Anthurium no. 0328 "Polly Esther Blend"

This post took a while to shape into something I would have considered posting, and then on Sunday I decided I didn't like it. So I started it over from scratch, which means that all kinds of things have happened between this post and the one I posted on Wednesday.

The main thing that's happened, which took all of one day and a few hours from a second, is that I redid the shelves in the basement. Took all the plants off,¹ took all the lights off, disassembled the shelves, cleaned the shelves, cleaned the lights,² reassembled the shelves, put the lights back on, put the plants back on. It was also fairly frantic work, because I still needed to water plants the next day, so the situation was basically: I had exactly sixteen hours, in which to do exactly sixteen hours of work.

All this was necessary because I'd run out of room, and there was no more floor space to take over, so the only direction I could expand was up. And the only place I could actually expand upwards was at one end of the shelves -- everywhere in the basement there were 6-foot-tall shelves except for some 4-footers at one end. So I bought a new 6-foot shelf set, which I swapped in for the four-foot shelves, and I got a few cubic feet near the ceiling. And I took the opportunity to adjust the shelf heights, so the plants don't have to burn themselves on the fluorescent bulbs anymore and everything has enough space to grow a little.

Things aren't entirely settled yet; I still need to hang a light from the ceiling in one spot, and I'd really like to find an alternate location for some non-Anthurium plants, because I'd overlooked them in the original planning and so now they're in empty shelves I'd intended to use for Anthurium expansion, but I guess things are okay for the moment. Certainly the framework is in place, and I can tweak stuff later as the opportunities present themselves.³

Anyway. So.

I wasn't expecting 0328 "Polly Esther Blend" to turn out like she did. Polly has two siblings who had bloomed before her: 0329 "Gladys Panzarov," which is an intense, saturated orange with a beige spadix, and 0330 "Faye Quinette," which is complicated, but sort of a light red-orange / beige.⁴ What I got from Polly instead was light pink / beige, which is the first time I've seen that particular color combination.

Seeing Polly, Gladys, and Faye side-by-side, you wouldn't think that they were particularly closely related.⁵

Top to bottom: 0328 "Polly Esther Blend," 0329 "Gladys Panzarov," 0330 "Faye Quinette." I suppose you could argue that they look sort of related, insofar as they're all at least slightly orange with beige-ish spadices, and neither Polly nor Faye are very dark. But "I guess they could maybe be related" is not the same thing as "OMG those are definitely related," as is the case with some of the other sibling groups.
The strongest resemblances Polly has to her sisters are in the size of her spathes (small side of normal, like Gladys) and her leaves, which are basically identical to Gladys's:

As she aged, Polly's spadix lost whatever yellow tint it started out with, and the spathe went from an ambiguous light orange-pink to a less interesting light pink.

Left: August 1. Right: August 11.
So that's a little disappointing. Polly is also shorter than her siblings, which is odd but not necessarily bad.

I'm not sure what kind of breeding potential there might be from Polly (do I really want to tempt the gods to send me more pink Anthuriums?), but I like her, and I intend to keep her. We'll see how things go.

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¹ There was also a temporary side benefit, in that our downstairs toilet has never looked lovelier:

I mean, we couldn't use it, but it was pretty. For a toilet. The photo really doesn't do it justice.
And why were there Anthuriums around the toilet? Well, I had something like 120 square feet of plants to put somewhere while I got the shelves together, and the basement only had just so much free space, so plants wound up everywhere. Around the toilet, in the shower, on the futon, under the stationary bike, on the coffee table, under the coffee table, etc.
² In fairness, almost all of the shelf- and light-cleaning was taken on by the husband, who had better things to do with his time but did this for me anyway.
³ Also, I apologize for the lack of photos of the process. I did take pictures here and there as we went along, but I didn't take a "before" picture to compare to, which was a mistake, and the pictures I did get mostly didn't turn out well and more or less fail to illustrate what happened.
⁴ I keep meaning to do a follow-up blog post about Faye, but the new seedlings keep taking all my attention. So maybe I should just talk about her here, since I brought her up.
Faye's got two blooms on her at once now, and the most amazing thing is that they both have these psychedelic, unphotographable backs, sort of brownish-orange with bright green veins. The front is a lighter and redder orange that fades to a light orange, which would be noteworthy all by itself, but the backs of the spathes make Faye really remarkable. My camera isn't up to the challenge, but here's the closest I've gotten so far:

In person, the contrast is much sharper and stronger, and the green is a lot more vivid. I'll keep trying to get a good picture, but don't hold your breath.
Faye has had problems off and on with scale, and I've recently started seeing thrips as well, though her leaves are broad and sturdy and so relatively easy to wipe off, so I'm not especially worried about the scale yet. It's not clear whether the thrips will actually become a problem or not.
⁵ There's a fourth sibling from the AX group (seed parent: NOID red; sow date: 9 November 2012), 0331 "Elvis Herselvis," but so far Elvis takes strongly after her mother. It looks like she's going to be a dark red, probably with either a green or white spadix, but she's developing very slowly so it might be a while before I can confirm this. In any case, it doesn't look like Elvis will look any more related to Polly, Gladys, or Faye than they do to one another.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Memoria Larry Heuer

I feel like the camera didn't handle this one particularly well this year. Fortunately, there's a better picture of the same plant from 2013, for anyone who's interested.

It seems like I took a lot of Paphiopedilum and Phragmipedium pictures again this year; some of the reason for that might be that they're easier to take pictures of. The auto-focus on the camera doesn't handle stuff with lots of little flowers at varying distances very well: it always seems to choose one particular bloom at random to focus on, and it's never the one I want it to focus on. But with a paph or phrag, the whole flower is right there, more or less facing the camera directly, and even if the pictures don't always turn out that well, they can't go wrong in as many ways.

Paphiopedilum Memoria Larry Heuer = Paphiopedilum malipoense x Paphiopedilum emersonii (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0338 "Anne Fibian"

With some of these Anthurium-seedling posts, I've been trying to answer a question that I don't think anyone is actually asking: "should I try plant-breeding, too? Would I like it?" I mean, obviously the answer is going to depend on your personality and what kind of resources you have available, and even if I knew those things I still probably couldn't answer it very accurately. But it's been sort of fun to contemplate how plant breeding as a hobby is different from growing houseplants as a hobby, and the sorts of rewards (and penalties) that belong to one but not the other.

Not that I'm finished doing that; I mention it because, one, the seedling of the day is not very interesting so I'm going to need to talk about something else, and two, because I'm about to come up with another take on answering the question. But let's do the seedling first.

So Anne is: not great. At least so far. This is possibly a case where I should wait to make a decision until the second bloom. The first bloom, though, is a little spadix-heavy (or a little spathe-light, I suppose), and since it's also in the second most common color (red / yellow), I'm not really into it at all.

The foliage could be nice, if it weren't all pockmarked. I still haven't figured out what causes that. I assume it's the result of insect or mite damage on developing leaves, but I usually can't see any actual insects or mites, and from time to time, plants appear to grow out of it completely, which you wouldn't expect from a pest problem.

The overall habit¹ is decently compact, though for a two-and-a-half-year-old plant, I'd expect more leaves than this. At least Anne's trying to offset.

I could imagine keeping Anne around, if she started to produce some better leaves, and if the second bloom is a little more normal-looking. I'm not in any rush to throw her out, at least. But I'm guessing she won't still be in the house in five years.

As far as the "should I try plant-breeding?" question:

Long ago, when my only real source of information was houseplant books -- and I read a lot of houseplant books -- I would never have had any idea that a lot of plants even could be grown from seed, because the authors never mentioned it. Presumably some of this comes from the assumption that readers would want exact duplicates of the plants they already had, and growing plants from seed won't usually give you that. Plus space is limited in a book, and growing plants from seed is a pretty niche interest. Growing plants from seed indoors is going to appeal to even fewer people, and you want people to buy your book. So I get it.

With that said, though, few books even mention that it's possible. Of the seven houseplant books I have handy,² only two (Toogood, Griffith) so much as mention that Schlumbergeras can be grown from seed, and both of those are specialty books, one aimed at large-scale plant producers (Griffith) and the other specifically about plant propagation (Toogood). The situation is slightly better for Anthurium (Toogood, Kramer, Crockett, Griffith) and Spathiphyllum (Toogood, Kramer, Griffith), though none of the books have much to say about how one would grow either from seeds, or how one would get seeds to sow in the first place: they just note that it can be done. A surprising number of books fail to mention Coffea at all, and of those that do, only Crockett bothers to mention that they can be grown from seeds.³

So for the longest time, I assumed that there was no way to get more of certain plants I really enjoyed, like Anthurium, aside from the long, slow process of waiting for offsets.^{4, 5} So one of the incidental benefits of plant-breeding, at least when it comes to the Anthuriums and Spathiphyllums, is that it's opened up new things I can do with old, slow, or boring plants.

Sometimes that doesn't exactly pay off, as with Anne. But trying things is more interesting than not trying things.

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¹ Am I the only one who occasionally has a quick mental picture of plants as nuns and/or addicts, when reading about their "habits?" Just me? Okay.
² • Stuckey, Maggie. The Houseplant Encyclopedia. The Philip Lief Group, Inc., Garden City, NY, 1993.
• Crockett, James Underwood. Crockett's Indoor Garden. Little, Brown & Company, Canada, 1978.
• Simons, Paul, and John Ruthven. Potted Histories. BBC Books, London, 1995.
• Powell, Dr. Charles C., and Donald M. Vining. Ortho's Complete Guide to Successful Houseplants. Ortho Books, San Francisco, CA, 1984.
• Kramer, Jack. The Illustrated Guide to Flowering Houseplants. Peerage Books, London, 1985.
• Toogood, Alan, ed. Plant Propagation. DK Publishing, Inc., New York, NY, 1999.
• Griffith, Lynn P., Jr. Tropical Foliage Plants: A Grower's Guide. Ball Publishing, Batavia, IL, 1998.
³ In fact, it usually seems to be taken for granted that if you have one Coffea, you're not going to want any more. I disagree, but you're probably not going to want a lot more. They do get really big.
I think I've read somewhere that Coffea can be grown from cuttings as well, though I've never tried it, and I'm pretty sure none of the books mention it. No idea where I might have seen that, but I keep meaning to try it some day, just to satisfy my own curiosity about whether it's possible.
⁴ Sucker production used to be something that breeders selected for, both because a plant with a lot of suckers looks fuller and can produce more blooms at once, and because the more suckers there are, the faster you can propagate a plant asexually. Now that tissue culture is the industry standard for propagation, suckers matter less: if you want a full plant with lots of blooms, it's easy enough to pot several tissue-cultured plants together.
That said, suckering has probably never been the main thing Anthuriums were selected for, and if your hybrid could resist bacterial and fungal infection, produced lots of large flowers on long, straight stems, had a novel bloom color, shipped well, and lasted a long time in a vase, you had a gold mine, whether it suckered a lot or not. Consequently, cultivars available in stores now vary tremendously in how many offsets they will produce, and the speed with which they will do so, so if you buy a plant you really like with the expectation of dividing lots of suckers from it, you may or may not find yourself disappointed.
⁵ Plant books usually don't mention that you can take top cuttings of Anthuriums either, though in that case it kind of makes sense: the plants that have been cut back recover slowly and may not rebloom for a couple years, and my experience has been that cuttings fail a lot more often than suckers do. (Usually they root in water fine, but then fall apart after getting moved to soil.)

Anthurium no. 0365 "Murray Hill"

Murray Hill is one of the world's better-known drag kings.¹ Which isn't saying a lot -- drag kings haven't gotten nearly the same amount of attention that drag queens have -- but still. I don't know exactly why drag kings haven't yet become A Thing, but I have theories:

• It's possible that it's more technically difficult to fake stereotypical male features like big muscles and facial hair (especially facial hair) than it is to fake breasts and put on a wig. Though I suppose shoulder pads, at least, are easy enough.
• Maybe women, as a group, just aren't that interested in doing drag. (Though that doesn't really explain anything: if they're not interested, why are they not interested?)
• Maybe sexist club owners are less inclined to book drag kings than drag queens, so it's harder to find an audience, and budding drag kings give up. Or, conversely, maybe club owners are perfectly happy to book drag kings, but there's no audience interested in watching them. (This article explains the situation thus: "Straight women find [male drag] threatening because it’s like, Does this mean I’m a lesbian if I think this guy’s cute? Straight men find it threatening because, after all, that’s supposed to be their domain. And lesbians find it threatening because it seems like this is the stereotype of what a lesbian is — a women who wants to be a man.")
• The husband suggested that maybe it's a matter of exaggeration -- drag queens aren't just dressing up as women, they're dressing up as super-glamorous women, with eye-catching dresses, huge hair, and the outsize personalities to match; exaggerate men too far and you wind up with Ron Swanson. Who is funny, sure, but you can only exaggerate the strong silent type so far before it shades into catatonia. ("Maybe a country music star?" the husband suggested, and I was like, oh, yeah, actually one of the bigger drag kings, Gage Gatlyn, has been doing Tim McGraw for years, that makes sense.) Though there are plenty of male stereotypes besides just strong-silent.
• Maybe the world is just waiting for a breakout star to appear and create an audience for drag kings, like RuPaul did in the early 90s. RuPaul is actually in a good position to make that happen, with her show (RuPaul's Drag Race), there's some support for the idea from previous contestants, and drag kings have auditioned for RPDR; it's just a matter of actually, you know, doing it.
Also, just to underline it: that last link is a video of a woman, pretending to be a man (and, in spots, pretending to be a man who is pretending to be a woman), who is lip-synching to a song perfomed by a man who's famous mostly for pretending to be a woman.
• Maybe I'm out of the loop, being out here in Iowa, and everyone who matters (i.e. the people in large cities on the U.S. coasts) knows about drag kings already.
• I found one really interesting article about drag kings in which a king blamed "shaming from the drag queen community" for stifling a fairly robust late-1990s drag king scene in New York. So maybe it's an internal LGBT problem. A few performers interviewed for that article say that audiences who come for drag queens are usually very bad audiences for drag kings: "audiences at male drag venues are so conditioned to cheer for queens that they sit in baffled silence through even the best king’s performance." Which is interesting. Why would that be?
• All of the above?
• None of the above?

Whatever the reason why kings haven't taken off yet, I feel like the moment is right for a drag king to break into the mainstream within the next decade, and Murray Hill seems like a good candidate.² He's got a definite shtick, not "man" or even "exaggerated man" but "slightly lecherous drunk mid-1960s Rat Pack comedian," and does it well --

-- so, you know, remember the name.

All of the above is to distract you from the fact that I don't have a whole lot to say about the seedling "Murray Hill."³ He's another member of the social science clique: dark red spathes; green spadices that turn white; fairly compact habit; dull, dark green leaves.

He's not doing anything new, and to be honest 0357 "Rhea Litré" and 0360 "Heidi Gosique" are both better, by virtue of having superior foliage.

But Murray is certainly good enough to consider a keeper for now. (There's no rule that I can't have as many dark red / greens as I want.) If I ever get the scale and thrips under control, I might sell him, but that's a hell of an "if."

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¹ Not to be confused with his namesake, the Manhattan neighborhood of Murray Hill. Also, Hill hates to be called a "drag king:" I gather that the problem is that it implies that he's not actually male. He stays in character all the time, apparently.

'It's fascinating to me how Murray keeps up this boozy, B-grade Rat Pack persona 100 percent of the time,' says Earl Dax, who produces the "Direct From NYC" performance series in Philadelphia. 'One time Murray stayed at my apartment. First thing in the morning, there he was, in boxers and a T-shirt. I said, "Good morning," and he said, "Hey, kid! How ya doin?"'

(Ref.)
I assume Murray the human being is aware of being a drag king, but obviously it would be upsetting to Murray the character, and if Murray the human never breaks character, then, well. . . .
² And there has in fact apparently been some interest in developing a Murray Hill TV pilot, though I gather from this article that that's never gone past a sort of wouldn't-it-be-nice hypothetical thing. For what it's worth to any producers who might be reading this: I'd be interested! Do it!
³ I mean, I also think it's interesting stuff to talk about, but I always worry when I stray too far from the topic of plants, because that's all that I know you (the generic / collective "you") like to read about.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Violet Fizz 'Luna'

I might side-eye the use of the word "violet" here (even "magenta" might be a stretch), but if it weren't for nonsensical and factually incorrect orchid names, we would have no orchid names at all, so I suppose I'd allow it anyway.

The show didn't have many Dendrobiums this year, but this was probably the prettiest of the ones they had. I was kind of amazed by how thick the stem was: I knew Dendrobium was a large and varied genus, but I wasn't expecting anything like this.

Dendrobium Violet Fizz 'Luna' = Dendrobium Happy Honey x Dendrobium Cassiope (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0373: "Shangela Laquifa Wadley"

The less said about Shangela, the better, I think. Boring color, a spathe so pockmarked by thrips (or something) that it looked polka-dotted,

crappy foliage,

just an all-around mess.

The only nice thing I can think of to say about 0373 is that yes, it did bloom, and not all of the seedlings do. Which is practically the definition of damning with faint praise.

You'd think I would have thrown it out already, but, you know: inertia, the inexplicable hope that just maybe the second bloom will be awesome somehow, resistance to throw any seedling out until it's proven itself irredeemable, etc. It's definitely out of here as soon as I work myself up to a second purge, though. Earlier, if it gets scale. Which would be totally in character, so it'll probably happen.

Anthurium no. 0371 "Deb Autry"

So round 1 of the Anthurium seedling purge has ended, and a total of 32 seedlings are gone (plus nine others that just happened to die during the purge period).¹ This is sort of unpleasant, but at the same time, hanging on to a bunch of lazy, non-blooming, long-internoded seedlings had been preventing anything else from happening. No room to expand, no way to promote promising 3- or 4-inch seedlings up to 4- or 6-inch pots, no room for potting up any new seedlings. So I threw out 32 4-inch plants, and initiated a "repotting cascade:" empty space lets me shuffle plants around, which creates room for new plants to move up, which creates more empty space, which means some of the next-smallest size of plants can move up, which produces empty space in a different area, etc.

I haven't actually followed that through to its inevitable end just yet; time has been short, and I seem to have injured a shoulder besides, so keeping everything watered is work enough, but soon, I'll have a new batch of seedlings moving out of the cupcake containers and into pots.

I'd feel bad about the purged seedlings, but the minimum for being a purge candidate was that it had been around for at least three years, without producing any buds (whether or not those buds went to completion or not), and I still kept roughly three out of every four plants I considered throwing away.

(None of this really has anything to do with the seedling du jour, 0371 "Deb Autry," but it's news, and I have to record this sort of thing somewhere.)

Deb is one of a group of seedlings in the mid-300s that produce red or dark red spathes along with green or yellow-green spadices (others include 0357 "Rhea Litré" and 0360 "Heidi Gosique"), all of whom are probably 'Gemini' x NOID red crosses. Deb's spathe is a lighter red than the others, and a little bit smaller than Rhea and Heidi so far, but she's still good.

Most of the group (which I think of as the "social science clique," because that's where their numbers fall in the Dewey Decimal System²) has pretty nice foliage, which also fits the theory that they're 'Gemini' x NOID red; Deb's leaves aren't the clique's best, but they're above average when compared to all seedlings.

Same comment for the plant as a whole -- not the best in the clique, but better than average among the seedlings generally.

So although the competition is continually getting tougher, as more and more seedlings bloom, I don't think Deb has anything to worry about. I'm not necessarily going to up-pot her, but I won't throw her out unless she's irresponsible enough to get root rot or scale or something like that.

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¹ The list of purged plants:
0007 "Coco Peru"
0009 "Dame Edna Everage"
0012 "Heklina"
0030 "Sister Roma"
0034 "Alaska Thunderfuck"[a]
0037 "CoCo Montrese"
0050 "Roxxxy Andrews"
0093 "Claire Leah Goodpick"[b]
0094 "Clara Path"
0098 "Julee Antonellis"
0124 "Fox Saik"[c]
0143 "Gracie Spoon"
0156 "Igor Tulerne"
0179 "Katie Boundary"[d]
0210 "Myra Venge"
0242 "Saffron Sisko"
0250 "Sheila Blige"[e]
0256 "Sue Parduper"
0261 "Tim Berwulf"
0277 "Zach Treplica"[f]
0278 "Hailey Escorpus"
0301 "Serena ChaCha"
0308 "Gladys Bentley"
0348 "Yara Sofia"
0561 "Belinda Chinashop"[g]
0563 "Marian Cousins"
0566 "Bebe Zahara Benet"
0569 "Sherry Vine"
0572 "Autumn Bahn"
0573 "Adore Delano"
0576 "Pearl Harper"
0587 "Susan Sokhsov"
plus the nine that just happened to die, who don't count.
[a] Alaska had bloomed before, but developed root rot. Two suckers survived, but the bloom wasn't special enough to make it worth nursing the suckers along until they hit blooming size. Alaska deserves a more interesting seedling named after her anyway. Maybe the next Alaska Thunderfuck will be better.
[b] Claire had produced a bud like a week prior to the purge, but I didn't remember to look for it when I was throwing plants away, and it didn't jump out at me, and the rest of the plant was crappy-looking. From the pre-purge photo of the bud, we're not missing anything -- it was very pale, which means it would probably have been pink, and it had a bunch of brown spots on it besides, which may or may not have been from thrips.
[c] Fox had attempted to produce a bud once, more than a year ago, but had not shown any inclination to try again, and had weird, misshapen leaves besides.
[d] Katie had bloomed previously (red / yellow, medium size), and I liked her fine, but she went and got scale. As with Alaska, I liked Katie, but she wasn't special enough to try to fix.
[e] Sheila had also attempted to bud, twice, but she dropped the first one before it got anywhere, and the second attempt was so small and light in color that I missed seeing it. She had a very long internodal distance, so I don't feel too bad about throwing her out either.
[f] Zach had started and aborted two buds already, which was frustrating, and they were both pale and scarred-up, like Claire's, which made me think the blooms would have been crap anyway. Also his internodes were really long and the leaves were small and he was just generally crap.
[g] Belinda had a bud briefly in June, but aborted. The bud seemed potentially nice while it was around (red, unblemished), but the rest of her was terrible.
² (specifically 357 to 371: from "mounted forces in warfare" to "schools and their activities / special education")

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum (Adam Hausermann x Winston Churchill)

See that orange-brown spot on the lip, just to the right of center? I bet orchid show entrants hate it when their plants do something like that right before a show. I mean, it's plenty irritating to me to find thrips marks on an otherwise pristine Anthurium, and there is nothing at stake there. I show them to you, and you might have feelings about my Anthurium seedlings and their flaws, but you're not literally judging me on them.¹

I like the bloom anyway. The spot doesn't ruin anything for me. Just imagining what it must be like to see a bud get bigger and bigger and start to open and then, boom -- a spot, in the most obvious possible place.

Anyway. We haven't encountered this particular cross before, but there are a couple related orchids from past years: both its parent, Paph. Winston Churchill, and its half-sibling, Paph. Cheryl Ann Boyd, showed up in the 2012 show. (Paph. Winston Churchill) (Paph. Cheryl Ann Boyd)

Paphiopedilum Adam Hausermann = Telesis x Gigi (Ref.)
Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill = Eridge x Hampden (Ref.)

The family tree doubtless goes several layers deeper than that, but that's more than most of you wanted to know already.

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¹ Or maybe you are, in which case: how am I doing? Have I won yet?