Your Love is Like / a Rollercoaster, Baby, Baby

Weird times. The plant collection is at once thriving in previously unprecedented ways and going completely to hell, which I guess is something that can happen once a collection reaches a certain size. Sort of like how Texas can be a disaster area due to flood and drought simultaneously.

On the one hand, I've been finding scale infestations all over the house, including on some very special plants,¹ which has at times left me despairing of ever getting things under control. (For good reason -- this has been going on for almost two years already, and only seems to be getting worse. It's showing up in new rooms, it's showing up on plants I thought I'd cured, and it's particularly bad on the plants that were outside for the summer.²) I'm not seeing scale on that many plants, really (probably only about 50, in a collection of 955), but of course it's the scale you're not seeing that's the real problem.

Also the Euphorbia fungus has returned as well. It probably never left.

On the other hand, the Stapelia giganteas are blooming like crazy, which is delightful, in that special way that the smell of dog shit can be delightful if it's being smelled for the right reasons.³

Anthurium "Bijoux Tuit" is working on a second bloom, making it the second of my Anthurium seedlings to bloom twice. Three more Anthurium seedlings are producing first blooms,⁴ for a total of thirteen. I'm not completely used to the idea of the Anthuriums blooming, even though it's been a few weeks now, so this is neat every time I'm reminded of it. About 40% of the Clivia seeds I started are producing leaves.⁵ I just took a whole bunch of berries off the Coffea and started seeds drying.⁶

Seeds on lower right.
I had one Schlumbergera seedling, #55, produce a flower bud about 14 months after it was first sown.⁷ The Spathiphyllum seedlings are looking like actual plants now, and have been for some time.

They're even suckering!

So the teal deer here is that the most incredible, wonderful, and exciting things are happening with the plant collection, and I am honestly thinking about throwing it all in the trash, shuttering the blog, and taking up a less emotionally draining hobby, like competitive jam-jar rolling.

For the time being, I've just been throwing out plants⁸ and looking for sources for bulk imidacloprid.⁹ Should I find scale on the Anthuriums again, however, absolutely anything might happen.

LATE EDIT: While watering on Tuesday night, I found out Schlumbergera number 25 has decided to try and bloom as well:

Hopefully that bud will do better than #55's did.

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¹ The original Murraya paniculata, all four of the gray-variegated Yucca guatemalensis, and the Furcraea foetida 'Medio-Picta,' to name a few.
² Lesson learned: don't put scale-infested plants outside in the summer. I blame ants.
³ So far, I have six blooms open at once in the plant room, plus at least one on the smellier Stapelia variegata, and I'm not finding the combined odor objectionable or even noticing it much. Which might mean that I've just gotten used to it, but the husband hasn't said commented on any unusual smells, and he spends less time in the house. So I'm thinking maybe it's just really not that bad unless you're up close. They're not a flower you want to stick behind your ear or anything.
⁴ #118, "Elijah Sturdabowtit;" #46, "Aurora Boreanaz;" and #235, "Rowan DeBoate." Rowan is particularly of interest, as her spathe is sort of a pale peach/cream color, which I haven't seen before on my plants.
⁵ No, it does not seem to have mattered much whether I rinsed them with hydrogen peroxide before planting, though I can't say for certain that it doesn't matter at all. The un-peroxided group of five seeds currently stands at: 0 rotted, 3 inactive, and 2 germinated and producing foliage. The peroxided group of eight seeds has 2 rotted, 1 inactive, 2 germinated but not doing much of anything, and 3 germinated and producing foliage. If we're only counting the seedlings that are visibly growing and healthy-seeming, that's a success rate of 40% on the first group and 38% on the second.
⁶ I took one berry off on 7 October, which gave me two seeds. Then on 27 October, I removed a whole cupful, and got 138 seeds. Though at least three got washed down the drain while I was trying to clean them off, and I'm planning to give a few others away, so I'm probably going to wind up starting about 130 seeds from this batch on 22 December. And that's not even half the berries that are on the plant.
Unrelated point of interest: in large quantities, Coffea berry skins smell sort of oniony, it turns out.
⁷ No pictures, because the bud dropped. It had either already given up on further development when I took it out of the flat it was in, or I knocked it off the plant in the process of untangling it from the other seedlings, 'cause by the time I went to get the camera to take a picture, it was no longer attached to the plant. Considering that it had no business even thinking about blooming in the first place (it's in the basement, under artificial lights, so it doesn't get the long, cool nights it should require for setting buds, and it was also a couple years too young to be blooming besides, according to all the reputable websites), I figure this is a pretty good sign. The moral? Between this and the Anthurium situation, I'm thinking that it's best to ignore when people tell you that plants have to be X years old before they'll bloom, because plants can't read and will bloom when they feel like it.
⁸ I had 1017 plants at the beginning of September, 1001 at the beginning of October, and it looks like we're going to be somewhere around 950 at the beginning of November. Since most of the plants that were easy to get rid of got thrown out ages ago, every plant I discard now is like a knife to the heart, pretty much.
⁹ For comparison, I've been paying $8.50 for one pound of 0.22% imidacloprid; the stuff at the link is $3.08/lb for 0.5% imidacloprid, before shipping. Do I actually need that much in order to dose the entire collection all at once? No, probably not that much. My best ballpark guess is about 25 lb. of what I've been getting, or 11 lb. of the bulk stuff.
Some of you will, at this point, be thinking about telling me I should try something else, something other than imidacloprid, like neem oil or rubbing alcohol or whatever. The reason why I'm not considering these as options is because sprinkling imidacloprid granules on soil is fast, covers the whole plant, and only has to be done once. Spraying neem or rubbing alcohol, or anything else, takes much longer to apply, covers only the areas I can reach with the spray (not so bad for large-leaved plants like Strelitzia, but spraying every surface on a Polyscias fruticosa? Fuggedaboutit.), and has to be re-done at least every week or two to keep up with the freshly-hatched larvae. As the size of the collection decreases, rubbing alcohol or whatever might be more of an option, but at the moment, there's really no way I could keep up. It's not like I haven't tried before.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Noirmont

With bonus background Midwesterners!

Phragmipedium Noirmont = Phragmipedium Memoria Dick Clements x Phragmipedium longifolium

Saturday morning Sheba picture

No big Sheba news. No little Sheba news either, as far as that goes.

Unrelated: I noticed yesterday morning when I was out with Sheba that we had a volunteer Petunia in one of the beds (the one that never got weeded or watered and was full of whiteflies for the last month and a half of the summer because I am a bad outdoor gardener and because whiteflies like Cannas).

I like Petunias quite a bit, but we've never actually grown any here, or even attempted to, so this was a happy surprise. (Also a happy surprise: it color-coordinates with the blog.) We had a tiny peach poppy appear out of nowhere in early August, as well.

We might be able to explain the Papaver, as there's a chance it might have been in an old packet of "wildflower seeds" that we threw around the lawn just to see what would happen, but the Petunia is a mystery. Maybe seeds got blown through the fence from the neighbors' garden?

Grab bag

Various recent plant- and fungus-related events:

1. Stapelia gigantea

Everybody else has been posting Stapelia pictures for the last month or so, but my plants have lagged behind for some reason: everybody else was posting flowers when I was just beginning to see buds.

So far, two flowers have opened, and there are another four or five left to go. As to the smell: I can't detect any just standing in the room with them. I can if I get right up next to them and inhale, though. Experiments to determine the minimum number of Stapelia gigantea flowers it takes to be unpleasant in a plant-room-sized room are ongoing; I'll keep you informed about the results.


2. Strelitzia juncea
I've finally obtained some Strelitzia juncea seeds, after a long period of wanting some but not finding any. I began with five seeds, which I planted on 19 September, and I noticed the first sprout on 18 October, which I guess is fairly rapid progress. I'd been warned that they were irregular germinators, and could take a few months to do anything, so I guess this is encouraging.

I'm not even sure why I wanted them in the first place; the existing Strelitzias here (2 S. nicolai, 2 S. reginae) are big and awkward to deal with, and it's not clear that S. juncea can even be grown indoors in the first place. But I'm still going to try.


3. Anthuriums, assorted
The Anthurium "hookeri" spadix is not showing any sign of having self-pollinated. Which is more or less what I was expecting to happen. Or expecting to not happen, I guess. It's still attached to the plant, though, and sometimes they take a while to show any obvious changes, so I haven't entirely given up hope yet.

There are also two new additions to the list of flowering Anthurium seedlings, #26 ("Peaches Christ," whom we've seen on the blog before) and #276 ("Zach Religious"). That's eight seedlings blooming now: 26, 59, 76, 108, 238, 243, 276, and 282. In case you needed some lottery numbers to play or something.¹

Peaches' spathe is, so far, the same pink-red as "Bijoux Tuit" and most of the others, and is consequently not that interesting enough to warrant a photo, but the plant as a whole looks good even if the flower's nothing special.

Zach is possibly going to be the most interesting seedling yet; his spathe is a pale peach-pink with a red margin right now.

It's actually kind of unsettlingly close to my skin tone (below and to the left of the spathe), now that I look at the picture.
The color may change -- not only is it normal for developing spathes to get darker in color as they mature, but I'm not sure Zach's going to make it to full bloom. Some of the Anthurium seedlings do a practice inflorescence and then drop it before they make a real one in a different color,² and there are some indications that Zach might be inclined that way. (Both "Dave Trading" and "Bob Humbug" did this too; maybe it's a guy thing.) In any case, I'm potentially excited about having some variety in color.

"Sal Monella" is both in the process of unrolling the spathe from its first inflorescence and in the process of producing a second bloom. If the second bloom is successful, then Sal would be the first of the seedlings to bloom twice, which makes him potentially valuable for breeding. Also nice: the spathe has remained a solid red red, not the pinkish-red of most of the others. It's not hugely different from the other five that had bloomed previously, but it's different enough to notice and be happy about.

(New inflorescence is just starting to be visible, below and slightly to the left of the one that's opening now.)
EDIT: I finished this post Wednesday morning, then found another two flowers in progress on Wednesday afternoon: #58 ("Betty Larsony") and #245 ("Sawyer Ad"). Sawyer's spathe looks more or less in line with Gemini and most of the other seedlings; Betty might be a little lighter in color but it's hard to tell for sure. In Betty's case, I believe she's trying to apologize. So that makes ten.

And no, I'm not going to blog about it every. Single. Time. one of the Anthurium seedlings produces a flower from now until the end of eternity. But I'm excited. Bear with me.


4. Unknown mushrooms

I happened on this group a while back and found the size of the clump impressive enough to photograph. I couldn't make an ID on the species, even with the pictures to go from and my copy of The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms; my best guess is something in the Hypholoma genus but I emphasize that it's a guess.

The closest match in the book was H. capnoides, but the pictures of H. capnoides that come up in Google don't look much like my pictures or those in the book. And considering that the book is explicitly about edible mushrooms, and not all mushrooms are edible, there's every chance it shouldn't contain a photo of this particular mushroom in the first place. So I probably shouldn't even be guessing at an ID in public.

Mushrooms remain neat, though, even if they aren't plants.


5. Artiocarpus heterophyllus

Finally, an oddity at the supermarket: Jackfruit.

One could buy it by weight ($10/lb, which translates to $4.50/kg) or pay $30 (reduced from $35!) and get the entire fruit. (Which suggests that the whole thing was maybe only 4 lb / 1.8 kg to begin with. It sure looked a lot heavier than that, though, so I may be making some bad assumptions.) At those prices, for a fruit I couldn't have even guessed how to begin eating, I wasn't particularly tempted, though the informational sign next to it mentioned seeds, and that got my attention briefly.

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¹ Yes, I am aware that lottery numbers usually don't go that high, and don't usually have you pick eight numbers. But I'm not seriously suggesting that you play the lottery, so it all works out.
² It's not really practice. But that's what it looks like. (If you object to plant anthropomorphization, what are you even doing here in the first place?)

Pretty pictures: Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips

It kind of bugs me when people name non-red things "cherry" something. Not bothered a lot, but it does seem sort of exceptionally wrong.

I can't tell whether these pictures turned out well; I'm still getting used to having an LCD monitor. From some angles they look washed-out, and from other angles they don't. In either case, they do an admirable job of matching the blog's current color scheme, so there's that.

Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips = Vanda Doctor Anek x Vanda Antonio Real

Random plant event: Neoregelia 'Gazpacho'

Hi again.

Efforts to bring the outdoor plants back indoors have kind of stalled; out of about 130-140 that were outside at the peak of summer, I've managed to find spaces for all but about 30-40 of those, mostly Agaves that may or may not have scale. So that's kind of both good and bad. And the scale situation inside the house hasn't really improved either; it's still confined to certain spots, as far as I can tell, but it's hit a few plants that I didn't think were scaleable. So I'm finding plants more depressing than interesting right now. What's ultimately going to have to happen, I'm afraid, is another purge,¹ but that will take some working up to. (All the plants that would be easy to throw out already have been.)

So the post isn't a complete bummer (if I'm only going to post once every three days, I should try to make it pleasant enough to show up for), here's a Neoregelia 'Gazpacho' that's surprised me by blooming this month.

I knew it was old enough to bloom -- the parent plant flowered almost five years ago, and its offspring are now larger than the parent was then --

-- but it's been large enough to bloom for at least a year, maybe two, so the only reason I can think of why it would have chosen now is, I repotted it in May, along with the other two of the original plant's offspring. I also gave them a partly-obstructed south window, instead of a pretty wide-open east window, this summer, which may or may not have had something to do with it. (That still wasn't enough to give it full color: had I been able to grow it outside like it would have preferred, it would all have been red with green spots, instead of mostly green with a red-and-green center.)

The original 'Gazpacho' lived for another year and nine months after blooming, and about half to a third of the offsets survived. It would probably have had a higher survival rate if I'd let the offsets get a little larger before giving them their own pot. In any case, all three plants currently have at least one offset already, and the one from this post is going to start pumping them out now that it's bloomed, so I suppose I should brace myself for a Neoregelia population boom in the next year or two.

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¹ (I can't afford to buy the amount of imidacloprid it would take to dose every plant in the collection, never mind the amount of time and extra effort that would require. And there's no guarantee that, if I did spend the money, time, and energy, it would even be effective.)

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Maudiae x Paphiopedilum Stone Lovely

Random plant event: Anthurium "hookeri"

And now for something way less pretty than Thursday's Ananas post.

Which is not to say it's ugly, exactly. As Anthurium spadices go, the color is an interesting choice. There are more ornamental Anthurium hybrids with purple spadices -- my NOID purple-blooming plant has them -- but in those cases, the spathe is also purple, and there's an overall purple thing happening. With A. "hookeri,"¹ only the spadix is purple. The spathe is dull green and narrow, and then the pollen is orange, which was surprising to me -- I'd expected white, powdery pollen like from the blooming andreanum / scherzerianum hybrids I mostly grow.

Granted, this isn't the best picture of the pollen. But it's there, and it's orange.
Anthuriums which are receptive to pollen produce small droplets of a sticky liquid (the better to hold onto any pollen that gets dropped on them, I suppose). It's a pretty minor thing with most of my Anthuriums, and in a lot of cases, I can't even tell when they're receptive, so tiny is the amount of fluid involved. Not so with "hookeri." Once it started producing fluid, it went a little nuts about it -- it's not been dripping on the floor or anything, but there's so much that if I try to dust the spadix with a paintbrush now, the brush gets all gunked up with what can only be described as an orange pollen-based mud.

It'd certainly be awesome if the plant were self-fertile. I don't have any room for more Anthurium seedlings -- there are already, as of last Friday morning, 225 of them here, and I suspect that "hookeri" seedlings would probably get big really fast. As it is, I'm already throwing out or selling off some of my plants to try to make room for everything coming in from outside. But you know I wouldn't be able to resist starting "hookeri" seeds anyway, were any berries to form.

As to how I got it to bloom in the first place, the only thing I did differently than usual involved watering: I had previously been watering it the same way as everything else. Take it off the shelf, plop it in the tub, water water water, splash of fertilizer, drain, back on the shelf. A few weeks before this happened, I got tired of lifting it on and off the shelf, which is difficult because of all the huge, fragile leaves. So I poured some water in, splash of fertilizer, and left it, without draining. I don't know why that would make the difference, and it's possible that this is coincidental and the blooming was going to happen anyway, but the change in watering sure seems related to the bloom. We'll have to try again in a few months and see what happens.

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¹ "Hookeri" is in quotes because this plant is probably not the actual A. hookeri. It is my understanding that the actual species is pretty hard to find, so clever and evil plant-sellers have just taken to calling whatever old Anthurium they have lying around A. hookeri, the logic apparently being that by the time you find out that you didn't get the species you wanted, they'll already have your money and so who cares. That said, when one takes into account the distortions in form (floppy habit, bigger leaves, longer petioles) caused by my plant having been grown indoors, there does seem to be a decent chance that my plant might actually be A. hookeri. The spadix is the right color, the leaf margins are sort of ambiguously wavy, and the internodes are short (especially for a plant that should be stretching toward the light).

On the other hand, I haven't seen the black glandular punctates described at the link, and my plant's yet to produce berries, so I have no idea if the berries are red or white. (It's probably not going to produce berries, either -- I've tried smearing the pollen around just to see if something cool will happen, and I've also taken the pollen to the Anthuriums I'm breeding, same reason, but Anthuriums are not universally interfertile or self-fertile, so the odds are that nothing is going to come of that.) But at this point, I don't think I can rule out that I might have the real thing, even if the odds are still against it.