Pretty picture: Trichosalpinx orbicularis

Well. "Pretty" picture is stretching the truth a bit.

I like the leaves, though.

Random plant event: Ctenanthe burle-marxii

For a plant in the Marantaceae, Ctenanthe burle-marxii has been pretty easy to grow, and I've managed to propagate it a number of times (by divisions), and it's been relatively unbothered by pests. Apparently the Ctenanthes are just like that -- this post, which mainly talks about growing them outdoors, says they're pretty easy-going.

Also, if you're wondering: the "c" is silent. Dave's Garden says it's pronounced "tee-NANTH-ee;" I've been pronouncing it "ten-ANTH-ee." Potato, pohtato, maybe.

No Ctenanthes are commonly-sold around here; besides C. burle-marxii, the only one I've ever seen for sale was C. lubbersiana, and it's never at a size or price I could afford to get.¹ C. burle-marxii itself was never actually for sale at the ex-job while I was there; my recollection is that shortly after I got Nina, I noticed a tiny, two- or three-leaved plant growing out of the soil on the greenhouse floor, and took it home for her terrarium, which it eventually took over, though I don't have any great photos of how much it took over. I was assuming when I brought it home that it was a Calathea, and then I thought Stromanthe for quite a while; it took a long time to figure out that it was a Ctenanthe.

In any case. The point being that it hasn't been a particularly difficult plant for me, but it's also never gotten me terribly excited, either -- it does its thing, and gets bigger, and it's handsome, and I like it, but it's never done anything new. Until now.

Which, this isn't especially pretty either, but it's the first time I've seen one bloom, so it's, like, exciting on a technicality, or something. And it's blooming a lot. This photo only shows three inflorescences, but that's because I couldn't fit the whole plant in the photo and still have the background. Really it's at least six:

Anyway.

I should maybe mention at this point that although I'm not quite back yet, I'm expecting to slowly ramp back up to a more frequent posting schedule in the next few weeks. (I hope you want to see some pink Anthuriums!) At some point relatively soon, we'll see round 2 of the Schlumbergera seedlings for sale as well, if there's anyone interested in those.

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¹ I've seen them at Lowe's before, but in like 10-inch pots, which is too big. The ex-job had a couple once, also in huge pots, and for like $40, and I asked if they'd sell me a cutting cheap and they said yes but then it never actually happened for some reason. Which is probably just as well, 'cause it's not like I need any more plants that get huge.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon

So at the show this year there were two specimens of I-Hsin Balloon, and just like last year, I loved them both. Something about this particular hybrid really does it for me.

I was also pleased to note that the name on both was "Balloon," though I sort of knew before I even got to the show that that was likely how the tags would read.¹ A couple days prior to the show, I got this comment on the 2014 post from "Marcia:"

I own this plant and I registered it exactly as Hausermann's label stated...it will be in the 2015 show at Wallace's...sure like to know who you are.

Which I'm not really that interested in whose fault it is that it was tagged incorrectly, since it's easy enough to see how it could have gotten changed. It's easy to drop (or add) a double letter. A smudge or piece of dirt could turn a lowercase "n" into a lowercase "r" easily enough, and while in most contexts "ballor" would be a nonsense word, it's not like "I-Hsin" is everyday English, either.

So anyway. I would like it if sellers, in particular, would treat plant names as important enough to double-check. I feel like the ID is part of the product, and if you can't be bothered to proofread your tags before you send plants out, that says something about what else you might be skipping over on your way to make a buck.² I can't say that I've ever declined to buy something I wanted solely because of mistagging, but it does get me to look more closely at a plant, and often if the ID is wrong, there's something else wrong with the plant too.

It would be nice, also, if exhibitors in orchid shows would also double-check names, since orchid shows are a big place where the general public gets exposed to orchids, and if they see a plant they like and want one just like it, it's helpful to be able to search for it by its actual name. Plus, you would think that if awards are being given out, it'd be extra important to make sure that you have the names right. If you can get a blue ribbon for growing the biggest, most colorful, most beautiful Neostylis anyone's ever seen, but it's actually a Laeliocattleya, clearly something's gone wrong with the show.³ But Marcia says that was how the tag had it, and I don't doubt her, so whatever. It'd be nice, but it's not that big of a deal.

In any case. I left Marcia a comment back at last year's post, but she didn't respond, so we still haven't met. We could have -- at the show, I knew who she was,⁴ and I could have gone up and introduced myself -- but 1) I wasn't feeling especially social that day to begin with, no reason, just sometimes I wake up not wanting to deal with people and that was one of those days,⁵ 2) call me paranoid, but "sure like to know who you are" sounds a little ominous if you read it the right way,⁶ and 3) when I first saw her, she had kind of a sour expression on her face, which is understandable in that by this point the show had been going on for several hours already, and I imagine it's kind of exhausting to be part of an orchid show even if you're an extrovert and you like being in orchid shows. I mean, I assume she's probably a perfectly nice person and she would almost certainly not have gotten me banned for life from the orchid show or framed me for murder or anything like that. But given 1) and 2), I had pretty much decided that I wasn't going to say hi anyway, so it didn't take much of a push to make that decision final. Next year, maybe.

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon = Phalaenopsis Sogo Lisa x Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Gem (Ref.)

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¹ Still with the "Dtps.," though, which is no longer accurate. Though given that botanical genus names have been in upheaval for several years now, and occasionally revert to their original designations, I can understand not leaping to correct it to "Phal." immediately.
² Though even there, things will happen that are out of your control. I've complained a number of times about the Exotic Angel brand (started by Hermann Engelmann Greenhouses -- apparently in order to sell plants you have to have a double-N in your name somewhere, which is why I'm thinking about changing my name to Mr. Subjunnctive -- but Engelmann was purchased last year by Costa Farms) being terrible at getting IDs correct, and I think mostly that's because Engelmann didn't give a shit, but, it's also the case that customers will switch tags around, with or without malicious intent, or that a tray of plants will get knocked over and dumped out on the floor on the day when the person who knows what everything isn't scheduled to work.
It remains to be seen whether Costa will do a better job with the tagging than Engelmann did, though I am not optimistic, considering my previous interactions with them: see the Strelitzia incident or the more recent Anthurium incident.
³ Not that anyone would make that particular error: I'm using a deliberately ridiculous example. But you see the sort of thing I mean.
⁴ (Name tag, plus looking for Marcias on the Illowa Orchid Society's web page to confirm a surname)
⁵ Those days are becoming more frequent as I get older, a troubling trend when extrapolated into my 80s. I blame Facebook.
Not because Facebook necessarily has anything to do with it; I'm just trying out this thing where when I don't like something, I hold Facebook responsible for it. You'd be surprised how often Facebook-blaming makes sense.
Though now that I think about it, by the time I'm in my 80s, I will likely be dead, living in a radioactive hellscape searching through debris for small rodents to eat, or in a robot-staffed nursing home, and in all of those situations, being antisocial is unlikely to be my worst problem.
⁶ "Dr. ChaosDoom, stroking the Siamese cat in his lap and smirking at the video monitor, said 'I'd sure like to know who you are' to Captain HeroGuy. Outside, thunder crashed."
This reading is maybe even more understandable if you imagine that Captain HeroGuy had been complaining, a lot, and in public, about Dr. ChaosDoom's 2011 and 2012 world-domination plans being really poorly-spelled and factually inaccurate.

Pretty picture: Epidendrum stamfordianum

Didn't mean to just stop posting like that, but I've been busy, and the plants aren't doing anything especially noteworthy anyway. There have been new Anthurium blooms, and lots of new Anthurium buds which will eventually become blooms, but they've all fallen into the same red/yellow, red/white, and pink/pink categories I've shown you several times before, and it's hard to feel any urgency about making a blog post to show them off. I have a few ideas for longer posts still, but never seem to find any time to work on them, so . . . probably not going to be posting a lot in the near future either.

But we'll always have the orchid-show orchids. This particular one photographed badly -- for every shot I took, the camera made a different guess about where to focus, all of them wrong -- and it might not have been that interesting even if it had photographed better. Epidendrums seem to concentrate more on quantity of flowers, rather than quality. But the colors at least coordinate well with the color scheme on the blog at the moment, and the photo looks a little better at full-size. (Which possibly means that I should have cropped it differently.)

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum sukhakulii x (Black Cherry x sukhakulii)

A lot of the orchids in this year's show were pleasant enough, but not new, or new but not all that pleasant. The more years I go, the harder I am to surprise, I guess. In any case, this was probably as close as I got to a jaw-drop moment, just 'cause it's so dark:

Which, it's not that it's so pretty, exactly. I just didn't know that paphs could do this. (Not saying it's not pretty, though. When a plant's unusual enough, though, pretty is sometimes sort of beside the point, and I think that's what's going on here.)

Paphiopedilum Black Cherry = Paphiopedilum Fremont Peak x Paphiopedilum Red Maude (Ref.)

Paphiopedilum sakhakulii is pretty colorful, but lumpy; an image search says that Black Cherry is smooth and very dark red-purple. (It's really nice, actually. Like, if I could grow paphs, Black Cherry would be a paph I would want to grow.¹) This plant seems to take more after Black Cherry, despite being 3/4 P. sakhakulii.

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¹ Please don't tell me oh but you can! They're really easy! -- it's been tried. It didn't go well. I can only give plants the care that I can give, and that does not currently include care suitable for paphs. Perhaps someday my circumstances will be different -- I'll have a greenhouse, or fewer plants, or something -- and then we'll be open to trying the genus again, but for right now, even though I technically could, in practical terms, at the present moment, I can't.

Question for the Hive Mind: Trifolium pratense

There's nothing new going on here at the moment -- believe me, I tried to find something better than this to talk about¹ -- so I thought this might be a good moment to ask a question that's been rattling around in my head for a couple years instead.

Why do people not deliberately cultivate red clover (Trifolium pratense) in their gardens?

I mean, yeah, I get that it's weedy and would tend to take over, given enough time, but gardeners overlook that in other plants, so it doesn't seem like that would be enough to disqualify it. And rabbits like it, but again -- that doesn't stop anybody from growing lots of other stuff. And it has good points. The flowers are pleasant, and numerous,

and even mildly fragrant. Bees love them. They improve the nitrogen content of the soil. There's a medicinal use for them.² The plants quickly reach a mature height of about two feet tall and then stop getting taller, which seems to me like it should be a good quality for an outdoor plant.

So I'm just wondering. Last year, I let a couple grow in the Portulaca bed, and that seemed to work out fine for me,³ so I'm just wondering why nobody else does it. I assume there's a reason. Or several.

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¹ There have been a few new first-time Anthurium blooms (0335 "Donna Fanuday," 0346 "Lois Carmen DiNominatre," 0360 "Heidi Gosique," 0373 "Shangela Laquifa Wadley," 0597 "Raven"), but Shangela is hideous, Donna, Lois, and Raven aren't fully opened up yet and have so far photographed terribly, and Heidi is basically a repeat of 0357 "Rhea Litré." I mean, I'll get to all of them eventually, I'm sure, but as a group they're kind of underwhelming. And in any case I'll have to sort through a bunch of photos first.
² I'm not generally that impressed by claims that a garden plant can be used medicinally, because I really kinda feel like people are better off not gambling with self-administering unproven chemicals they don't really understand, at an unknown dose, with no supervision by a medical professional, but some people consider it a point in a plant's favor if it's "useful" for something, so that seems like it should be a point in favor of deliberate cultivation.
³ Didn't this year, because they were getting so big so early that they threatened to shade out the reseeded Portulaca grandiflora before it even had a chance to germinate. And yes, that means I've had a lot of seedlings to pull up. But the Trifolium is a much easier weed problem to deal with than, say, dandelions, maple tree seedlings, Oxalis, lamb's quarters, or crabgrass. If not for the Portulaca, I would have been perfectly happy to let the clover have the bed this year.

Pretty picture: Isochilus linearis

I panicked for a second yesterday morning. Oh, crap, I need to do a blog post for tomorrow and I don't think the plants are doing anything, what can I write a post about? And then I looked at the queued posts and saw that there was an orchid post scheduled, so I didn't have to come up with something, and was relieved.

And then I looked at the photos, and was concerned again.

The notes I wrote down in March say that I found this one somehow "friendly and fun-seeming" despite its odd appearance. (It must be true -- I mean, I wrote it down and everything -- but I can't say these qualities translated to the photos very well.) I went on to note that the foliage was a lot stiffer than you'd think from looking at it, which I do remember (one doesn't expect to be stabbed by an orchid), so "friendly" seems even less appropriate, but whatever.

Isochilus is a new genus for the blog; I. linearis seems to be the main species in cultivation, though I did find some I. aurantiacus (orange flowers) references around as well. I. linearis is, I think, not supposed to be as yellow as the plant in the photos, either -- most of the photos that come up in an image search show green leaves. Some of that could be my camera's fault, though I remember thinking at the show that the leaves were pretty brown, so it can't all be the camera.

Random plant event: Neofinetia falcata "Amami Furan"

It's getting to the point where I can't even say I'm unable to grow orchids anymore.

Let me first admit that Neofinetia falcata "Amami Furan" is not especially interesting to look at.

That's it. Solid white flowers, stiff dull olive-green leaves, orchid-type roots. The most interesting thing about its appearance is the long spurs on the flowers:

Which don't seem that interesting either, granted, but the way the plant suddenly grows them is sort of neat. The earliest stages of bud only have short, stubby spurs:

And then all of a sudden they start shooting out the back of the flowers. Which is interesting to watch, but not, like, beautiful.

However, Neofinetia does have one non-obvious feature that totally makes up for the plain appearance. You know it doesn't look like much, but how does it . . . sound?

(No. I'm kidding. It's fragrant, not noisy. I just wanted to surprise you for a second.)

And what a fragrance! It changes a little bit from hour to hour and day to day, but it usually smells like vanilla, a Gardenia, or something in between the two. It's not overpowering like the Hoya lacunosa:¹ I can only detect it if I'm within 3 or 4 feet (0.9 to 1.2 m) of the plant, and even then only if the air currents are exactly right. It's also only fragrant at night, after about 6 or 7 PM.

I don't know how long to expect the blooms to last; they opened up on June 3, and aren't wilting or browning as I write this on June 12, so there's nine days right there. I'd be surprised if they lasted a month, but then, I haven't had this happen before, and couldn't locate any information about bloom lifespan on-line, so for all I know, they last forever. (Don't spoil it for me if you know.)

Even if they are set to die pretty soon, the plant has produced a second spike, about 2 or 3 weeks behind the first --

-- so that'll extend the life of the scent a bit further.

I'd given up on ever growing an actual Gardenia indoors a long time ago, and had mostly given up on growing orchids since an unhappy Oncidium / Sophrolaeliocattleya / Potinara / Dendrobium experience in 2011 and 2012, so having an orchid bloom for me for the first time,² and having it smell more or less like a Gardenia, is . . . well, "miraculous" would be a bit strong, but it's still two impossible things happening at the same time. So whatever the word is for two impossible things happening at the same time. Which I suppose may as well be "miraculous."

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¹ The Hoya is not actually that bad, though when multiple peduncles are in bloom simultaneously, the smell does get pretty strong.
Recently, with the Neofinetia smelling like a gardenia in the kitchen, the Hoya smelling like a florist's display case in my office, and the Murraya paniculata smelling like musky orange blossoms in the plant room, the house has had a pretty complicated scent landscape lately. A week ago, it was even more complicated than that, as Sheba chose to roll in some fresh shit (her own? neighbor cat?) she found in the yard and got a thick streak of it on her back, which necessitated an emergency bath.
² I ought to acknowledge here that I received this plant for free, in a plant trade in May 2012, and that I had specifically encouraged the sender not to send it to me, on the grounds that sending it would be a waste of an orchid, as I can't grow orchids. And they sent it anyway (potted in the softest, fluffiest sphagnum moss you have ever seen -- I wanted to, like, sleep in it), and here we are, three years later.