Anthurium no. 0330 "Faye Quinette"

I feel like I should probably get this out of the way right at the beginning: Faye is more or less impossible to photograph. Keep that in mind.

Faye's the brown one. You remember the brown one. Super-slow to develop, which was even more agonizing than normal because I was anxious to see how the bloom would turn out. But so here it is:

As sometimes happens, the front and back of the spathe are different colors. The back stayed more or less the same medium wood-brown throughout the bud development, and only started to change after the spathe had been fully open for a while. The spathe interior is a dull light orange. This is the most accurate photo I could get that shows both colors at once:

I was sort of braced for Faye to be awesome, and I was sort of prepared for her to be terrible, but this is neither of those, so I'm not sure what to feel.

What I actually got is probably more pleasant-looking than what I would have had if the interior matched the exterior. If nothing else, it doesn't look as dead as I'd thought it might. Which is possibly good. And I like that it's something new and different, even if it's not quite as different as I was expecting. We lucked out with the contrasting spadix, too: a matching spadix on this color would have been gross. And the foliage is good.

It's just that it's a little too pretty to be ugly, and a little too ugly to be pretty.

The other thing this means is that I probably didn't have to get 'Midori' last summer after all, since I apparently already had a plant that produces chlorophyll in the spathes. The seed parent is the NOID red, which even if the spathes on the NOID red aren't particularly dark or brownish, they're dark enough that it seems plausible that that's where the green is coming from. (For the orange, there's really only one plausible choice -- 'Orange Hot,' which seems to have been involved in most or all of the seedlings with orange blooms.¹) Though 'Midori' is now kind of exciting on her own, since I'm pretty sure the first bloom of 'Midori' that I pollinated had the NOID red as the pollen parent. The seedlings from that cross² could, in theory, wind up red, red-brown, green, or tan.

So what do you think? Pretty? Ugly? Neither? Both? Interesting? "Interesting?"³

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¹ 'Orange Hot' is the seed parent for 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" and 0031 "Sylvester," both of which are solidly orange, as well as the orange-then-pink 0118 "Elijah Sturdabowtit."
0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha" looks orange so far, but has not yet opened a bud, so that's a tentative confirmation of the theory: her seed parent is 'Orange Hot' also.
The only orange blooming seedling that doesn't work with this theory is 0329 "Gladys Panzarov," but whatever explains Faye also explains Gladys, since they're siblings.
The strangest thing, for me, is that 'Orange Hot,' despite the name, is barely orange at all. I mean, Eliza, Sylvester, Elijah, Marsha, and Gladys are all way more decisively orange than 'Orange Hot.' Which makes me very curious about why it's named that. Was "Peach Hot' taken?
² Only four of which are official so far: 1033 "Phoenix," 1092 "Mia Amor," 1093 "Luna Stones," and 1094 "Ella Vawaydego." Here's a recent picture of Phoenix:

I do still have some seedlings from this cross still in the germination containers, though.
³ I.e., I hate it but I don't want to say so to your face like this so I'll say something ambiguous and let you decide what you want it to mean.

Pretty picture: Vanda Princess Mikasa Pink

I mentioned in a post last year that Google said V. Princess Mikasa can also be pink, but that I hadn't seen it personally. And now I have.

I can't figure out from the available information whether this is from the same cross that produced the original blue-violet Princess Mikasa, or if it's a different cross that someone just named the same. The International Orchid Register doesn't have a separate entry for Princess Mikasa Pink (so that's probably not even its name, technically: it's probably just Princess Mikasa), which makes me think it's probably a sibling of the blue-violet Princess Mikasa, but the world of orchids is often illogical, redundant, self-contradictory, or counterintuitive, and I gave up on it making sense a long time ago, so bear in mind that that's only a guess.

If the pink Princess Mikasa is from the same cross as the violet Princess Mikasa, its ancestry is:

Vanda Princess Mikasa = Vanda Royal Sapphire x Vanda coerulea (Ref.)

Previously: 2013, 2014 (both are the blue-violet version)

Anthuriums no. 0257 and 0264

Anthurium seedling 0257 has probably the truest and most relevant name of all the seedlings: Summer Bederth-Enuthers.

Summer herself is not among the cream of the crop: goodness knows I have plenty of red / yellow seedlings to choose from, and she hasn't especially distinguished herself. Though there's nothing wrong with her either.¹ Leaves are unremarkable.

Seedling 0264 "Trey Lerpark" is along the same lines, except with a white spadix.

Trey's main distinguishing characteristic at this point is his stubborn refusal to completely unfurl his spathe. Maybe he's slow, maybe he's just genetically mandated to keep his spathe curved. I'd actually be fine with the latter, since the usual alternative to spathes staying concave is for them to flip backward and turn convex, which is stupid-looking. We'll see. In any case, he's also not particularly special either, for good or ill. Leaves are pretty typical.

The only thing that comes to mind is that I don't recall ever seeing any thrips, not that I have perfect recall of every time I've seen thrips.

I have the first orchid photo from 2015 scheduled for 6 April, and then I'll start showing you some Anthurium seedlings that actually are notable and cool. Or at least one seedling is (depending on how you feel about 0132 "Eve Stropper"). And maybe the "cool" one isn't actually cool, just notable. Though you might think it was cool: I don't know what you consider cool. The point is, it's not all going to be the same red and pink, red and pink, over and over again forever. I promise.

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¹ Or, well, one thing -- I may have seen a thrips once or twice. She doesn't seem to be inordinately bothered by thrips, unlike some of my seedlings (both 0046 "Aurora Boreanaz" and 0108 "Deena Sequins" are awful about this), but it's something of a character flaw to have any thrips.

Anthuriums no. 0041, 0220, 0237, 0344

SO MUCH PINK DEAR GOD MAKE IT STOP

Actually things aren't quite that bad; I'm throwing these four pinks together in a single post because I don't have much to say about any of them individually, and because this gets them all out of the way so we can talk about some marginally more interesting seedlings later. And for the record: I actually like pink just fine: I'm objecting to the repetition, not the color itself.

Seedling no. 0041 "Anna Graham"

Anna produced a first bud a long time ago, which was tiny and pale but unmistakeably pink, just like this one. I wasn't especially impressed the first time -- it was different, sure, but also tiny, and the color was a little too washed-out to be very interesting. I'm more into it now: the plant has grown quite a bit, the new foliage is pretty nice, and although the flowers are small, I have to admit that they do stand out pretty well against the rest of the plant. So Anna got the last available promotion to 6-inch; if I want to up-pot any more seedlings, I'm going to have to clear off another shelf.


Seedling no. 0220 "Nora Morse"

Nora and #0219 "Rhoda Horse" both started buds at the same time, but Rhoda chickened out, or something. Rhoda's bud was sort of kinked, like the most recent one from #0275 "Yvette Horizon," which may or may not be related. The only thing that's especially interesting about Nora is that she's a slightly different shade of pink, which leans ever so slightly to orange. Still really pink, though, obviously.


Seedling no. 0237 "Roxy Casbah"

Roxy started a bud last year and aborted during the summer, so it's mildly gratifying to see her trying again this year. That said, the color is exactly what I imagine when I'm talking about the pink / pinks, and we've seen it plenty of times. Also my brain tells me that any variation on the name "Roxanne" needs to have a red bloom,¹ so it's difficult for me to remember which one Roxy is.²


Seedling no. 0344 "Formica Dinette"

Formica leans slightly toward the highlighter-pink color of #0275 "Yvette Horizon," but without the distorted spathe. So . . . um . . . good for her, I guess. Could be worse.

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¹ ♪Roxaaaaaaaaaaaane -- you don't have to put on the red spathe, those days are over, grab a loofah, get in the bathtub, and bathe♫ (There are very very few English rhymes for "spathe," it turns out. Pretty much limited to "scathe," "bathe," and "lathe," as far as words anybody else would know the meaning of.)
² Fortunately, 0236 "Roxanne DeBree" looks like she's going to be red. No indication either way from 0050 "Roxxxy Andrews," but Roxxxy's so old that I figure if she were going to bloom, she would have done so by now, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum mastersianum

Well, this is different.

Definitely prettier than previous Bulbophyllums have been. (I suppose one could argue that B. echinolabium is prettier, though I think I prefer B. mastersianum.)

Not sure if it means anything, but I saw more Bulbophyllums at the 2015 orchid show than ever before (three, compared to a mere five total over the previous five years) -- are they having a moment? Did the genus just become cool or something?

New plant (But It's Also an Anthurium)

I'm, like, binging on new Anthurium-buying lately. Two in two months! (Six weeks, even!)

I don't know what this one's called either, and likely will never know, because it's also a Costa Farms product and they don't give a shit.¹ I did at least remember to ask Wallace's while I was there, and they were like, sorry, they just ship 'em to us as "6-inch Anthurium," we never get any more information about it than that.

So that's how it's gonna be, I guess. I took a couple stabs at looking for a patent, but patents for red Anthuriums are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't really help to try to narrow it down to "dark red."

But none of this should take away from the plant itself. It may be nameless, but it's also awfully interesting, from a breeding standpoint. The actual blooms aren't anything spectacular, though it's at least a color we haven't seen much of before (a sort of dull dark red, with a streak of brighter red near the midline).

I'm still not a big fan of the saddle-shaped spathes, but I suppose it might be interesting to see what sorts of shapes result from crossing those with a standard or tulip spathe -- maybe I'll wind up with something new. Mostly, though, I bought this one for the foliage:

²

Not only are the leaves all unusually shiny and large, the new foliage is almost black. (I just went and looked at it again to be sure, and that photo makes it look much browner than it is in real life. In real life, it looks like a very very very dark brown-green that is all but black.) I have named varieties and seedlings where the new growth is green (most of 'em), red (0649 "Layona Davenport"),³ orange (0573 "Adore Delano"), pink-red (0105 "Deanne T. Christ"),⁴ brown (0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" and lots of others), or brown-with-green-veins (0002 "Alexis Mateo"), but black is new. And would be awesome.⁵

Have yet to try to pollinate the new acquisition, and I'm not 100% sure it's even going to be possible, but fingers crossed.

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¹ Not that they should have to! I don't expect to be able to communicate with the wholesalers who supply my garbage bags or Q-Tips or milk or whatever. But if you're going to invite communication from the public, it seems like you should at least acknowledge when the public tries to communicate with you. Call me unreasonable.
² All the pictures I got were crap: it's too large to fit within the black backdrop I have, and it's dark enough that, especially in combination with a black backdrop, the camera doesn't know what's going on and starts making things up. But I promise you, it's awesome in person. (If you like very very large, shiny, and dark-colored leaves, that is.)
³ Recent photo of Layona:

⁴ Semi-recent picture of Deanne:

The new leaves look more purple-red than anything else, in person. The photo doesn't show that very well.

⁵ Based just on what traits get me most excited, I think I'm ultimately breeding toward an Anthurium with very large, dark, glossy arrowhead-shaped leaves, large, dark purple standard spathes, non-matching spadix (color to be determined), and dark brown new growth. Not that that's a conscious goal exactly, though now that I'm imagining it, it does seem pretty appealing. So.

Anthurium no. 0275 "Yvette Horizon"

Yvette has surprised me this winter / spring. She'd bloomed once before, a year ago, and while that bloom was nice enough --

-- it was still only a pink / pink, and didn't stand out from the other pink / pinks, so I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It tried to produce a second bud as the first bloom was dying, but that bud fell victim to The Great Droppening, when lots of plants threw buds at the same time, likely to protest being sprayed with white oil.^{1, 2}

But then this February, a new bud started to form, and I got interested in it when I noticed how large it was getting. Not long before the spathe started to open, an odd kink toward the bottom of the bud indicated that something was not quite right,

and then the bud actually did open, and it was an intense highlighter pink, as well as being bigger than most of the other seedlings' blooms, but that one corner really was screwed up so the whole thing was sort of a letdown anyway.

Worse, I don't know what caused it to do this in the first place. The kink appeared fairly early in the bud's development, so I'm inclined to blame drought stress, which is what I always blame for Anthurium problems I don't understand,³ but this is the first bloom I can recall getting holes in the middle of the spathe, and I know plenty of the other seedlings have been drought-stressed before, so that's clearly not the whole explanation.

Sort of waiting to see what happens with the next bud on Yvette, then. A new bud has just started developing, so by June or so, I should know whether this is something they're all going to do, or something peculiar about that particular moment.

It's worth noting, while I'm talking about Yvette, that she also has very nice leaves --

-- dark green, more or less flat, unblemished, interestingly veined, and so forth. And the spathe color is fading with time a lot less than many of the other pink / pink seedlings' spathes do.⁴ So there's definitely potential here, if future spathes can do a better job of holding themselves together.

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¹ White oil: mix of water, vegetable oil (soybean in my particular case) and an emulsifier (dishwashing liquid), which is sprayed on plants with bug problems in an effort to suffocate the bugs by blocking their breathing pores with oil. In fairness, this really did make a big impact on my thrips problem here, for several months, but it did not actually eradicate them. Also, being an unsaturated oil, it goes rancid when exposed to air, which turns out to be a problem, and a few plants react very badly to being sprayed with oils of any kind, the worst in my experience being Cordyline fruticosa, Euphorbia milii, and Breynia disticha. Ask your horticultural professional if white oil is right for you.
² Though the cause / effect relationship is only speculation, until / unless I try spraying everything with white oil again. Which I'm hesitant to do. See above re: rancidity and not eradicating things.
³ (and you'd be surprised how often that turns out to be the correct answer)
⁴ Both 0241 "Megan Gigaterra" and 0126 "Erin Dirtylondry" get much lighter as they age. This looks better on Erin than on Megan even though they both lighten to about the same color; I haven't been able to put a finger on why that is. Curiously, Yvette's first bloom got very light within a couple months, so it's possible that there's a seasonal or cultural factor to work out too.

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Georgian Franczyk

It'd be hard to get excited about the color pattern here -- faint stripes seem to be pretty common for Masdevallia hybrids -- but the color itself is something I don't think I've seen before. The closest we get is probably Masdevallia Tortoise 'Plum Petite,' from the 2012 show, and this is a lot more saturated than that.

Masdevallia Georgian Franczyk = Masdevallia Midnight Plum x Masdevallia coccinea (Ref.)

The Quad Cities orchid show was last Saturday, and it was, you know, fine. Like an orchid show. I got about 60 sets of pictures, I think, depending on how salvageable a few bad shots turn out to be, so we'll have about one orchid post per week for the rest of 2015, roughly the same frequency as the 2014 posts. Spelling and IDs were more consistent and more often correct than previous years too, so good for the Illowa Orchid Society.

Not a lot of surprises, though there were a few new weird species, which I enjoyed even if they weren't very flashy. Sadly, I only saw one Masdevallia in 2015, and it wasn't even a pretty one. You won't see many Phragmipediums this year either. (They were at the show; I just didn't take pictures of them. Most were the ringleted types, with the long skinny petals that fall down to either side of the bloom, and those rarely photograph well, so I figured this year I just wouldn't even try.)

The fashion story this year seemed to be Black Is The New Black -- seemed like an unusually large number of very dark blooms, including a couple really dark purple Phalaenopsis, a dark purple Vanda, and a few Paphiopedilums that were basically black in places. So we have that to look forward to, beginning in April.