Anthurium no. 1095 "Carolina Pineforest"

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I'm experimenting with a coping strategy.¹ I ran into it at MetaFilter. I asked the person who posted it via private message whether they wanted to be named specifically, whether they wanted it quoted directly or paraphrased, etc., and they said use it however, it's not even mine.² So.

It's not exactly a "follow these steps and be saved" kind of strategy. It's not even a "here's how to turn everything back around after a setback" strategy. It's more "here is what you can do when you feel like you can't do anything, as a way of (maybe) building some momentum that will (eventually) enable you to (begin to) turn things around."

Oh yeah, there's also an Anthurium seedling to evaluate. You'll forgive me if it doesn't seem especially important. Though a tiny part of me is pleased with the color. Haven't had an actual white seedling before, only very light pinks.
Improve things. This is not necessarily grandiose like "clean everything in the entire house" or "start a national movement to change public opinion," though I suppose if you feel up to something like that then go ahead. It's more like, clean the bowl that's sitting in the kitchen sink. Make your bed. Do that minor format tweak to your blog that you've been meaning to do for the last six months. You don't have to make it perfect, you don't even have to finish. Just make something better than it was. If dusting all four shelves of the bookshelf seems like too much, tell yourself that doing just one of them is fine. (It is fine.) A lot of self-care sort of winds up in this category, too: remember that you will need to eat things sometimes even if you don't feel hungry,³ that you'll need to rest even if you can't actually sleep, that you still need to take your meds if you can't imagine feeling any more miserable without them, and so forth.

Appreciate things. Again, this need not be "get dressed and drive to the nearest state park so you can walk along the beach and become inspired by the beauty of nature / vastness of the night sky / calming sound of the waves." All you have to do is find something about the world that is pleasant, and take a moment to acknowledge that. Are your holiday cacti blooming? Well, that's something. Do you have a pair of scissors lying around with handles that are a pretty shade of blue? Well, blue is a nice color; let's take a second to focus on that. Do you live with someone who has a nice laugh? Did that home-improvement project from six months ago turn out well? Are you capable of doing an internet search for "cute kitten video?" Can you wear that t-shirt that fits you just right today (even if you can't get it together to shower; even if the shirt isn't clean)? Is the room at a comfortable temperature? Doesn't that bookshelf (or that one shelf on the bookshelf) look nicer now that you've dusted it? Etc.

This is a leaf.
Connect with other people. You don't have to run for office, march in the streets, or volunteer at the food bank if you aren't up to doing those things, but you know somebody who would sympathize with you. Or there's someone out there who needs your sympathy. Or just spend time with your roommate / spouse / relatives⁴ / pets. (Pro tip: pets are also good for Appreciating.) I've found this one the hardest, because when it comes right down to it, I'm not actually in regular contact with very many people, and a good chunk of the people I am in contact with . . . wouldn't be good people to talk to, for this particular situation.

Protect something or someone. Make a donation to a charity that does work you respect. Get out the old rubbing alcohol and wipe down that cactus that has mealybugs again. When that coworker starts disrespecting that other coworker in your presence, maybe say something this time, or make up any excuse to get the victim out of the situation ("hey, X, can you show me how to change the copier toner again? It's not working for me."). Give your dog his heartworm medicine. Call your kid's school principal and tell him what you think about the lack of an anti-bullying program in the school.

If everything I've just said still feels like it's more than you can handle right now, and/or if you're having thoughts of suicide,⁵ you may be suffering from acute depression. I can't make you do anything, obviously, but I would encourage you to seek help. If you are in immediate suicidal crisis and in the U.S., you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255; they will connect you with a crisis center in your area that provides immediate, confidential emotional support, and can help you get other resources you need after that.

If you're not in an immediate crisis, but still want help and don't know where to start, the National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) run by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration can refer you to someone in your area who can help with mental or substance abuse problems. The Helpline does not provide immediate emergency counseling over the phone like the NSPL does, though.

The leaves are on a plant.
If you're somehow not feeling paralyzed and hopeless, and you're not in immediate crisis . . . um, that's awesome for you, I guess.

And that's kinda all I've got. Posting was going to be erratic and not very interesting anyway, for mysterious reasons I may or may not ever explain to you, plus the plants are displeasing me lately so I'm not super motivated to write about them, and now . . . well, now, I've got all this scissor-looking-at to do. So, you know, set your expectations really low as far as frequency and quality in the near future.

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¹ Any co-occurrence with historically significant events is coincidental. In fact, I don't even know what you're talking about.
² It's apparently adapted/borrowed from two books by Steven Stosny, Love Without Hurt and Living and Loving After Betrayal.
³ I lost 6 pounds (2.7 kg) in the 72 hours between Tuesday morning and Friday morning. I make myself eat, because I know I need to, but I don't enjoy it, and afterward I always kind of wish I hadn't. Still alive, though, so . . . so far, so good, I guess.
⁴ Not valid for all families, obviously.
⁵ I will cop to the occasional fleeting "well, all things considered, I guess death might not be so terrible." I don't think this counts as having actual suicidal impulses, since I'm not actually contemplating ways to make that happen, just looking for a silver aluminum cadmium lining in the event that it happens against my will. It is, obviously, debatable whether this qualifies as mentally healthy, but I feel like I'm doing okay compared to a lot of people, and I'm not actually in any imminent danger, also unlike a lot of people, so.

Pretty picture: Oncostele Midnight Miracles

This was my favorite plant from the whole 2016 show.

I don't usually like the Oncidium-adjacent orchids very much, but this one had a weird depth to the color that I liked. The depth was only sort of capturable in photos. This was as close as I got:

I think what does it for me is the subtle banding across the petals.

I found a Midnight Miracles photo on Flickr; that specimen is darker, lacks the bicolored lip, and although it's difficult to tell the size of the bloom without any context, it looks to me like the flower is smaller overall.

Oncostele Midnight Miracles = Rhynchostele bictoniensis x Oncidium cariniferum (Ref.)

Haven't seen Midnight Miracles in previous years' shows; the most similar previous plant is probably Miltassia Charles M. Fitch x Odontocidium Black Beauty, from the 2012 show.

Anthurium no. 0407 "Maria D'Millionaire"

I appear to have missed the moment when Maria initially unfurled her spathe, though I couldn't have missed it by more than a week, so the odds are good that this was never a pretty inflorescence:

Still, it's unusual for a spathe to flip backward so hard and fast that it actually curls around itself:

Actually, now that I think about it, Maria's most notable for coming up with inventive new ways of being horrible. Her foliage would never be great,

but she went through a spell about a year ago where she would start building leaves and then forget to finish them:

In some cases, she couldn't even be bothered to finish building the petiole, never mind the leaf:

Had she not budded in May,

Maria would have been gone a long time ago, but I kept her around on the off chance that the bloom might have been interesting.

I suppose technically it was. My fault for not being more specific.

Anthurium no. 0811 "Alma Children"

Here's Alma.

Alma's from the BY seedling group (seed parent 0234 Ross Koz; sow date 29 September 2014), which has produced three other blooming plants to date, and her inflorescences don't especially resemble those of her mother or any of her sisters.

0234 Ross Koz (seed parent).

The BY seedling group.
Clockwise from top left: 0807 Lucinda Italic, 0811 Alma Children,
1038 Adlai Lowe, 0855 The Very Miss Dusty O.
I mean, the whole point of propagating Ross in the first place was because I liked his spathe color and size.¹ None of the offspring have gotten anywhere close to the same color, and Alma's the first seedling to produce spathes of similar size.²

Although Alma's color is one we've seen before,³ she does it really well, and is therefore probably a keeper regardless of what's happening with the foliage.

Fortunately, the foliage also looks decent. I mean, it's not going to be the centerfold in Verdure magazine⁴ or anything, and there's an unevenness to the texture that bugs me a little because I can't decide whether it's thrips-related or not. But the foliage is fine, even if there isn't very much of it.

So yeah, a keeper.

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¹ To a lesser degree I was hoping for foliage like Ross's as well. It's plain-looking, but large, and holds up well against the thrips.
² It's possible that the seedlings in group BX are also full siblings; the sow date for BX was two weeks earlier (15 September 2014) but it was probably from the same spadix. If so, then 0805 Triana Hill is another sibling with dissimilar color, but similar size.
If it's possible for offspring of 0234 Ross Koz to have similar coloration, we should find out eventually. In addition to the BX and BY seedlings, which should continue to bud for a while, I should be seeing buds on the DB and DT seedlings in January or February. So by May or June 2017, I'm guessing, we'll have seen quite a bit more of what 0234 Ross Koz is capable of as a seed parent.
³ (0108 Deena Sequins, 0110 Delta Badhand, 0112 Dottie A. Rebel, and 0698 Landon Cider)
⁴ (I buy it for the articles.)

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Fuller's Sunset

I'm a little confused by the name on this one; I suppose yellow sunsets do happen, but it's not the color I associate with sunsets particularly. Maybe that's the point?

The whole-plant photo below is crappy, but it does at least show that the bloom in the close-up above is a significantly darker shade of yellow than the other flowers on the spike.

The plant doesn't do a lot for me personally, but there's nothing especially wrong with it. Just not my taste, I guess.

Phalaenopsis Fuller's Sunset = Phalaenopsis Taisuco Date x Phalaenopsis Chian Xen Queen (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0765 "Hope Leeze"

Not a lot going on with this one; Hope is one of the relatively small number of seedlings to bloom before being moved up to a 4-inch pot, but she wasn't especially early; I just haven't had room to move plants up lately. So some of them get to around 2 years old and then decide to bloom anyway.

The color is good -- I'm not yet tired of the red / pink combination, though there have been several.¹ And even if the bloom isn't huge and gorgeous, I'm surprised at how little visible thrips damage I see. On the other hand, the foliage is kind of uninspiring,

and the plant is already kind of floppy in its pot,

so I'm not seeing strong arguments in favor of keeping it or in favor of throwing it out. Probably I'll keep it for a while and then throw it out when I next need space.

P.S.: I know this post sucked; I suddenly have a lot less time to work on the blog. I'll explain eventually.

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¹ (Hope's coloration is most similar to 0072 Beth Rowe, 0144 Graham Reaper, and 0575 Darcy Drollinger, but there have been about six others)

Random plant event: Schlumbergera x buckleyi seedlings

Out of bloom, most commercially available Schlumbergeras look more or less identical.


Approximately rectangular, with a deeply serrated margin. We've all seen it.

(The above photo isn't of my seedlings, but it may as well be; that's what their parents looked like, and that's what they look like too.)

So I was curious about what the seedlings from Schlumbergera x buckleyi were going to look like, since buckleyi has several traits that distinguish it from the others: the notches in the stem segments are very shallow, the margin between the notches are rounded rather than coming to a sharp point, the overall segment shape is narrower (sometimes with a triangular base), and the habit of the plant overall is much less upright than the S. truncata hybrids.

This photo was originally taken to highlight the shape of S. x buckleyi fruits, but it works well enough to show segment shape. For what it may be worth to you, perfectly round, smooth fruit is more the exception than the rule, and a number of my seedlings can make "ribbed" fruits like this, though most of the seedlings that do this make 'em round sometimes and ribbed other times. As far as I've seen, buckleyi fruits are always ribbed.
The 28 buckleyi seedlings I started in March 2015 are now producing mature new growth, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a group of them and a group of other seedlings of different age, though some of the buckleyi seedlings overlap the others enough in appearance that I don't know that I could accurately pick out the 10 buckleyi seedlings in a group of 30 seedlings.

Top row, L-R: 261, 263, 270
Second row: 273, 274, 275
Bottom row: 260, 268, 276, 277
(It may help to view the photo full-size.)
As you can see from the picture, they're all making attempts at marginal serrations, similar to x buckleyi, though the shapes vary. 274, 260, and 268 have scalloped (crenate) edges, that make the segments look something like a child's drawing of a cloud; most of the others are half-assing it, putting occasional slight waves in the margin without a sharp indentation. They also mostly take after x buckleyi in having longer, narrower segments than usual.

I haven't investigated whether the drooping habit is inherited or not; most of them are still small enough that they'd be upright even if genetically programmed to droop.

Buckleyi's bloom color is nice --

-- and I will be excited to see whether it transfers to any of the offspring, but they'll have to bud up first, and there's a substantial obstacle in the way of that happening. Buckleyi is exceptionally picky about having long, perfectly dark nights, and will not set buds otherwise. In some years, I've gotten no blooms at all from my two buckleyi plants; last year I got maybe ten flowers overall, mostly in the spring,¹ and I had to put the flat on a low shelf in the plant room, remove an artificial light from a couple shelves above, and pile up a bunch of plants in front of the buckleyi to block the light, in order to get even that many.

So far, only three of the buckleyi seedlings have moved into the plant room (#s 256, 271, and 272), and none have tried to bud yet. This doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be fussy about dark nights too -- only about a third of the seedlings capable of producing a new first bud have done so,^{2, 3} and it's still very early in the season -- but it's not an encouraging sign, either.

In any case. I don't necessarily like the stem segment shapes from this group of seedlings (though 268, one of the "cloud" ones, is intriguing), but they're distinctive enough that I'll probably be able to tell if x buckleyi was the pollen parent for any of the future batches of seedlings. Which will be nice.

I'm thinking about trying to make deliberate crosses this year, if I can figure out how to identify which are which: I have so many random crosses from last year that I don't even have space to start all of the seeds, much less enough space to pot up all the seedlings that result,⁴ so I either have to switch to specific, deliberate crosses, or convince the husband to add a second basement.

Finally, I wanted to share this picture of seedling 354, because I was impressed with how much branching it thinks it's going to be doing:

354 is a second-generation seedling (seed parent: 082A Strawberry Madeleine), and the photo was taken when it was about two weeks shy of being a year old.

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¹ Though x buckleyi tends to bloom later in the year than the S. truncata hybrids, and is therefore more deserving of the name "Christmas cactus," they don't have to bloom in late December. The few dated photos I have of mine are from 27 November, 1 December, and 15 February, and I'm pretty sure that my buckleyis were blooming late into the spring last year, after most of the other schlums had stopped. I just wasn't taking their pictures anymore, because by that point I was pretty sick of taking Schlumbergera pictures.
² By contrast, it seems like all of the seedlings that bloomed in previous years have budded up already; as I write this on 27 October, three have even opened a bloom already: 025A Clownfish, 034A Wahine, and 082A Strawberry Madeleine. Two more (033A Clueless and 057A Pyrotechnic) will have a bloom open by the time you read this.
³ Of some interest, perhaps: one of the second-generation plants (seedling 239) is budding. Its seed parent is 025A Clownfish; I have no idea what the pollen parent was.
⁴ A very rough headcount of all the Schlumbergera berries suggests that I probably have about 125 ripe berries at the moment. Each berry produces an average of about 80 seedlings (also a pretty rough guess). That means that I have something like 10,000 potential seedlings from ripe berries, on top of the 2000 or so seedlings still in the germination containers.
With the Anthuriums, it's been (somewhat) possible to cross them randomly and start every seed I get (though I'm actually starting to get picky about which seeds I sow and which I let wither on the spadix), because a lot of the seeds fail to germinate, or the seedlings die or are discarded for one reason or another, each individual bloom doesn't produce very many seeds (The record is 121 on a single spadix from 0239 Russ Teanale; average seeds per spadix is closer to 20-25.), and each individual plant doesn't produce that many blooms. None of those apply to Schlumbergera, which virtually all germinate, live forever once germinated whether I pot them up or leave them in the germination containers, produce many seeds per bloom, and bloom several times per season.

Pretty picture: Mediocalcar decoratum

This one is a little different.

I don't want one of my own, because orchids and I just do not get along at all.¹ Even if we did, Mediocalcar decoratum is poorly-suited to living in the house. It's native to the cloud forests of Papua and New Guinea, which means lots of moisture and cool temperatures.

The flowers reminded me of Manettia luteorubra (candy corn plant or candy corn vine), which I occasionally see in stores around here, as an outdoor annual, which has blooms of similar size and coloration, though the shape on Manettia is long and tubular. I thought maybe the similarity could be explained by having a pollinator in common, but apparently not: though there seems to be a lot of confusion as to what species of Manettia it is, everybody agrees that Manettia is a New World family, and I doubt Manettia and Mediocalcar have the same pollinator, considering that they're separated by the whole Pacific Ocean.²

Much better photos of M. decoratum can be found here.

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¹ In fact, I've recently thrown out two orchids I'd had for a really long time -- a NOID Dendrobium and a Brassolaeliocattleya Helen Brown, both from October 2008 -- because eight years was long enough. The Dendrobium had bloomed before, so I know it was capable of it; the Brassolaeliocattleya was small when I got it but I felt like it was surely blooming size/age by now. The Dendrobium had been dropping leaves for a few months; I think it was probably unhappy with the watering frequency. One big leaf on the Brassolaeliocattleya turned half black basically overnight, and I have no idea what caused that: the only thing I can think of that had changed for it in the last year was that I changed its growing medium (replaced old bark chips with new bark chips, same brand and everything).
Had I held on to them for a few more months, I could probably have stuck them outside next summer and gotten blooms. And maybe I should have. But the reasoning was basically, 1) if they could bloom in the house for me, they would probably have done so already, 2) I've gotten no enjoyment from either of them for a few years now, 3) it looks like they're beginning to fall apart, and 4) I need the room for Schlumbergera seedlings.
So far, the only exceptions to the "orchids and I don't get along" rule are Phalaenopsis, which pretty much likes everybody (despite which it still only tolerates me), and Neofinetia falcata "Amami Furan," which actually seems to like me, and vice-versa.
² Not that it still couldn't happen; both are believed to be pollinated by birds, and birds do get around. But there are probably not many species of bird living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. Though I suppose there could be different species of bird from the same genus on opposite sides of the ocean, where both kinds of bird really like tiny, yellow-tipped orange blooms, in which case the Mediocalcar / Manettia resemblance could be an example of convergent evolution. I couldn't find a source that identified the species of bird responsible for pollination for either flower; it's possible that we don't actually know.
Of course, the whole thing could be coincidence, too. Only so many colors out there, and so many ways of arranging them: given enough species with flowers, some repetition is bound to happen.