Pretty pictures: Anthurium andraeanum cvv.

I've mentioned before, probably more than once, that I generally have at least one Anthurium blooming at any given moment. Here's what I had going on March 23. Just 'cause.


A NOID pink flower, from my longest-lived Anthurium (at one time, I suspected 'Cotton Candy,' but I've never had any idea; pink Anthuriums are pretty common. The photo didn't really reproduce the color well: it's basically just a medium pink, like bubble-gum pink.). The plants had been around forever, and I cut them back maybe a year and a half ago or two years ago, I don't remember, and tried to root the tops in water and then soil. This is a bad idea. Don't do that. I lost about half of the cuttings, and the ones that have survived are only now getting around to flowering again, and look pathetic anyway. It's not impossible to restart Anthuriums, but don't do it the way I did.


Technically not flowers yet, but they will be. These are buds of 'Red Hot.' As you can see from the photo, 'Red Hot' isn't exactly red, but it's kind of a red-pink. The more exciting part for me personally is that the leaves start out sort of a red-orange, and gradually change to green as they age, which is pretty.


I tried to adjust the color on this to match reality a little better, but failed. This is 'Orange Hot,' a name which is a lie, being neither orange nor especially hot. It's a really interesting color, but nobody at work was fond of it, and it didn't sell that well either: in person it's a kind of pink-orange color that made me think of the "flesh" color of certain (Caucasian) dolls. In some situations, it was attractive, but it tended to clash with anything that was around it. I have one anyway, of course, and it's a pretty agreeable plant: this particular plant has a bud on it too.


I don't have an official ID for this, but people suggested 'Purple Plum' and 'Anouk' as possibilities when I first posted about it. It's one of the more consistent bloomers as long as I water it properly; it stops if I let it get too dry, but only for a couple weeks.


'Pacora' is another good one: the spathes are larger than those on most of my plants, they're a nice, solid red (the spadices vary from light yellow, as shown here, to green, to yellow with a green tip - I haven't figured out what determines the spadix color), the new leaves come in reddish, as for 'Red Hot,' and it's a very consistent bloomer.


'Pandola' has large pink blooms, sometimes with a little green in the "ears," which turn lighter pink as they age. This flower is a very old one, on the verge of turning yellow, but it's still not looking too bad, considering it's probably been around for two or three months.


These are more typical of the 'Pandola' color, though they'll be a little lighter than this when they open.


'Florida' is one I've photographed for the blog quite a bit, but it's just so darn photogenic, I can't help myself. And this bloom was there, ready for a photo. So. Unlike 'Orange Hot,' it's a real orange kind of orange, and like 'Pandola,' it also frequently has a little green around the "ears," which you can see in this picture.

I have other varieties here, including a couple red-violets and a white, but they weren't blooming on the 23rd. Perhaps another time.

Random plant event: Stapelia NOID flower bud

I discovered this during the last round of watering, on the 22nd. I'd seen the Stapelia start a number of buds since I bought it last summer, but most of them aborted while still tiny, and I'd pretty much given up on looking for flowers around November.

Which all means that by the time I found this one, it was already huge, roughly 6 inches (15 cm) from tip to base. I'm not especially looking forward to the smell, but I will be interested in getting a definite ID for it. Obviously updates will be forthcoming once something happens.

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Prince Charming

This is one of the orchids from Saturday's orchid show in the Quad Cities. Full-size view is recommended.


I don't have a lot to say about the orchid, which I think is pretty self-evidently cool, and any commentary I had would be roughly along the lines of hey, isn't this orchid pretty self-evidently cool?, which seems like a waste of your time and mine.

In Sheba news:

As of Day 3, the allergies are still a complete non-issue, which is awesome. The slight amount of reaction I had at the animal shelter when we first picked her up appears to have been from her environment, not the dog herself; since we bathed her on Friday, I haven't even had a small reaction. Unlike Fervor, too, she can play-bite me without it being a problem, though it's rare for her to try.

On the other hand, her anal glands need to be emptied (which we'll take her to a vet as soon as we can, but in the meantime this is not an endearing quality, and sometimes I have to back away from her because the smell is too much, which she of course doesn't understand). She whines when crated, though usually not for very long. She appears to bore easily, which is both good (probably pretty smart, then?) and bad (going to need more toys, play, and direct interaction?). She's agonizing to walk: she clearly hasn't been on a leash much, doesn't know how it works, weighs about 50 pounds (23 kg) and is very easily distracted by birds and squirrels. Both of which are everywhere at the moment.

She does seem to have figured out pretty quickly that she's not allowed on the furniture, she seems to be totally housetrained, she appears to understand that she's not to go into the basement (we have the stairs blocked off, but it's not like she couldn't jump the barricade if she wanted to: when we tried blocking the plant room, she jumped over the block just fine), and she hasn't done anything obvious to any of the plants, if anything at all.

So it's not all bad, or even mostly bad, and the problems we have are fixable, but at the moment, this whole anal-gland situation means I don't enjoy her a whole lot inside, and her unwalkability means I don't look forward to being outside with her either. And I feel kind of bad that I'm not happier about her being here.

Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia leaflets sprouting

The longish essay-type thing I had planned for today first turned into a different post than I had intended to write, and neither the original idea nor the new one were ready by the time I woke up yesterday. Also the coffeemaker has decided to stop working, plus we'd already been planning to go to the Illowa Orchid Society Spring Show at Wallace's, in Bettendorf (~1 hour away) yesterday so that I could get new and exciting pictures of new and exciting orchids for you guys, but then we had to figure out what to do with [not?-]Sheba when we went, because if we took her there was a good chance she'd yak in the car and be miserable, but if we didn't, she'd be alone in the house and be miserable, and then also plus I had to start the watering cycle again because I had Salvia elegans wilting in the basement already.


So yesterday just kind of didn't work. On a number of levels. And instead of the thoughtful, psychologically penetrating post that I'd thought I would post today, you get a long, drawn-out series of excuses and a couple kind of ugly pictures of baby Zamioculcas plants.

I don't know when these were started for sure; they came from plants that came into work with a few of their leaves broken off. If I'm remembering everything correctly, that means I've had these for either 13 or 17 months. Growing Zamioculcas from leaflets is really not worth the time and effort unless you do it on a pretty large scale, and maybe it's not worth it then, either. There's also the disappointment where sometimes even after you get a leaflet to sprout and nurture it along for a year, it'll still fall over and die on you if you give it too much water (has happened to me). Or it will just sit there doing nothing for ages if you don't give it enough water. But it's kinda fun, if you have the space, aren't made unhappy by looking at dirt for a year and a half, and have a really flexible definition of the word "fun."


On the more positive side of yesterday, the trip to Wallace's netted me a few months' worth of orchid pictures, and they're mostly prize-winning orchids of genera we haven't seen at PATSP before, so that much was very worthwhile. There were orchids for sale all over the place, too, but I think I have decided that orchids are just not going to be one of my things: I don't seem to have a natural talent for growing them, and learning seems likely to involve a lot of plant corpses and even more money. Certainly the flowers are often breathtaking, but I don't need to have all the plants I see, not really.


I did buy an Iresine herbstii, though, and had a nice conversation with one of the employees (Kate Terrell, Nursery Manager), because she e-mailed me after running across PATSP somehow, and she told me I should introduce myself if/when I visited for the orchid show. We had a nice conversation, and of course it's very gratifying to have somebody in Eastern Iowa taking blogs and the internet seriously, particularly when it's my blog. There may be more on this later. The conversation got cut short when she was called away to handle a tree question, and my camera's batteries died shortly thereafter, so we left without getting a proper well it was nice to meet you in, but we'll be back at some point, and y'all may see more references to Wallace's in the future.

As for Sheba, we left her crated at home while we were gone, after first taking her on a long and extremely frustrating walk (Sheba does not yet see the walks as a collaborative activity), and playing with her until almost the exact moment we left. So she probably slept through most of the time we were gone, or at least that was the plan. If she was upset by being left alone at all, she appears not to be holding it against us.

Saturday morning Nina picture

An old picture today; I haven't seen Nina do this in a very long time.


Maybe just a phase she was going through? You know how a lot of kids these days are experimenting with tail-curling.

Plans to try to add some pictures of Sheba, or whatever her name is, failed to come together fast enough, but I will try to get some for next week's Saturday morning Nina and/or Sheba picture post.

Pretty picture: Murraya paniculata flowers

As with the Plectranthus x 'Mona Lavender' I wrote about on Tuesday, the Murraya paniculata flowers sporadically all the time, but has gotten really excited all of a sudden, within the last week or so. Possibly the trigger was that I moved it to the watering station and gave it a good soaking and showering a couple weeks back. It's heavy, so this is hard to do, and doesn't happen that often.

In any case. I was moved to write about this partly because the current round of blooming is so intense, and partly because James Missier posted about his plant a few days ago. In that post, he mentions rumors of the flowers' scent being poisonous, which is similar to a couple comments I had after I posted the plant profile a couple years ago -- some anonymous person showed up and promised me a "lifetime of illness" unless I got rid of the plant, and claimed that his/r children were all allergic to it. People are (as we know) sometimes allergic to things, but by the time my anonymous commenter left his/r comment, we'd already had the plant for a year, blooming sporadically throughout, and both the husband and I were fine. I'm not saying that we haven't both been sick for the last three years, just that it seems like the sort of thing I'd remember.

Unless part of the illness involves memory loss, obviously.


James said in comments on his post that he'd read an account somewhere of a woman who'd found that the flowers' scent triggered her migraines and other ailments. This is certainly plausable: in some sufferers, migraines can be set off by certain scents, and (wikiposedly), some migraine sufferers experience heightened sensitivity to smell too, as part of the aura. (The word aura refers to sensory or neurological signs that precede a migraine in about 20-30% of sufferers; most commonly visual disturbances like seeing flashing lights, blurred vision, or scintillating scotoma, but tingling feelings in the face or extremities, heightened sensitivity to odors, or olfactory hallucinations are also fairly common.) As Murraya flowers have a pretty strong odor on their own, anybody who was exceptionally sensitive to smell during a migraine's aura, or triggered into migraines by strong smells, would obviously be hit pretty hard by it.

So there may be something to this, and it's probably a good idea not to put a Murraya in a store or other public space, because one doesn't want to give other people migraines. At the same time, it's no more "poisonous" or "dangerous," as far as I can tell, than when people wear too much perfume, cologne, or aftershave, or use scented laundry detergent, or whatever. Strong smells can trigger allergies or migraines in certain people. We knew this already.

Perhaps I'm being overly defensive. But I like this plant, and don't want to see people getting scared away from it over nothing. Some people will be allergic to it, and others may find it triggering migraines, but both groups should be relatively uncommon, and if you or someone you live with fall into one group or the other, you probably already know about it and wouldn't be buying a Murraya anyway. So.

And they really do smell nice.

BREAKING: Dog Adoption Complete

We did adopt Sheba. I don't react allergically at all to her saliva, apparently, and only slightly to her dander (which might not be her: it could be something else from the shelter), so I think this should work. Won't be able to say it's definitely worked until some time has gone by, of course, but I think there's reason to be optimistic, based on how things have gone so far.

It was a very long ride back for her, and unfortunately she does get carsick -- though we'd been driving for just over an hour before she actually threw up, and she'd had a pretty intense day already and was perhaps not at her best to begin with. So hopefully this won't be as much of a problem in the future.

I'll add a picture or two to this post as soon as I get them uploaded and sorted and everything.

UPDATE:

This one is pre-vomit, obviously, though she looked just fine post-vomit too, once we got her out of the car.
I'm pretty sure there are better photos possible; this was just the best of what I was able to get today. Perhaps there will be others to go with this week's Nina picture.

Except for the ears, she really does look an awful lot like a scaled-down Fervor.

Have You Seen This Plant?: Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest'

The website for Twyford International, a tissue-culture company located in Florida, with a separate facility in Costa Rica, lists a large number of plants that are very familiar to me, that we got from Florida all the time when I worked in the garden center. Twyford produces and either holds the patent on, or has applied for a patent on: Aglaonema 'Golden Bay;' (Correction: Whatever Twyford's site may claim, they have not in fact applied for the patent on 'Golden Bay;' that belongs to Florida Foundation Seed Producers.) the Anthuriums 'Gemini,' 'Krypton,' 'Red Hot,' (Correction: Whatever Twyford's site may claim, they do not in fact hold the patent on 'Red Hot;' that belongs to Florida Foundation Seed Producers.) and 'White Gemini;' Microsorum musifolium 'Crocodyllus;' the Dieffenbachias 'Tiki,' 'Tropic Breeze,' 'Tropic Marianne,' and 'Tropic Rain;' and the 'Brasil,' 'Imperial Green,' and 'Imperial Red' Philodendron varieties.

Also Philodendron 'Xanadu,' but nobody's perfect.

I own, or have owned, all of the above plants except for Aglaonema 'Golden Bay,' and 'Golden Bay' is on my list to get at some point. So the point is that I'm generally happy with the plants Twyford puts out there, save for 'Xanadu,' which is Satan come to earth in the form of a plant,¹ plus a fair number of their plants were developed by Dr. Richard Jake Henny of the Plant Daddy blog (Sadly, there's a lot less plant-daddying there lately, and a lot more cars, fishing, and complaining about the weather, but the archives are still worth checking out.²), which makes them special just because I usually don't know anything about where my plants originated, much less their creator's feelings about cold weather.³

So I have been excited for quite some time, since discovering their website, about the possibility of one day owning a Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest,' which looks a lot like 'Tropic Rain' in the (blurry, low-res) photo,

Dieffenbachia 'Tropic Forest.' Photo from Twyford International and used without permission; I will take it down immediately if anyone at Twyford has a problem with this and says so.
but which has a different texture to the variegation which I find more appealing.

And I have waited to see one of these show up in my area, for a couple years now, without luck. Not only have I never actually seen one, but we never had them on the availability lists from Florida. They were never even an option. So finally, I e-mailed Twyford to ask them where they were, and why they had 'Tropic Forest' on their website even though they don't appear to sell the plant.⁴

The answer didn't help very much; the people who wrote me back basically said that they'd never seen it before either, and didn't think they've sold 'Tropic Forest' in the last two years, and they're sorry the website is so out of date (all the news-clipping and press-release pages end in 2004, and their availability list stops last August). They did suggest some wholesalers I could check with, and I appreciate their being nice enough to answer in the first place, because they didn't have to -- I'm just some guy with a blog who might, if he finds a source, buy a plant or two of 'Tropic Forest;' they didn't really stand to gain anything by writing me back. So this was very kind of them. But at the same time, I'm no closer to the goal of having one of the plants, either.

So the report, at least for now, is: 'Tropic Forest' is a real Dieffenbachia variety, patented and everything, originally created in Australia by Edwin J. Frazer, from a cross between Dieffenbachia 'Birdsey No. 4' and D. 'Marie Selby 79-92,' sometime before January 1995, when the patent application was first filed. Nobody has seen 'Tropic Forest' since January 2007 (the date on the picture in footnote 3) and Twyford, at least, hasn't sold it in the last couple years. Nor does anyone else appear to selll it either, at least not under that name. If you sell it, if you have one you might give me cuttings of, if you've spotted it somewhere, if you know Edwin J. Frazer or are Edwin J. Frazer or think you maybe once talked to someone named Edwin at a party who had an Australian accent and did something with German-sounding plants, for the love of all that is good and holy please e-mail me.⁵

PATSP Profiles for:
Aglaonema cvv. including 'Golden Bay'
Anthurium andraeanum cvv., including 'Gemini,' 'Krypton,' 'Red Hot,' and 'White Gemini'
Dieffenbachia cvv., including 'Tiki,' 'Tropic Breeze,' 'Tropic Marianne,' 'Tropic Rain,' and (hypothetically) 'Tropic Forest'
Philodendron hederaceum, including the cultivar 'Brasil'
Philodendron 'Xanadu'

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¹ Not really. It's true that I have a problem with 'Xanadu,' but the houseplant incarnation of Satan is, I'm pretty sure, Ravenea rivularis, the majesty palm. Maybe poinsettias or Opuntia spp. 'Xanadu' maybe places somewhere in the top ten, though.
² Also: if the reader will take a close, full-size view of this photo from Plant Daddy, s/he will see some very interesting-looking yellow-speckled experimental pothos in the foreground. There's also an odd-looking vining plant of some kind which I think is either a Philodendron hederaceum or another kind of pothos, with sort of long, narrow dark green leaves and a bright white or cream-colored center, on the far right-hand side of this photo.
³ SPOILER: He's against it. Not overly fond of birds either.
⁴ (Indeed, the plant doesn't even appear to exist: when I Googled for it, the only hits that came up were for the Twyford site, multiple sites referring to the patent for 'Tropic Forest,' one really good picture, and PATSP, because I mentioned 'Tropic Forest' in passing during the Dieffenbachia profile. Davesgarden.com has a page for 'Tropic Forest,' but it's just a placeholder: there are no photos or comments.)
⁵ (See the sidebar and follow the directions.)