the rest is pretty easy, if slow. Fruits usually take 6-12 months to develop, though if you really want to, you can leave them on the plant a lot longer than that. Fruits usually turn pinkish-purple when ripe, though varieties with pale flowers may only turn light pink. Extracting the seeds is the same as for the Columnea and Rhipsalis -- cut or squeeze the fruit, remove the seeds, let them sit out overnight, then start them in vermiculite. I was pleasantly surprised at how well my seedlings handled their transplanting.

The number of seeds per fruit varies, but the last batch of seeds I started, I actually took a picture of them all on a plate and then painstakingly counted from the picture. I got about 550 seeds from 4 fruits, which averages to 138 seeds each.

It takes about three or four years for a seedling to get old enough to bloom.

• Developing fruit with spent flower
• Ripe fruit
• How to start them (also Anthurium)
• Newly-germinated seedling


As for the recommend / anti-recommend, that sort of depends on your goals, I suppose. If you want to make something new, stick to the plants that require cross-pollination, like Abutilon, Anthurium, and Schlumbergera. If you just want as many baby plants as possible and don't really care if they're exactly the same as what you've already seen, I'd recommend Abutilon, Chlorophytum, Justicia, Rhipsalis, or Schlumbergera.

My personal three favorites from this group: Anthurium cvv., Schlumbergera cvv., Murraya paniculata. Least favorite: Hypoestes phyllostachya.


Supplemental list #1:

I have reason to believe that these would belong on the above list, if only one of the following conditions were true: 1) I still owned one, 2) existing fruits would hurry up and develop, 3) my plant(s) would flower, 4) something hadn't happened to the developing seedlings.

Alternanthera cvv. (joy weed, calico plant, calico weed, Joseph's coat) -- we got some A. dentata 'Purple Knight' self-seeding at the ex-job, in the greenhouse, though I never saw flowers or seeds when I had Alternantheras in the house.
Ardisia crenata (coral berry, coralberry tree) -- my plant is too young to flower still, but presumably would self-pollinate like A. elliptica.
Chlorophytum 'Charlotte' (no common name) -- I've gotten seeds and seedlings before. The seedlings looked like they were going to be solid green, instead of variegated like the parent, but they all died because I let the soil dry out. Only one time, too. So I never found out whether they were going to be variegated or not.
Clivia miniata cvv. (clivia) -- the 'Aztec Gold' I wrote about a while back now appears to be developing seeds, though my understanding is that this is a slow process, and it's not clear how successful it will be.
Coffea arabica (coffee plant, coffee tree) -- I have fruit currently developing on my plant (flower buds, flowers), but I have no idea how long it will take to develop, how many will develop, or whether I'll get usable seeds out of any of them. We'll have to see.
Cyrtomium falcatum (holly fern) -- I've managed to get tiny protoplants from spores my plant produced, but they fell prey to a fungus (and/or springtails) before I could pot them up on their own, and I haven't seen any new spores since. So this is theoretically possible, but I haven't actually achieved it yet.
Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa (no common name?) -- these self-pollinated at the ex-job, just like the Rhipsalis above, and we got seeds from the fruits in the same way. (flowers, fruits, seed preparation, seedlings, fruits) My plant at home has never managed to bloom.
Spathiphyllum cvv. (peace lily) -- drunk on my Anthurium successes, I tried crossing two Spathiphyllums this summer, when I had one shedding pollen and another that looked like it might be receptive. The jury is still out on whether or not this will be successful. One spadix does have some spots that appear to be growing larger, and it's not dried up like the inflorescences normally would have by now (though the spathe is⁶), so there are indications that something may have actually happened; there's just a long ways to go before I can say I've successfully crossed any. Even if I have, I can't think of any good reason why I would want to have more peace lilies, so the whole thing feels pretty pointless.


Supplemental list #2:

Other people claim to have crossed these at home, but this hasn't happened for me, because 1) I don't have multiple varieties to cross, 2) my plants have never bloomed, 3) germination of seed is difficult to do, 4) I'm not crossing them correctly, 5) I don't own any, or 6) some combination of the above.

Adenium obesum & spp. (desert rose) -- I'm not sure I've seen anybody who wasn't a professional grower / breeder claim to have crossed Adeniums successfully, but I have seen amateurs raise Adeniums from seed. So it might be possible, I guess.
Begonia cvv. (angel wing begonia, rhizomatous begonia, rex begonia) -- surely someone must do this, or else we wouldn't have so many. No idea how easy this might be; I haven't actually seen any amateur growers talking about it.
Citrus spp./cvv. and Fortunella spp. (orange, lemon, lime, kumquat, citron, grapefruit, etc.) -- at least in theory, if you can get fruits, then you should be able to get seeds as well. And citrus seeds aren't supposed to be that hard to germinate. I know people do get fruit produced on their plants indoors occasionally, so it would logically follow that they could also start new plants from the seeds. I just don't think I've run into anybody who claims to have done that.
Episcia cvv. (flame violet) -- I've seen a number of people claiming to have crossed Episcia in their home. I've tried to do it myself, but absolutely nothing has come of it. It's possible I might try again at some point, if I can determine how I've been screwing it up, but it's not a high priority for me.
Hibiscus rosa-sinensis cvv. (tropical hibiscus) -- I've seen a number of people claiming responsibility for new hybrids on-line, but I couldn't tell whether the claims were coming from amateurs or professionals. I attempted it myself a couple years ago, when I had two varieties blooming at once, but nothing happened. I no longer have the plants to experiment with.
Hippeastrum cvv. (amaryllis⁷) -- amateurs do experiment with these pretty regularly, and in fact the one Hippeastrum I have is the result of someone else's experiment, but I've never done it myself. I've never even had one flower, actually.
Orchids -- amateurs cross orchids all the time;⁸ the problem is that once seeds have formed, most people don't have the ability to germinate them.⁹ Some amateurs send their seed pods to flasking services, who place them in sterile flasks and grow them for however long it takes to get viable baby plants, then they mail the flask back. You can read some about this at Plantgasm, if you're interested.
Passiflora caerulea and maybe other Passiflora spp. (passion flower) -- I have a houseplant book that mentions new plants can be produced from seed, though they're not specific about where the seed is supposed to come from. I don't know whether it's plausible for an amateur to produce their own seeds or not, nor do I know whether different Passiflora species will hybridize with one another.
Pelargonium cvv. (geranium¹⁰) -- I assume someone must be doing it, because there are so many varieties, and I recall seeing some seed pods on the Pelargoniums we overwintered at the ex-job, so I know it's possible to get seeds. I have no idea whether anybody is actually deliberately collecting and starting the seeds, or what the success rate would be, but in theory this might happen.
Punica granatum (pomegranate, dwarf pomegranate) -- again with the houseplant book making claims. I suppose it's plausible, but I don't know whether a given Punica could be self-fertile or how readily they'll set fruit.
Saintpaulia cvv. (African violet) -- as for Episcia, except that I no longer have any plants here to try with and probably never will.¹¹

If the reader knows of any plants I've left off the list (and I'm sure there must be lots of plants I've left off the list), I welcome suggestions for others in the comments. If you do leave a comment to suggest another plant for the list, please indicate how confirmed it is. (I.e., let me know if you've actually done it yourself, if you're in the process of doing it but don't actually have new plants yet, if you know someone else who does it but haven't tried it yourself, if you heard about somebody doing it once somewhere but don't remember where, etc.)

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¹ I no longer have them. They need a lot of water and light, and it eventually reached the point where I could no longer provide them those things here.
² I considered trying to cross the 'Bella's with the common Iowa weed Abutilon theophrasti ("velvetleaf"), just to see if anything interesting would result, but it's probably just as well that that never happened.
³ The most recent picture of them, from 11 September 2012:

The one in the front there is not looking so great, but the plants in the other two pots appear to be doing well.
⁴ 'Gemini' and 'White Gemini' are much better at accepting pollen than they are at shedding it. ('Gemini' is easily the most productive of the varieties I've got: 54% of my seedling Anthuriums have 'Gemini' as the mother, and another 27% are from 'White Gemini.')
'Pandola' and 'Pacora' are fairly good at shedding pollen.
A NOID reddish-purple variety consistently accepts pollen and begins to form fruit, but then aborts the whole inflorescence before the fruit is ripe. This might be a watering issue, instead of a hybridization issue. Similar things seem to happen a lot with a pink NOID.
'Red Hot' and a NOID purple variety will only rarely form flowers in the first place, much less permit them to be pollinated, which is annoying.
I might have a lot of berries developing right now from 'Florida,' which has large, heart-shaped, orange spathes. I would be very excited if those turned out to be viable.
Etc.
⁵ If you're mostly an outdoor gardener, you probably think of one of the Philadelphus spp. when you hear the name "mock orange." They're totally different.
⁶ The stalk seems to have gotten bent at some point, possibly when I let the plant get too dry. I don't know whether the spadix will survive without the spathe, or whether one dying means they're both doomed. Here's what the inflorescence looked like as of last Saturday:

⁷ There is a genus with the botanical name Amaryllis as well, but usually when people talk about an amaryllis in an indoor-growing context, they mean Hippeastrum, in the same way that "pothos" never means Pothos and "nephthytis" never means Nephthytis.
⁸ Indeed, there seems to be a certain amount of sniffiness among the established, serious orchid breeders about how amateurs don't know what they're doing, and screw things up for everybody by flooding the world with their inferior crosses or whatever. One shudders to think of what might happen were an amateur orchid breeder to enjoy him- or herself without first getting the permission of his/r betters.
⁹ There are two main problems. The first is that orchid seeds and seedlings are very susceptible to fungus, so they require a sterile medium for germination, which most of us can't achieve in our homes very easily. The second is that the seeds are extremely small, and consequently difficult to work with. Flasking provides a sterile growing medium for the seedlings, and they can use syringes and other equipment to make sure that the seeds are distributed evenly on the surface. It's not that you couldn't do this at home if you really wanted to, but it'd be a lot of extra work. Lincoln Orchid Society has a page of instructions for home orchid flasking, if you want a sense of how much extra work.
¹⁰ As with Hippeastrum / "amaryllis," when people talk about "geraniums" indoors, they usually mean Pelargonium.
¹¹ I'm a little bitter about the African violets, in fact. This is completely unjustified: I don't water enough, and I seem not to have sufficient light either, even though they're not supposed to be that picky about that, so of course they don't do well for me. But I still feel entitled to them, since the rest of the world seems to be able to grow them just fine, therefore bitterness and resentment.

Pretty picture: Miltoniopsis Lennart Karl Gottling

The tag said "Miltoniopsis Lenart Karl Gotting." Google finds "about 19,700 results" for Lenart/Gotting, "about 19,500 results" for Lennart/Gotting, and only 996 for Lennart/Gottling, but it suggests the Lennart/Gottling version when you search for the others, and The International Orchid Register says the last one is the correct spelling. Which means we have another error to log on the Big Board of Orchid Show Name Errors:

wrong tags: 7
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 9

I realize that most of you probably do not care even slightly about these things, and that you probably make tsk-tsk noises with your tongue, roll your eyes, or make jerking-off motions with your hands whenever I do this, with the specific response depending on your age and gender. And I'm sorry about that. If you object strongly enough to want to do something, start by contacting your local orchid society. Ask them if you can give them a brief presentation titled Why Proofreading Your Show ID Tags Is Important 'Cause Seriously, It's Like Six Words Max, And How Can You Be So Busy That Proofing Six Words Is Some Kind Of Major Imposition, Goddamnit, You Assholes.¹

Miltoniopsis Lennart Karl Gottling is a cross of Mltnps.² Timberline and Mltnps. Pearl Ono.

Oh, and it's pretty:


In other news, we have a Scalepocalypse 2012 update:

Aspidistra elatior (16 Oct 2012, basement) -- neemed.
Asplundia 'Jungle Drum' (16 Oct 2012, basement) -- neemed.

The scale on the Aspidistra was different than the ones I'd been seeing previously (small and black, instead of large and brown), which could mean that it's something other than scale,³ or it may mean that there's another scale infestation on top of the three I was aware of already.

There's some good news, in that I think the Philodendron scale was discovered quickly enough, and treated aggressively enough, that it's probably over. I also haven't found new cases of scale in the plant room for quite a while, though I'm hesitant to say that that one is definitely over. They could just be regrouping.

Tomorrow: a big list post, which is sort of by request of Kenneth Moore, in the comments from this post.

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¹ (I'm waiting to hear back from the Illowa Orchid people, but I'm optimistic that they're going to want to hear what I have to say.)^a
a (I have not actually contacted the Illowa Orchid Society about this, nor will I.)
² Some websites say the proper orchid abbreviation for Miltoniopsis is Mps, not Mltnps., but those people are wrong. I think. Which brings me to my second orchid-related lecture series, No You Don't Get To Invent Your Own List Of Abbreviations All Willy-Nilly Just Because You're Too Lazy To Look Things Up.
³ Like maybe mechanical damage? I've been fooled into thinking that I saw scale on Euphorbias and Ficus benjamina before, when it was really only dried sap from minor wounds. Unlikely, but it'd make me happy if this were what was going on.

Random plant event: Nepenthes NOID

I've always assumed that I probably didn't have enough room, didn't have the right conditions, or both, for a Nepenthes, so I've never attempted to grow one and ordinarily don't pay them a whole lot of attention. Last Wednesday at the ex-job, though, I happened to notice that they had one blooming, which I'd never seen before.

And, okay, it's not like it's amazing or beautiful or anything, but it's at least new. (I was sort of surprised to learn, when I went to add the tags for this post, that I've never had a Nepenthes-related post on the blog before.)

Individual Nepenthes plants are either male or female,¹ and are distinguishable by the presence or absence of pollen. This particular plant is male; the yellow dots are the pollen.

Wikipedia says that Nepenthes are insect-pollinated, but the insects in question vary quite a bit ("flies . . . moths, wasps, and butterflies"), so it's not clear what insect might go for this particular inflorescence. Scent could be a clue, but I didn't detect one. It's possible (likely?) this is a hybrid variety and no natural pollinator exists anyway.

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¹ (Or so I'm told. Please blame any inaccuracies that may be present in this post on the internet in general, and Wikipedia in particular.)

Pretty picture: Potinara Sweet Norma 'Hilo Flame'

According to Wikipedia, the whole Cattleya alliance is a taxonomic mess. Sophronitis no longer exists, and is now Cattleya, and some Cattleyas have been moved to Guarianthe, plus a couple Brassavolas are now Rhyncholaelia.

Potinara is supposed to be the nothogenus for hybrids of Brassavola, Cattleya, Laelia and Sophronitis, but obviously if some of the parent species have changed names, then the nothogenus name has to change too.

Potinara Sweet Norma 'Hilo Flame' is a cross between Potinara Odom's Sweetheart and Brassolaeliocattleya Lawless Freischütz, except both parents are now Rhyncholaeliocattleyas instead. I'm assuming that this means that Pot. Sweet Norma 'Hilo Flame' is probably also actually a Rhyncholaeliocattleya.

Rhyncholaeliocattleya is the nothogenus for crosses between Rhyncholaelia and Cattleya. At this point, I officially run out of fucks to give about the ancestry of the grex, so if you still care (if you ever cared), you'll have to figure it out on your own. If you don't care, here is a pretty picture of a flower.