Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum armeniacum

Sometimes when people talk about yellow being a cheerful color, I want to counter with, oh yeah? Well what about dingy laundry? Or dying leaves?¹ In this case, though, even I have to admit that this is a seriously cheerful-looking flower.


P. armeniacum is fairly new to cultivation (late 1970s / early 1980s, depending on whom you believe). I gather from some minimal googling that it's also fairly difficult to grow. There are some extremely precise recommendations here, though I can't vouch for their accuracy. P. armeniacum is also somewhat unusual in that it produces plantlets on runners, like a spider plant or strawberry begonia.² A photo of such a runner can be found here.

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¹ (I actually find it extremely weird that we assign emotions and genders to specific wavelengths and intensities of light in the first place, but that's something to discuss another day, I suppose.)
² (It's possible that there are lots of other orchids that do this and I've just never heard of them before, I suppose. The concept was new to me.)

Random plant event: Epiphyllum NOID

And this would be the second of the two big developments during the hiatus.¹

This probably shouldn't have happened either, by the way. Just three months ago, the plant was just two unrooted cuttings,² which is surely way too young to be blooming. Though the cuttings were from growth that looked pretty solid and substantial, which is maybe why it worked anyway. I don't know.

In any case, I first noticed that something was going on in mid-July. It wasn't immediately clear that what I was seeing was a flower bud, as opposed to a developing branch, but by 21 July it was pretty obviously a flower.

I refused to get my hopes up about this, because Epiphyllums are fairly prone to dropping buds when being grown in less-than-ideal conditions, and the conditions here are nothing if not nonideal, so I was kind of expecting to be disappointed sooner or later. But it kept developing.

(3 Aug)
The orange color in the above photo is true-to-life; even though the flower was actually pink, I spent a few days hoping that it was actually going to turn out orange, because of the bud.³ But by 7 August, it was clear that no, it was going to be pink after all:

And then things proceeded very rapidly. About 8 hours after the above picture, the bud started to open:

I took a bunch of pictures because I wasn't sure how many opportunities I would actually get; some Epiphyllums' blooms are only open for a single evening, and even though I didn't think that was the case here, I wanted to be sure to get some kind of photographic documentation, lest the flower be gone in the morning. So the opening-bud pictures are kind of crap, but they were the best I could do at the time.

By the time I went to bed on 7 August, the plant looked like this:

And then when I woke up in the morning, it looked like this:

TAA-DAAA!!!!
So then I took like 150 pictures on the morning of August 8, which is what the rest of the post is about.

This not only immediately became my favorite flower of aaaaalllllllllllll the flowers I've ever had in the house (including the orchids, 'cause fuck orchids, they don't like me anyway),⁴ but then I also called my mom, and was like oh my GOD mom, you HAVE to come see this FLOWER I just got it's AMAZING.

The surprising part being that the family actually did come up a couple days later, on 12 August, by which point the flower was beginning to droop a bit, but it was still in good enough shape that you could sort of see how it would have been impressive at one point. I figure they got the general idea. (They were more impressed with the Clivia, though.)

Epiphyllum: bringing families together!
The flower lasted a mere four or five days, by the way: late on the night of August 7 until late afternoon on the 12th.

The odds of this happening again next year, or ever, are pretty slim, I suspect. Probably it only happened this year because the cutting had lots of stored energy from being grown outside, and was freaking out over the sudden decrease in light. Though I suppose the other cutting could still decide to bloom at some point. Hard to say. The orange-blooming cuttings I'd actually asked for had a much rougher trip, and were smaller to begin with, so I doubt those will bloom any time soon, but clearly Epiphyllum-type miracles do happen, so I'm not going to rule it out.

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¹ The first, in case you missed it, is here. The explanation for what was going on with this hiatus is here.
² (A bonus plant, that arrived here as part of a trade.)
³ I'm not strongly anti-pink or anything, but given the choice, I'd rather have had orange. The Epiphyllum I'd actually asked for was orange.
⁴ This is all the stranger because I'd seen plenty of Epiphyllum photos on line before this, and had been largely unmoved by them. I mean, the pictures were nice and all, but nothing I'd seen before this prepared me for the actual jaw-dropping beauty of seeing one in the flesh.

Pretty picture: Cattleya alliance NOID

Nothing much to say about this one; it was untagged, so I don't know anything about it.

And I suppose the picture could be better, too.

wrong tags: 5
incomplete tags: 1
missing tags: 8

Random plant event: Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold'

All photos are from either August 8 or August 10, except as otherwise noted.
This is the first of the two big cool things the plant collection did while I was on hiatus. I've had this plant for four years.¹ It had blooms when I got it, but it was already pretty close to bloomed-out, so I only got to see them for a few days, during which time I failed to get any decent pictures of them. And then I waited for about 1,435 days, at which point I went to water the plant and saw this:

(August 2)
I gasped loud enough that the husband heard it from two rooms away and came running. (I didn't know that was even a thing that really happened: I thought gasping was something that only happened on TV, like time travel or celebrity realtors.)

Over the next week, the buds and stalk grew, until we had this:

The normal color of Clivia blooms is orange, and frankly, I think I would probably have preferred that to this cream / yellow color. I mean, I get that this is less common and stuff, and I don't find the flowers objectionable or anything, but this mostly just looks washed-out to me, and it's difficult to photograph: see below.

In close-up, it looks much nicer, though. This is pretty close to true color:

I should note that I don't actually know what I did to make this happen. The main thing that's different about this year compared to last is that the plant's been getting a whole additional year of fertilizer, so that's my best guess, but it's not really blooming at the right time of year (normal is late winter or early summer, says Google, so it's a couple months late), and I'm pretty sure I didn't give it the right temperatures during the winter either.²

Anyway. Worth waiting four years for? Maybe, maybe not. But if it's trying to get me to like it better, it has fantastic timing.

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¹ From Pierson's. You can tell it was a long time ago, because I still had money to buy plants with, and Pierson's was still willing to take it.
² (Ideally, this should be between 55F/13C and 34F/1C for about a month, according to this site: what the plant actually got was more like three months of 55-60F/13-16C. I can't let the plant room get much cooler than that, because the other plants in there will complain, but I can't really keep it much warmer than that either, because the room is mostly windows, we're in Iowa, and there's only so much electricity in the world.)

Pretty picture: Epicattleya Rene Marques x Epidendrum pseudoepidendrum

Enough time has passed now that I no longer remember why I didn't get a close-up picture too. (The picture is from March.) I must not have been able to; I'm pretty sure that I would have if it were possible.

These are pretty close in appearance to those in the previous Epicattleya picture. Not surprising, since it was a picture of Epic. Rene Marques, one of the parents of this cross.

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Scalepocalypse 2012 update:

In other news, I've discovered scale on a few more plants on Saturday: 3 Hatiora salicornioides, an Asparagus macowanii, and a seedling Murraya paniculata. The Hatioras and Murraya got the basement infestation, and the Asparagus from the Alpinia.

It's also possible that the Asparagus was the original source of the scale that got the Alpinia, since I'm pretty sure it was the newest plant on the shelf in question, and the infestation was fairly advanced by the time I saw it.

In the cases of the Hatiora and Asparagus, I was lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that neither plant has broad leaves and stems: it didn't seem like a scale insect would be able to make a go of it, with so little access to the sap. Plus they're both difficult plants to check, since both naturally have bumps of the same color in places, and since both have lots of bushy, narrow stems, you're pretty much bound to miss some.

The Asparagus fronds most affected were cut off and thrown away, and the plant was sprayed with neem, but I haven't thrown it out because if all else fails I can always cut it down to the soil line and let it start over. I threw out the three Hatioras that I definitely saw an infestation on, as well as another four that were in close proximity to the infested ones. I kept another ten that were on the same flat but not visibly infested, and neemed them. The Murraya was likewise neemed, because its infestation seemed relatively mild.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I'm not planning to bring back the Saturday pet pictures as a weekly thing -- it winds up being a lot more work than you'd think -- but it's been a long time, so.

Nina's been fine. Or at least she's been fine as far as I know: sometimes it's hard to tell.

Post-replanting, some plants have done well, and others haven't. The Episcia 'Coco' has been happy, as you can see, though the crickets do nibble at it (hence the hole in the leaf in the bottom left of the picture).

The Murraya paniculata is in decent shape, too; the crickets leave it alone, and it's produced a little bit of new growth. I'm a little concerned that the terrarium may not get enough light to keep the Murraya happy, though.

The Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' has had a more mixed response: the stuff on one side (labeled 1 and 2 in the photo at the above link) has been growing well, and is producing a lot of new growth; the stuff on the other side (6 and 7) has died. One of those (I think #6) was basically completely devoured by the crickets, who prefer Begonia to Episcia. I'm not sure what happened to the other one.

The Ctenanthe burle-marxii (3) that I was sure would do fine was the first plant to die, and I'm not sure what happened to it. I might try to replant it, since I do have others, but I also might take this as a sign and leave it open, or try a different plant. I may have Aglaonema 'Peacock' cane segments rooted in a little while; that's probably the leading candidate if I decide not to replace the Ctenanthe.

Sheba, meanwhile, has been having another round of allergies, worse than those in the spring. We did have the vet look at her (we were there anyway for the annual Bordetella shot), and he said he thought it was just allergies, and that we should get her 25 mg of Benadryl twice a day if this continued, and that would probably take care of everything. Which was fine, but then we didn't immediately run out and buy the Benadryl, because this had gone away on its own previously without any intervention. So Sheba's gotten noticeably more uncomfortable (as of Tuesday, when I'm writing this), but we're working on it. A large part of the issue might be that it's ragweed season, and I've just found out that the husband has been walking her near weedy areas. I mean, not that the pollen doesn't get everywhere, but we might be able to limit her exposure a little bit.

Random plant event: Coffea arabica

It was sort of a logical thing to happen, following the Coffea flowers, but even so, I was genuinely startled to find that my Coffea has begun to produce berries:

This picture dates from 16 July, about a month into the hiatus. It's pretty cool, though I'm not counting it as one of the two big things the plant collection did to try to get back into my good graces, as described in Tuesday's post. Those things are way more incredible than this.

The Coffea is now about 5 feet / 1.5 m tall now, which would be fairly cool on its own, even without the berries and occasional new flowers. (Still haven't been able to smell the flowers, by the way.)

Pretty picture: Ascocentrum miniatum

tag: Ascocentrum miniatum