Random plant event: Breynia disticha

I now have three Breynias in the house: the original, and two (barely) smaller plants from cuttings of the original. If they were easier to propagate from cuttings, I would have even more than that, because I like them,¹ but a lot of cuttings fail. (Cutting failure is a good thing in this particular case, though, because they get big quickly, and if all the cuttings had been successful, we would probably have had to give them all their own room.)

I happened to notice a couple months ago that the original Breynia had decided to bloom. The flowers are small and inconspicuous, to the point where although I know I've seen them once before,² I could easily believe that my plants have flowered several other times without me noticing.

This has no real practical application to anything -- I doubt I could pollinate them successfully. Nor is it particularly decorative, appealingly fragrant, or otherwise desirable. But it is news, technically, in that it is something that has happened. So make of that what you will.

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¹ They're easy, except that they always seem to need water. With a lot of plants, you could just move the plant up to a larger pot and get some relief, but Breynia roots fill any additional room they get almost instantaneously. So I've learned to just check for wilting more often, and water them out of turn if they need it.
Otherwise, Breynia is a good plant for me: not overly demanding of light, not prone to bugs (so far, though there have been brief minor spider mite infestations), copes well with indoor humidity and temperature. It's not my favorite plant or anything, but I like it well enough to have three of them.
If you live in a more tropical climate, be advised that Breynia disticha will propagate itself throughout your yard/garden, as well as those of your neighbors. If you live in Florida or Hawaii, in particular, you should not be growing Breynias outdoors. Not that it's going to bring back the native ecosystems, but you can at least try not to make things worse.
As houseplants, obviously, the damage to the ecosystem was done when the house was built, so grow whatever you want, just keep it inside.
² Those photos are better than these photos, if you care.

Early April Anthurium (and Schlumbergera) Seedling Update

I think I finally have the color-fidelity problem licked. If not, all the photos in this post were taken on the same day, in as close to the same conditions as I could manage, so if the colors are biased, they should at least all be biased in the same direction.

Everything with buds on it as of March 24:

First column, top to bottom: 088 ("Charlotte F. Babylon"), 213("Nadya Falt"), 239("Russ Teanale"), 238("Rudy Day"), 234("Ross Koz"), 247("Selma Carr").
Second column: 066("Barbara Seville"), 085("Carson Trucks"), 046("Aurora Boreanaz"), 108("Deena Sequins"), 005("Chad Michaels").
Third column: 040("Ivy Winters"), 200("Mario Speedwagon"), 031("Sylvester"), 243("Sal Monella"), 058("Betty Larsony").
Fourth column: 202("Mason Pepperspray"), 280("Jujubee"), 283("Anne Pursand"), 118("Elijah Sturdabowtit"), 231("Rhea Listick"), 063("Audrey Quest").
Aurora Boreanaz appears to have a thrips problem. I was really excited about Aurora at first, because there was a little bit of purple in its spathe, but the bud in the picture has opened since that photo was taken, and it's a dead ringer for Deena Sequins: red with a dark purple spadix. So not only does it not have a new color, but by the time the spathes open they're pretty thrips-ravaged. It's not seeming like a promising candidate for future breeding. I may have to discard the plant and recycle the name.

Mario Speedwagon has gotten darker in the last week, which is a good sign, and a new, light pink, bud has appeared. This suggests that it's going to keep getting darker until it opens, which would make for a very pretty inflorescence. Lots of potential so far. Rhea Listick is looking pretty good, in similar ways: more on her in a bit.

Chad Michaels and Alexis Mateo (#002) both produced buds at basically the same time, and they were both very, very dark red, verging on black. Alexis's bud caught on part of the plant as it developed, and wound up snapping itself off (!), so I don't know what it would have done; Chad's is staying very dark. Very dark red Anthuriums already exist, but I don't have one, so I'm kind of excited about this.

Sylvester has started to open since this photo was taken, and it has remained orange. (The previous orangish bud, Elijah Sturdabowtit / #118, took a sharp left turn to pink as the spathe opened, which was disappointing. Worse, it wasn't even a pretty pink, and was so short-lived that I didn't even manage to get a picture. I'd been hoping it would be my first orange -- the seed parent was 'Orange Hot' -- but Elijah fizzled out in every way possible.)

Pretty much every time I water the seedlings, I spot a new bud or two; so far (as of 31 March 2014), 40 of the Anthurium seedlings have at least attempted to bloom. The only bud not in the above collage is 097 ("Colin Ambulance").

I've also seen new inflorescences on the Spathiphyllum seedlings (#3, #9, #11), and a few more Schlumbergeras (#007, #022, #024, and #057).

The Spathiphyllums look like Spathiphyllums. At least one of them (#3) has scented inflorescences, which is kinda special.¹

The Schlumbergeras are, unexpectedly, all pretty similar to #25 ("Clownfish"). #24 is basically exactly the same as #25. #22 hasn't fully opened yet, but looks the same as #25 so far. #57 is slightly more pink/coral; I'm pretty sure there's a difference, but you probably wouldn't notice it in a photo. #7 has a lot more white in the petals, which should be exciting but in reality just makes it look kind of washed-out and sad. I suppose it's nice to know that if something happens to #25, I have replacements ready, but I had been hoping for more variety than this.

There are 19 Anthuriums with fully-opened spathes at the moment, 7 of which are interesting enough to show you.


"Eileen Dover" (#116)

Eileen is pretty similar to 'Red Hot.' So nothing new, but I suppose she's still nice. Eileen spent several weeks pretending she was going to be orange or coral, so the sudden swerve toward red at the very end was a surprise. I don't know why all the 'Orange Hot' children lie so much. Not raised right, clearly.


"Heather Boah" (#149)

You can't tell in the photo because of how I cropped it, but the most surprising thing about Heather is how tiny the flower is. The biggest of the seedlings' spathes run about 2.5 inches (6 cm) long and wide; the average is probably about 2 inches / 5 cm; Heather's one spathe to date was just over 1 inch (2.5 cm). Not a very commercially-viable trait, but I've noticed that several of the seedlings produce larger inflorescences now than they did when they first started blooming, so maybe Heather will bulk up with time.


"Zach Religious" (#276)

Zach's spathe looks pretty trashed these days, but the berries seem to be developing normally. It's still the only one of the seedlings I'm sure has been cross-pollinated, but 271 ("Wanda Reulthemal") seems to be getting a little bumpy, so Zach may not be alone for long.


"Barbara Seville" (#066)

Barbara's here because she happened to photograph well and it's her first bloom.


"Yvette Horizon" (#275)

Also the first one for Yvette, though she didn't photograph so well.


"Ross Koz" (#234)

I am increasingly infatuated with Ross. The only thing keeping him from being basically perfect is spathe size. On everything else -- spathe color, foliage, lack of blemishes, number of blooms -- he's up toward the top of my list. One of the reasons I'm looking forward to seeing what Rhea Listick does is because there's a good chance she's from the same parents, the bud is similarly purplish, and it's already looking larger and broader than Ross's. But Ross is a good plant regardless of what Rhea does.


"Sawyer Ad" (#245)

Sawyer is another potential full sibling of Ross's,² and also a good candidate for my favorite seedling. The color, obviously, is not that special, but the flowers are good about not cracking, large, pleasantly-shaped, and longer-lasting than most. As a bonus, the spadices are a bright, saturated yellow. I wasn't initially that impressed, but Sawyer's growing on me.

The next seedling update will probably happen once I can show you what happened with Rhea, Chad, and Mario's buds, plus a week or two to take and crop pictures. So maybe late April or early May. I will try really, really hard to write some general houseplant stuff before then.

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¹ The seed parent didn't have scented inflorescences, but apparently it didn't self-pollinate like I originally thought.
The plant I think must be the pollen parent has a sort of soft, powdery, lilac / baby powder fragrance. It's nice, but it's not particularly strong, and often doesn't seem to be coming from the plant: any number of times I've gone hunting around the basement, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from.
The seedling's scent is similar: not very strong, lilac / baby powder, but when I first notice it, I often pick up a flicker of cinnamon before I notice the rest of the odor. I can't tell if that's actually part of the fragrance, or if "cinnamon" is just my brain flailing around for something to call the smell: it happens that fast.
² The reason why I don't know is because I don't record attempted crosses, because I don't have much of a way to know if they worked or not. So far, I've just been randomly crossing things any time there are multiple flowers in bloom. The reason why I think they might be related anyway is because my notes say that they came from the same seed parent ('White Gemini') and were sown on the same day (5 May 2012). Since it's possible that not all the berries on a given spadix have the same pollen parent, and it's also possible that I took berries from more than one flower when starting the seeds, the relationship isn't really provable. But Ross may be siblings with:
Rhea Listick (#231)
Rowan DeBoate (#235)
Rudy Day (#238)
Russ Teanale (#239)
Sal Monella (#243)
Sawyer Ad (#245)
Selma Carr (#247)
and 32 other seedlings which have yet to produce flower buds. So far, Rhea is the only one to resemble it in inflorescence color, but one of the nonbloomers (#244, "Sara Problem") has similarly-shaped foliage.

Pretty pictures: Rhyncattleanthe Mary Weiss (?)

And here's the last orchid from last year's show; it's a contender for my favorite out of that batch just because the color is so weird. (The other contenders: Phalaenopsis Mistral's Sunrise Flame 'Mendenhall', Dendrobium pierardii, Caulaelia Snowflake 'Northland' (which you'll be seeing again in 2014), Rhyncholaeliocattleya Dick Smith 'Aloha Spirit,' Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips, Cattleya amethystoglossa. It'd be a difficult decision, if someone forced me to pick a favorite.

Rhyncattleanthe Mary Weiss = Rhyncattleanthe Memoria Christine Sineni x Rhyncholaeliocattleya George King

As for the blog, well, the husband has returned, so we're good there, but then I did something terrible to my back while trying to pick up the big Murraya paniculata on Saturday, which is complicating my life in a number of ways. So I feel pretty confident in saying that regular blogging (whatever that even means anymore) will resume at some point, but I have no idea when or what that will be.

I'm considering some kind of public service announcement post about what a bad idea it is to put large plants into clay pots. I just need a rhyming slogan of some kind.

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.