Anthuriums no. 0041, 0220, 0237, 0344

SO MUCH PINK DEAR GOD MAKE IT STOP

Actually things aren't quite that bad; I'm throwing these four pinks together in a single post because I don't have much to say about any of them individually, and because this gets them all out of the way so we can talk about some marginally more interesting seedlings later. And for the record: I actually like pink just fine: I'm objecting to the repetition, not the color itself.

Seedling no. 0041 "Anna Graham"

Anna produced a first bud a long time ago, which was tiny and pale but unmistakeably pink, just like this one. I wasn't especially impressed the first time -- it was different, sure, but also tiny, and the color was a little too washed-out to be very interesting. I'm more into it now: the plant has grown quite a bit, the new foliage is pretty nice, and although the flowers are small, I have to admit that they do stand out pretty well against the rest of the plant. So Anna got the last available promotion to 6-inch; if I want to up-pot any more seedlings, I'm going to have to clear off another shelf.


Seedling no. 0220 "Nora Morse"

Nora and #0219 "Rhoda Horse" both started buds at the same time, but Rhoda chickened out, or something. Rhoda's bud was sort of kinked, like the most recent one from #0275 "Yvette Horizon," which may or may not be related. The only thing that's especially interesting about Nora is that she's a slightly different shade of pink, which leans ever so slightly to orange. Still really pink, though, obviously.


Seedling no. 0237 "Roxy Casbah"

Roxy started a bud last year and aborted during the summer, so it's mildly gratifying to see her trying again this year. That said, the color is exactly what I imagine when I'm talking about the pink / pinks, and we've seen it plenty of times. Also my brain tells me that any variation on the name "Roxanne" needs to have a red bloom,¹ so it's difficult for me to remember which one Roxy is.²


Seedling no. 0344 "Formica Dinette"

Formica leans slightly toward the highlighter-pink color of #0275 "Yvette Horizon," but without the distorted spathe. So . . . um . . . good for her, I guess. Could be worse.

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¹ ♪Roxaaaaaaaaaaaane -- you don't have to put on the red spathe, those days are over, grab a loofah, get in the bathtub, and bathe♫ (There are very very few English rhymes for "spathe," it turns out. Pretty much limited to "scathe," "bathe," and "lathe," as far as words anybody else would know the meaning of.)
² Fortunately, 0236 "Roxanne DeBree" looks like she's going to be red. No indication either way from 0050 "Roxxxy Andrews," but Roxxxy's so old that I figure if she were going to bloom, she would have done so by now, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum mastersianum

Well, this is different.

Definitely prettier than previous Bulbophyllums have been. (I suppose one could argue that B. echinolabium is prettier, though I think I prefer B. mastersianum.)

Not sure if it means anything, but I saw more Bulbophyllums at the 2015 orchid show than ever before (three, compared to a mere five total over the previous five years) -- are they having a moment? Did the genus just become cool or something?

New plant (But It's Also an Anthurium)

I'm, like, binging on new Anthurium-buying lately. Two in two months! (Six weeks, even!)

I don't know what this one's called either, and likely will never know, because it's also a Costa Farms product and they don't give a shit.¹ I did at least remember to ask Wallace's while I was there, and they were like, sorry, they just ship 'em to us as "6-inch Anthurium," we never get any more information about it than that.

So that's how it's gonna be, I guess. I took a couple stabs at looking for a patent, but patents for red Anthuriums are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't really help to try to narrow it down to "dark red."

But none of this should take away from the plant itself. It may be nameless, but it's also awfully interesting, from a breeding standpoint. The actual blooms aren't anything spectacular, though it's at least a color we haven't seen much of before (a sort of dull dark red, with a streak of brighter red near the midline).

I'm still not a big fan of the saddle-shaped spathes, but I suppose it might be interesting to see what sorts of shapes result from crossing those with a standard or tulip spathe -- maybe I'll wind up with something new. Mostly, though, I bought this one for the foliage:

²

Not only are the leaves all unusually shiny and large, the new foliage is almost black. (I just went and looked at it again to be sure, and that photo makes it look much browner than it is in real life. In real life, it looks like a very very very dark brown-green that is all but black.) I have named varieties and seedlings where the new growth is green (most of 'em), red (0649 "Layona Davenport"),³ orange (0573 "Adore Delano"), pink-red (0105 "Deanne T. Christ"),⁴ brown (0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" and lots of others), or brown-with-green-veins (0002 "Alexis Mateo"), but black is new. And would be awesome.⁵

Have yet to try to pollinate the new acquisition, and I'm not 100% sure it's even going to be possible, but fingers crossed.

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¹ Not that they should have to! I don't expect to be able to communicate with the wholesalers who supply my garbage bags or Q-Tips or milk or whatever. But if you're going to invite communication from the public, it seems like you should at least acknowledge when the public tries to communicate with you. Call me unreasonable.
² All the pictures I got were crap: it's too large to fit within the black backdrop I have, and it's dark enough that, especially in combination with a black backdrop, the camera doesn't know what's going on and starts making things up. But I promise you, it's awesome in person. (If you like very very large, shiny, and dark-colored leaves, that is.)
³ Recent photo of Layona:

⁴ Semi-recent picture of Deanne:

The new leaves look more purple-red than anything else, in person. The photo doesn't show that very well.

⁵ Based just on what traits get me most excited, I think I'm ultimately breeding toward an Anthurium with very large, dark, glossy arrowhead-shaped leaves, large, dark purple standard spathes, non-matching spadix (color to be determined), and dark brown new growth. Not that that's a conscious goal exactly, though now that I'm imagining it, it does seem pretty appealing. So.

Anthurium no. 0275 "Yvette Horizon"

Yvette has surprised me this winter / spring. She'd bloomed once before, a year ago, and while that bloom was nice enough --

-- it was still only a pink / pink, and didn't stand out from the other pink / pinks, so I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It tried to produce a second bud as the first bloom was dying, but that bud fell victim to The Great Droppening, when lots of plants threw buds at the same time, likely to protest being sprayed with white oil.^{1, 2}

But then this February, a new bud started to form, and I got interested in it when I noticed how large it was getting. Not long before the spathe started to open, an odd kink toward the bottom of the bud indicated that something was not quite right,

and then the bud actually did open, and it was an intense highlighter pink, as well as being bigger than most of the other seedlings' blooms, but that one corner really was screwed up so the whole thing was sort of a letdown anyway.

Worse, I don't know what caused it to do this in the first place. The kink appeared fairly early in the bud's development, so I'm inclined to blame drought stress, which is what I always blame for Anthurium problems I don't understand,³ but this is the first bloom I can recall getting holes in the middle of the spathe, and I know plenty of the other seedlings have been drought-stressed before, so that's clearly not the whole explanation.

Sort of waiting to see what happens with the next bud on Yvette, then. A new bud has just started developing, so by June or so, I should know whether this is something they're all going to do, or something peculiar about that particular moment.

It's worth noting, while I'm talking about Yvette, that she also has very nice leaves --

-- dark green, more or less flat, unblemished, interestingly veined, and so forth. And the spathe color is fading with time a lot less than many of the other pink / pink seedlings' spathes do.⁴ So there's definitely potential here, if future spathes can do a better job of holding themselves together.

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¹ White oil: mix of water, vegetable oil (soybean in my particular case) and an emulsifier (dishwashing liquid), which is sprayed on plants with bug problems in an effort to suffocate the bugs by blocking their breathing pores with oil. In fairness, this really did make a big impact on my thrips problem here, for several months, but it did not actually eradicate them. Also, being an unsaturated oil, it goes rancid when exposed to air, which turns out to be a problem, and a few plants react very badly to being sprayed with oils of any kind, the worst in my experience being Cordyline fruticosa, Euphorbia milii, and Breynia disticha. Ask your horticultural professional if white oil is right for you.
² Though the cause / effect relationship is only speculation, until / unless I try spraying everything with white oil again. Which I'm hesitant to do. See above re: rancidity and not eradicating things.
³ (and you'd be surprised how often that turns out to be the correct answer)
⁴ Both 0241 "Megan Gigaterra" and 0126 "Erin Dirtylondry" get much lighter as they age. This looks better on Erin than on Megan even though they both lighten to about the same color; I haven't been able to put a finger on why that is. Curiously, Yvette's first bloom got very light within a couple months, so it's possible that there's a seasonal or cultural factor to work out too.

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Georgian Franczyk

It'd be hard to get excited about the color pattern here -- faint stripes seem to be pretty common for Masdevallia hybrids -- but the color itself is something I don't think I've seen before. The closest we get is probably Masdevallia Tortoise 'Plum Petite,' from the 2012 show, and this is a lot more saturated than that.

Masdevallia Georgian Franczyk = Masdevallia Midnight Plum x Masdevallia coccinea (Ref.)

The Quad Cities orchid show was last Saturday, and it was, you know, fine. Like an orchid show. I got about 60 sets of pictures, I think, depending on how salvageable a few bad shots turn out to be, so we'll have about one orchid post per week for the rest of 2015, roughly the same frequency as the 2014 posts. Spelling and IDs were more consistent and more often correct than previous years too, so good for the Illowa Orchid Society.

Not a lot of surprises, though there were a few new weird species, which I enjoyed even if they weren't very flashy. Sadly, I only saw one Masdevallia in 2015, and it wasn't even a pretty one. You won't see many Phragmipediums this year either. (They were at the show; I just didn't take pictures of them. Most were the ringleted types, with the long skinny petals that fall down to either side of the bloom, and those rarely photograph well, so I figured this year I just wouldn't even try.)

The fashion story this year seemed to be Black Is The New Black -- seemed like an unusually large number of very dark blooms, including a couple really dark purple Phalaenopsis, a dark purple Vanda, and a few Paphiopedilums that were basically black in places. So we have that to look forward to, beginning in April.

Anthurium no. 0088 "Charlotte F. Babylon"

You may remember Charlotte from last spring, when she grew a bud and then dropped it after working on it for three months. At the beginning of February 2015, I noticed a new bud, and that one developed a lot faster, opening its spathe about a month later.

There's not a lot to say about this; we've seen red / yellow blooms before. I like it fine, but mostly I think that's because I'm happy it's not a pink / pink. Even if it isn't exactly breaking new ground in Anthurium bloom color, it's pretty large, and seems to be holding its own against the thrips pretty well, which is enough to make me happy.

The leaves are pretty much the same story: not groundbreaking, better than the default, good enough.

Is Charlotte a keeper? I'm not sure yet. I certainly have a lot of choices, when it comes to the red / yellows,¹ and I've already moved four of those² up to 6-inch pots,³ so I certainly don't have to keep her around, but the red / yellows also tend to age better -- a lot of the pink / pinks get lighter over time, whereas the red / yellows tend to stay more or less the same color -- so I'm at least tempted to keep her around. We'll see.

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¹ (0034 "Alaska Thunderfuck," 0058 "Betty Larsony," 0059 "Bijoux Tuit," 0063 "Audrey Quest," 0076 "Bob Humbug," 0088 "Charlotte F. Babylon," 0125 "Anya Wei," 0179 "Katie Boundary," 0223 "Patty Cake," 0245 "Sawyer Ad," 0257 "Summer Bederth-Enuthers," 0280 "Jujubee," and 0282 "Dave Trading.")
² (0059 "Bijoux Tuit," 0076 "Bob Humbug," 0245 "Sawyer Ad," 0282 "Dave Trading")
³ Getting moved to a 6-inch pot is more or less my way of saying to a seedling, good job, you get to stay. At the moment, there are only 29 named seedlings in 6-inch pots, and unless / until I can sell some more of my non-Anthuriums, I only have room for one or two more, so competition is pretty intense. If 0330 "Faye Quinette," the one with the brown bud, winds up looking at all pleasant, she's probably going to get a 6-inch pot, but there aren't any other seedlings that are obviously in the lead, and I don't know how much longer Faye is going to take. It seems like she's been working on this one bloom forever. (In reality, it's only been since late January, not even two months yet.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 099

The other recent Schlumbergera bloom is prettier, I think, than seedling 111A "Morning Sun." We already knew that I'm kind of a sucker for this orange-and-pink combination.

Seventeen name possibilities this time, but it was easier to rule them out than it was for 111A. Combine only caught my attention because I just finished playing Half-Life 2 a little bit ago;¹ it otherwise makes no sense for this. Bells and Angels is an interesting image, but the name is too long and has too little to do with anything. Tabletop isn't even an interesting picture, much less word. Elvis Special just doesn't seem like a flower name. A flower named Koala should really be gray, or gray and black, not orange and pink. Aerial is kind of a neat picture, but the name leaves me cold. Girls' Weekend seemed briefly interesting, but then the moment passed and I couldn't figure out what it was about the idea that had appealed to me in the first place.

Sunset Mandala, Maine Sunrise, and Other Sun(s) are all perfectly reasonable names, but I just named a seedling after the Sun.

The photo for Roman Candle doesn't even contain a Roman candle, as far as I can tell, but even if it were, when I imagine a Roman candle in my head, it's green, or maybe red. Definitely not orange and pink.

American Biscuit amuses me. I won't go into it here, but "biscuit" means different things in American English and British English. The whole business is fairly complicated, plus changing all the time as cultures exchange ideas, but a good explanation can be found here if you're interested. The photographer seemed to be confused by the KFC ad in the photo ("a scone surely?"), but I'm assuming that the whole U.S./U.K. confusion is why the ad specifies that the photo depicts an American biscuit. None of this is remotely relevant to Schlumbergeras, but I was briefly amused by the idea of calling a Schlumbergera seedling "American Biscuit." And then that stopped being amusing.

Helium-Filled Heart appealed to me when I first saw the photo, but it's also a pretty long name, and there's nothing heart-shaped about the flower. Helium by itself is retained for consideration, though.

So we wind up with five possibilities, the aforementioned Helium, plus these:

I lived in Washington DC, long ago, for a very short time, and although I don't think I technically lived in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, it was my closest Metro stop, so it kind of felt like I lived there. The seedling has nothing to do with Dupont Circle, and neither does the photo, really (aside from, I gather, being taken inside some building in the neighborhood), but I don't know. Maybe?

Potential Energy is also a bit of a stretch, when it comes to seedling-naming, but there's something sort of energetic about the colors, and it at least doesn't seem like a ridiculous thing to name a seedling.

Dessert Room appeals mostly because I like the idea of having a house so large that there's a dedicated room solely for eating dessert, sort of the way some of the obscenely wealthy have rooms dedicated to gift-wrapping. Except that having a dessert room seems more practical, because one eats dessert once or twice a day, and how often do you really need to wrap gifts? The connection to the flower is tenuous, though the colors seem sort of fruity and sweet, and I'm sure I've seen desserts that color before.

Barcade is another idea that I can't believe never caught on. An arcade full of games that you can play while getting drunk? Yes please! I assume it never caught on because, when arcades were a common thing, video games were perceived as being for kids too young to drink, and now arcades are uncommon because the home video gaming market has removed the need for people to leave their home to play.²

Alas, Barcade is an ugly word. Further, my mental spell-check keeps wanting to correct it to "brocade"³ (the actual spell-check wants to correct it to "barricade"), so it's out.

My memories of Dupont Circle are mainly in gray, white, and brown, because I was there from November to January. Even during warmer times of the year, I doubt there's a lot of orange.⁴ Not that the other options are particularly color-appropriate either, but this seems especially bad.

No particular reason to go against Potential Energy or Helium that I can think of, but the more I ponder, the more I like Dessert Room. So that's what I'm going with.

We'll have to see what happens with the other Schlumbergera seedlings; Schlumbergera 091 and 082 definitely have buds developing at the moment, and 113 might (hard to tell at this point -- very very new buds look an awful lot like new stem segments), so there might be a few more yet to see and name. Several seedlings are trying to rebloom,⁵ too, which I probably won't post about unless the new blooms are obviously different from what's come before, but rest assured that I'm keeping track of which ones bloom well and will let you know about that when it's time to try to sell them. The first set of cuttings I took are beginning to produce new stem segments now, so it shouldn't be too much longer before I know which will be available.

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¹ The multidimensional alliance of alien species which is trying to take over the Earth and blah blah blah. The game is, of course, wonderful, which if you're the sort of person who cares about stuff like this, you probably already know it's wonderful, because I'm ten and a half years late to the Half-Life 2 party.
² Though there are a few arcades still operating, plus hybrid establishments like Dave & Buster's, which combine a bar, restaurant, and arcade. I guess Dave & Buster's is doing well enough, but there are no Iowa locations, and even if there were, their website makes those locations look loud and full of assholes. So no thank you.
³ Perhaps a more appropriate name for places like Dave & Buster's, in the arcade-full-of-bros sense. Not so much in the fabric-containing-raised-designs sense.
⁴ Pink, maybe: it was and is a gay neighborhood.
⁵ 022A "Sad Tomato," #023A "Stoked," #024 "Safety Vest"/"Bryce Canyon," #026A "Brick Wall," #027A "Kiln," #028 "Phil Collen"/"Neon Like," #030A "Diwali," and #031 "Baby Carrots," at the moment.

Pretty pictures: Cymbidium Yowie Flame

There never seem to be very many Cymbidiums at the orchid show.

According to the blog's Cymbidium tag, I got zero photos of Cymbidiums at the 2010 orchid show, one in 2011, one in 2012, one in 2013, and now the one in 2014.

What would explain this? Are they just uncool? (If so, why?) Is it hard to get them to bloom in March? 'Cause you can't tell me they're not pretty. And I know they're not significantly more expensive than some of the other kinds of orchids, or harder to find -- I've occasionally seen them for sale in stores around here. So why aren't they better represented at the show?

Cymbidium Yowie Flame = Cymbidium Tapestry x Cymbidium Sensation (Ref.)