Anthuriums no. 1000 to 1028

So a lot of things are going on with the Anthuriums lately, some of them more interesting than others. In the past, I've tried to just let a certain amount of stuff build up and then dump all the news on you at once in a big post like this or this, but so many things are happening so quickly that any draft I attempted to write would go out of date as I was writing it. Also I suspect those are sort of a lot to ask of y'all. Those posts tend to be really long, and you have things to do, places to go. So I'm going to try, instead, to treat them more like the recent Schlumbergera posts¹ and focus on individuals or small groups of seedlings.

The positive part of this is that I should be able to update the blog nearly every day until . . . I don't know. Until the Anthuriums stop doing things. The negative side is that it's all going to be about Anthuriums, and will probably be just as repetitive as the Anthurium Update posts were, just spread out over a longer period of time.

So that's what I'm thinking will happen. You've been warned.

This particular post just marks a new milestone in the Anthurium-breeding process: the seedling ID numbers have just rolled over into four digits, as of 19 February. Here is #1000, "Thorgy Thor."²

No, she doesn't look like much yet, but she's still basically a preschooler, in human years.³ Give her time.

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¹ Which are possibly not over after all; there are at least two previously-unbloomed seedlings with new buds at the moment (099 and 111). Who wants to bet they'll both be some shade of orange?
² (The performer rhymes "Thorgy" with "orgy," not "corgi.")
³ Thorgy's six months old in this photo.
I spent forever playing with numbers in Excel trying to get a formula to convert Anthurium age to human age, figuring that seed sow date was more or less equivalent to birthdate, first bloom was more or less puberty, and age when a seedling's seeds were sown was parenthood (which first motherhood in the U.S. is averaging around 25 years old, according to a sort of rushed and non-critical internet search), but the Anthurium life cycle doesn't scale well to a human life cycle. The best overall approximation I could come up with was a fifth-degree polynomial (y = 0.000000279x5 - 0.000047302x4 + 0.002328818x3 - 0.020959355x2 + 0.381271297x, where y is the human equivalent in years and x is the actual age of the plant in months), which was obviously not particularly easy to calculate in one's head and consequently isn't very useful. And also might not bear much relationship to reality in the first place: I don't know the maximum possible lifespan for an Anthurium hybrid. Don't even have a guess. But let's go ahead and say Thorgy's a preschooler anyway: it's true metaphorically, whether it's true biologically or not.

Pretty pictures: Phalaenopsis OX Spot Queen 'OX1460'

A "Spot Queen" that . . . doesn't really have any spots to speak of. I wonder what that's about.

In orchid-related news: the Illowa Orchid Society's Show is being held March 21-22 this year. I'll be there, taking pictures, so if you'd prefer that I not take pictures of your orchids you should probably put "make a 'NO PHOTOS' sign for orchid show" on your to-do list now.

Phalaenopsis OX Spot Queen 'OX1460' = Phalaenopsis OX Honey x Phalaenopsis OX Black Jack (Ref.)

Random plant event: not a Schlumbergera or Anthurium (!)

You may have gotten the impression that I no longer have any plants that are not Schlumbergeras or Anthuriums. If so, you are wrong, but I forgive you, because it's . . . basically true.¹ There are, nevertheless, other kinds of plants here, and sometimes they still do things. No Eucharis has bloomed for me since June 2013, and this particular Eucharis hasn't bloomed since December 2010. I wasn't trying to make this happen, so it was a pleasant surprise:

And they still smell wonderful, of course.

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¹ 754 Anthurium seedlings, 25 specimens of named varieties used to generate seedlings (though some of the named varieties' names are not actually known -- I'm assuming they have names -- and some of the named varieties have not yet actually produced any seedlings); 193 Schlumbergera seedlings, 26 cuttings of seedlings, and 10 named varieties. As of February 20, this means that 65% of the individual plants in my collection are either Schlumbergeras or Anthuriums. Expand that to include the other plants I'm producing from my own self-generated seeds (32 Spathiphyllums, 34 Coffea arabicas, and 4 Euphorbia leuconeura) and about 70% of my plant collection is self-produced now.
And that's me being slightly restrained -- I have a whole fruit's worth of Leuchtenbergia principis seeds I could start but haven't, plus a bunch of Salvia elegans seeds I collected in late fall that I'm not sure how or when to start, and I have enough Canna seeds that I could just about fling them throughout the house and then skate from room to room:

Pretty pictures: Miltoniopsis (Dearest x Butterfly Primrose)

I'm assuming that the reason for the two sets of flowers being different colors is that they change over time, like so many other kinds of flowers do. (The lighter-colored ones do seem a little more beaten-up than the darker blooms.)

Another explanation is that the darker ones are just in shadow, or that my camera is making up colors again, as it often does when photographic subjects are at the extreme red or violet ends of the spectrum. Either way.

Miltoniopsis blooms are nice, but the ones at the orchid show always seem to be basically the same flower -- red or magenta, with varying degrees of spots and stripes near the lip -- with one yellow exception (Miltoniopsis Andrea West).

More typical: Keiko Komoda (from the 2010 show), Morris Chestnut (2010), Arnold Linsman (2011), Lennart Karl Gottling (2012), Echo Bay 'Midnight Tears' (2013, Echo Bay (2013). Surprisingly, most of the ones that come up in an image search are white, which I think I like better than the red / magenta? Not sure.

Schlumbergera seedling round-up

Okay. So I think we've seen all the Schlumbergera seedlings we're going to see until the fall. Could be wrong, but that's how it looks right now. So here are all twenty-nine of them together:

#008A "Frightened Dog"

#008B "Candor"

#010A "Semantic Satiation"

#012A "Sofa Fort"

#019A "Belevenissen"

#021A "Spider Crab"

#021B "Birthday Dinner"

#022A "Sad Tomato"

#023A "Stoked"

#024A "Safety Vest"

#024B "Bryce Canyon"

#025A "Clownfish"

#026A "Brick Wall"

#027A "Kiln"

#028A "Phil Collen"

#028B "Neon Like"

#030A "Diwali"

#031A "Baby Carrots"

#054A "Helpful Gesture"

#055A "Pumpkin Festival"

#057A "Pyrotechnic"

#060A "Wet Dog"

#061A "Leather Fairy"

#064A "Rose Hoses"

#078A "Art Party"

#083A "Psychedelic Bunny"

#083B "Guy Fawkes Night"

#084A "Downward-Facing Dog"

#088A "Cyborg Unicorn"
And for what it's worth, some of the variation in colors here is because of differences in lighting or camera settings, or the plants just being naturally variable in their bloom colors (both from bloom to bloom but also according to the age of the flower: Schlumbergera blooms don't change as much with time as Anthuriums can, but they do change some), but the seedlings really didn't all bloom in the same shade of orange. Most of them fall pretty neatly into a handful of categories: orange/pink ("Neon Like," "Sofa Fort"), orange/white ("Belevenissen," "Baby Carrots"), red-orange ("Sad Tomato," "Phil Collen"), dark orange ("Clownfish," "Stoked"), light orange ("Bryce Canyon," "Leather Fairy"), and "other" ("Psychedelic Bunny," "Helpful Gesture").

I've started cuttings of ten of these and expect to offer them for sale through this blog at some point, if they don't die and I'm convinced that they've rooted adequately. I haven't done cuttings for every one of the seedlings: some of them just suck and why would you want cuttings (e.g. #060A "Wet Dog"), some of them aren't large enough yet to be able to spare cuttings (e.g. #028A "Phil Collen"), and some of them finished blooming before I came up with a way to keep track of which seedlings were which, so I actually can't take cuttings yet (e.g. #054A "Helpful Gesture"). I'm expecting to be able to take cuttings from three more fairly soon, and if the plants keep blooming sporadically during the spring and summer, I should have most of the good seedlings in propagation, if not actually ready to sell, by the end of summer.

I'll have a post about buying the cuttings once it's warmed up outside, outlining which ones are available and how to go about purchasing one. (There may also be some Anthurium seedlings available in the summer, but again, I don't know for certain that there will be any, and if there are, I don't know which seedlings they'll be.) For the moment, though, posting will slow down until I can get some new material together, and when I do, it's likely to be pretty Anthurium-centric.

Pretty pictures: Masdevallia Copper Angel 'Highland'

The foliage really was this yellow, and an image search for the cultivar suggests that it probably shouldn't have been. (What would cause this? Some kind of fertilizer problem?)

It's nevertheless kind of a nice effect, if you can bring yourself to pretend that it's supposed to look like that. I mean, at least it's a smooth, uniform sort of yellow.

Masdevallia Copper Angel 'Highland' = Masdevallia triangularis x Masdevallia veitchiana (Ref.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 010

And for the second-to-last Schlumbergera post until like October (probably), we have #010A. Which is . . . okay. I mean, we've definitely seen worse.

This one was another seedling that I found difficult to name. TinEye generated a lot of names, but none of them quite worked for me.¹ I spent a vast amount of time trying to come up with something I liked from the TinEye results, and then when that failed, I spent even more time shuffling around the various pieces of the TinEye results, in hopes of stumbling onto some kind of recombinant name genius, but that didn't work either. Nor was it helpful to bring more fragments from names I'd previously rejected and shuffle those:² all that managed to do was drive me to semantic satiation for all the words and word-pieces I was shuffling around.

So in the end, I chose the best photo TinEye had come up with, "Presidential," and added to it to make "Presidential Pumpkin." I didn't actually like the name, but I couldn't afford to spend another however many hours it was³ trying to come up with something better. And that photo is straight-up adorable besides. I mean, I'd vote for her. Seems like the sort of person you could sit down and have a couple beers with, you know? Somebody who understands what ordinary people are going through.

And then, having made that decision, it occurred to me that not only was "Semantic Satiation" probably more appropriate for this particular seedling, given the circumstances, but it 1) saves me a repetition of "pumpkin," and 2) is two characters shorter to type. Therefore, a last-minute impulse decision to "Semantic Satiation."

And thank goodness there aren't any more seedlings to name for a while. I don't think I could handle it.

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¹ I think the problem is that we're at the end of the show, so there's pressure to come up with a really good one.
² Which is not to say I didn't come up with some names that were amusing or interesting in some fashion: I just didn't come up with anything that I thought I could live with indefinitely as a name. "Pepper Void," "Chick Detective," "Granny State," "Mostly Dancing," "OMG Soup Soup," etc. are all interesting ideas, but they were also all too easy to rule out for one reason or another.
³ (I'm positive I spent at least four on this. Would not be surprised to be told six.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 030

For what I suspect will be the spring's third-to-last Schlumbergera post, I reined in my tendency to collect all the possible name options a little bit. (I thought yesterday's was maybe a bit much.) So instead of 12 finalists, we have seven.

A small apology for the photos: I tried to hide it as best as I could, but these were taken before the flower had fully opened, because the light was better that day than it was supposed to be on the following day. This is most obvious in the following image.

However, even on the following day, some of the petals hadn't flipped back yet, leaving it weirdly flat-looking at the front. So it's possible that this is genetic. Time will tell.

The seven contenders, in order of their elimination:

"Bel Air" is an okay photo, I guess, but the name doesn't really have much to do with the bloom, has a certain snobby rich Southern-California vibe I don't like, and it sounds too much like something someone else would name a plant. I wouldn't necessarily grind my teeth every time I saw the name, if someone forced me to call this seedling "Bel Air" anyway, but there are more compelling options.

"Roadtrip:" I like going on road trips, which I guess counts in favor of the name. It's an odd thing to name a plant, as well, which is also a minor point in favor. But the name's not really relevant to the flower, and there's nothing about it to get me excited, so, again: we can do better.

"Ganesha" has a lot going for him -- "remover of obstacles, patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom," per Wikipedia. Seems like he'd be right up my alley. And the picture is actually kind of nice too. But Ganesha has always just bothered me. Much of this is probably because elephants are freaky, on their own, even when you don't combine their heads with human bodies.¹

"Grannyface" shows up on the list again. I don't know why, but that word just tickles me.²

I'm not crazy about the photo -- nothing against the subjects or photographer, it's just, you know, it's just very 1979, in a way I don't like -- though that's not hugely relevant, I suppose. Clearly I really want to name something "Grannyface," someday, but I don't think this is it.

"T. rex" would make a decent plant variety name, except that it looks like a species name (because it is), so it might be confusing, having a species name followed by a different species name. I suppose you could get around that by changing the punctuation (Schlumbergera "T-Rex") or spelling it out (though it seems cruel to ask someone to type out both the word "Schlumbergera" and the word "Tyrannosaurus" every time one wants to talk about the cultivar). It's not as though there aren't plenty of other possible names out there, so I'm not feeling any pressure to somehow force this one to work.

I'm not sure I've ever heard the phrase "Love Fest" spoken in a way that wasn't sarcastic, dismissive, hostile, or some combination of the three. I mean, probably I have at some point, and when I did a search for "love fest," most of the results were of actual public events that people had deliberately and sincerely named that, including: Love Fest in the Midwest, Saint Lucia LoveFest, R&B Love Fest, Library Love Fest, Lovefest San Francisco, etc., so clearly not everybody thinks of it that way, but I wouldn't be able to take it seriously as a name.³

Which brings us to the winner, "Diwali." It's something pleasant, it happens in the fall,⁴ and fireworks are involved.⁵ Plus I really, really happen to like the photo for this option, which is never a requirement but certainly never hurts. Also there's enough of a Hindu connection to make me feel a little better about passing up Ganesha.

Tomorrow: the final seedling-naming until autumn. Probably.

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¹ When was the last time you really looked at an elephant? I don't think people appreciate how weird elephants are, since we grow up being exposed to photos of them, and lots of other weird-looking animals (giraffes! killer whales! penguins! horses!) so by the time you're an adult, you just look and see: elephant, and that's as far as the mental process goes. But elephants are almost literally unbelievable. Check it, yo:


Adorable! And yet. . . .
² The explanation may be as simple as me being reliably amused by most _______+"face" constructions, since to some degree or another I find "duckface," "[resting] bitchface," "Murderface," "shitface[d]," "Funny Face," "'o' face," "pizza face," and, weirdly, "Scarface," all a little funny.
The only exceptions I can think of are the race-related ones (warning: some of the links may contain objectionable images:) blackface, yellowface (The fish is okay, though.), redface, brownface, and paleface.
The face thing doesn't work in reverse. Face blindness, Facebook, face off, face painting, Face the Nation, face value, face-centered cubic: none of them are amusing.
Well, Face the Nation is a little funny. But in kind of a sad way.
³ Taking "Cyborg Unicorn," "Leather Fairy," or "Sofa Fort" seriously: not a problem. Taking "Love Fest" seriously: problem. In my defense, I never claimed that this hangup of mine was in any way rational.
⁴ Though Diwali is often earlier than a Schlumbergera would bloom (between 2014 and 2022, the earliest date is October 19, and the latest is November 14, so occasionally Schlumbergeras would be blooming for Diwali, but usually they wouldn't). And this particular seedling didn't bloom until February 2, so it's, like, really, really late. So the season may not be that much of a point in favor.
⁵ Also a bit of a stretch, but Schlumbergera flowers sort of have a vague resemblance to fireworks. Close enough for seedling-naming purposes, anyway.