Pretty pictures: Paphiopedilum Bit-O'-Sunshine x Paph. William Sanders x Paph. malipoense

Since my last post, there's been a family event (death in the family on the husband's side). It would be complicated to explain, but the upshot is that although it's not a big emotional crisis for anybody involved, for the first time since 2006, I'm sleeping by myself, and all alone in the house,^1,2 and everything is now all upside down and backwards.

So either I'm going to wind up writing lots of blog posts out of boredom, or I'm going to be writing no blog posts at all because I'm trying to clean the house top to bottom. Physical stuff seems more distracting than verbal stuff right now, so the smart money is on cleaning / no blog.

In the meantime, here is a new orchid for you to look at, and I will be back when I can.

All I have on this one from the tag is "Paphiopedilum Bit-O'-Sunshine x Paphiopedilum William Sanders x Paphiopedilum malipoense". That could be

(Paph. Bit-O'-Sunshine x Paph. William Sanders) x Paph. malipoense,

or it could be

Paph. Bit-O'-Sunshine x (Paph. William Sanders x Paph. malipoense).

It looks like the tag is trying to suggest the first option, so that would be my guess, but parentheses would have helped clarify.

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¹ (save for Sheba, who tries, but is not a great conversationalist. She's really more of a listener than a talker, and honestly, she's not even that great of a listener sometimes. It depends on how often I'm saying "Sheba.")
² I would have gone with the husband, but you would be surprised how difficult it is to find someone to plant-sit 1000+ plants for a week on short notice, and many of the Anthurium seedlings in the basement wouldn't be able to survive a week without watering. To say nothing of trying to find someone to take care of Sheba. Maybe if we'd had more time to figure something out, I could have gone, but it was all pretty abrupt.

Pretty picture: Tolumnia Tequila Sunrise; also, New Plant

This particular orchid is unknown to the orchid registry where I usually confirm names, or at least it was as of a year ago, when I was looking for IDs on the 2013 batch. I found plenty of orchids named "Tequila Sunrise" (Cymbidium, Miltoniopsis, Phalaenopsis, Dendrobium, Rhyncholaeliocattleya), but Tolumnia wasn't among them. So I can't tell you what the parents are for this one.

And that is all I can say about Tolumnia Tequila Sunrise.

I came very, very close to not going to the orchid show this year,¹ but I went. And it was . . . okay? Every year, it feels like the show is smaller than the year before, though I don't think it's actually changing in size; I think there's just something weird about the way I store orchid show information in my brain. (I also always think that I got better pictures than in previous years, which never turns out to be true either.)

Compared to previous years, the 2014 pictures seem unusually heavy on pink, purple, and shades in between, and unusually light on yellows and oranges. I tried to get fewer Paphiopedilum and Phragmipedium photos,² though I wasn't entirely successful. I tried to get more Masdevallia pictures, but I don't think I succeeded at that either: there just weren't that many there, and the ones that were there weren't actually that interesting. Certainly nothing anywhere near Masdevallia Sunset Jaguar 'Night Breed,' which I would have loved to have seen again.

Regular posting will remain slow for the next week or two, while I sift through and upload this year's batch of photos. I'm hoping I'll be done with that by the time I run out of 2013 photos (at the end of March).

While in the Quad Cities, we also went to Home Depot, because I wanted to get a bunch of Glidden paint color cards. The reason is weird,³ and I felt really conspicuous and self-conscious about doing it, with the result that I was too distracted to pick up any yellows.⁴ Then I felt bad about coming to the store just to load up on paint cards,⁵ so I wound up buying an Anthurium, just like last year. $10 for a 4-inch pot (which seems to have become standard around here), but the color⁶ is unusual,⁷ and if it's interfertile with the plants I already have, it'll be good for breeding purposes.

The tag didn't include a variety name, and a trip to the Westland Greenhouses website didn't turn up any possible cultivars, but I e-mailed the company yesterday and they said it was Anthurium 'Joli.' I also learned from their website that, however unlikely it sounds, my 'Joli' was grown in Grand Bend, Ontario. Which I am still trying to get my head around. (How is heating a greenhouse in Ontario not prohibitively expensive? How can Ontario compete with Florida?)

Not only are they Canadian and prompt to reply to e-mails, but the instructions on the Westland Greenhouses tag are much, much better than the instructions from the Just Add Ice tag, and includes "don't place in direct sunlight during the summer months" and "add fertilizer once after every six waterings." Neither of those are exactly what I'd recommend, and of course "better than the Just Add Ice care instructions" is a very low bar to clear, but I am nevertheless pleased, and give you permission to purchase Westland-grown Anthuriums.

Also making me happy is the tag's shape. Perhaps I have a smutty mind, but, well -- you can see it, right?

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¹ Back problems, probably caused by me trying to get through the weekly watering cycle faster than normal. (I didn't want to come back from the show on Saturday and still have a hundred plants to water.) We wound up going late on Sunday, which seems to have worked out fine.
² They were there, of course. I just tried not to take many pictures of them, because I really want to be able to grow them and can't. Seeing photos of them just reminds me of this, and then I get depressed.
It's not like I'm great at growing any orchids, but I only get upset about not being able to do Paphs and Phrags.
³ It's been bothering me, when I write stuff down about the Anthurium seedlings, that I don't have better ways of describing spathe colors than just "red," "dark red," "pink-red," etc. I mean, that's fine as far as it goes, but it'd be nice to make finer distinctions, in cases where, for example, flower A is red, and so is flower B, but Flower A and flower B aren't the same color. Now that I have a set of cards to compare to, though, I can say that flower A is "Cherries Jubilee" red, and flower B is "Red Rose Bouquet" red, and feel more or less confident that I have made an important distinction. (note: All the Glidden color names in this post are ™ Glidden. In using their names, I do not mean to imply in any way that Glidden approves of me, my blog, Anthuriums, or plants in general; I'm just using them as a convenient means of identifying specific colors. Conversely, I don't want to imply that I approve of Glidden, their marketing department's color-namers, Glidden products, or paint in general, either.)
It may or may not actually be an important distinction, of course. But I've noticed in the plant patents I've looked at that they frequently make references to standardized colors (one set of which is apparently the Exotica Horticultural Color Guide, mentioned in the Dracaena deremensis 'Warneckei' profile), so it seems like this is something I'll eventually have to think about. May as well start now, I figure.
I tested this out yesterday. Compared cards to a couple spathes before dinner, and then checked all the plants that are currently blooming after dinner. My pre- and post-dinner assessments didn't agree, so there are clearly some problems with the whole concept. But it may be better than nothing.
⁴ The logic at the time was that I was so vanishingly unlikely to ever have a yellow Anthurium spathe to describe that I had no need to pick up any yellow cards. Then I got home and remembered: spadices. Almost all my spadices are yellow. D'oh!
⁵ The husband assured me that Glidden and Home Depot would manage to scrape by financially, even if I took their paint cards, and I believed him, but 1) he told me this after I'd already bought the plant, and 2) there's a good chance that I was rationalizing buying the plant with the paint chips thing. It's not like I need more plants, after all. And it's really not like I need more Anthuriums. But I wanted it. So there you go.
⁶ (somewhere between Blooming Fuchsia and Sexy Pink for new spathes, aging to Watermelon Smoothie)
⁷ Though Mario Speedwagon (#200) is similar, and is looking extremely interesting. The spathe is closest to Blooming Fuchsia (a darkish pink-purple) so far. The problem being that they often change as they develop, so Mario will get more interesting or less interesting with time, and I don't know which it's going to be yet.

Microphotography: Hippeastrum Pollen and Mystery Substance

I'm still trying to figure out a way to get good photos through the microscope. It may well be the case that no such way exists with the current microscope and camera, in which case I'm wasting my time trying, but for now, I have not yet decided that it's hopeless.

Part of the problem is that I lack for subject matter that I think you guys would find interesting. I could get plenty of pictures of scale insects, I suppose, but for the most part, anything I can see with the microscope is what I see with my naked eye, but bigger, which means my camera can get pictures reasonably well already.

Pollen is an exception. I can't tell much about pollen aside from its color with my naked eye, and sometimes I can't even determine that, but the microscope magnifies it just enough to see shapes. Hippeastrum pollen happens to look just like yellow rice.

And there is so much of it, too. Though I didn't try to get a picture of that.

I did try to self-pollinate the Hippeastrum, but it didn't work. The petals and sepals dried up, and the base of the flower swelled like it's supposed to, all as expected, but after about a month, the whole flower stalk turned yellow and mushy, then flopped over. Oh well. It was trying to save me from myself, no doubt.

The microscope has also proven itself useful a number of times during suspected bug infestations. My Anthurium schlechtendahlii, in the husband's office, was getting a thorough inspection a while back because I'd found scale on a plant on a shelf above it, and I saw this weird white stuff.

I didn't think scale eggs were big enough (or abundant enough) to be visible like this, but I didn't know what else it could have been. So out came the microscope again, and I got these pictures:

The texture made me think of spittlebugs. Spittlebugs indoors would be unusual, but ever since the caterpillars, I don't rule anything out. On the other hand, spittlebugs produce a lot more froth, the froth would be easy to move around on the leaf, and spittlebugs wouldn't put the froth out in the middle of a leaf: they're pickier about location than that.

So it was a mystery for a while. But then the husband noted that the contractors had been in his office a couple months before, and had sprayed various substances in there, so it was probably (his theory) spray-on wall texture stuff. (Would it have been beyond our capabilities to cover the plant shelf with plastic before stuff got sprayed in there? No it was not. But we didn't do it.) So unless the A. schlechtendahlii is suddenly covered in some new kind of bug in the near future, I'm assuming that this is contractor-related, case closed.

Still haven't made any determinations as to the identity of the mysterious Aglaonema mites. I did wipe them off the affected plants with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel, after that post, and they've stayed off of some plants but not others. (Which is what I expected: I didn't think one time would be enough to get rid of them.) So I don't know what's going on, and possibly never will.

Side note: apologies for the relative dearth of posts lately. I especially apologize for not posting right after finding out how many of you just check in with the blog every day instead of using a feed reader. There are four reasons for the silence:

1) I've just felt really run down lately, as happens from time to time, and then Daylight Saving Time had to happen and screw everything up even more. When I invent my time machine, first thing I do is go back and kill George Vernon Hudson. Entomologists are always ruining everything.
2) The orchid show is this coming weekend (15-16 March) and I'm trying to water stuff faster than usual so I can be ready for that. It's not really working so far, because of the tiredness, but the intent is there. This is also going to keep posts slow for a while, since sorting and scheduling the orchid pictures is always at least a week's work.
3) I mailed out Coffea seeds and Leuchtenbergia seeds on Monday, which took up a bit more of my time. And then
4) New Anthuriums produce buds almost every week,¹ and it's getting harder and harder to keep up with who's doing what when, so I'm trying to set up some notebooks so I can keep track of each one individually. And then I decided to make the project more complicated, because . . . I always decide to make everything more complicated. So it looks like that's going to take a long time to sort out.

But posts will return eventually, I promise.

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¹ The most recent set of buds (from March 3 and 11):
Wes Coast (#273) -- light pink?
Audrey Quest (#63) -- red
Jujubee (#280) -- light pink?
Chad Michaels (#5) -- dark red?
Mason Pepperspray (#202) -- ivory, so maybe eventually light pink?

Pretty picture: NOID NOID orchid

I don't know if there wasn't a tag, or if I just missed getting a picture of it. But in any event, I don't know what this is. Looks sort of Phalaenopsisish to me, but the photo's not great, and those are some mighty big roots, for a Phalaenopsis, so I am prepared to believe pretty much any ID anybody wants to offer.

Unfinished business: Leuchtenbergia principis

I spent a lot of yesterday working on a different, longer post, but it became clear that I wasn't going to finish soon enough to publish it today, so instead you get this. We'll call it a follow-up to the Leuchtenbergia principis profile.

I noted in that post that different sources gave wildly conflicting information about the color of Leuchtenbergia fruits, and guessed that they were perhaps just that inconsistent about fruit color. Since that post was written, my two mature plants' fruits have ripened, and in fact the two plants do not agree on the proper color for ripe fruit. The small plant's was pinkish-purple,

and the large plant's was yellow.

This is sort of backwards -- the small plant's flower was solidly bright yellow, but the fruit was pinkish; the large plant's flower was a pinkish, but produced a solid yellow fruit. So I guess the lesson here is that they turn whatever colors they feel like turning, at all stages of the process. Leuchtenbergias are the honey badgers of the plant world.

Both of the above photos date from last November; at the beginning of February, the small plant's fruit had browned and shriveled up, so I pulled it off, and I learned the truth behind another thing that had confused me while researching. A couple sources mentioned something about the seeds coming out of a small hole at the base of the fruit, which didn't make sense to me until the small plant's fruit came off -- the hole the seeds come out of is where the fruit was originally attached to the tubercule. (The way it was phrased, I'd thought that maybe the fruit stayed attached to the plant and, like, grew a hole on its side or something. Which didn't seem like a sensible way for a plant to go about distributing its seeds, but I thought maybe Leuchtenbergias were just kinda crazy. See above re: honey badger.) The dried fruit works more or less like a salt shaker -- seeds kept falling out of the hole as I moved it around. And it was basically packed full to begin with.

So I guess they don't actually need animals to find and eat the fruit, because the fruits will dry up and disperse the fruits all on their own. Which may explain the inconsistent fruit coloration: if you don't have to attract animals in order to get the next generation going, you can color your fruits however you want. So everything makes sense now, and I'm happy.

So, now, I have 15 seedlings in tiny clay pots in the basement, there's another six in the plastic container where I germinated them last May, I have maybe 70 seeds left over from the ones I bought, and I have an unknown number in the two fruits. So for the love of all that is good and pure in the world, please, if you are at all interested in having seeds or seedlings of Leuchtenbergia, send me an e-mail and ask. Something can be worked out, I promise.

Pretty picture: Rhyncholaeliocattleya Seto Rainbow 'Fantasy'

I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: I cannot wait for the day when every combination of "good" words has been used up for orchid hybrids, and the hybridizers have to resort to names like:

Rhyncholaeliocattleya Booger 'Donkey Ladle'
Paphiopedilum Soulless Infection 'Cthulhu'
Phalaenopsis Cursed 'Honk Fart.'

It's gonna happen someday. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but someday.

They'll probably still be pretty, though. A rose by any other name and all.

Rhyncholaeliocattleya Seto Rainbow 'Fantasy' = Cattleya Irene's Song x Rhyncholaeliocattleya Hawaiian Lightning

Question for the Hive Mind: Blog Subscriptions

For unknown reasons, I've gotten two e-mails in the last week that asked how to subscribe to PATSP, and . . . well, I have no idea how to answer them, aside from telling people to find a feed reader and subscribe to the PATSP RSS feed. It's not a problem I've had to deal with personally, because Blogger comes with a feed reader and has not yet given me any reason to look for something else, but if people are going to keep asking, I suppose I should try to figure out a good answer. People especially seem to want to know how to get new posts sent to e-mail. (I'm kind of against that, since I want you to have to come here to read it -- if you don't visit the page, I have no way of knowing you ever read anything. But I can't make you come here if you don't wanna.)

So: how do you keep up with new PATSP posts? Feed reader? Just check in every so often? Something else? What should I be answering, when people ask how to subscribe to PATSP?

Seedlings update (including, for the first time, Schlumbergera!)

After many, many months of struggling to get even halfway-decent Anthurium photos, I think I have finally cracked the problem. It involves crawling through a thicket of Agaves under a table,¹ but it improves the color fidelity from my camera, so it's worth it.²

This means you'll be seeing more Anthurium seedlings. But first, I've finally gotten some blooms from one of my Schlumbergera seedlings. (You forgot those existed? Sometimes I do too!) And it is spectacular.

³

And now you're thinking, well, that's very nice, certainly, but "spectacular," Mr. S.? Aren't you overselling it a little?

Perhaps. But it seems pretty darn spectacular to me. I didn't already have an orange Schlumbergera, and orange is a color I particularly like in flowers, so it's a lucky break that the very first schlum to bloom happens to be a deep, vivid orange. It also wasn't expected -- the known parent was 'Caribbean Dancer,' which is red with a magenta tube. Orange with a white (very pale pink, in the right light) tube isn't something I was expecting to see out of 'Caribbean Dancer.' Not in a single generation, anyway. But I did say in the Schlumbergera profile that Schlumbergera genetics and breeding is screwy like this, so I suppose I should have been expecting to be surprised.

The new schlum is in the foreground; 'Caribbean Dancer' is the red one in the background.
Whether you find it impressive or not, this has made me ridiculously, deliriously, uncharacteristically happy, for a couple weeks and counting. Unlike the Anthurium seedlings, I hadn't given names to the Schlumbergera seedlings in advance, so I got to search for names for it. (Presently it's just "Number 25.") Out of curiosity, I used the photo search by color at TinEye Labs to see what sorts of things it might be reasonable to name a flower this color, and have settled, at least for the moment, on Schlumbergera "Clownfish," though I haven't definitely ruled out "Road Work Ahead" or "Oompa."⁴

I've been very pleased with some of the Anthurium seedlings as well, but "Clownfish" / No. 25 is the first plant I've made where my reaction has been oh my god I would absolutely buy that if I saw it in a store I must propagate a million of them and have it forever. It doesn't hurt that it is apparently more willing to bloom than the 100+ other seedlings, or that it's apparently less sensitive to day length, since it's tried to bloom a few times before this. Seriously. You have no idea how excited I am about this.⁵


Schlumbergeras 7 and 23 are also in bud, so we might have some more schlum pictures coming up soon. Early indications are that 7 will be orange or red and 23 will be pink or magenta, but schlum buds change even more during development than Anthurium buds do, so that's just a guess.

Whew.

There's also another Spathiphyllum seedling getting ready to bloom (which would be the third to do so), as far as it goes, but I'm willing to bet that you can imagine that just fine without me showing you a picture.


Moving on to the Anthuriums:

Since the last report, four more Anthurium seedlings have produced buds. They are:

Sylvester⁶ (#31) -- color indeterminate, may wind up being a little orange but it's hard to tell
Mario Speedwagon (#200) -- looks like it will end up somewhere in the pink/purple/lavender neighborhood
Rhea Listick (#231) -- also purple to some degree or another, but it's too early to tell how purple
Heather Boa (#149) -- red or dark red


Bob Humbug (#76)
We've also finally, finally seen a full-grown flower from Bob Humbug (#76). He's kept us waiting since October, and I lost track of how many buds he's aborted since then. (It's approximately five.) But Bob turns out to be red to dark red, depending on the light, and the spathe is respectably-sized:

It's not amazing. Arguably not worth the wait he put us through. But there's nothing wrong with it either.

The wavy edges, by the way, are just a side effect of the spathe having just opened when I took the picture; it had smoothed out by the next day.


Ross Koz (#234)
The Haus of Kinda-Purple officially gained a new member this week, but I'd suspected Ross would be at least a little purple for quite a while. The spathe isn't as big as Alyssa's, and the color and veining isn't as neat as Carson's, but Ross is the one with the unusually large, flat, shiny, unblemished leaves that I was pleased with anyway, so to have purplish flowers on top of that makes me nearly giddy.

As sometimes happens, the back is a different color than the front:

And here are the three members from the Haus of Kinda-Purple together:

(L-R) "Alyssa Edwards," "Carson Trucks," "Ross Koz"
And yeah, the size difference really is that pronounced, though I think Alyssa may be slightly closer to the camera.


Betty Larsony (#58)
Betty's spathe had some kind of malfunction while it was unfurling, so it's torn. But it would have been a pretty awesome inflorescence if it hadn't. (And it's still okay. Maybe next time, Betty.)⁷

Elijah Sturdabowtit (#118)
Elijah is the one from this set where I'm not sure the color in the photo is accurate or not. I've been watching it for the last couple weeks, and got excited because it looked like it was going to be a little bit orange.⁸ And then once it actually opened, it looked pink to me. Except that it still photographed kind of orange. But it looked pink. So . . . Elijah is either the first player for Team Vaguely-Orange, or another unphotographable oddball like Deena Sequins. Or both, I suppose.

It's too bad the foliage isn't nicer. Maybe it'll improve.


And that's the report for now. I had intended the Schlumbergera announcement to be accompanied by a different, more contemplative kind of post, but after trying to write it several times and not being happy with how it was turning out, I finally decided that it was more important to tell you about the new bloom than it was to try and get deep. You can only keep Pointer-Sister-level news quiet for just so long, after all.

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¹ No, seriously. When the Agaves came inside last fall, I didn't want to put them with the other plants, because I knew that some of them had scale. I never wound up finding a good place to put them, so they've been "temporarily" under the dining table that serves as my office desk, all winter. Because the table was developing wobbly legs, we've bolted it to the wall.
The north-facing window in my office has a shelf of plants in front of it, naturally, and will only roll just so far because a lower shelf is holding all the surge protectors. And then the table with the Agaves underneath is right next to that. So in order to take photos using the window for lighting, I have to roll the shelf back as far as it will go, then crawl under the table, through the Agaves, take the pictures, and then crawl back out. It works, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking for an easier way.
² If you care, this solution was inspired by this Flash Photography Crash Course (found via MetaFilter), specifically the part about hard light vs. soft light.
³ The Schlumbergera pictures pre-date my discovery of the crawling-under-the-table photography method, but the colors are pretty accurate.
⁴ Most of the pictures that came up with TinEye were also of flowers, with roses, Gerberas, Hibiscus, Papaver orientale, and various lilies dominant. Tomatoes are also highly represented, which initially struck me as weird (we're accustomed to thinking of tomatoes as red, not orange) but is undeniably relevant to the color. There are also a surprising number of photos and logos related to the Free Burma movement. I investigated, but didn't come up with much of an explanation: the best I could do is that it seems to be related to the use of saffron to dye the robes of Buddhist monks, and Buddhist monks are one of the more prominent groups in the Free Burma movement. However, Buddhist monks' robes are more traditionally dyed maroon, so I don't know if that even explains anything. Concert photos, chili peppers, tulips, sunsets, and unidentifiable abstract things make up most of the remainder. I did see one picture of an electric stove's burner, with the coil glowing orange, that I thought was nice, and so for a second or two "Burner Coil" was under consideration, but I didn't want to have to explain that.
Meanwhile, oranges, orange juice, Snooki, and John Boehner were all unexpectedly underrepresented in the TinEye results.
⁵ I am aware that other orange Schlumbergeras exist. I don't care. This orange Schlumbergera is mine. You can't bring me down. I even found a moderately advanced scale infestation on Tuesday. Water off a duck's back: I have an orange Schlumbergera.
⁶ Not a drag queen, but close enough.
⁷ On being told "and this one's Betty Larsony," the husband's response was "yeah, she looks like a Betty." And it's true: she does.
⁸ It's a seedling from 'Orange Hot.' 'Orange Hot' is only orange compared to all the pinks and reds, but it's the best I've got to work with.