Pretty pictures: Dendrobium convolutum 'WK' x self

I have in my notes that the pictures here are a bit more impressive than the plant was in person, on account of the flowers being very small.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum bellatulum

I really like this flower, but I'm not going to talk about it because there's something else on my mind.

About a week ago, I received this comment on the "Comment Policy" page:¹

Please do not post pictures of my plants unless you ask my permission...owner, Phrag. Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane' AM/AOS CCM/AOS

Which refers to this post from 2012.² This confused me on multiple levels, since the plant's owner was not being disparaged in any way (indeed, the photo contained no text which could have identified him³ as the owner), and since I felt like the term orchid show sort of implies that people might, you know, look at the orchids.⁴ Photography is not discouraged at the show, and it could hardly be a surprise to the orchid's owner that people photographed his plant, since at least a third of the people at the show, every year, are walking around with cameras and sort of obviously taking pictures of things. The way the comment was phrased, it seemed like the objectionable part was the posting of the photo, but the photo -- that specific arrangement of pixels -- belongs to me, legally, and I can do whatever I like with it, regardless of who the subject belongs to, so if that's the problem then somebody's just going to have to deal.⁵

I spent a few days being kind of riled up about this, and then I remembered something. Rarely, I get comments on the orchid picture posts complimenting me on my beautiful orchids or whatever, in the sort of way that implies that the people leaving the comments believe -- in spite of comments to the contrary and tags like "Wallace's Orchid Show 2014" -- that the orchids in the photos belong to me. So perhaps the person leaving the comment believes that I'm misrepresenting the orchid in the photo as being my own plant, rather than his. I don't think that would technically be illegal to do, but obviously it'd be kinda douchey of me if I were.⁶

So. For the record.⁷

• Displaying pretty things in public, at a show, where photography is not only not prohibited but actively encouraged, is likely to result in people taking photos of the pretty things. If this is a problem for you, you should probably stop entering your orchids in shows which are open to the public.
• Photographs legally belong to the photographer who takes them unless / until the rights to the photo are sold or the photos specifically placed in the public domain. I don't have to ask anybody's permission to post my own photos on my own blog, no matter what the photos are of.
• All the PATSP posts tagged with "Wallace's Orchid Show [year]," where "[year]" = 2010 or any year after 2010, do not depict my own plants and were never intended to imply that they did depict my own plants.

-

Photo credits: mine, mine, all mine (though the plant is not mine)

¹ Which I published and then accidentally deleted, so you won't see it if you go there. For future reference: there is a "Delete forever? (Cannot be undone)" checkbox on the comment-deletion screen, but whether you check the box or not, there is no way to recover deleted comments. The only difference checking the box makes is that if you check the box, it will be as if the comment never existed in the first place, and if you don't check the box, the comment will be replaced by a line saying "This comment has been removed by a blog administrator."
So if you publish a comment and then have second thoughts about it, your options are between having it publicly readable forever, or having it publicly unreadable forever -- there's no option to take it down temporarily but preserve the option of restoring it later, even if "cannot be undone" implies that there is a way to undo the deletion.
² And this photo, specifically:


³ Pretty sure it's a him, based on blog statistics from the same time, the members of the Illowa Orchid Society named at its home page, and Google. And the sense of entitlement the comment projects.
⁴ I mean, it's not the 2011 Illowa Orchid Society Describe, now, is it?
⁵ In the U.S., at least, people can apparently take a photo of you whenever you're in public and reproduce it however they like, with certain exceptions made for context. Like, you can't use a random photo of some guy to illustrate a newspaper article about alcoholism without getting the model's permission, lest it appear that you're saying they're an alcoholic. But otherwise, there's a general assumption that being in public means you've implicitly given permission to have your picture taken. And that's for people. (Ref.) I imagine there's probably even less of an expectation of privacy when you're a plant. And less still when you're a plant that has been entered in a public orchid show.
⁶ (It's maybe worth pointing out that the original comment doesn't say that. This is just my guess as to what's bothering the guy. A literal reading of the comment implies that he believes that he owns any photos taken of his orchids, and that he should be consulted before anything's done with said photos.)
⁷ As far as I can tell, the guy who left the comment hasn't come back to the blog and will probably never see this defense of mine anyway. I suppose if the situation comes up again, I at least have the defense all written out and linkable now.

Pretty pictures: Vandachostylis Lilac Blossom

Another new orchid genus. Or, well, a new nothogenus, anyway. Interesting?

Vandachostylis Lilac Blossom = Rhynchostylis coelestis x Vanda ampullacea (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis (Sogo Yukidian x Brother Oxford)

This is okay, I guess. I think I like the yellow / white combination better than I would have liked pure yellow. And it's definitely more appealing than pure white would have been.

In personal(-ish) news:

The reader will no doubt be pleased to learn that I believe my ongoing itching problem, which has been annoying and frustrating me for much of the last year, appears to have been resolved, and was only dry skin all along. I mean, it still doesn't make any sense to me really, but the fact remains that doing stuff intended to fix dry skin has made the itching go away, so it's hard to argue that dry skin wasn't the problem. So yay. I guess. Why and how my skin got dry in the first place remains unexplained.

The Anthuriums appear to be on strike at the moment. I don't know what they're angry about (my suspicion is that they want to be moved up to 6-inch pots, which I don't have room for), but there are only three plants (out of literally hundreds) in the basement producing new blooms right now. One is 'Joli,' for the first time since I bought it in March, so there may be some new purple genes entering the seedlings in a year or so. The second is #095 "Clarice Fullhartz," who is still bravely trying to build a flower even though her roots are like 90% gone and she keeps getting pulled out of the pot. I'm not sure the bud is actually getting any larger, but she's at least not given up, which I suppose is the best we can hope for given the circumstances. The third is #040 "Ivy Winters," who has started and aborted so many blooms that I'm not really expecting anything to happen with the current buds, but it's gotten further than the other ones ever did, so that's something.

I have at least not spotted any new thrips damage, thrips, or scale since before the last round of oiling. It would be foolish to expect that this means they're all gone, but I nevertheless hope that maybe, something has finally worked.

Pretty pictures: Cattleya Crystelle Smith 'Hampshire'

Howdy. I'm still alive, and apparently so are you, so . . . things could be worse.

These photos are not as different from one another as I must have been thinking when I uploaded them, but the color combination is great. Sometimes less is more.

Cattleya Crystelle Smith 'Hampshire' = Cattleya Beaufort x Cattleya loddigesii (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Annette Hall

We were without internet access for like twenty-five hours on Wednesday / Thursday and it was exactly like that one episode of Little House on the Prairie where they lose their internet access and Pa Ingalls has to take the horses out into the blizzard to chop it free or whatever, except that the snow is so deep and the internet is so heavy that when he loads it all on the horse to take back to the cabin, the horse can't move, so Pa builds a barn around the horse and the two of them just stay outside like that until the snow all melts in the spring and Laura and all the lesser Ingallses missed everything that happened on Facebook for, like, the whole winter.

This plant didn't, like, blow me away at the show or anything, but the photo turned out nicely. I'm this close to being more depressed that I can't grow Masdevallias than I am about not being able to grow Paphiopedilums.

Masdevallia Annette Hall = Masdevallia Copper Angel x Masdevallia Manco Inca (Ref.)

Pretty pictures: Lycaste Alan Salzman

This genus is new to PATSP, though there will be a different Lycaste post in January. Not sure how I feel about this exactly. It's not actually peloric, but it looked enough like a peloric flower on first glance that I was confused for a while. I suppose the color is pleasant, and the flower is at least big, so it's got that going for it.

Lycaste Alan Salzman = Lycaste Island of Vulcorn x Lycaste Shoalhaven (Ref.)

Anthurium seedlings update:

Not a lot going on lately with the Anthuriums; a lot of the previously-pollinated flowers have produced ripe berries now, so I've sown seeds from:

#005 "Chad Michaels"
#059 "Bijoux Tuit"
#108 "Deena Sequins"
#200 "Mario Speedwagon"
#234 "Ross Koz"
#239 "Russ Teanale"
#271 "Wanda Reulthemal"
#273 "Wes Coast"
#276 "Zach Religious"

and I have potted up seedlings from all but three of those; still waiting to pot something up from 059 (Bijoux), 108 (Deena), and 200 (Mario).

And by the time you read this, I will probably have sown seeds from #002 "Alexis Mateo" as well.

There have been a couple recent seedling deaths, but only among the newer / smaller 3" plants -- nobody you'd know.

No thrips sightings in quite a while, which is good news, though some of the reason for that may be because there aren't many active blooms at the moment. I haven't seen a first-time bloomer since late August (#171 "Genevieve la Difference"), and I think all of the buds that the Anthuriums have tried to produce lately have aborted without developing. The thrips seem to prefer the spathes to the leaves, so with fewer spathes to choose from than usual, and with everything being sticky from the oil / dishwashing liquid mixture I sprayed everywhere, the thrips have been having a tough time.

Also started lots of new seeds from the NOID purple (41 seeds), NOID pink (31), and 'White Gemini' (51) lately, moved a lot of seedlings to 3" pots, and have a first new bud on 'Joli' now (which may still drop, but it's developed further than most, so I may be able to work in some 'Joli' genes after all).

'Midori' has definitely been pollinated, and I count 14 developing berries right now. If 'Midori' is typical, then Anthurium math says I should get about 16 seeds and 10 seedlings from that pollination, of which maybe 1 will live long enough to produce an inflorescence. But I can try again with the next 'Midori' bloom, too.

I'm also trying to decide which of the seedlings to move up into 6" pots; a lot of the 4" plants are floppy and easily tangled in one another. Because they're all flopped together, most of them aren't getting enough light anymore, and they can't really sucker, so some of them are going to need more room, like, yesterday. The trouble is that very time I start trying to make a list of possible candidates for promotion to 6", I wind up with like 15 plants on the list, and there's no way I have room for 15 6-inch Anthuriums anywhere in the house, so I'm going to have to do a lot of rearranging, it looks like. And maybe some throwing-away and selling.

So, overall, things are more boring and less pretty than I expected, but the indications for the future are fairly positive: lots of new plants, it's possible if not likely that the thrips and scale are gone, and I may be able to start thinning the herd by selling some of them on Craigslist once they start blooming again.

Pretty picture: Guarianthe aurantiaca

I'm pretty sure I've gotten better pics of this in the past (in fact they are all better; 2011 is probably the best), but oh well, this one's still really orange, and that's the important part.

previously (as Cattleya): 2010, 2011, 2012