Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum malipoense

This particular species has only appeared on the blog once (2012), but there have been lots of its hybrids around:

Paphiopedilum Lynleigh Koopowitz
Paphiopedilum Norito Hasegawa
Paphiopedilum Jade Dragon (possibly; the identity of the plant in that photo is uncertain, though it sure looks a lot like P. malipoense)
Paphiopedilum Memoria Larry Heuer
Paphiopedilum Bit-O'-Sunshine x Paphiopedilum William Sanders x Paphiopedilum malipoense

Anthuriums no. 0083, 0555 and 0556

Anthurium no. 0555 "Mystique Summers Madison" bloomed quite a bit earlier than Anthurium no. 0556 "Frank Lee Grande," but they're both divisions from #0083 "Carmen Adairya," and it looks like they are probably even clones of Carmen.¹

Mystique bloomed first:

This was pleasant enough, I guess. I was a little disappointed about the amount of thrips damage,² but the pale pink color, combined with the light yellow-orange spadix, was nice enough. (I'd only seen that combination of colors once previously, on #0214 "Anita Knapp," who also had a lot of thrips damage.³)

Frank followed about three weeks later, and I was initially excited because the spathe looked like it was going to be less chewed up:

but by the time it actually opened, it was worse than Mystique's:

Since these photos were taken, Mystique's spadix has darkened, and she's now a pink / pink; it remains to be seen what Frank will do, but I'm expecting the same. I don't know if I'll ever be able to say for certain, but it looks to me like both were probably suckers of #0083 "Carmen Adairya," and consequently all three plants are clones of one another. Here's the side-by-side comparison:

Top: #0083 "Carmen Adairya." Middle: #0555 "Mystique Summers Madison." Bottom: #0556 "Frank Lee Grande."
Making allowances for the fact that the blooms were photographed at different ages, I'd say they're similar enough to be plausible as clones. If they're merely siblings, well, they're freakishly similar siblings.

If I could just do something about the thrips, they'd all be very pretty plants. Carmen has photographed really beautifully before. Just need to figure out something to do that won't freak all the plants out.

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¹ When I divided some of the plants last April, I couldn't distinguish easily between multiple seedlings planted together in the same pot, and single individuals that just produced lots of baby plants ("suckers") from the original stem. Older varieties of Anthurium were somewhat selected for high suckering, to make mass-production easier, but now tissue culture can give you as many identical plants as you want without having to wait for the parent plant to produce suckers, so nobody cares whether plants sucker or not.
Which means that some of my seedlings sucker a bunch, and some of them sucker hardly at all, and it can be difficult to tell which is which, even if I take the time to brush away the dirt and see how they're connected to one another. (Suckers arise from the roots, not from the stem, so a sucker can look a lot like a small seedling that's just happened to grab onto the roots of another, larger plant.)
Even when they're not suckers, the way I do things here means that plants from the same original pot are probably from the same cross, so they should have a family resemblance whether they're identical or not. Which makes it that much tougher to determine whether they're suckers / clones or just siblings.
² Supposedly thrips prefer yellow blooms and plant parts, but the ones around here seem more inclined to go for light pink, the lighter the better. Though as far as I can recall, I've never had any problem with them on "White Gemini," which is actually white. Possibly it's spared because it's in a different part of the house.
I don't think it's just a matter of the lighter colors showing damage better, though I suppose it could be. Haven't really done a formal survey of the pictures.
³ #0214 "Anita Knapp:"

Anthurium no. 0329 "Gladys Panzarov"

And the award for Best New Bloom, 2014-15 Season, goes to. . . .

Gladys makes me happy. First and foremost, she's orange, which is praiseworthy all on its own, as previously discussed. But then also I enjoy the name, and the foliage is pretty interesting as well:

(How is that interesting? Well, it's unusually lumpy, for one -- the main veins radiating away from the point of attachement of the petiole are slightly sunken, compared to the rest of the leaf, giving it a slightly "quilted" appearance. Which the photo doesn't show terribly well, so if you don't see it, don't worry about it.)

Gladys is also, I think, the only seedling so far that I've moved up to a 6-inch pot before seeing what the bloom looked like, based only on the color of the bud and the nice leaves.

If I have any complaints about Gladys so far -- and I'm not sure that I do -- it'd be that the particular shade of orange is a little more to the red side than I would like. When the spathe first opened, it was only clear that she was orange instead of red by comparison to a red-blooming plant nearby (#0282 "Dave Trading"). This seems to be getting better as she ages, though; I haven't taken a new batch of photos lately, so I can't confirm this yet, but it looks like she's going from red-orange to a lighter orange.

Also thrips-resistant so far, which is a pretty big deal. (Yes, the thrips are definitely back; they never went away. The question before me now is whether to try again with the oil, and risk massive bloom / bud drop happening a second time, or live with the thrips and try to find some other way to control them. Both options strike me as pretty terrible.)

The reader may see a resemblance to #0031 "Sylvester," which was also orange with a white/beige spathe, but Sylvester's spathe is much smaller and more upright, like a "tulip" Anthurium.¹ And the color was a lot lighter.

Seedling no. 0031 "Sylvester."
Obviously the dream would be to cross Gladys and Sylvester and get tons of orange seedlings, but that's not to be. Or at least it's not to be now: Sylvester hasn't bloomed since last September. Someday, perhaps.

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¹ Which is a thing. "Standard" Anthuriums have the big, flat, heart-shaped spathes with the spadix sticking out from it, like 'Florida:'

"Tulip" Anthuriums tend to have a larger number of small flowers, with flame-shaped spathes, and the spadix stays closer to and nearly parallel with the spathe, as with these NOIDs:

According to the Anthurium-breeding book, "tulip" types are favored for potted plants, while "standard" types are used more as cut flowers. That's possibly changed some in the 20 years since the book came out, plus there are newer shapes available now, like the weird Zantedeschia-esque thing the NOID green-pink is doing. Personally, my tastes run more toward the standards.

Also there doesn't seem to be a clear line between "standard" and "tulip;" some of the seedlings of mine have characteristics somewhere in between the two, like #0085 "Carson Trucks:"

And before you ask: no, I cannot explain why "tulip" Anthuriums are called that. I agree that they don't look like tulips. Keep in mind that these are the same people who think that light orange = "coral." When you're an Anthurium breeder, words can mean anything you want them to mean.

Anthurium no. 0565 "Myster E"

Myster E didn't photograph terribly well, but that's okay: you're not missing much. Just one more in a very long line of LPAs (Little Pink Anthuriums).

He doesn't have a lot going for him. The foliage is pretty crappy.

Some of that could be drought stress. I've had other seedlings do this sort of thing when younger and then grow out of it later on.

The only interesting thing is that Myster E, like several other seedlings, likes to flip his spathe back as the inflorescence develops.

Unlike most of the others, on him I think it actually kind of works. Or at least it was working at the time the above photo was taken; he got a little carried away later. Even then, though, the spathe was at least folded back in a more or less symmetrical manner, and was strong enough not to tear itself in the process. Which is something. I guess. Kinda.

Anthurium no. 0231 "Rhea Listick"

I have a lot of favorite Anthurium seedlings, depending on what particular detail I'm most focused on, but there's an argument to be made for Rhea as the best all-around seedling.¹ Not only is the foliage nice, but the spathes are broad, flat, a good color, not prone to cracking, and seemingly resistant to thrips. She could maybe be a little more diligent about producing blooms, but this is a good seedling, and her most recent bloom has been, I'm pretty sure, the biggest and nicest yet.

Rhea's managed to produce eighteen seeds so far. I started eight of those in mid-December, and another ten at the beginning of January. I got 88% germination from the first batch, and 70% from the second, which makes 78% overall. At the moment, it looks like seven of those might be ready to pot up, though I'm probably not going to do that quite yet.² I don't know whether I'll be potting up more than those seven plants; sometimes when I take the biggest seedlings out of a group, some of the ones that remain will have a growth spurt and be ready to pot up themselves,³ later, but sometimes slow, tiny, stunted plants remain slow, tiny, and stunted whether they're crowded or not.

This is the second batch of seedlings from #0231.
I'm always pretty limited here, as far as what I'm able to cross with what, because very few plants are ever shedding pollen at any given moment, but I'd really like to cross Rhea with a really dark red, in hopes of getting a dark purple bloom at some point down the road. It's possible that Anthurium genetics doesn't actually work like that, of course, and even if they did, it's possible that I wouldn't be lucky enough to get one like that on my first try. After all, a substantial number of seedlings die before I ever find out what sort of blooms they'd make, and even when they don't die, they don't always bloom.⁴

There's nothing special about the goal of a dark purple Anthurium (aside from, I've never seen one in person so it'd be novel). I've gotten plenty of neat results from the seedlings so far without having any specific goals, so it's not something I'm planning to work toward, exactly. It'd be fun if it happened, though.

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¹ Top five, at least.
² The survival rate is better if I let seedlings get bigger before transplanting, though the real reason for waiting is that I don't have room for more seedlings until a few plants die or get sold or move to a different part of the house.
³ This has been particularly weird with the large batch of seeds from #0005 "Chad Michaels" in late August 2014: they were all sown on either the 25th or 28th of August, but they've matured and been potted up in five different waves (September 21, October 26, December 8, December 28, and February 19), as new sets of seedlings got big enough to transplant. Which is weird. It's as if they're taking turns.
(My guess is that the actual reason for this is not that they're polite, but that they're in competition with one another for light and water, and when the most successful seedlings are removed, that frees up space for a new set to be successful and grow quickly. But I think you'll agree that it's nicer to think of them as cooperating with one another to take turns.
⁴ I suppose it probably seems like I have a lot of Anthuriums blooming here. By comparison to the number of Anthuriums in the average Iowa home (zero, probably?), this is true, but by comparison to how many seeds I've started, it doesn't seem like a lot to me. I'll spare you the actual math, but my estimate (backed up by actual numbers when possible) is that for every 100 seeds I sow:
• 30 will fail to germinate,
• 10 or 11 will germinate but be too crappy-looking to transplant,
• 33 or 34 will germinate and transplant but die within three years of being sown,
• 16 will germinate, transplant, and survive but not even attempt to bloom within three years of being sown,
• 2 will germinate, transplant, survive, and attempt to bloom within 3 years but not actually bloom, leaving only . . .

• 8 plants that actually germinate, transplant, survive, and actually produce a bloom within three years.

For those who like graphs (and who doesn't like graphs?):

I mean, plus or minus a few, obviously, depending on the batch -- some groups of seeds have been much more successful than others -- but that's more or less it. Every blooming plant you see here is standing in for about twelve that didn't. Consequently, it'd be reasonable to think that the 18 seeds from Rhea might net me one or two flowers by 2018.

Pretty picture: Tetratonia Dark Prince

Another new nothogenus from the orchid show. I like this, especially the patterning on the petals and sepals.

Aside from the ancestry information available on-line, I know nothing about this plant or nothogenus. No idea what they're like to grow.

Tetratonia Dark Prince = Broughtonia sanguinea x Tetramicra canaliculata (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0085 "Carson Trucks"

You may or may not remember that I was eagerly anticipating a new bloom from Carson, back at the beginning of February.

It didn't work out.

What happened here is rare, but not unheard of -- sometimes the developing bud gets stuck on the cataphyll (the sheath the plants build to protect the developing buds and leaves; you can see dead cataphylls from time to time in my photos because I am not super-diligent about picking them out before taking pictures), and then as the peduncle¹ grows, it pushes harder and harder on the bud until it can't bend sharply enough anymore and it strangles itself. This is the first time, I think, that Carson's done this, but #0002 "Alexis Mateo" did it on her first bloom attempt, and I'm sure there have been others that I've forgotten about. 'Midori' has attempted to produce four blooms since arriving last summer, and strangled two of them, so some plants are clearly more inclined to it than others.

The picture doesn't show the break that well, because of the angle, but you can see that the peduncle changes abruptly at some point close to the inflorescence, which is where the problem happened. The peduncle remained attached, but got much narrower at that point. The spathe never opened up any further than the photo shows, and the whole bloom was beginning to dry up by the following day. I'm hopeful that Carson will try again shortly, though he's always been a somewhat reluctant bloomer, so I'm not holding my breath waiting.

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¹ (= the "stem" on which the inflorescence grows; for some reason I have a terrible time remembering that this is the name for it. Some of the problem may be because there's another term, "scape," which has essentially the same meaning -- a flower stalk -- but is more restrictive: my understanding after a cursory look at the internet is that all scapes are peduncles but all peduncles are not scapes, though I can't quite figure out what the difference is between the two. Since the only situation when I ever need to know is for Anthuriums, I'm unlikely to put in the time to figure the whole thing out, but if you know, hey, leave a comment.)

New Plant (But It's an Anthurium)

I bought Anthurium 'Joli' about a year ago (March 16), and haven't even seriously considered buying any other new cultivars since then, mostly because the store plants don't vary a lot. Mostly red / yellow and pink /yellow. (I did see a light pink spathe / red-purple spadix at the ex-job that was interesting last April, but I didn't have the space for it, and it wasn't that cool.¹)

But I needed more flats for the Anthurium seedlings about three weeks ago, and went to the ex-job to see if they had some,² and happened to see this guy for sale:

The greenhouse person wasn't very enthusiastic about it; she said they weren't difficult or anything, but the color wasn't to her taste, especially since the spathes start out green and develop the pink color over time, so any particular bloom spends a while being kind of inconspicuous before you even know it's there. But I'd never seen anything like this before, and I had, you know, visions of seedlings dancing in my head, and all that, plus it was pretty reasonably-priced for the ex-job ($19.99), so I went ahead and got it. A short time later, it did start to produce a new bloom, and . . . well, she's not wrong.

They really are pretty inconspicuous to begin with. After a little while, the spadix had changed color, at least, which made it slightly more noticeable --

-- but I'm still waiting for it to develop any pink. So I see her point, but am nevertheless pleased.³ I mean, I got excited about a plain green one, 'Midori,' not that long ago, so a plain green one that eventually goes on to be not plain green ought to be quite a thrill for me.

The only real problem with it so far is that I can't find a name for it. It had a Costa Farms tag in it, "Allura," but I get the impression from poking around the internet that "Allura" is the name for this particular line of plants, that it's like an Allura Collection, or something, and the name of this specific cultivar is likely something else. So, having had good luck e-mailing Westland Greenhouses a year ago to get the name 'Joli,' I thought well, what the hell, Costa's all over the place on social media and whatnot, and there's an e-mail address on their website, so surely they'll respond to a short, politely-worded request for a variety name like Westland did.

But no. Not even a "we received your question but are unable to answer it, sorry" response. This, combined with that time in 2010 when I had bought one of their Strelitzias at a big box store and I wanted to know if it could plausibly be a Strelitzia reginae, if S. reginae was a plant they produced and sold, when they were also useless, makes me think that Costa Farms is a lot less interested in engaging with the public than they pretend to be.⁴

(Alternately, it could be that Westland, being Canadian and all, is just that polite, and will respond to any question no matter how ridiculous, and they're the ones being weird.)

So I'm on my own, as far as locating a cultivar name. The best option I've come up with (mostly from looking at http://freepatentsonline.com/ and image searches) is 'Fantasy Love.' The main problem is that different sites don't agree on what 'Fantasy Love' even looks like. The image search results that match my plant the best (which mostly derive from this original blog post) show new spathes as being mostly white, whereas my plant's are mostly green, though they change to white shortly thereafter so that's maybe close enough. However, a lot of the results also show red-violet or pinkish spadices, instead of orange like my plant.⁵ One website claims 'Fantasy Love' spathes are primarily white and purple. And there are a few results with red-purple blush on the spathes, instead of pink (possibly from overzealous photoshopping). I don't think these can all be accurately identifying the same variety. (Also worth noting: the original patent for 'Fantasy Love' claims that spathes start out red and change to green, which if true means that none of the plants identified as 'Fantasy Love' on line are actually 'Fantasy Love.' Though the more detailed description of the color changes, later on in the patent, describes more or less the same sequence of colors as my plant, so maybe.) Nor are there clear photos of many of the other plants in the "Love" line.⁶ When one looks for "love" on the net, I suppose not knowing exactly what it is you're finding comes with the territory, but this is ridiculous.

In any case. 'Fantasy Love' is far from the only green-white-pink cultivar in existence, but I can't rule it out, and all the others have similar problems, in that it's impossible to tell whether plants with which you are unfamiliar have been correctly identified in image-search results. Even if they are, the same plant will photograph very differently in different lighting conditions, too.

Consequently, I'm going to keep on calling it my NOID green-pink for now. If Costa Farms should ever happen to answer my question, or even if they send a non-answer answer like "we have no idea, believe whatever you like," I'll update this post, probably also make a new post about it, and apologize for saying such awful things about them. Or at least I'll apologize for one of the awful things. But they already have my money, so I'm not sure what would be in it for them to answer, so I'll probably never know for sure.

I don't think I've been able to pollinate the plant yet, though there could be developing berries in a couple spots on some of the old spadices, from pollinations that happened before I bought the plant. I suppose I'll know for sure in a couple months. If they were previously pollinated, and I get viable seeds out of those crosses, that could be great: I don't know who the seed parent is, and not knowing the pollen parent either means there could be a bonus addition to the gene pool. Even if the berries wind up being a self-cross, this plant means the chance to add weird spathe shapes, color-changes, and zones of different colors to my Anthurium gene pool, which may or may not wind up being helpful in five years or something.

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¹ Anthurium 'White Heart,' which would more accurately be 'Very Very Pale Pink, Or Kinda Pinkish-Lavender, Even, Heart:'

² They did not. Or, well, they did, but I needed a very specific kind of flat, and they didn't have that one.
³ Though I'm not crazy about the spathe shape.

'Joli' has the same kind of weird saddle-shaped spathes, though this plant's size and shape are more extreme than 'Joli.' It appears that breeders are trying to turn Anthuriums into calla lilies (Zantedeschia) or something. That's fine with me as an eventual goal, I guess, kinda, but the intermediate stages we're getting now are more odd-looking than attractive. I like a nice flat spathe best, personally.
⁴ So why have a contact e-mail address at all? What's the point in soliciting communication from your customers if you're going to ignore their communications?
⁵ Though the older spadices are pinkish --

-- so either this is something that will develop over time, or it's something that only develops in certain cultural conditions. I'll find out which eventually.
⁶ Oh so very many others in addition to 'Fantasy Love:' 'Tender Love,' 'Fresh Love,' 'Sugar Love,' 'True Love,' 'Fresh Love,' 'Red Love,' 'Sunny Love,' 'Lady Love,' 'Exciting Love,' 'Bright Love,' 'Orange Love,' 'Candy Love,' 'Changing Love,' 'Summer Love,' and 'Happy Love,' at least. I have nothing in particular against love, but this makes me kind of want to barf.