Anthurium nos. 1547 "Shavonna Brooks" and 1546 "Gia GiaVanni"

So it's come to this: I have to start doubling up on the Anthurium seedling posts, because covering a single seedling every other day has led to me getting further and further behind.¹ I'll still give really special seedlings posts of their own, but the stuff we've seen over and over doesn't really need the individual attention I've been giving them. So let's look at Shavonna.

I had been somewhat excited about Shavonna when the bud was developing, because the outside of the bud (the back of the spathe) was sort of purple-red, and I thought the spathe would wind up being purple-red as well, but no. Plain red, like we've seen dozens of times before.

The seed parent isn't 0234 Ross Koz; it's the NOID red. But Shavonna has some characteristics in common with Ross -- large, flat leaves, and a certain manner of reflexing its spathe² -- which makes me wonder if Shavonna's pollen parent might be Ross.

The thrips seem to be getting more of a foothold with the more recent leaves, unfortunately.

So a disappointing color, but nice leaves, and this is only the first bloom, and it was willing to bloom while still in a 3-inch pot, so possibly it'll get better? Somehow?

1546 Gia GiaVanni has a better shot at sticking around, not because I need another borderline orange-pink,

but because the foliage is interestingly-proportioned,

and the plant as a whole seems more thrips-resistant than average. (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's thrips damage in the bottom right of the second leaf photo, but we've seen worse. The spot in the top left of the first leaf photo, on the other hand, is heat damage from touching a fluorescent light bulb, and is totally my fault.)

The second bloom from Gia somehow ripped itself in the process of unfurling. I mean, spathes get ripped all the time, but that's almost always my fault. It's disconcerting for the plants to be ripping themselves up.

Still, though, Gia's likely to have the opportunity to bloom several more times, because the leaves are interesting and the blooms aren't bad.

1546 Gia GiaVanni and 1547 Shavonna Brooks are both from sibling group FK, and are either full or half-siblings.

The real³ Shavonna Brooks is a drag queen from Atlanta; she has a YouTube channel that I didn't have time to investigate fully, but the music on this one is great (it's kind of a slow build, but great):


Gia GiaVanni is based in New Orleans at the moment (as far as I could determine, anwyay); the audio quality on her videos tends to be better than most YouTube drag videos, but the videos are all vertical and tiny. I'd love to see what the Ursula the Sea Witch outfit in this video actually looks like, for example. This one isn't really my thing musically,


but at least the audio's not full of people shouting, and you can see her face.

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¹ (also, the Schlumbergera season actually has begun already; so far it's just the NOID white, but the seedlings will follow. I need to rearrange the plant room so I can bring up some more seedlings from the basement and give them a chance to bloom this year.)
² Though it seems to be partially determined by the environment, different seedlings have different ways of flipping their spathes backward, depending on which part of the margin tries to flip back and how hard it works at it.
The ideal seedling doesn't reflex at all, like 0231 Rhea Listick or 1181 Tajma Stetson:

Some of them only pull back slightly, and then only at the "ears," like 0244 Sara Problem and 0330 Faye Quinette:

Some reflex only at the sides, and the spathe sort of makes a hinge in the center, like 0234 Ross Koz and 1547 Shavonna Brooks,

Some reflex at the sides, but so strongly that the spathe basically rolls itself up into a tube, like 1171 Chris of Hur:

A surprisingly large number of spathes curl back only at the very tip, e.g. 0361 Willam Belli and 0565 MysterE:

A few pull the whole spathe back, often tearing in the process, like pulling an umbrella inside-out; here are 0213 Nadya Falt and 0282 Dave Trading:

And then some give the impression of having no plan whatsoever, like 0002 Alexis Mateo and 0283 Anne Pursand, though I think this might actually be a subset of the "tube" ones, where the spathe got in its own way so much that it failed to actually form a tube:

Though Alexis looks like she might be trying for a hinge instead.
³ (well, "real," anyway)

Anthurium no. 1249 "Celeda"

The human Celeda has me very confused; Wikipedia says she was born Victoria Sharpe, which suggests that she was AFAB,¹ and yet Wikipedia also says she's a drag performer, and doesn't include her on the list of faux queens. I can't figure out anything about what kind of drag she did/does,² or whether she performs in drag at all. Not even 100% certain which pronouns she prefers; Wikipedia says "she/her" but this site uses "he/him." Granted, it's not really any of my business, so I'm happy to let the matter drop, but it's weird not to be able to find any clarification.

In any case, everyone is much clearer on what Celeda does: she sings.³ She's even gotten hits on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart, which, okay, that's a pretty narrow category, but -- have you gotten a hit on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart? I didn't think so. I like "Let the Music Use You Up:"

The seedling is a little more straightforward.

Smallish pink-lavender / light yellow, which is reminiscent of some of the seedlings from the 400s and 500s.⁴ Like most of the 400s/500s seedlings, the bloom didn't look very good for very long; the spathe flipped backward the day after the above photo was taken,

and the inflorescence was dead not long after that. The foliage is even less impressive:

Even without the thrips damage, it wouldn't be great.

So the only thing the seedling does particularly well is the bloom color. It's not a color combination that comes up very often, and it's pretty: a large, blistered spathe with the same coloration would be gorgeous. The problem is that I'm not sure Celeda's capable of producing seeds or pollen, given how quickly the first bloom faded.

Even if it could breed, I'd rather not see the genes for small spathes that reflex really quickly spread in the population of seedlings. So I'm torn about whether to keep her or discard her. My gut feeling is that probably she's going to be one of those painful cases, when I have a seedling with one or two really good traits that I nevertheless wind up having to discard anyway, but I'll let her try to bloom again before making the decision. Maybe she can save herself.

Celeda is from seedling group CB (seed parent 'White Gemini,' sow date 4 to 12 October 2014). It hasn't been a great group so far:

• 0835 Brenda Dharling (light pink / pink-purple) was thrown out because of scale, officially, but it was going to get thrown out for one reason or another eventually because it was terrible.
• 0886 Zaria Baudit (purple-pink / light yellow) has similar coloration to Celeda but is darker and a bit more robust. Could be a keeper.
• 0892 Eddie Izzard (pink / pink) hasn't impressed me at all; he's still around, but not for much longer.
• 0897 Sylvia Womansune (red / purple-red) is a little boring, but not terrible. Maybe a keeper.
• 1095 Carolina Pineforest (white / white) has already died, from rot or being partly uprooted or both.

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¹ (assigned female at birth)
² (it's also unclear whether she's still performing currently)
³ This complicated the attempts to find out about the pronouns and etc., because most of the search results are for sites hosting her music, which don't generally have any information about her as an artist. So there's a lot more stuff to look at than for most drag queens, but most of it isn't relevant to Celeda personally.
⁴ E.g. 0428 Helen Bach, 0515 Diane Torr, and 0534 Celia Putty.

Anthurium no. 0808 "Kent C. Forshette"

A small group of seedlings of 0234 Ross Koz -- which produced purple-red spathes with contrasting yellow spadices -- have bloomed in various shades of pinkish-orange and orangish-pink; Kent¹ is one of those.²

And that's nice, I guess. I mean, it's not unique or breathtaking, but it's pretty. Kent does have the advantage over most of the pink-orange-pink seedlings in that the spathe color doesn't fade as much over time, and he seems surprisingly thrips-resistant, considering that thrips damage shows up incredibly well on light-colored spathes like this. So we could have done a lot worse. The foliage is also just to the positive side of meh --

-- and the plant as a whole is very full, with lots of suckering. If nothing else, Kent is one of the few seedlings of 0234 Ross Koz whose leaves actually somewhat resemble Ross's.³

Also, although the spathes do flex backwards as the inflorescence ages, they do so to a much smaller degree than a lot of the other seedlings.

So probably at least a short-term keeper; I don't know about the long-term.

In (literally!) related news, Kent's full- or half-sibling 1038 Adlai Lowe is in the process of producing a second bloom. One hopes. The first bloom was so tiny that I wasn't sure it should even count, and it started at least one other bud but aborted it (which was just as well, since that bud was in a similar location and would probably also have had a difficult time opening its spathe), but the current one seems likely to produce a normal-looking inflorescence. I don't expect the new bloom will be especially interesting -- it's all but certain to be a smallish, run-of-the-mill red/yellow -- but it'd still be nice to have, for the sake of completeness.

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¹ (The name is a roller-derby name, not a drag name, by the way.)
² The others: 0805 Triana Hill, 0813 Arya Reddy, and 1721 Leonid the Magnificent.
1344 Boeff Stroganoff has the pink-orange coloring, sort of, though it was so poorly executed that I'm not sure it's actually what the seedling is genetically programmed to do. We'll find out when it produces the second bloom.
³ Ross's leaves are distinguished mainly by being large and flat, without a lot of conspicuous veining.

Anthurium no. 1203 "Peaches West"

1203 Peaches West is another dark red seedling, and another seedling with short, squat spathes.¹

Neither trait photographs particularly well; the camera tends to bring the dark reds to more of a medium, saturated red, and the spathes flip themselves back a little bit as they age, which makes it difficult to get a direct, face-on view of the shape. But you can kind of get a sense of the color by comparing it to another seedling, 1158 Joey Arias, which is a medium purple-red:

The inflorescences do have one significant thing going for them: they last a really long time. At least a couple months, likely much longer. So that's kind of exciting. And the dark red color is probably a red pigment being expressed at the same time as a light green, and I find that I really like blooms with some green in them -- bronzy oranges and browns, light green, that sort of thing. So I'm probably keeping Peaches around for breeding purposes. She's also doing some interesting stuff with the leaves: the undersides have some red pigment in the larger veins,

and the thrips damage isn't terrible (though it could be better).

On the bad side, the growth habit tends to be kind of floppy / viney.

So a mix of good and bad here, but good enough to keep.

Peaches is one of the DV seedlings, which I've made a point of noting because I get surprised by the DV seedlings every time I think about them; they're all so different from one another that it's hard to believe they're related.²

The real Peaches West is based in Denver, Colorado; mostly what I could find from a quick online search was about her regular job working in a LGBTQQ drop-in-space.³

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¹ Incidentally, if you wondered at all: 1268 Li'l Miss Hot Mess is now on her fourth or fifth bud, and every bloom so far has been more or less kidney-shaped, so I'm thinking that this means it's genetic and not environmental. Or at least a genetic cause is seeming a lot more likely. Which is kinda neat.
² The only exceptions are 1203 Peaches West and 1220 Mario Montez, who are both dark red / yellow. All the other DV seedlings has had a distinct coloration so far, and there have been a lot of DV seedlings, so the diversity has been a neat surprise. Probably this points to multiple pollen parents, or maybe even multiple inflorescences -- the seed parent, the NOID red, often had multiple blooms simultaneously, so it wouldn't surprise me if the DV seedling group were all half-siblings of one another.
³ I'm not super familiar with the term "drop-in-space" (and kind of think it should be "drop-in space" anyway), but I gather they're basically community spaces for kids to go after school? Mostly in larger cities, though if I'm understanding their website correctly, Iowa City has one, so it must not be necessary to have a huge city.

Anthurium no. 0336 "Jeff Boyardee"

Underwhelmed by the eclipse on Monday. We didn't try for totality, but we did drive a ways south, to get an extra 1.8% of coverage, and I was surprised by how little difference it made, and how dark it didn't get. The 2024 eclipse will be close to us too; maybe it'd be worth driving to the zone of totality for that. Dunno. Considering how much hype there was leading up to Monday's eclipse, it could hardly help but be disappointing, I suppose, so I'm glad we had other stuff happening during the trip too.

I did find out the reason why one of our neighbors' trees turned brown abruptly in early July, and then in early August started to leaf out again (though only at the very top): Japanese beetles. They apparently like linden trees as much as they like Cannas. And of course there's no picking them off of a tree by hand, so I bet it makes no difference how many beetles I killed this year because the neighbors' yard is probably even more full of JB grubs than ours is, and they're all going to be mature beetles in ten or eleven months.

Anyway. So I suppose I should talk about Jeff. He's pretty similar to his brother 0339 Johnny Lufschachi: similar dark red, fairly narrow spathes,

dark, fairly unscarred foliage,

and a really strong desire to flip his spathes backward, which I don't have a photo of.

Jeff's a little more compact than Johnny was,

but there are plenty of seedlings that are better at what Jeff's doing, so he's almost certainly a discard. Might even be in the garbage by the time you read this, in fact.

Anthurium no. 1301 "Symphony Alexander-Love"

There have long been a group of seedlings that are pretty clearly pink in photographs, but somehow seem to be a little pinker than pink in person. It's hard to describe. I thought for a while that maybe they were slightly fluorescent, but that's been difficult to verify (no black lights handy at home, though we do have some purple LEDs that make certain objects in the kitchen fluoresce faintly). I'm still not sure. In any case. 0273 Wes Coast was one of those; 0721 Chandelier Divine Brown is red instead of pink, but also seemed that way for the first few blooms; 0758 Miles Long, Esquire is consistently that way so far. And now 1301 Symphony Alexander-Love is joining the club, at least sort of. No obvious genetic connection between them all, so it's a mystery for now.

Above is the first bloom Symphony produced, and although I was initially kinda meh, whatever, purplish-red, big deal, the odd inexplicable glow won me over eventually. The color actually got a bit more intense as the spadix aged. Five days after the above photo, the bloom looked like this:

So far, so cool, right? And then a second bud opened, and it looked really really ordinary:

Which was disappointing, but it turned more purple and more saturated as it aged, too. So it's been very up and down, emotionally, but it's interesting to have a seedling where the blooms' beauty peaks a while after they open. Usually the blooms are prettiest right after the spathe is fully unfurled, and they start declining immediately.

The foliage is also more interesting than it needs to be; the leaves are longer and narrower than average.

And the leaves aren't completely free of thrips damage, but they do a lot better job of dealing with it than 1300 Gia Sunflowers did.

She's even been doing some modest suckering already, as you can see. So when it was time to move up some of the three-inch seedlings, Symphony was one of the more obvious candidates. It'll be a while before I post about any of the others that got promoted,¹ alas.

Symphony Alexander-Love is a Miss Gay Wisconsin USofA at Large, most recently, but has also won titles in Ohio and South Carolina (the full list is kind of exhausting, honestly). Her baton-twirling (in the talent portion of the Miss Gay Wisconsin 2013 pageant) is pretty cool, if you're the sort of person who enjoys watching drag queens twirl batons. But this video is really impressive:


Possibly I meant "exhausting." Maybe both. Anyway. So that's Symphony Alexander-Love.

A side note -- I'm starting to see buds on several of the Schlumbergeras. So far, they've been developing for a few weeks and then dropping off; no actual blooms yet. But they're getting close, and this is way too early to start. The last Schlumbergera season didn't even end until late June; I don't want to start the next one in August. . . .

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¹ Though if you want to see, you can check out the gallery; the other recent promotions are: 1419 Maya Douglas, 1541 Miss Bounce, 1592 Maliena B Itchcock, and 1634 Helena Handbag.
I also promoted two others even though they hadn't bloomed yet: 1357 Dayonna Hilton, because she's one of the few seedlings with 'Midori' as a parent, and 1747 Anaol Fetale, because 1) she'd budded once but then dropped the bud, 2) her leaves were ginormous and I was a little worried about her shading the other seedlings to death, and 3) she was pretty severely rootbound and really needed the larger pot.

Anthurium no. 1300 "Gia Sunflowers"

Some mixed feelings about the name for this one; using Latin names for cultivars is frowned upon, because of the potential to confuse people about the identity of the plant (if you see a "'Cuphea' Angelonia" in a catalog, for example, it's very easy to think it's a Cuphea rather than an Angelonia), and although these names aren't official cultivar names, just something to call them so that I can remember which seedling is which, and even though it should be totally obvious in any context that this isn't a sunflower, I still hesitate to use the name. It just feels . . . wrong.

But in any case. Gia Sunflowers is an actual drag queen from Atlanta, GA, and there are plenty of videos of her on YouTube if you're interested in seeing them; I'm not going to link or embed any because I didn't like the sound quality on any of them, but they're probably worth it with the sound off. The outfits are interesting.

As is the seedling. Gia's another one from the DV seedling group, which I last mentioned in the post for 1217 Charles Ludlam ("the least interesting of the DV seedlings;" pink/pink with unusually vivid new leaves) but there have been a few DV seedlings since then: 1209 Raven Samore Holiday (weird proportions, boring color), 1224 Perry Watkins (possible obake, slightly interesting colors), and of course 1299 Sinthia D Meanor (odd spathe shape, sort of tan and green, weirdest seedling ever). You wouldn't look at this group and think Gia was related to them, but here we are anyway.

So far, Gia hasn't made a great showing; the spathe color is interesting, and I like the contrasting spadix. There's even a hint that she might be another obake-type, though I had a terrible time trying to get the green to show up in photos at all:

You'd see it if you were here.

I mean, you wouldn't see it at the moment, because the bloom was disappointingly short-lived. But had you been in the right place at the right time, looking with the right optical equipment, you would totally have seen a tiny sliver of green. Mostly on the back of the spathe.

Gia bloomed at more or less the same time as her sibling, 1301 Symphony Alexander-Love. At the time I was more impressed with Gia, but it's Symphony who got promoted when I up-potted recently, mostly because Gia's thrips resistance is terrible.¹

What a mess.

I intend to postpone the decision on Gia; it'd be nice to see a bigger bloom, or some thrips resistance, or even just a longer-lasting spathe. Basically any improvement at all, and I'd be happy to try keeping her around a while longer. We'll see if she can do it.

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¹ In addition to the short-lived blooms. Symphony's the next seedling in line for a post, so you'll soon see just how much better she does than her sister at . . . basically everything. Even the color's grown on me, though I thought it was kind of boring at first.

Anthurium no. 1446 "Kayla Krawford"

Kayla didn't make much of an impression either way, though I suppose on balance she's good; not the most interesting color, but the spathe is pretty well-formed,

and resisted thrips well. This is the same bloom six weeks later:

The leaves are also fairly resistant to thrips, if not 100% so:

And there's also the fact that it bloomed early; it was only 17 months old.¹ Kayla's seed parent, 0282 Dave Trading, was the same color² and also produced a first bud very early (15 months), and then I lost Dave in The Great Purge to thrips. Dave was mainly noteworthy for its (large) size and speed of blooming, not its beauty or originality, but even so it would be nice to have a replacement for him, so I think I'm going to try to keep Kayla.

At the moment, this is logistically difficult; there just isn't room for the number of seedlings I have. I just moved up seven seedlings from 3-inch to 4-inch pots, but should have promoted three times that many, easily -- trying to decide who got to move on was agonizing. So while I would really like to hang on to Kayla as a Dave substitute, I'm not sure it's going to be possible.

Should maybe note that Kayla is from seedling group EQ;³ the only prior EQ seedling is 1447 Daesha Richards, who also bloomed very early (13 months!) and often, and is almost indistinguishable in photos from 0282 Dave Trading. Though Kayla's doing much better with the thrips, and Daesha's blooms were of wildly varying quality.

The drag queen Kayla Krawford is from Arizona, and is a former Miss Gay Arizona USofA at Large, a very complicated title that I don't quite understand, though I guess I don't need to.

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¹ Median time from sowing a seed to the first bud is currently 26 months.
The quickest two (0058 Betty Larsony and 1716 Tess LeCoil) took 12 months, though neither bud actually opened; Betty didn't complete a bloom until a couple years after the first bud. Tess's first bud happened in January; she hasn't tried again yet.
I'm still waiting for a bud from a lot of the seedlings, but the longest wait for a seedling that actually did produce a bud still belongs to 0105 Deanne T. Christ (54 months), which has since produced a lot of blooms. Apparently it was just waiting for me to move it to a bigger pot.
The point being that 17 months for a bud that actually opened is pretty fast, and Kayla was in a 3-inch pot the whole time, even.
² Red/yellow changing to red/white. Almost indistinguishable in photos without any objects to indicate size:

L: 0282 Dave Trading. R: 1446 Kayla Krawford.³ (0282 Dave Trading / 15 September 2015)