Other: The "Battlestar Galactica" Finale

WARNING: There will be spoilers here for the last episode of "Battlestar Galactica" herein, as well as spoilers from the rest of the show. Do not read further if you haven't seen the show and think you might want to be surprised by stuff later.

[Deep sigh]

This was, as one of the commenters at rifters.com said, one of those endings that made me wish I'd never started watching the show at all. It was probably too much to hope for, that Ron Moore and the writers had actual answers in mind for the various questions they'd been teasing us with. (Not just teasing, but all-out promising, over and over and over, that all would be revealed. This actually made me a little nervous at the time, because I didn't see how they were going to have time to get to all the questions they'd left dangling, even given a two-hour episode to do it in, but they'd done enough fascinating twists and turns prior to this that I thought, well, if anybody could do it, it'd be this group. So I reserved judgment. I would decide whether they'd pulled it off when I saw the ending.)

Most of the cast, in a promotional photo. Last Supper reference is totally intentional.
But the ending turned out to be mostly handwaving and some stupidity about God. So here's how I picture a conversation with me and Ron Moore going:

What was Starbuck? How did she go to Earth and die and come back in a brand-new Viper, and then find her own dead body? What was her special destiny that we've been getting anvilled into our heads since season 1?

Dunno. God did it, or something.

Who are Head Six and Head Baltar? Why do they look like those characters? What's their agenda? Is Head Six a Cylon implant? Part of Baltar's subconscious? Something else?

Dunno. Angels, I guess.

(L-R) Head Baltar, D'Anna (No. 3), Caprica Six. You can tell it's Head Baltar because he always wears that suit.
Well how come all of a sudden Baltar and Six can see one another's [eye roll] "angels," then? That's not supposed to be possible, according to the rules you set up previously. What gives?

Oh. Um, well, now they can see them. 'Cause God wants them to see them, or something.

What was the point of the original genocide on the Twelve Colonies? Millions of people died, and everybody keeps saying, over and over, that all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again, so why are we being shown this particular iteration of it? What's special about this time? Are they going to figure out how to stop it?

No, not really. It was just God's will that the Cylons would wipe out 99ish percent of the human species in a really horrible and painful genocide, because . . . He wanted the humans and Cylons to get together and frak and eventually create us?

Well so what about "Kara Thrace will lead humanity to its end," or whatever it was the Hybrid said? Humanity didn't end.

It didn't?

No. It didn't. In fact, we know that in one way or another, humanity has continued for 150,000 years after the story we were just following. Nothing ended at all, much less the human race.

Oh. Well, the Hybrid was being metaphorical or something. [pause] Angels!

None of the "answers," in short, are answers in the usual sense of the word. They all just push the "answers" back one level, so that now instead of wondering about why the Cylons attacked the Colonies, we're left wondering why God wanted (apparently) the Cylons to attack the Colonies. Instead of wondering what Head Six is, we're left with questions about why everybody doesn't have these angels, why angels are necessary in the first place, why if God is going to deliberately intervene in the plot He can't do so without so much needless suffering. Instead of answering the question about why "All Along the Watchtower" keeps popping up throughout the show, as opposed to some other song, the answer turns out to be, why, silly, that's the song that has the notes in the right sequence for the coordinates of Earth. Well who set that up? And what for? Was it really necessary to disguise it as a song, rather than just a string of digits (4815162342, perhaps?)?

The Temple of Five.
What I liked about the show, originally,¹ was that it seemed to be aiming for realism, more or less. I mean, realism with killer sexbots and faster-than-light space travel and all that, but still. It was about the sorts of real feelings and thoughts that people have; they were just having them in reaction to weird science-fictiony events. They did stupid stuff because of emotions, like real people do. They were loyal to one another, and conflicted, and treacherous, and frightened, like real people. And unlike certain other shows I could mention, they had adversaries who were actually scary, and moral gray areas, and they showed war and social dissent and all these other things in ways that were more or less like actual people behave. It was about how people deal with having enemies, and it was about that on several different scales simultaneously.

As time went on, of course, they left more and more of that behind, but still. The wars looked like wars, the people looked like people (even the robots looked like people), the bad choices looked like bad choices. And if there had to be some mysticism, some hallucinogenic spiritual visions, to drive the plot, well, I was okay with that, because the bulk of the show was still solidly rooted in human psychology, and it's awfully churlish to complain about a little mysticism making the thing unrealistic when we're talking about robots that are increasingly indistinguishable from human beings and faster-than-light travel and such.

But somewhere along the way, the whole thing went off the rails, and realism stopped being such a big deal. I think "Maelstrom" (3.17) is the episode where they finally said, fuck this realism thing, let's just start trying to be surprising all the time for no reason. And they killed Kara, and although there were good episodes after that, I believe the mutiny episodes ("The Oath" and "Blood on the Scales," 4.13-14) were the last good episodes they did. At the very least, they seemed like the last episodes where people were reacting like people. (Bad people, frequently. But recognizable as human beings.)

R.I.P. Laird. *sniffle*
And it's not only the God stuff I object to. The fleet deciding to junk all their technology, all the ships, scrap metal, antibiotics, literature, and start over civilization entirely from scratch, is completely unsupported by anything. There's not even a debate. Like, nobody in the entire 30,000+ population is shown even hesitating: they're all just like, yeah, let's build huts out of grass and die of malaria, 'cause that whole civilization and being able to defend ourselves thing sucked ass. Nor, for that matter, has any of this been particularly foreshadowed. Yes, there was all that at the beginning of the show about how networked computers were bad and everything, but people still acknowledged that without any computers, they would be lost: they didn't get rid of all the computers, they just didn't link them together. Well, having landed on Earth, you know what? They're still lost, without any of their technology. It's just as necessary as it ever was, and it makes no sense that they'd just fire it off into the Sun.

On New Caprica.
So I don't buy it. In fact, I don't buy it so hard. Talk about your jarring, wrenching, out of nowhere plot twists. None of them -- and I mean none, okay, none -- would even be alive without the tech they're all blithely rejecting, and they don't even hesitate. ("Oh! They have antelope here! We're saved!") Dumb dumb stupid stupid stupid dumb dumb.

And so, knowing that this was what it was all leading up to, that all the (relative) realism and mystery and endless "THE ANSWERS WILL BE REVEALED" and "AND THEY [the Cylons] HAVE A PLAN" and whatever were just so many carrots dangled in front of the audience to keep us watching: turns out the carrots were wax and plastic after all. I'm really, really disappointed. I'm probably buying the Season Four DVDs anyway, but I'm going to have to stop watching at "No Exit" (4.15), because honestly everything after that was just Moore & Co. shucking and jiving to try to get us to think that the show was going somewhere.

I do appreciate some of the character arcs: many of the characters did get appropriate, poetic, even, endings. Boomer was handled well. It was nice to see Doc Cottle start to mist up: we always knew there was a softie in there somewhere. I'd always kind of hoped that Baltar & Caprica might get together again.² It made me happy that Hoshi was the designated substitute Admiral: he may or may not have been the ideal person for the job, of course, but it's always nice to see family do well.³ I wasn't especially happy with the endings for Sam (why, exactly, was he okay with suiciding himself?) or Tory (yeah, she probably deserved to die, but a better show could have made me feel bad about it⁴). Roslin had some good moments too: the one moment that got to me above all others in the episode was the simple bit of her trying to tell the wounded guy that he'd be all right, trying to comfort him, and having Ishay come by and X his forehead. There was something very honest-seeming about that particular shot; I don't know what about it got to me so, but it was the one moment where I came close to crying. (Mary McDonnell should get all the Emmys.)

The Tighs, doing what Tighs do best.
So it was certainly not all bad, especially at the micro level. But the ending as a macro, big-picture kind of thing, took a rich allegory, with interesting stories and full, three-dimensional characters, and turned it all into . . . well, as one of the commenters (starlitskyy) at Television Without Pity put it,

. . . now we find out that, no, really, it was about killer robots after all . . . . God(s)/It doesn't care about slavery, genocide, etc. God(s)/It doesn't care if you kill each other because you are different races or religions or ethnicities. As long as you don't create killer robots, you're doing great.

This does answer the question of why, if all of this has happened before and will all happen again, this particular round of it is worth paying attention to. However, unlike what I was expecting, that the point was that we have the ability to stop the cycle, that we're not doomed to repeat this over and over again, that things really can be different if we try to make them so, it turns out that we were just supposed to pay attention to this iteration because it was All About Us, and our ancestry from 150,000 years ago. I.e., it's not important because there's anything to learn from it, it's important because we share genes with them.

[another deep sigh]

As this show aired, human beings have some real problems. Wars, climate change, economic crisis, torture, suicide bombing, what have you. I'm not saying I was looking to "Battlestar Galactica" to provide the answers for all this, because who looks to a TV show for that, but it would have been nice to be told that it was worthwhile to look. Instead, what we heard was that coming up with answers or not coming up with answers isn't even up to us, we have no direct control over any of it, it's all for God (or whatever It wants to be called) and prophets and angels to sort out for us. Which is an order of magnitude worse than the nihilistic, everybody-dies episode that I was expecting to see last Friday.

Nihilism can be rebelled against. Optimism can motivate one to try doing something new and wonderful. But what Moore & Co. gave us was helplessness, and admonishments for making leaps of faith and against making killer robots. OMG how very fucking useful.

-

Photo credits: Various points in the show, taken from the Battlestar Wiki. I believe this is fair use, though admittedly I'm really unclear on what constitutes fair use anymore.

¹ The first episode I saw would have been "Occupation," the opener for Season 3, and the scene that made me want to keep watching the show was the dinner Leoben and Starbuck were having. Leoben puts the food out in front of her, she says she needs a knife to cut the meat, he comes over and cuts it for her, she says thank-you, he tells her she looks lovely, and then she stabs him through the throat with knitting needles. He tells her he'll be back. She says he should take his time, wipes her bloody hands on the carpet, and goes back to eating her food as he bleeds out on the floor.

The dinner.
It wasn't the best thing I've ever seen on television, but at the time, it struck me as being a very brave and unapologetic scene to show, and it still does. Unlike the angels and leaps of faith in this finale, which strike me as being the most craven admission that they had no idea where they were going with this story and didn't much care to figure it out.
² A better show might have given a nod to the fact that Caprica Six was, up until episode 4.16 ("Deadlock"), apparently feeling close to Tigh, and vice-versa, and that losing the baby by itself shouldn't have been enough to just make all of that disappear. I mean, in real life, something like that would be emotionally messy, and people would get hurt, and it would take a long time for all involved to get over it, but I don't think it was even so much as mentioned again after 4.16. Which is weird.
³ Though, irritatingly, Hoshi is never actually revealed as gay within the series proper: you have to go to the "Face of the Enemy" webisodes, which I mostly did not watch first hand (it took more time to track them down than any of them actually ran: too high of a work-to-reward ratio), to find that out. I presume this is about the usual Hollywood double standard where it's okay to show lesbianism (Adm. Cain and Gina), because lesbians are titillating, for some reason, for straight men, but to even officially identify a character as gay is so potentially offensive to the audience (or to one's Mormon overlords -- let's not forget that Moore is Mormon, and the Mormon Church is an active enemy of GLBT people, whatever individual LDS members might feel or believe personally: we can't rule out a real-life religio-political motive for why Gaeta and Hoshi's relationship wasn't made part of the regular series) that it's just unthinkable. Note also, for the record, that the "Star Trek" franchise has never really acknowledged GLBT human beings either, despite years and years of promising fans that they would do so in the very next series. And Ron Moore came from "Star Trek," so . . . well, I'm not sure what my point is. It just seems noteworthy that popular televised science fiction still has such a big issue with this that it's now lagging behind the sitcoms, soap operas and daytime talk shows.
Nevertheless, Jane Espenson, bless her heart, offered me a chance to claim Hoshi for the tribe, so I'm gonna. (You straight people can have Gaeta. I'm pretty sure we don't want him. Though I liked him as a character, even when he mutinied.)
⁴ This, actually, is another thing that the show seemed to be promising and never delivered on: we know and understand more or less why Tory killed Callie (much of the understanding being because by that point we wanted to kill Callie too), but that was pretty much the last thing she ever did; we didn't see how the event played out in Tory's mind, whether she felt bad about it when she saw Chief reacting to it, etc. Tory, in fact, got fairly short shrift in the series as a whole, because we never really got to know her as anything other than a sort of cold, bitchy Bad Guy.

Pretty pictures: Clarkia 'Satin'

. . . Aaaaaaand we're back from hiatus. I got much less done (in terms of the blog) than I had hoped, but that's sort of always the case.

These are pictures of Clarkia 'Satin.' The tags actually said Godetia, but davesgarden.com says that Clarkia is current now, a number of other sites more or less confirmed that, and anyway thinking the word Godetia makes me feel like I'm in a cheerleading movie ("Go Deesha! Go Deesha! Go, go, go Deesha!").


I had never heard of this plant before: we didn't get any last year (these came in through the flower shop). A bit of googling, and asking co-workers, and . . . well, so I've heard of it now. They don't seem to be grown around here, and although I found information about their preferences and stuff, said information contradicted itself, so I'm still not very clear on it. One thing that everybody seemed quite emphatic about is that they go by the common names "atlasflower" (dunno what Atlas has to do with anything, but it's the sort of thing flowers get named, so wev) and "farewell to spring" (which is bizarre and a little ominous).

But they're pretty, which is the point.


I have no idea if these can be grown inside, but I'd bet probably not outside of a greenhouse.

Anyone wishing to express amazement that I hadn't heard of Clarkia/Godetia before now (I know somebody out there must be thinking that) is invited to do so in the comments.

Pretty pictures: Gerbera jamesonii flowers

It's apparently Gerbera season: we've just started getting them in at work again. I don't have a lot to say about these: I think gerbs are pretty self-explanatory.

This also serves as the announcement of my spring hiatus: there will be no new posts from 20-23 March, and then we're back to business as usual with a post of some kind on the 24th.

Quote

from slacktivist, about AIG:

It's not so much that they're paying out huge bonuses after accepting billions in bailout funds from taxpayers. It's that they're paying out huge bonuses to the guys who, you know, nearly destroyed the world's economy. Screwing over millions of formerly hard-working people ought to be its own reward.

Pretty picture: Gardenia jasminoides in film-noir lighting

We've just gotten some Gardenia jasminoides in at work, after several months of only having one kind of problematic large one that refused to bud (and then disappeared when it did start to bud), so I've been reacquainting myself. They don't actually spend all day lurking in the shadows, but when I saw that that was the direction the photo was heading, I elected to run with it.

Pretty picture: Lithops group planting

I did this at work yesterday, and thought it came out well enough to be worth sharing. I intended to hide them better, but was hampered by a limited pebble palette: some greenish or bluish pebbles would have helped a great deal. Or some black or yellowish Lithops. Whichever.

Sailor (Philodendron hederaceum)

Philodendron hederaceum is a fairly tolerant, attractive houseplant. It's very similar to, and often confused with, pothos (Epipremnum aureum), to which it is related.¹ Personally, I like it better than pothos, and find it easier to grow (hence the lower difficulty rating), but I am not typical that way.

In fairness to the Philodendron, a ridiculously large number of people (including a shocking number of professional plant people) are unable to tell the difference between the two, so maybe they only think they like pothos better. (See the special Epipremnum or Philodendron? post for ways to distinguish between the two plants.)

Top center: Philodendron hederaceum. Bottom left: P. hederaceum 'Aureum' or 'Lemon-Lime' or whatever: it has a lot of aliases. Bottom right: P. hederaceum micans.
Philodendron hederaceum is originally from most of South America, northward through Central America and a little of Mexico, plus parts (all?) of the Caribbean. It's been cultivated as an indoor tropical plant for literally hundreds of years, ever since it arrived in Western civilization² with Captain William Bligh sometime in the 1790s. Captain Bligh is the same Captain Bligh of "Mutiny on the Bounty" fame, and his collection of Philodendron hederaceum, as best as I can determine, occurred on the voyage after the one with the mutiny.

The original purpose of the first voyage, the mutiny voyage, was to collect breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, a plant in the Moraceae³ which produces large edible fruits that taste like bread or potatoes, depending on who you believe and how it's prepared) from Tahiti and take it to the Caribbean, where it would provide food for the slaves on the various English plantations there. This, obviously, was a slightly evil mission: first off, Bligh was doing it for money (apparently there was some kind of cash prize being offered for being the first person to pull this off), but more importantly, any new, easily-produced source of food would also make it possible for even more slaves to be kidnapped and brought to the region, so, well . . . I guess I'm digressing. The point is, it was a good thing for a lot of people that the little mutiny happened and delayed the Artocarpus.

Bligh stopped in Tahiti for five months, where he and the crew collected small breadfruit plants, which they potted and tended. About three weeks after they left Tahiti, the famous mutiny happened, and the mutineers sent Bligh and those loyal to him off in the Bounty's launch, which sailed around in circles in Polynesia for a long time before finally reaching Batavia (the old name for the Indonesian city now called Jakarta). A few of the plants were even still alive at this point, but they had to be abandoned in Batavia while Bligh and the remaining crewmen returned to England through means I'm unclear on.

Not long after his return, Bligh tried the whole thing again, and this time more successfully, bringing Artocarpus to the Caribbean and collecting samples of Philodendron hederaceum to take back with him to England. 'Cause, you know, why the hell not? And apparently Philodendron hederaceum was then maintained in one or more botanical gardens in England for many years.

Philodendron hederaceum.
That's more or less where the story would have ended, had advances in insulation and heating not made it possible for people to start bringing plants indoors and keep them there year-round. Cuttings of P. hederaceum were shipped to Florida (Not just shipped, but smuggled: Lynn P. Griffith, Jr. claims that cuttings of P. hederaceum were brought to the U.S. on Puerto Rican rum-runners. He doesn't specify when this would have been, but if rum-runners were involved, I assume it would have been during Prohibition, which was between 1920 and 1933.⁴), where growers produced the plants in huge numbers, and then sent them north to the larger population centers to be sold to the public. I presume that the same sort of thing happened elsewhere, though perhaps without the rum-runners.

Philodendron hederaceum has a large number of aliases, because it was apparently "discovered" over and over for a while. I was able to find about twelve: P. acrocardium, deviatum, harlowii, cordatum, oxycardium, scandens, micans, miduhoi, cuspidatum, microphyllum, pittier, hoffmanii, and various combinations of the above like hederaceum var. oxycardium. A few of these names are currently assigned to other species (cordatum, e.g.), but most are now meaningless.

You'll still find references to oxycardium, scandens, and cordatum in houseplant books, on websites, etc., but hederaceum is the actual correct name. I promise. The reason for all the names, in part, is that the plant has a really variable habit, depending on its age and growing conditions,⁵ so specimens collected at different times and places may differ in size, habit, coloration, and texture. Sort of the way the below pictures might not be recognizable as the same person, if you didn't already know that they were:


Not that I'm claiming that Michael Jackson's face is naturally variable. But you get my point. So the botanists of yore weren't incompetent necessarily. (Though I'm sure some of them probably were.⁶) They just didn't have the advantage of genetic testing and long-term cultivation to help them out.

So: booze, mutiny, crime, boats, aliases -- it's a bit of a stretch, but I think this adds up to "sailor." Especially if the plant swore a lot (and we don't know for a fact that it wouldn't, if it could). Now they've settled down, for the most part, and the most excitement the species sees is the development of a new cultivar every now and then, but there's a history. There's always a history.

Indoor care is really pretty simple, and goes more or less like this:

LIGHT: P. hederaceum will tolerate low light, for quite a long time, though like most "low-light" plants, it will do better if given bright indirect light. The ones at work tend to scorch a bit if they're too close to the ceiling (where it's very bright and very hot), particularly the chartreuse variety, so I don't recommend full sun.

TEMPERATURE: It's best not to go below 50ºF (10ºC), and anything below 60ºF (16ºC) is probably pushing it. My own plants, I found, did better when I moved them from a normal room-temperature, fairly dim location to a warmer, brighter spot near the ceiling: for various reasons I think it was more the temperature than the light that spurred faster growth. Don't get carried away, but normal indoor temperatures that are a little on the warm side (maybe 75-80ºF / 24-27ºC) is good, particularly if you've got the humidity to go with it.

Philodendron hederaceum micans.
HUMIDITY: P. hederaceum doesn't seem to be terribly set back by dry indoor air, but moist air does seem to lead to larger leaves and faster growth.

WATERING: I have the best luck with mine when I let them dry about halfway down between waterings.⁷ They'll handle more frequent watering than that, to a point; they're not as happy about getting any drier than that.

PROPAGATION: Like pothos, these are easily rooted in water, and can be grown in water more or less indefinitely. Unlike pothos, P. hederaceum transfers from water to soil easily, too. Vermiculite also works to root cuttings, though it seems to be slower. Commercial propagators use leaf-and-node cuttings in soil: you just go down the length of the vine, cutting between nodes,⁸ and then plant the cuttings such that the nodes are below the soil. At work, it works better to do two-node cuttings, taking the leaf off of the lower node and leaving a leaf on the upper one. It doesn't really seem to matter a lot, but sometimes when I bury a one-leaf node, the attached leaf will rot and I'll lose the cutting. With two-node cuttings, I know I don't have to bury any of the leaf, and then they don't rot.


Philodendron hederaceum 'Aureum' or 'Lemon-Lime' or whatever you want to call it.
GROOMING: Nothing huge; mostly just a dead leaf here, a dead leaf there.⁹ Repot when the plant is noticeably needing water more often than it used to. Eventually, the vines will get so long that they're kind of difficult to manage (One site said they can get to be 20 feet long indoors.), in which case they may be cut back. It doesn't really matter that much where you cut, though for best results I'd leave a few leaves on the vine, just so it has some energy to resprout with.

I don't often see it done, but training plants to climb may be worthwhile if you're looking for larger leaves. They're not very good at climbing on their own, though: we have one at work in a hanging basket that's climbed its hanger and is working on the metal braces in the greenhouse roof --



-- but as you can imagine, it's not finding much to grab on to.

There are a few pictures of successfully trained plants on moss poles at exoticrainforest.com, if you're interested.

PESTS: I've never really seen any pests on any of my plants or the work plants. The growers' guide lists several kinds of bacterial pathogens, and also warns about aphids, caterpillars, mealybugs, root mealybugs, scale, and thrips, but these must be more of a concern for producers than consumers. So be prepared, and check your plants once in a while (particularly for spider mites and mealybugs), but really they're fairly pest-free indoors.

There are at least three cultivars, in addition to the plain-green species form. I've seen the chartreuse variety variously referred to as 'Lemon-Lime' or 'Aureum,' and probably there are other names I have yet to run across. It's basically the same as the others, though as I mentioned previously, it does seem more prone to sunburn.¹⁰

'Aureum' / 'Lemon-Lime' again.
'Micans,' which is sometimes P. micans or P. hederaceum micans, has a velvety texture, with a reddish cast. It can be very pretty if well-cared for, but doesn't (in my experience) tolerate low light as well: the new growth comes in smaller and the distance between leaves will be much greater. When I first discovered micans, I got kind of obsessed with it, and bought several, and then later I wondered what I was thinking and got rid of about half of them. This is something that happens to me sometimes.¹¹ I still have a couple, though, and like them very much.

'Brasil' (or 'Brazil') is a cultivar from Twyford International¹² which is mostly green but with a yellow center, so named because it vaguely resembles the Brazilian flag:



'Brasil' doesn't seem to be substantially more difficult than any of the others, though it does seem to like to revert to solid green, which is annoying.

I have all four of the above varieties, and they behave more or less identically, though I think 'Aureum' is my favorite. It's a nice color: somehow it's not as harsh as the Epipremnum aureum equivalent ('Neon'), and I like the way the new orangish leaves go with the green and chartreuse of the older ones. I am admittedly a little puzzled about how 'Aureum' contains enough chlorophyll to be able to make a living, but clearly it gets by somehow.

It seems like a fast-growing, adaptable, easily-propagated plant like P. hederaceum should be invasive in tropical areas, but I didn't find much evidence that this is so (unlike Epipremnum aureum, which is invasive in a lot of places). In fact, I only found one warning about it, and it didn't include any specific information. Heart-leaf philodendron also has a common name ("vilevine")¹³ that suggests it's problematic, but that doesn't necessarily mean invasive.

Almost all houseplants are cultivated far away from their actual point of origin, and consequently have a long trip of some kind or another in their past. P. hederaceum's is really only of interest because it's associated with a man we know for other things. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that even the houseplants that are so common and familiar to us were once the Hot New Thing of their day. Even heart-leaf philodendrons were exotic to somebody, somewhere, once.

-

Photo credits: Michael Jackson pictures from public domain, I think. Pretty sure. Brazilian flag from Wikipedia. All others are my own.

References / Further Reading:
ubcbotanicalgarden.org
www.aroid.org
aggiehorticulture.tamu.edu
www.helenair.com
www.exoticrainforest.com

¹ They're in the same family, the Araceae, like Spathiphyllum spp., Anthurium andraeanum, Syngonium podophyllum, Dieffenbachia spp., Scindapsus pictus, Alocasia spp., Aglaonema spp., and so on.
² I know Western (i.e., European) civilization isn't the only one that matters or the only one that ever did anything cool. However, as far as I've ever seen, it is the main one to bring plants indoors for decorative purposes, and as such, it's the one that's relevant for our purposes here.
³ Which makes it a cousin of houseplants like Ficus elastica and Ficus benjamina, as well as mulberry trees (Morus spp.) and the osage orange (Maclura pomifera).
⁴ It's unclear whether the plants were also being smuggled, i.e., illegal, or whether the plants were just used to hide the alcohol. I have a hard time imagining anybody outlawing heart-leaf philodendrons, but weirder things have happened.
⁵ A lot of Philodendron spp. are like this, it turns out, especially the climbers.
⁶ I forget where I saw it, but I have a dim memory of seeing a half-joking rule of thumb that 20% of people in any profession are incompetent. Sounds maybe a little high (I'd guess more like 15%), but I'd agree it's somewhere in that neighborhood.
⁷ This is probably the single biggest care difference between P. hederaceum and pothos -- with pothos, you need to let it dry almost entirely, not just halfway. The Philodendron won't keel over and die if it's allowed to dry out, but that's not the way to get on its good side, either.
⁸ A node is the point where a leaf attaches to the main stem. A lot of plant-propagation depends on knowing where the nodes are, especially for cane- and vine-type plants.
⁹ . . . here a dead leaf, there a dead leaf, everywhere a dead leaf dead leaf . . .
¹⁰ It may be that 'Aureum' isn't more susceptible to sunburn, it's just that sunburn shows up better on a bright yellow plant than it does on a darker one.
¹¹ Monstera deliciosa was like that but much worse, because they're larger plants to begin with. I've also gone bonkers for Peperomia caperata and Strelitzia nicolai and then sort of regretted it later. It happens. It especially tends to happen when I'm writing the plant profiles, which I know I've mentioned before.
¹² Plant propagators and tissue-culturers based, I think, in Apopka, Florida, though I had a hard time finding an actual physical address. They are responsible for the U.S. supply of, or hold the patents on, or have applied for the patents for, a lot of the plants I've featured on this blog, including Aglaonema 'Red Gold' (still alive and presentable, by the way, though it's been grumpy lately) and 'Golden Bay,' Philodendron 'Xanadu' (well, we all make mistakes), Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Marianne' and 'Tropic Rain,' Anthurium andraeanum 'Red Hot' and 'Gemini,' etc., and they should totally send me some free evaluation plants of Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest' at their earliest convenience because I can't seem to find any anywhere else and I really really want one. Like, desperately, do I want one. (I know you guys read this: I see the hits from Apopka on Sitemeter. So c'mon. It's just one plant. Pretty please?)
¹³ Though it's not particularly common, as "common" names go: I only ran into it in a couple places on-line. I've never heard anyone actually say "vilevine." And if they did, I probably wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about.

Pretty picture: Impatiens 'Fusion Heat'

Like a lot of the pictures here, this doesn't quite do justice to the subject, but oh well, it's as good as I could manage. Last year at work, we had the related variety Impatiens 'Fusion Glow,' which was nice, but never quite did it for me. The flowers were interesting, certainly, but as they aged, they turned lighter in color, and then the ones we didn't sell also developed yellowish foliage for one reason or another late in the summer. The yellowy foliage and the increasingly-lighter yellow flowers left me a little cold, and wound up looking just kind of washed-out. But this -- is awesome. At least so far.

It's a little less orange and more pink than this in real life.


Which, I know for the people who have been gardening a long time, one more Impatiens is nothing to get worked up over. But all the same, every time I go by their table at work, I think to myself, oh my gods those are neat; I want one.

By and large, we've gotten the same stuff this year that we had last year (and the year before that, and the year before that. . . .), but I'm surprising myself by being excited about some of the new varieties of things. There's an Osteospermum I'm looking forward to seeing in particular, and we got a lot of new coleus varieties (somewhat at my urging, which I'm hoping won't turn out to be a mistake) this year too, some of which are going to be pretty stunning when they're full-grown. It's at least something to look forward to.