Anthurium no. 0241 "Megan Gigaterra"

The first-ever completed bloom from Megan is . . . nice, but a little disappointing. I mean, it's reasonably well-formed, and there's minimal thrips damage, but it's also just another pink / pink in what is turning out to be a very, very long line of pink / pinks.

Not the plant's fault, obviously. I'm sure I'd be quite taken with it if it were the first pink / pink I'd gotten.

Leaves are fine. Nothing special one way or the other. I'd probably be more impressed with the whole sunken-primary-veins thing if I hadn't seen it plenty of times before, too.

Tomorrow's post will have more novelty to it, I promise.

Anthuriums no. 0088, 0132, 0171, 0236, 0237, and 0415

The Anthurium post for today is about seedlings who had produced a bud at one point, aborted it, and are now working on a new one. Until the spathes open, there's little to say about these that I didn't just say in the previous sentence, so it's mostly going to be about the photos.

#0171 "Genevieve la Difference"

#0236 "Roxanne DeBree"

I was pleased when Roxanne re-budded, mostly because I like her name.


#0415 "Darby Dragons"

I'm surprised at how quick Darby was to retry; the previous bud had only aborted a month earlier. This one is at least coming from the center of the plant, near the growing tip, which I think is a good sign.


#0132 "Eve Stropper"

#0237 "Roxy Casbah"

I like Roxanne DeBree's name better, but Roxy has the more interesting bud so far. In person, it's slightly lavender, though I imagine once the spathe opens it's just going to be another in a long line of pink / pinks, like several of her siblings and half-siblings. At least it's a fairly large bud.


#0088 "Charlotte F. Babylon"

Finally, Charlotte is really close to opening (one or two more weeks?).

Anthurium no. 0290 "RuPaul Charles"

So the last thing I'd heard, season 7 of RuPaul's Drag Race was supposed to premiere yesterday, March 2, but when I checked on March 1 it was already up at LOGO's website, which was confusing. LOGO's been weird about the timing of the premiere for months now: for a long time they wouldn't name a specific date at all, and then they gave a few different dates, and after seeming to settle on one they don't even stick to it? But then the husband and I watched it on Sunday night¹ and all became clear: they were debuting everything except for the final judging at the end, so the actual debut really was yesterday and everything makes sense again. In any event, the point is that I was trying to time this bloom's debut to coincide with the beginning of Drag Race, which I have now done even if it was confusing and adds very little to the post itself.

I'd also like to take the moment to note that one of this season's contestants, Sasha Belle, is from Iowa City, so if she seems at all pleasant on the show, I feel like I kind of have to root for her.²

Anyway. So #0290 "RuPaul Charles." Here she is:

The weird margins are, I think, the result of some kind of stress or damage while the bud was developing, and not something we should expect from every inflorescence, but at least they're symmetrical, and they kinda make it look cool. (Right? It looks cool?)

Eight days later, the spathe did that annoying back-flip thing that spathes often do, rendering the bloom more or less impossible to photograph.

So that was a little disappointing. But I've learned not to assume too much from a first bloom. We'll see if Ru gets her act together in subsequent bloomings.

The foliage is nice.[2] Ru's parents were probably the NOID red and 'White Gemini:' I know 'White Gemini' was the seed parent, and anything with brown new leaves like this probably has the NOID red in its background somewhere.

Final assessment? It's okay. Not my favorite seedling by a long shot, but it has potential, maybe, especially if it can be induced to bloom again, or if I can get it pollinated. We'll see how it goes.

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¹ On LOGO's spectacularly terrible website, which is so loaded with ads and trackers and goodness knows what else that it is almost impossible to navigate and frequently crashes. My interpretation is that the entire website is some kind of passive-aggressive attempt at getting us to sign up for cable, which we will never do because our local cable TV monopoly, like all cable TV monopolies, is awful to deal with in every conceivable respect (signing up for service, getting service, calling for repairs, getting repairs, pricing tiers, billing, billing disputes, closing accounts, etc.). So I feel like LOGO's just abusing us for no reason, which some pretty ballsy behavior coming from a network with one good show.
² She also does shows at the club/bar where the husband and I met, which is another small reason to root for her, though she wasn't actually working there that long ago and I've never actually seen her perform in person. And probably never will, because clubs are loud and I am old and the whole thing just seems like it would be totally miserable for me. But I, you know, support her from afar. I guess. In theory. She seemed okay in the 20 minutes or so I've seen.

Pretty pictures: Brassocattleya Sunset Glory

This is the last of my favorite orchids from last year's orchid show. It might also be my favorite favorite, if I had to pick just one. Can't explain why. I just dig it.

Brassocattleya Sunset Glory = Brassocattleya Richard Mueller x Cattleya purpurata (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis"

Considering that virtually all of the Schlumbergera seedlings so far have been orange, you'd think that an orange Anthurium would be no big deal to me: way more orange than anybody could ever need already, no point in getting excited about more. But no. However common orange Schlumbergeras might be around here, orange Anthuriums are rare, and it can totally make my week to see a first-time bloomer come up orange, like happened recently. (You'll get to meet her soon.)¹

And Eliza is as orange as they get, so far.

She doesn't have especially large spathes, which is sort of a problem, but they're at least exceptionally vivid. (I'm not altogether convinced that there isn't a fluorescent pigment in there somewhere, because they seem to reflect more light than is hitting them.) Plus the leaves are different, in a way which stands out to me but probably just looks like another stupid Anthurium leaf to you:

²

Like #0126 "Erin Dirtylondry," Eliza's been promoted to a 6-inch pot. I haven't been able to pollinate her yet, but I haven't given up trying.

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¹ Only four members in Orange Club, and two of them don't even attend all the meetings:
#0031 "Sylvester" is orange / white, and #0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" is orange / orange, and then there are two that are only sort of technically orange: #0118 "Elijah Sturdabowtit" is orange when it first opens but then quickly changes to pink (and then quickly changes to dead -- the blooms are not long-lived at all), and the fourth is the new one that I'll write about shortly, who is also only kind of orange, but in a neat way.
² (The lobes and tip are both more rounded, the secondary veins leading away from the midrib are slightly sunken compared to the rest of the leaf, giving them a slightly "quilted" look, and the margins curl under very slightly, making the already rounded leaves look even more so.)
Which, um, by the way -- I know I mentioned a while back that I was working on an Anthurium foliage post, and I'm sad to inform you that however long I imagined it taking when I said that, it's going to take me a lot longer than that to finish. It's mainly a problem of not quite having a vocabulary for talking about them yet. I see certain traits popping up in certain seedlings, like, the new leaves on some of them are brown, or all of the veins are slightly sunken, or the lobes at the top of the "heart" are unusually pointed or whatever, and it's easy enough to see those particular bits, but different characteristics also seem to move as a group: a seedling whose immature leaves have a red midrib is also way more likely to have thin, broad, dark-green mature leaves with wavy margins; seedlings with five or seven main veins all radiating out from the point where the petiole meets the leaf also tend to have light yellow-green new leaves. Not only have I not yet sat down and closely examined all of the seedlings' foliage and recorded their descriptions, but I don't even have a terribly good sense of how many characteristics I'm looking for, total, or where to draw the line between trait A and trait B, because characteristics may be more obvious or less obvious, blend together gradually, only appear on leaves after a plant has reached a certain age, only visible under certain lighting conditions, or whatever. I feel fairly certain that I have Things To Say about Anthurium foliage, but I don't know what they are exactly, or even how to go about finding out. So it's probably better if you just forget that I ever promised a foliage post.

Anthurium no. 0283 "Anne Pursand"

Alas, Anne is no more. The problem in this case was that she lived on the outside edge of a flat and, when her flat was being moved, or when an adjacent flat was being moved, she tended to be tangled up in another flat's leaves and consequently got uprooted. Regularly. Like, once a week. It is occasionally the case that I can re-root an uprooted Anthurium, but it's uncommon, and obviously it's basically impossible if the uprooting is an ongoing thing.

At her best, Anne was okay,

but she was not at her best a hell of a lot of the time.

I'd be more broken up about this if Anne were anything but a pink spathe / pink spadix, but I have plenty of those, so no big loss. I have to remind myself of it pretty often, but I'm really not going to get strong, bug-resistant, beautiful plants unless I throw out some weak, buggy, gross ones from time to time.

Anne is survived by no children, sixteen siblings and half-siblings,¹ and a whole truckload of nieces and nephews.

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¹ (#0271 "Wanda Reulthemal," #0273 "Wes Coast," #0274 "Wilma Wishcomtroux," #0275 "Yvette Horizon," #0276 "Zach Religious," #0277 "Zach Treplica," #0278 "Hailey Escorpus," #0279 "Tristan Shout," #0280 "Jujubee," #0281 "Laganja Estranja," #0282 "Dave Trading," #0284 "Divine," #0288 "Cookie Buffet," #0578 "Bubba Lee," #0594 "Charity Case," and #0595 "Josie P. Katt")

Anthuriums no. 0219, 0220, 0330, 0556, and 0580

An unrelated note first:

About a year ago, when there was some big to-do about AOL accounts being hacked, I attempted to change my password. I didn't have any reason to think that my account was one of those affected, but it's the sort of thing you're supposed to do from time to time anyway, and it seemed like an especially good idea then, so I tried it. Put in my security question answers and the old password and typed in the new password twice and so on and so forth, and when I clicked the button to save the new password, I got the little spinny loading icon, but it never actually loaded a new page to tell me that the password had been updated, and the old password continued to work, so clearly nothing got changed.

I talked to someone at AOL about this, and he indicated that there were just that many people trying to change their AOL accounts at that time, so if I was just patient and kept trying, he claimed, sooner or later it would go through. So I spent about a week and a half periodically trying to change my password, but it always ended the same way, and eventually I just gave up and forgot about it.

Fast forward almost a year, and I have concerns about my AOL account again (I think my e-mail address is being spoofed, not hacked, but again, changing passwords is something you're supposed to do, so I tried it again, and it failed again, and I contacted AOL again. This time, AOL suggested trying to log in with a different browser, which I did (not helpful), and then said that the only thing they could do would be to give me a free 2 months of technical support, and tech support could log into my computer remotely and determine the problem and deal with it.

And I'm like, well, um, that sounds great and all, but you're not really giving me any reason to have confidence that, at the end of the free 2 months, I'll be able to get out of the tech support deal, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to pay for technical support. And the guy was like, no, it's actually really easy to get out of tech support on-line if you want to, you wouldn't have to pay. And I was like, yeah, but you guys think it should be really easy to change a password on-line, too.¹

So the upshot is that I'm looking for a new e-mail service. My ideal e-mail provider would look like this:

(highest priority)
1. Free
2. Not GMail
3. Reasonably secure for a user whose understanding of internet security is basically "don't click on suspicious-looking links" and "use strong passwords"
4. (optional) Simple to set up and use
5. (optional) No ads
(lowest priority)

Thunderbird fails condition #1,² GMail fails condition #2. I'm leaning toward Outlook.com at the moment, but I thought maybe one of y'all would have some warnings, advice, or alternatives that would be worth hearing before I make the final decision.


Now the Anthuriums.

What do these five seedlings have in common? None of them have bloomed yet. This isn't the complete list of plants with buds but no blooms, but four of the five also have in common that they haven't been mentioned here previously. Consequently, the photos aren't going to be terribly exciting. You've seen undeveloped Anthurium buds before. Really the e-mail stuff is probably more entertaining. But this is still news, so.

#0219 "Rhoda Horse"

Now there are two Rhodas doing things. (The other is #0232 "Rhoda Badcek," who first bloomed last April.) This is kind of bad news, because it's going to make it even harder for me to keep straight in my head which seedlings are doing what (like the Eliza / Elijah similarity wasn't bad enough). I suppose something like this was going to happen eventually.³


#0220 "Nora Morse"

Nothing terribly interesting about Nora yet, though it's interesting that she and her presumed sibling Rhoda both started buds at exactly the same time. I don't actually know that there's a way to induce Anthuriums to bloom short of giving them decent conditions and letting them make up their own minds about the timing, but stuff like this⁴ makes me think that there must be some kind of specific signal.


#0556 "Frank Lee Grande"

Had I mentioned previously that I'm including drag king names too? 'Cause I'm including drag king names too. Couldn't find a page for Mr. Grande to link to, alas.⁵


#0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha"

This is one of those names where I can't remember if I found it somewhere, invented it, or found it, forgot it, and reinvented it. Maybe the question is moot. Do people even get Brady Bunch references these days?


#0330 "Faye Quinette"

Faye's bud remains brown. I've noted before that photos of brown-spathed Anthuriums tend to look, to me, like someone just took a photo in bad light: my brain has a hard time accepting that the spathe actually looks like that. (My mother's reaction on seeing it: "You're sure it's not dead?") This also turns out to be the case when I'm looking at it with my own two eyes, strangely enough. But these photos (especially the first one) are pretty accurate w/r/t color.

Of course, the most recent bloom on #0334 "Jean Poole" also looked fairly brown⁶ and that wound up being dark red once it opened, so it's still possible that Faye will turn out to be not quite actually brown. But so far, so good, and although I can't imagine finding a brown Anthurium remotely appealing, the potential weirdness has me pretty excited. I'm hoping that if I just keep checking the bud daily, I might be able to convince my brain that this is its actual color by the time the bud opens.

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¹ (Left unsaid:) And anyway, in what universe does it make sense for me to, when having security-related problems with your e-mail service, grant you even more intrusive access to my computer?
² (the service itself appears to be free, but you have to pay to get an e-mail address initially, and it's not clear whether that's a one-time fee or an ongoing one. Also even if it were free, it didn't look like it met the "simple to set up" criterion, so.)
³ And it could get way worse than this: the combined list of already-named seedlings and potential future seedling names includes three Alexises, four Amandas, three Auroras, three Bobs, five Donnas, three Eves (plus two Evies), four Heathers, four Heidis, four Hollys, three Honeys, three Idas, three Jacks, three Ninas, three Reginas (naturally), three Sashas, three Sharons, three Veras, and three Wandas, and that's ignoring duplicate names where the spelling differs. That list also ignores the even more numerous cases where only two actual / potential seedling designations share a first name.
It's not yet as bad as, say, a preschool class, where there are eight Sophias and twelve Jacksons and everybody has to distinguish between Sophia H., Sophia R., Sophia A., Sophia J., and so on, and in any case something like this was bound to come up sooner or later because there are only so many common and familiar names, but it does complicate things for me. We're already at the point where I'm beginning to have trouble keeping track of how many seedlings have attempted to bloom (81, for the record; 60 have completed blooms), how many of those have died (8), where they all are down in the basement (which gets more complicated because sometimes I have to move them around), what colors they all are (especially complicated because some of them have only bloomed once, a while ago: obviously it's easier to keep up if they just bloom continuously, because I get reminded continuously), etc.
⁴ Other pairs of closely-related plants that have produced new blooms simultaneously after a long bloomless period: #0279 "Tristan Shout" and #0594 "Charity Case," and #565 "MysterE" / #0232 "Rhoda Badcek." This could be coincidental, but I'm betting there's something else.
⁵ It's possibly one of those names that gets used by several people at once. Certain drag queen names, like "Ida Slapter," are so old that they seem to be available to whoever wants to use them and don't necessarily correspond to any particular performer. "Frank Lee Grande" could be one of those. It is, of course, more likely that I just fail at search engines.
⁶ More of a red-brown, granted. Pretty much the color of old scabs, truth be told, though if you wanted to I suppose you could probably imagine it as surface-of-Mars-colored instead, which isn't a prettier color but is a little more poetic-sounding. Name That Color says the back of Jean's spathe is "Prairie Sand," which is arguably even more poetic-sounding, but I don't think of prairies as being especially sandy places so that mostly just confuses me.

Anthurium no. 0126 "Erin Dirtylondry"

Erin was the thirteenth Anthurium seedling to bloom for me, and in looking back through old posts to see where she got mentioned, I notice that she kinda got lost in the crowd at the time. Which is too bad, since her blooms have been pretty consistently nice, large, and long-lasting. The only thing wrong with them, really, is the color: I have lots of pink-and-pinks.¹

One does need a couple good pink-and-pinks around, though. Erin is one of a few pink-and-pinks that have been promoted to 6-inch pots;² the bloom in this post is the first one she produced after the transplant.

Nothing about Erin is clearly superior to all the other seedlings, but she manages to be above average in most categories (earlyish to bloom but not the earliest, spathes are larger than average but not the largest, pleasant leaves but not the biggest / heaviest / prettiest), plus, as one of the earliest seedlings to bloom, there's a bit of a sentimental attachment there.

One slightly interesting thing: last May/June, she produced a spathe with a dark pink blush at the base, which isn't unprecedented (#0083 "Carmen Adairya" does this a lot) but is definitely uncommon. According to the Anthurium-breeding book,³ this may be related to the time of year -- apparently a lot of Anthurium plants will produce blushed inflorescences in the winter but not at other times of the year, and obake spathes (those with green coloration near the margins) tend to be produced only in summer and early fall, with the plants producing "standard" blooms of a solid color the rest of the time.

If blushing is supposed to be more intense in the winter, and Erin was blushing in the summer, then the timing seems weird, but it's entirely possible that the basement seedlings have their seasons backwards -- they don't see a lot of natural light, and it may well be warmer down there in the winter and cooler in the summer because of us running the heat and air-conditioning.

In any case, Erin's looking like a keeper. She's even already produced five seedlings.⁴

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¹ So far:
#0041 "Anna Graham" • #0066 "Barbara Seville" • #0083 "Carmen Adairya" • #0126 "Erin Dirtylondry" • #0214 "Anita Knapp" • #0216 "Gillian Jamm" • #0218 "Noah Fence" • #0232 "Rhoda Badcek" • #0235 "Rowan DeBoate" • #0241 "Megan Gigaterra" • #0244 "Sara Problem" (deceased) • #0271 "Wanda Reulthemal" • #0273 "Wes Coast" • #0275 "Yvette Horizon" • #0279 "Tristan Shout" • #0283 "Anne Pursand" (deceased) • #0565 "MysterE" • #0594 "Charity Case,"
with #0118 "Elijah Sturdabowtit," #0202 "Mason Pepperspray," and "#0218 "Noah Fence" as edge cases (Elijah is orange / orange when the spathe first unfurls, but becomes pink / pink over time; Mason starts out pink / pink and becomes white / pink; Noah's first bloom was pink / pinkish-lavender but the second was pink / orange, so I'm not sure how to classify him.)
² The others were 0066 "Barbara Seville," 0271 "Wanda Reulthemal," and 0275 "Yvette Horizon," who all have their own strengths (lighter pink, very fertile, and more saturated/vivid pink, respectively) though just between you, me, and the internet, I'm kinda thinking that Barbara might not deserve to be in such elite company, and I'm a little concerned that Erin, Wanda, and Yvette know this. I don't want to see a Mean Girls thing start up. Plus, now that I think about it, they often do all wear pink on Wednesdays.
³ (Breeding Anthuriums in Hawaii, Haruyuki Kamemoto and Adelheid R. Kuehnle, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI, 1996.)
⁴ Only five at the moment: #0982 "Elle Emenopé," #0983 "Boxxa Vine," #0984 "Alotta McGriddles," #0985 "Sasha Metz," and #0986 "Marie Noelle Ankwanza." Another ten or so have germinated but not been potted up yet.