Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Noirmont

With bonus background Midwesterners!

Phragmipedium Noirmont = Phragmipedium Memoria Dick Clements x Phragmipedium longifolium

Saturday morning Sheba picture

No big Sheba news. No little Sheba news either, as far as that goes.

Unrelated: I noticed yesterday morning when I was out with Sheba that we had a volunteer Petunia in one of the beds (the one that never got weeded or watered and was full of whiteflies for the last month and a half of the summer because I am a bad outdoor gardener and because whiteflies like Cannas).

I like Petunias quite a bit, but we've never actually grown any here, or even attempted to, so this was a happy surprise. (Also a happy surprise: it color-coordinates with the blog.) We had a tiny peach poppy appear out of nowhere in early August, as well.

We might be able to explain the Papaver, as there's a chance it might have been in an old packet of "wildflower seeds" that we threw around the lawn just to see what would happen, but the Petunia is a mystery. Maybe seeds got blown through the fence from the neighbors' garden?

Grab bag

Various recent plant- and fungus-related events:

1. Stapelia gigantea

Everybody else has been posting Stapelia pictures for the last month or so, but my plants have lagged behind for some reason: everybody else was posting flowers when I was just beginning to see buds.

So far, two flowers have opened, and there are another four or five left to go. As to the smell: I can't detect any just standing in the room with them. I can if I get right up next to them and inhale, though. Experiments to determine the minimum number of Stapelia gigantea flowers it takes to be unpleasant in a plant-room-sized room are ongoing; I'll keep you informed about the results.


2. Strelitzia juncea
I've finally obtained some Strelitzia juncea seeds, after a long period of wanting some but not finding any. I began with five seeds, which I planted on 19 September, and I noticed the first sprout on 18 October, which I guess is fairly rapid progress. I'd been warned that they were irregular germinators, and could take a few months to do anything, so I guess this is encouraging.

I'm not even sure why I wanted them in the first place; the existing Strelitzias here (2 S. nicolai, 2 S. reginae) are big and awkward to deal with, and it's not clear that S. juncea can even be grown indoors in the first place. But I'm still going to try.


3. Anthuriums, assorted
The Anthurium "hookeri" spadix is not showing any sign of having self-pollinated. Which is more or less what I was expecting to happen. Or expecting to not happen, I guess. It's still attached to the plant, though, and sometimes they take a while to show any obvious changes, so I haven't entirely given up hope yet.

There are also two new additions to the list of flowering Anthurium seedlings, #26 ("Peaches Christ," whom we've seen on the blog before) and #276 ("Zach Religious"). That's eight seedlings blooming now: 26, 59, 76, 108, 238, 243, 276, and 282. In case you needed some lottery numbers to play or something.¹

Peaches' spathe is, so far, the same pink-red as "Bijoux Tuit" and most of the others, and is consequently not that interesting enough to warrant a photo, but the plant as a whole looks good even if the flower's nothing special.

Zach is possibly going to be the most interesting seedling yet; his spathe is a pale peach-pink with a red margin right now.

It's actually kind of unsettlingly close to my skin tone (below and to the left of the spathe), now that I look at the picture.
The color may change -- not only is it normal for developing spathes to get darker in color as they mature, but I'm not sure Zach's going to make it to full bloom. Some of the Anthurium seedlings do a practice inflorescence and then drop it before they make a real one in a different color,² and there are some indications that Zach might be inclined that way. (Both "Dave Trading" and "Bob Humbug" did this too; maybe it's a guy thing.) In any case, I'm potentially excited about having some variety in color.

"Sal Monella" is both in the process of unrolling the spathe from its first inflorescence and in the process of producing a second bloom. If the second bloom is successful, then Sal would be the first of the seedlings to bloom twice, which makes him potentially valuable for breeding. Also nice: the spathe has remained a solid red red, not the pinkish-red of most of the others. It's not hugely different from the other five that had bloomed previously, but it's different enough to notice and be happy about.

(New inflorescence is just starting to be visible, below and slightly to the left of the one that's opening now.)
EDIT: I finished this post Wednesday morning, then found another two flowers in progress on Wednesday afternoon: #58 ("Betty Larsony") and #245 ("Sawyer Ad"). Sawyer's spathe looks more or less in line with Gemini and most of the other seedlings; Betty might be a little lighter in color but it's hard to tell for sure. In Betty's case, I believe she's trying to apologize. So that makes ten.

And no, I'm not going to blog about it every. Single. Time. one of the Anthurium seedlings produces a flower from now until the end of eternity. But I'm excited. Bear with me.


4. Unknown mushrooms

I happened on this group a while back and found the size of the clump impressive enough to photograph. I couldn't make an ID on the species, even with the pictures to go from and my copy of The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms; my best guess is something in the Hypholoma genus but I emphasize that it's a guess.

The closest match in the book was H. capnoides, but the pictures of H. capnoides that come up in Google don't look much like my pictures or those in the book. And considering that the book is explicitly about edible mushrooms, and not all mushrooms are edible, there's every chance it shouldn't contain a photo of this particular mushroom in the first place. So I probably shouldn't even be guessing at an ID in public.

Mushrooms remain neat, though, even if they aren't plants.


5. Artiocarpus heterophyllus

Finally, an oddity at the supermarket: Jackfruit.

One could buy it by weight ($10/lb, which translates to $4.50/kg) or pay $30 (reduced from $35!) and get the entire fruit. (Which suggests that the whole thing was maybe only 4 lb / 1.8 kg to begin with. It sure looked a lot heavier than that, though, so I may be making some bad assumptions.) At those prices, for a fruit I couldn't have even guessed how to begin eating, I wasn't particularly tempted, though the informational sign next to it mentioned seeds, and that got my attention briefly.

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¹ Yes, I am aware that lottery numbers usually don't go that high, and don't usually have you pick eight numbers. But I'm not seriously suggesting that you play the lottery, so it all works out.
² It's not really practice. But that's what it looks like. (If you object to plant anthropomorphization, what are you even doing here in the first place?)

Pretty pictures: Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips

It kind of bugs me when people name non-red things "cherry" something. Not bothered a lot, but it does seem sort of exceptionally wrong.

I can't tell whether these pictures turned out well; I'm still getting used to having an LCD monitor. From some angles they look washed-out, and from other angles they don't. In either case, they do an admirable job of matching the blog's current color scheme, so there's that.

Vanda Fuchs Cherry Chips = Vanda Doctor Anek x Vanda Antonio Real

Random plant event: Neoregelia 'Gazpacho'

Hi again.

Efforts to bring the outdoor plants back indoors have kind of stalled; out of about 130-140 that were outside at the peak of summer, I've managed to find spaces for all but about 30-40 of those, mostly Agaves that may or may not have scale. So that's kind of both good and bad. And the scale situation inside the house hasn't really improved either; it's still confined to certain spots, as far as I can tell, but it's hit a few plants that I didn't think were scaleable. So I'm finding plants more depressing than interesting right now. What's ultimately going to have to happen, I'm afraid, is another purge,¹ but that will take some working up to. (All the plants that would be easy to throw out already have been.)

So the post isn't a complete bummer (if I'm only going to post once every three days, I should try to make it pleasant enough to show up for), here's a Neoregelia 'Gazpacho' that's surprised me by blooming this month.

I knew it was old enough to bloom -- the parent plant flowered almost five years ago, and its offspring are now larger than the parent was then --

-- but it's been large enough to bloom for at least a year, maybe two, so the only reason I can think of why it would have chosen now is, I repotted it in May, along with the other two of the original plant's offspring. I also gave them a partly-obstructed south window, instead of a pretty wide-open east window, this summer, which may or may not have had something to do with it. (That still wasn't enough to give it full color: had I been able to grow it outside like it would have preferred, it would all have been red with green spots, instead of mostly green with a red-and-green center.)

The original 'Gazpacho' lived for another year and nine months after blooming, and about half to a third of the offsets survived. It would probably have had a higher survival rate if I'd let the offsets get a little larger before giving them their own pot. In any case, all three plants currently have at least one offset already, and the one from this post is going to start pumping them out now that it's bloomed, so I suppose I should brace myself for a Neoregelia population boom in the next year or two.

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¹ (I can't afford to buy the amount of imidacloprid it would take to dose every plant in the collection, never mind the amount of time and extra effort that would require. And there's no guarantee that, if I did spend the money, time, and energy, it would even be effective.)

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Maudiae x Paphiopedilum Stone Lovely

Random plant event: Anthurium "hookeri"

And now for something way less pretty than Thursday's Ananas post.

Which is not to say it's ugly, exactly. As Anthurium spadices go, the color is an interesting choice. There are more ornamental Anthurium hybrids with purple spadices -- my NOID purple-blooming plant has them -- but in those cases, the spathe is also purple, and there's an overall purple thing happening. With A. "hookeri,"¹ only the spadix is purple. The spathe is dull green and narrow, and then the pollen is orange, which was surprising to me -- I'd expected white, powdery pollen like from the blooming andreanum / scherzerianum hybrids I mostly grow.

Granted, this isn't the best picture of the pollen. But it's there, and it's orange.
Anthuriums which are receptive to pollen produce small droplets of a sticky liquid (the better to hold onto any pollen that gets dropped on them, I suppose). It's a pretty minor thing with most of my Anthuriums, and in a lot of cases, I can't even tell when they're receptive, so tiny is the amount of fluid involved. Not so with "hookeri." Once it started producing fluid, it went a little nuts about it -- it's not been dripping on the floor or anything, but there's so much that if I try to dust the spadix with a paintbrush now, the brush gets all gunked up with what can only be described as an orange pollen-based mud.

It'd certainly be awesome if the plant were self-fertile. I don't have any room for more Anthurium seedlings -- there are already, as of last Friday morning, 225 of them here, and I suspect that "hookeri" seedlings would probably get big really fast. As it is, I'm already throwing out or selling off some of my plants to try to make room for everything coming in from outside. But you know I wouldn't be able to resist starting "hookeri" seeds anyway, were any berries to form.

As to how I got it to bloom in the first place, the only thing I did differently than usual involved watering: I had previously been watering it the same way as everything else. Take it off the shelf, plop it in the tub, water water water, splash of fertilizer, drain, back on the shelf. A few weeks before this happened, I got tired of lifting it on and off the shelf, which is difficult because of all the huge, fragile leaves. So I poured some water in, splash of fertilizer, and left it, without draining. I don't know why that would make the difference, and it's possible that this is coincidental and the blooming was going to happen anyway, but the change in watering sure seems related to the bloom. We'll have to try again in a few months and see what happens.

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¹ "Hookeri" is in quotes because this plant is probably not the actual A. hookeri. It is my understanding that the actual species is pretty hard to find, so clever and evil plant-sellers have just taken to calling whatever old Anthurium they have lying around A. hookeri, the logic apparently being that by the time you find out that you didn't get the species you wanted, they'll already have your money and so who cares. That said, when one takes into account the distortions in form (floppy habit, bigger leaves, longer petioles) caused by my plant having been grown indoors, there does seem to be a decent chance that my plant might actually be A. hookeri. The spadix is the right color, the leaf margins are sort of ambiguously wavy, and the internodes are short (especially for a plant that should be stretching toward the light).

On the other hand, I haven't seen the black glandular punctates described at the link, and my plant's yet to produce berries, so I have no idea if the berries are red or white. (It's probably not going to produce berries, either -- I've tried smearing the pollen around just to see if something cool will happen, and I've also taken the pollen to the Anthuriums I'm breeding, same reason, but Anthuriums are not universally interfertile or self-fertile, so the odds are that nothing is going to come of that.) But at this point, I don't think I can rule out that I might have the real thing, even if the odds are still against it.

Random plant event: Ananas 'Mongo'

September 2013.
I've had Ananas 'Mongo'¹ since November 2008, when we got some in at the ex-job. This is long enough ago that I don't remember much about the event, but I blogged about it at the time, so you can read that if you're interested.

It's grown pretty reliably ever since, and this year I put it outside for the summer. This was at least partly because it had gotten so big, and I wanted it out of my way, which is counterproductive because that only made it grow faster, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Depending on how much sun it was getting, it fluctuated between brown, green, and brown-and-green striped, and it got big, and it attracted frogs, and so on, and then at some point in mid-September, I noticed that it was getting really red in the center. Which was confusing, because I was pretty sure all the plants were getting less light, as we approached the equinox, but I took some photos and went on, as you do.

And then it got more intense. And then I started to see a bunch of little tiny bracts emerging from the center of the plant, and I clued in to the fact that this was the beginning of an inflorescence.

Since then, things have gone pretty much how you'd expect. First the inflorescence appeared --

-- and then the true flowers (lavender) began popping out.

Though they never pop out in focus. Dunno what that means.

This is easily the Big Plant Event of the Summer, like last summer's one-two punch of Epiphyllum and Clivia. I mean, other things have happened, some of which were also very exciting, but this is the most dramatic and unexpected. Like with the Clivia, I'd pretty much assumed that my conditions weren't going to be suitable for a bloom, and it was just going to be a foliage plant for me forever, and I was fine with that. So blooming is a huge bonus.

This is my favorite picture of the plant so far. I feel like it ought to be on top of a Christmas tree or something.
Next up: offsets. And the inevitable attempt to root all of them, no matter how little room I have.

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¹ Has probably been referred to previously as Ananas comosus 'Mongo' on the blog before, but the most recent web-surfing I've done on the subject suggests that it is not in fact a cultivar of A. comosus, but is instead a hybrid. Nobody will say what species are involved in making the hybrid, but there are only about eight or nine possibilities.^a If I were being forced to guess, I'd guess that there's probably some A. nanus in there, because nanus has the small, bright pink fruit, and because many of the websites talking about 'Mongo' make reference to how small it is. (The smallness, in my opinion, is overstated. If smallness can be overstated. My plant is a solid 3 or 4 feet^b across, which is medium to large for plants in my collection.) The color suggests some A. lucidus genes are in there too. But that's totally a guess.
     ^a Wikipedia says eight; Plant List says nine. The two sources agree on A. ananassoides, A. bracteata, A. comosus, A. fritzmuelleri, A. lucidus, A. nanus, and A. parguazensis. Wikipedia adds A. erectifolius, which Plant List claims is a synonym of A. lucidus, and Plant List includes two species not on Wikipedia's list: A. monstrosus and A. sagenaria. We will leave the question of which of these, if any, is a legitimate species to the pineapple taxonomists to fight out among themselves in tequila-fueled motorcycle cage matches, as is the pineapple taxonomist custom.
     ^b (0.9 to 1.2 m)