Schlumbergera seedling no. 008

Neither the flower color nor the flower shape has been as variable as I had been hoping for,¹ and when shape deviates from the norm, it tends to be unpleasant. Behold Schlumbergera "Frightened Dog."

The name, obviously, derives from the excessively reflexed petals, which look to me like a dog with its ears flattened against its head.

The color is nice, I guess, but I don't really see any reason to keep "Frightened Dog" around just for that when I've got "Clownfish" and "Safety Vest."

They can't all be gems, you know.

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¹ Though I'm probably being unreasonable when it comes to color: the odds are high that most of these are siblings from a 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID salmon/peach cross.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 024

When I potted up the seedlings, initially, they were very, very tiny. I hadn't tried potting up Schlumbergera seedlings before, and had no idea whether they'd all transplant fine, or whether I'd see 75% of them die the first week, or what. So, to hedge my bets, I stuck multiple seedlings into the same pot, which has turned out to be overkill, since very, very few of the seedlings ever died.

What this means for seedling no. 024 is that it blooms in two different colors, a nice pinky-peach that TinEye's search says is basically exactly the color of Caucasian infants,¹ which plant is the clear winner in that particular pot, and possibly of the flat as a whole. And then there's a dark orange with a white tube, which looks a great deal like number 025 / "Clownfish" but is somehow inferior.

For record-keeping purposes, I'm going with "Safety Vest" for the darker bloom, because, you know, whatever. That's the color it is, it's not the better dark orange so there's no point thinking too much about what to call it.

Schlumbergera "Safety Vest."

Schlumbergera "Safety Vest."
Coming up with a name for the lighter bloom was tough; going strictly off the TinEye results, most of the obvious names wound up being kinda racist in one way or another.² Fortunately, the page included a photo of Bryce Canyon, in Utah, which was a pretty good color match, so in the interest of recognizing that babies aren't all the same color, seedling 024 will be "Bryce Canyon" / "Safety Vest." I guess. Unless someone can come up with a baby-related name that doesn't sound racist.

This photo and all following: Schlumbergera "Bryce Canyon."

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¹ Or Caucasian skin in general; the search also caught several tattoo photos, shirtless guitarists (with and without tattoos), and women in bikinis (mostly without tattoos).
² I mean, I'm willing to buy a Schlumbergera 'Exotic Dancer,' sure, but S. 'Caucasian Infant' seems a step too far.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 057

In the interest of coming up with more memorable names for the seedlings than just "number 25," "number 57," etc., I've been using the TinEye Multicolr[sic] Search Lab to look for things of the same color(s) to name them after.

In this particular case, the petals are (at least to a first approximation) #db665e, and the "tube" (there's got to be a better term for that) #f4dedb, which when paired with a sort of random amount of black (#000000) yielded multiple photos of fireworks, including a couple images from pyrotechnic displays at concerts. So seedling no. 57 is dubbed "Pyrotechnic."

Which is perhaps an exaggeration. But who'd want to live in a world where plants have to be named accurately?

Schlumbergera seedling no. 025

#025 ("Clownfish") is still my favorite Schlumbergera seedling, I think. One other one, #054, is competitive, maybe, and there's another (#024) that is all but identical to #025, but Clownfish will always have a special place in my heart. Pretty free-blooming (though there have never been a lot of blooms at once, it's at least been producing them over a long period of time), not overly sensitive to day length, and the color is consistently a strong, dark orange that all but glows in the plant room. Plus you get a lot of points with me for blooming earlier than I expect you to.

Pretty picture: Angraecum sesquipedale

This improves on last year's A. sesquipedale photo by having been taken inside the enclosure, as opposed to being taken from six feet away.

That still doesn't make it impressive-looking. But we're getting closer. Literally.

previously: 2013

Pretty pictures: Schlumbergera

You knew this was coming sooner or later. 'Tis the season and all.

As I write this, it is Sunday the 23rd, and I have a lot of Schlumbergera buds still in progress, so I'm not sure how many seedling bloom pictures I'll wind up having to show you. So far, though, I've got bloom pictures for numbers 008, 022, 024, 025 ("Clownfish"), 026, 054, and 057. There are at least buds on another three (055, 060, 064), and four other plants (021, 079, 083, 099) were up-potted a few weeks after the others. Theoretically, those four could decide to set buds and bloom before New Year's, though I don't expect them to. And as of 23 November, anyway, I'm contemplating moving a bunch more to 4-inch pots so that I can use the 3-inch pots for another batch of seedlings, which means there's an outside chance of seeing some others.

The point being that it's not clear which and how many seedling pictures I may be able to show you eventually, but most of the varieties I actually purchased or traded for have bloomed now,¹ so I figure I can show you those, give the seedlings a few more days to do whatever they're going to do, and then start showing you the seedling pictures next week.

So here are the six named and NOID varieties blooming around the house lately:

The NOID yellow plant had a tough time of things during its first year here (which would have been 2011), and I moved it to the basement so I could try to salvage some cuttings in a warmer, more consistently-lit environment. Most of the cuttings failed, but one pot remained, and the surviving plant filled in over the course of a few years, such that I felt comfortable moving it back to the plant room this year. I don't know whether it had been feeling frustrated during the three intervening winters, when the artificial lights in the basements prevented it from setting buds, but it sure seemed that way: once I moved it, it budded up in a hurry, bloomed all over the place, and then was more or less finished by the time all the other plants started to produce flowers. I did try to make some crosses with it, but I don't know whether any of them actually took.

'Caribbean Dancer' remains the star of the Schlumbergera collection, both because it's damn pretty and because it's gotten big. (I've had it since 2008, though, so that's kind of to be expected. The other plant I've had since 2008, which you'll see later, is still pretty small, though at least some of that is because it's still in the original 4-inch pot.)

The NOID magenta has bloomed before, but this year it's working extra hard at it. It's a very ordinary sort of color for Schlumbergera blooms, but that's not to say it isn't still nice.

The NOID white has produced a lot of blooms this year as well -- it's the second-largest plant I have -- but the white is also not that interesting, really, and it's difficult to photograph well.

'Exotic Dancer' is blooming for the first time this year; it had previously been living in the basement and so never got the opportunity. It's more similar to 'Caribbean Dancer' than I was expecting. Not that the red and white isn't nice; it's just that from a distance they look pretty much like the same plant.

And, finally, the NOID peach, which is occasionally more of a salmon or light coral. I got it in 2008, as a cutting from work, and I'm not sure whether I knew what color it would bloom when I brought it home or not. Maybe I did; maybe I just saw some dropped segments and took them home without regard for what they were: I did that sort of thing a lot in 2008. In any case, it's bloomed very regularly, though since I haven't moved it up to a larger pot, it's still very small. Lots more white in the petals this year, it seems like, than there has been in years past.

Many of the seedlings take after the NOID peach to some degree or another; I'm all but certain that most of the seedlings that have bloomed already have been 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach crosses.

And that is that. My plan is to start with the seedling posts on 2 December; we'll see whether I can keep up with that.

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¹ The only ones I'm still waiting on are:
• a NOID peach / salmon which may or may not be the same variety as a NOID peach / salmon that's already bloomed,
• 'Stephanie,' which has buds, at least, but is extremely late to the party, and
• Schlumbergera x buckleyi, which in previous years has often declined to bloom at all and has no buds I'm aware of at the moment, but did bloom at least once, last winter. So maybe it will again.

Pretty picture: Doritaenopsis Shu Long Black Jack

Don't know the ancestry on this one; there's a Phalaenopsis Shu King, but I couldn't locate any Dtps. Shu anything, much less Shu Long Black Jack, on the orchid registry. 'Course, I haven't looked since March, when I uploaded this, so it's possible that there's something there now.

Ordinarily I might go check on that, but I am exhausted, having put together a blog post for Friday that's not an orchid post. You know, like somebody who writes a general houseplant blog would.

And then there are plans to make even more non-orchid posts for like a week and a half in December, though that depends on me getting some photos together that I have not actually gotten together yet. And also you should probably not get your hopes up, in terms of post variety or quality. But even so -- new things to look at, on a more or less daily basis, soonish. It's pretty exciting, really. Assuming I can get it all together in time.

Pretty picture: Pleione x confusa 'Golden Gate'

Another new genus. Don't know a lot about Pleione, but this is apparently a naturally-occurring hybrid of P. albiflora and P. forrestii (Ref.), and I guess it's interesting. "Pretty" might be a stretch, but you can call almost anything interesting and have it be true.