Other: Mayflower Residence Hall, University of Iowa

This post isn't about anything in particular and is mostly just an excuse to post the picture.

It's from 23 December 2012, and is a shot taken from City Park of the University of Iowa's Mayflower Residence Hall. The husband and I were there late at night for . . . I think no good reason? If I'm remembering right, I was just feeling cooped up and restless that night and wanted to go somewhere and do something, so we bought groceries or something, walked around briefly in the park, looked at some Christmas lights people had put up, and went back home. Nothing big. But nice.

Pretty pictures: Dendrobium Nopporn Green Star

Not really green so much as a kind of dirty yellow, but I suppose "Nopporn Dirty Yellow Star" isn't as marketable. It helps, in the horticultural world, not to be too hung up on color names matching the actual colors. (see: "blue" petunias, "black" tulips, "red" Phalaenopsis, etc.)


The backlighting and black/white background were unfortunate. The people presenting their orchids are obviously not thinking about what it's like to try to photograph them. This isn't even as bad as it gets -- the worst background by miles and miles is the parallel sticks one, which was back again for the 2013 show. I nearly cried when I saw it.¹ This black-and-white one was also back. It's not that it's so terrible, it's just that it breaks up the outlines of the plants and confuses the camera and just generally makes it harder to see the actual plant. It's not, like, Hitler bad, but it's irritating. I wish they'd all just invest in some plain black foam board.


Backlighting should be less of a problem for the 2013 set, at least, since we had a nice overcast day for once. My camera gets confused by partly cloudy days -- it adjusts itself for sun, then the sun goes behind a cloud as I press the button and I wind up with a picture that's overly blue, or vice-versa and I get pictures that are too yellow. For 2013, though, I used the cloudy setting throughout, and mostly got nice pictures as a result. So there's that.

Anyway. Dendrobium Nopporn Green Star is a cross of Dendrobium Burana Jade (seed) x Dendrobium Srimahapote (pollen).

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¹ (exaggeration for comic effect)

Site-related: anonymous comments

On Saturday, I'm going to disable anonymous commenting on PATSP. This might inconvenience some of you, so I thought I should let you know sooner rather than later. It is my understanding that existing anonymous comments will not be affected, just the ability to leave new ones.

The reason for the change is that I am getting flooded by spam comments, and have been since about last November. First I tried to ignore it, then I tried to enjoy it, and now I'm trying to shut it down entirely.

The Google/Blogger spam filter does catch a lot of them, but there seems to be a bit of a time lag. It looks like a lot of stuff gets sent to legitimate-comment moderation initially, and then after a few hours, the system detects it as spam and puts it into the spam filter. Which means that I am constantly noticing "Yay! A new comment!" only to be disappointed when I check it out and it's a bunch of gibberish like this:

If you really want to read this, it will probably be necessary to open it in a separate window.
The worst part is that it seems to be accelerating. PATSP receives a new spam comment every 40 minutes, on average. It's making me crazy. I considered just adding Captchas and retaining the anonymous comments, but Captchas are kind of annoying, and I'm getting the impression sometimes that the spam might be being left by actual people who can solve Captchas anyway. (Those of you with blogs who use Captchas should let me know how well they've been working for you.)

So anyway. I apologize to those of you who will be affected by this. It's not personal. I held out as long as I could.

New plant

I had planned on buying something at Wallace's Garden Center (Bettendorf, IA) even before we left the house. I like Wallace's -- they took me seriously once, long ago, their selection is generally healthy and well-maintained, and they've never banned me from the store.¹ I didn't know what I would be buying, but I was going to try to come up with something.

I'd sort of been expecting an Agave, since I seem to be having an Agave phase, and since I've gotten Agaves from Wallace's in the past,² but they didn't have many, and the one that was the best size and price is one I'd already bought from them. I'm also unexpectedly appreciative of Epipremnum aureum lately, but they didn't have any varieties of that that I didn't already have either. So it wound up being an Anthurium.

This is, of course, ridiculous, since I already had 224 Anthuriums (out of 883 plants total). I mean, if there was any genus I didn't need more of, it would be Anthuriums. But it seemed like something new. I have Anthuriums that bloom white, pink, orange-pink, orange, red, purple, and red-purple, but I did not yet have one that bloomed white with red flecks.


So this seemed like a chance to add even more genetic diversity to the group. The ID tag wasn't helpful; it just said that it was an Anthurium, produced by Twyford, and asexual propagation was prohibited. Where a cultivar name should have gone, it just said "KS.1." I looked that up when I got home, and found nothing relevant on Google. Twyford doesn't even seem to have a publicly-accessible website anymore. I did eventually find a list of plant patents owned by Twyford. Only one plant on that list was an Anthurium with white-and-red-spotted spathes, 'Peppermint Gemini.' This was initially very exciting to me, since 'Gemini' and 'White Gemini' have produced the most seeds by a huge margin,³ and it seemed reasonable to think that 'Peppermint Gemini' would be equally prolific, but when I got into the details of the patent, it turned out that 'Peppermint Gemini' was a sport of 'White Gemini,' which itself was a sport of 'Gemini.' So all three look different, and apparently all three are different on some level, but they're also so closely related to one another that crossing 'Peppermint Gemini' with something else is not that likely to get me anything that I couldn't have gotten with 'White Gemini' or 'Gemini.' Disappointing.

On the plus side, it was only like $5, the flowers are pretty, and if it is more or less genetically equivalent to plants I've already got, this is at least a way for me to produce even more seeds even more rapidly. Which is something that I totally needed. [eye-roll]

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¹ Yes, it's that easy to get me to like your store. Pretend you find me interesting, talk to me briefly, carry plants I like and then give them appropriate care, and don't throw me out. (Talking to you, Pierson's.)
² Specifically A. bovicornuta 'Reggae Time,' now dangerously and alarmingly huge, and A. 'Blue Glow.'
³ I don't have the exact numbers handy, but the last time I checked, the seed parent was either 'White Gemini' or 'Gemini' for about 80% of the seedlings I've got in the basement right now. A few plants consistently abort their fruit before the berries are fully mature, a couple will produce a couple seeds every now and again but seem to be difficult to pollinate, and there are a couple that steadfastly refuse to produce fruit no matter what I do.

Pretty pictures: Paphiopedilum Wossner Kolosuk

Oh, Paphiopedilums, how you torment me. I've whined about this plenty of times before, so I don't think I need to go into details: you can read the whining here if you want. (Or here. Or here.)



tag: Paphiopedilum Wossner Kolosuk
previously featured: (2010)

Random plant events: white flowers

Nothing gigantic and incredible going on exactly, but I've got three plants blooming recently that are all notable in some way or another, and as it happens, all three have white flowers, so it seemed reasonable to group them together into one post.

First up is the Coffea arabica, which struggled a bit this winter (dropping the lowest leaves, mostly, which for all I know is normal) but just got super excited and put out a huge flush of flowers.¹

I counted flowers at 38 separate nodes. If each node produces 2.5 berries (previously, either 2 or 3 seemed to be standard), and each berry produces 1.9 seeds (also based on previous experience), that's roughly 150-200 seeds.


The husband pointed out that 150-200 seeds might actually be sufficient to make a cup or two of coffee. I'm a little bit tempted, but I'd be more inclined to plant the seeds and get more plants. Assuming that there are seeds. Also assuming that the seeds will germinate.² (Obviously there's a great deal of premature chicken-counting going on in this paragraph.)


I tried, but was unable to get any smell from the flowers at all. (The husband could, so I'm not sure what my problem is.)

Next up, I've got flowers on my Haworthia limifolia var. limifolia. This isn't the first time that one of the Haworthias has attempted to bloom, but usually the flower spike shoots up into the fluorescent lights and then burns before I notice it, or it starts to grow deep within the leaves and then stalls and dies for some reason. I don't know for sure that this is the first time I've ever had one reach full bloom, but it's the first in a very long time, at least.


There is a chance that H. limifolia var. limifolia may be self-fertile: some Haworthias are and some aren't, from what I hear. I won't be attempting to get seeds from this one, though, because the flowers are so tiny and easily damaged that I doubt I have the necessary visual acuity and fine motor control. (If you've got a flowering Haworthia of your own that you want to try with, you'll want to check this out.)

Finally, I think most of us have seen Cryptanthus flowers before, and I've never found them all that interesting or attractive, but these made me do a double-take:


I think Cryptanthus flowers are always white,³ so the color's not a big deal, but I was struck by the size and shape: ordinarily they're small, flat, triangular things that are easily overlooked. This particular plant (a NOID), though, produces flowers that are a bit larger, and more trumpet-shaped. It's not a huge difference, but it was enough to make me think, oh, those are really pretty, for a Cryptanthus.

I won't be collecting seeds from this either, first because there are no other Cryptanthuses blooming at the moment so I have nothing to cross them with, second because the recent failure with the Cryptbergias has made me doubt I could pull it off, and third because there are much easier ways to get more Cryptanthuses, if more Cryptanthuses is what you want, and I've already got so many baby plants from offsets that I have no idea what to do with them all. But let the record show that I totally thought about it.

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¹ Google says that the bloom season is "mid spring" or March, both of which apply. So I guess everything's normal.
² This might be a good moment to update you on the progress of the Coffea seeds I started on 18 February. It's an easy update: absolutely nothing has happened yet, as far as I can see. This is not surprising; Coffea seeds are slow germinators, and right now, at one month, is the very soonest I could have expected anything to happen. Two months seems to be typical, according to Google; some sources say as long as four. (Nobody claims anything faster than 1 month.)
I'm also wondering if I maybe got some bad information; a lot of the sources I found while googling for germination times also say that seeds that have dried out too much are generally non-viable. The plan I was working from initially said that viability was best with seeds that had been dried for eight weeks, so somebody has to be wrong here. I'm starting to get a little anxious.
³ (I've never seen them in any other color, anyway.)

Pretty pictures: Masdevallia Prince Charming

Good old reliable Masdevallia 'Prince Charming.' Long may he wave.









Previous PATSP posts about Masdevallia 'Prince Charming:' 2010

tag: Masdevallia Prince Charming
origin: Masd. angulata x Masd. veitchiana

Random plant event: Kohleria 'Queen Victoria'

It's fun when flowers happen that you don't see coming. Even better are the flowers that you didn't see coming and had never seen before.

I've had Kohleria 'Queen Victoria' since May 2011, and it has not always been clear, in the two years since, that I was going to continue to have it much longer. My watering frequency is not quite often enough to handle some of the needier gesneriads. But it's been coming back in a big way since a repotting (last summer? fall?), and I honestly had no idea that it was even thinking about blooming. I just happened to glance over at the shelf in my office, saw what I thought was an unusually large Episcia flower, and then realized -- that was no Episcia.


So this is fun. I don't think they're self-fertile, so I won't have seedlings or anything, but it's new, and pleasant.