Anthurium no. 0564 "Shannel"

From time to time, I get comments on posts, or e-mails, to the effect of, geez, your post today makes it sound like you must be [miserable, overwhelmed, depressed, stressed-out], what with all the [scale, thrips, fungus, ugly blooms, other disappointments or catastrophes]. I'm usually surprised to hear this, because however much complaining I may have been doing, I wasn't actually miserable. Then I wind up preoccupied for an afternoon: am I being too negative? Am I depressed and just haven't realized it yet? Etc.

It's also the case, a bit less often, that people will comment to the effect of wow, your place must be beautiful, what with all the flowers and stuff, I bet it's just AMAZING to live there. Which is also surprising to hear, because, you know, to me it's just my house, and the plants are just things in the house, like walls and doors and plumbing. I mean, sure, I recognize that this house is different from other houses I could be living in, and I could hardly forget about how much time it takes to maintain them all, but I'm not blown away by how amazing it is to have a house full of plants when other people don't, any more than I'm periodically blown away by how amazing it to have a toilet when other people don't, or stopped in my tracks by the overwhelming beauty of the front door or something. Toilets, front doors, and shelves filled with plants are all utterly ordinary things in my world, and it makes no sense to think that they might not be there.

The point being that what you, as a reader, might imagine a house full of Anthurium¹ seedlings to feel like is different from how it actually feels to me. I do still get depressed, frustrated, jubilant, or excited about things that happen here, of course, but the threshold for what's needed to trigger a feeling is really high. At least some of this is due to something I think of as the "Texas Effect."

The Texas Effect is so named because the first place I remember hearing it articulated was in a column by the late, wonderful Molly Ivins. I don't have the exact quote on hand, but it was something to the effect of Texas being so big that it was not at all unusual for the state to be both flooding and in a drought at the same time. In the same sort of way, it's perfectly normal for my plant collection to leave me despondent and jubilant at the same time. There are occasional moments when most of the news has been consistently good for a week, and some seedling or another has done something particularly surprising and wonderful, and I think I'm finally on top of the scale situation (and the other situations) and I'm fairly happy; there are more frequent moments when most of the news is consistently bad for a week, and all the blooms are coming up pink / pink,² and I truly am mildly depressed and discouraged over how I'm never going to get rid of the scale (and the other things). But my moods are mostly, if not completely, divorced from what the Anthurium seedlings are doing. Seeing scale on one plant is nothing. Even throwing out one plant is nothing. Having one nice new bloom is very nearly nothing.

With that for context, let's look at Shannel.³

Shannel is not a keeper.

The bloom started out tiny, and ragged around the base. It's not an interesting color. There are thrips scars.

As it ages, the spathe flips backwards, curls under in the ugliest possible way, and tears itself some more.

The internodal distance is long enough to make it awkward to move around, as well⁴ --

-- though the leaves are fine, maybe even pleasant, individually.

The most attractive things about Shannel, actually, are her buds. I don't ordinarily bother to provide photos of the buds in these posts, because . . . well, because you can usually guess what the buds look like pretty easily from looking at the finished bloom. Red blooms have red buds. Pink blooms have pink buds. Big blooms had big buds. Sometimes the color might change (at least one pink bloom, 0040 "Ivy Winters," consistently had orange buds, and I've seen an orange bloom with pink buds very recently), but had you asked me what makes for an attractive bud, say, six months ago, I wouldn't have even really understood the premise that buds can be attractive. But of course they can.

And if Shannel's spathes only stayed white at the bottom, with a red tip (like some of the A. kamemotoanum hybrids I mentioned a while back), I'd be excited about keeping her around, but sadly, that's not the case.

So, she's most likely a failure, though she was exempt from round 1 of the (just-completed) Anthurium-seedling purge because of the developing flower. I would not bet on her to survive round 2.

The point, though, is that this -- crappy bloom, throwing out seedlings -- is balanced out by other blooms that look good and are doing interesting things. I guess it's about time I showed you another one of those then, right? So I'll do that on Wednesday.

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¹ and Schlumbergera! Let's not forget about the Schlumbergeras! (To be perfectly honest, I think I may actually like the Schlumbergeras better than the Anthuriums. They're at least a hell of a lot less trouble.)
² I shouldn't complain about the pink / pinks as much as I do; they're perfectly nice on their own terms, and it's totally a case of familiarity breeding contempt. They're not even all bad: 0241 "Megan Gigaterra" is a pretty nice pink / pink, for example. I just get bored.
Also, a lot of the smaller and more thrips-ravaged plants in fact are pink / pink, which is possibly making me like the bigger, cleaner blooms less by association somehow.
³ (pronounced the same as "Chanel," FYI)
⁴ Shannel was divided from 0050 "Roxxxy Andrews," and so is either identical to, or siblings with, Roxxxy. I should probably say was identical to or siblings with: Roxxxy was thrown out in the first round of the 4-inch seedling purge, a week and a half ago. Why? Almost entirely because Roxxxy had absurdly long internodes. (And then also because she was old and had not yet bloomed, but that was a prerequisite for getting on the list in the first place and so doesn't count.) So are we surprised by Shannel's internodal length? No. We are not.

Pretty picture: Rhyncattleanthe Kurt Hausermann 'Friar's Cove'

I was worried, when I scheduled this post, that maybe late August was the wrong time of year to be looking at a flower with such hot colors: usually by August I'm so sick of the heat that I instinctively gravitate toward anything blue, cold, or dark. But this summer, like last summer, hasn't been that bad so far. As I write this on August 18, the National Weather Service is predicting a high temperature of 69F/21C for Wednesday the 19th. We had one pretty bad week in July -- there is always at least one bad week in July -- but other than that, it hasn't been particularly hot, so I'm not really sick of the heat.

Some of the other summer-related activities, yes. I'm definitely sick of weeding (and stopped doing it altogether about three or four weeks ago). Japanese beetles can kiss my ass (though not literally because that would be horrible). Haven't yet been stung by a wasp, but they are everywhere,¹ and I'm tired of having to watch for them. Not sick of summer, but definitely ready for fall.

But so anyway. The tag on this one said Brassolaeliocattleya; it's a Rhyncattleanthe according to the orchid register.

Rhyncattleanthe Kurt Hausermann 'Friar's Cove' = Cattlianthe Ken Battle x Rhyncholaeliocattleya Susan Stromsland (Ref.)

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¹ They seem to be fond of the Cannas, though I haven't yet determined whether they're getting something directly from the Cannas, like water or nectar, or hunting the various insects that do get something directly from the Cannas. Whatever the explanation, the wasps do nothing to help with the Japanese beetles, which is the only thing I can think of that might make up for the increased sting risk.

Anthurium no. 0288 "Cookie Buffet"

I've let myself get way behind on the blog posts lately, because I've been working on a special, complicated photo for like a week and a half, which has required me to take and sort a bunch more pictures than usual.¹ I've also been burning a lot of time outside, catching and drowning Japanese beetles (who discovered the Cannas about a month and a half ago and have been merrily shredding them since), and a couple days went toward beginning a purge of the 4-inch Anthuriums too, which is still technically in progress as I write this (18 August), but I haven't done any purging for a while, because it's very time-consuming, sitting there wringing my hands about whether or not to get rid of a seedling.²

The upshot being that I don't have a lot of time to devote to this particular post and seedling, because so much else has been going on.

Fortunately, Cookie's not the sort of seedling that would inspire a lot of excited chatter anyway. She's a middle-of-the-pack pink / pink:

The bloom wasn't bad when it first opened, as you can see, but it hasn't aged especially well. (I don't have a recent photo, but just trust me.) Cookie also lives in a bad neighborhood: her flat was ground zero for the scale-infested Gasteraloe leaf, a few months back, which means that although I've thrown some imidacloprid around, I'm still finding scale nearby. None actually on Cookie, as far as I can remember, but it's only a matter of time.

Cookie's internodal distance is also a lot longer than I would like. It's not bad enough to condemn her to the wastebasket necessarily, but she's floppy enough to be annoying to water or photograph.

The best thing she's got going for her, really, is her foliage. It's not amazing, but the leaves are relatively unblemished, and they're broad and flat, which I like. I doubt this will be enough to get her moved up to a 6-inch pot; it likely won't even be enough to keep her out of the trash can. As I keep reminding myself, I'm not going to breed awesome, wonderful Anthuriums by holding on to every single seedling forever. Can't make an omelet, gotta know when to hold 'em, etc.

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¹ The worst part of which is that if everything goes according to plan, y'all won't even get to see it until the end of September.
² (Even if the plant looks awful, has never even tried to bloom, and is nearly four years old, I still have to really think about whether or not to keep it.)

Anthurium no. 0335 "Donna Fanuday"

0335 "Donna Fanuday" has an odd thing in common with 0597 "Raven," from last Friday's post: they both produced first blooms with extremely short peduncles.¹ Like Raven, Donna was less extreme about this with her second bloom, but it's still weird. (From time to time, I fantasize about having English-speaking Anthurium seedlings who I could just ask about these things: WHY DID THIS SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA TO YOU ANSWER ME RIGHT NOW YOUNG LADY. But you knew that.)

I really wanted to like Donna, because she's large² and relatively unscathed by the thrips and has decent leaves,

but the bloom is seriously underwhelming. Even if it weren't shorter than the leaves, it's not an interesting color (red/yellow), and the spathe is so badly reflexed that it's difficult to photograph. Here are the best pictures of the first bloom:

And the second, shortly after it opened, before it had had time to raise the spadix and flip back the spathe:

We've seen worse before, and surely will again, and I'm not willing to say that Donna is definitely, for sure, doomed to the wastebasket. But I can't say for sure that she's safe, either.

The silver lining to this sort of thing is that it's a chance to learn something about what makes Anthuriums tick. Had I stuck to the varieties available in the garden centers, I'd never have seen a plant with short peduncles; I'd never even have known that that was a possibility.³ If you really want to get to know a plant and find out what it's capable of doing, breed a few hundred of them. If you're paying attention at all, you'll see something you've never seen before.

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¹ Peduncle: the modified petiole that supports an Anthurium inflorescence. Or we could call it the "stalk," I guess.
² I know small, compact plants are desirable, especially because they make it possible for me to keep more individual plants in the same amount of space, but . . . I like big leaves and I cannot lie.
³ Though I might have suspected. Of the dozen or so species genetically compatible with A. andreanum, at least two, A. kamemotoanum and A. hoffmannii, naturally produce inflorescences on very short stalks. I don't know how widespread the genes of either plant might be in modern Anthurium hybrids, though I get the impression that they're pretty well-represented.
It's not clear from reading the Anthurium-breeding book exactly what qualities A. hoffmannii might be used to impart to offspring, though it's mentioned as having contributed to the "tulip-type" hybrids, as is A. kamemotoanum. Hoffmannii also appears to be useful for producing green spathes, though A. nymphaeifolium and A. ravenii are also green, and A. formosum and A. roseospadix are sometimes very slightly green, so there are probably routes to get to a green spathe that don't involve going through Hoffmanniitown. Not that a lot of people are trying to make green-spathed Anthurium hybrids in the first place.
A. kamemotoanum is a really interesting species, and I was surprised to find that I couldn't locate a photo of it online -- the book has one photo of the blooms, plus an illustration of the whole plant on the dust jacket (low-quality image available at Amazon), and that is all. Not only is A. kamemotoanum unusual in having short peduncles, but the spathe flops over the top of the spadix a bit, giving the inflorescence something of a "hood," the two sides of the spathe are different colors (a dark red or purple-red "front," next to the spadix, and a green or green-streaked-with-red "back"), and some of the kamemotoanum hybrids shown in the book have a different color near the top of the spathe (the "acumen," if you're into terminology) than they do at the bottom. The most striking hybrid, a cross with A. lindenianum and A. kamemotoanum, is white or light pink near the base, sort of streaky pink and dark purple-red in the middle, and dark purple-red at the acumen. (It's on p. 39, for those of you following along in your own books at home.)
I don't know anything about the heritability of short peduncles, or the ancestry of my founding varieties of Anthurium, so I have no idea whether Donna's peduncles are a genetic throwback to hoffmannii, kamemotoanum, or both, but it's possible.

Pretty picture: Vanda Rachadaporn

I just straight-up hate this one. That color! Ugh.

I'd blame it on the photography, except that I remember being unimpressed in person as well. It's different, and, well, respect for being different, but this does not do it for me at all.

Vanda Rachadaporn = Vanda Thananchai x Vanda denisoniana (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0597 "Raven"

For the most part, growing my own Anthuriums from seed has been an exercise in spending a lot of time and money to get things I basically already had. I mean, there are subtle differences, none of the seedlings is exactly like one of the original named varieties, and every once in a while I get something different enough to be interesting, but it feels like I reinvent the wheel quite a bit. 0597 "Raven," for example, is awfully similar to my NOID pink.¹

Anthurium 0597 "Raven."

The NOID pink.
That's also a really bad match between name and color -- obviously a "Raven" Anthurium would need to be black. At worst, it should be some very very dark color, like maroon, plum, or brown. Something at least a little gothy. Even red would be more name-appropriate. *shrug* But what're you gonna do.

Reinventing the wheel is, I suspect, something plant breeders wind up doing a lot. Might be a bigger problem with some types of plants than with others -- plants that don't vary tremendously in the first place, like Spathiphyllum, and plants that self-pollinate, like Coffea arabica, both produce extremely similar offspring; I have no idea how breeders manage to choose one plant over another in those cases. On the opposite end, all my Schlumbergeras so far have been, I think, from the same cross, and although they were all pretty similar to one another, only a couple were at all like either of the suspected parents.² So far, for me, Anthuriums have been in between these two extremes. A quick look at photos of the 97 seedlings to have produced completed blooms to date shows me that about 5 out of every 6 Anthurium seedlings strongly resembles one of the parent varieties, usually 'Gemini' or the NOID pink.^{3, 4}

One reason to get into plant-breeding in the first place is because it's a good way to get lots and lots of some particular kind of plant you like. If you have more money than time, you just buy lots of that kind of plant; if you have more time than money, you can breed. So I'm probably less disappointed than you might imagine, when I get a plant like this. I mean, at least Raven has nice leaves; the thrips are leaving them alone so far.

And it's produced two blooms in a short period of time, which is also promising, though the first bloom didn't look much like the second.

The first bloom, in late June.

So is Raven a keeper? At least provisionally: as long as she can keep the thrips and scale at bay, and as long as she produces blooms more like the second one than like the first one, sure, she can hang around.

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¹ Not that the photos are a particularly good illustration of that, alas. I discovered while I was writing this post that I have very few usable photos of the NOID pink, and no good ones. This is going to be a tough omission to correct, too, since the NOID pink has been really reluctant to bloom for the last couple years.
² 055B "Fort Venus" was pretty close to 'Caribbean Dancer," and 061A "Leather Fairy" was similar to the NOID peach, though in both cases, there was enough space between parent and child that I think I could tell them apart if I needed to.
³ 'Gemini' was the seed parent for like 40% of the seedlings, and its close relative 'White Gemini' is the seed parent for another 40% or so, so it totally makes sense for a lot of the seedlings to look like 'Gemini.' I'm actually kind of surprised that they don't all look like 'Gemini,' to tell you the truth.
The similarity to the NOID pink is harder to explain. I don't think it's actually made that big of a contribution to the gene pool -- it doesn't bloom often -- but it is one of the few parent plants that reliably sheds pollen, so that could be some of it. It's also possible that the NOID pink is just close to the "average" of the plants I've got, that when you cross my parent varieties randomly, pink/pink is just what happens most often, the same way that when you mix lots of different colors of paint together, you're often going to hit some shade of brown or gray.
⁴ And considering that only eight seeds out of a hundred will go on to bloom within three years, and only one in six seedlings will look substantially unlike all the varieties I already have, this means that I have to start 75 seeds to get one interesting bloom within three years. And even then, there's interesting in a good way, and interesting in a bad way.

Anthurium no. 0058 "Betty Larsony"

Betty, Betty, Betty. She was the very first seedling to produce a flower bud, and is still the youngest seedling (14 months) ever to produce a flower bud. And then it took her two and a half years, maybe (?), to produce a flower bud that actually developed and opened. So that's, uh, pretty weird.

Some of the problem is that I had to cut the top off the plant; I don't remember when that was, or why, but that's a pretty substantial setback, and it's not like Anthuriums grow that quickly in the first place. But even then: the first bud never opened, and at least one bud last year (around January 2014) aborted before opening as well. Somewhere in between those two dropped buds, I cut the top off the plant and it grew back from the stump.¹

Two posts from 2014 claim to have photos of a flower from Betty; I decided later that this one was a case of mistaken identity,² and I'm unsure whether the second shows her or not (with 0035 "Alyssa Edwards"), but it strikes me as at least somewhat more likely.

So it's possible that it only took a year to re-bud. Even if that's the case, though, I only got one bloom, and then she was done trying for another year and a half. Two whole blooms in two and a half years is pretty weak. By way of comparison, consider: 0112 "Dottie A. Rebel" produced her first bud in late March 2015, i.e., not quite five months ago, and has already produced at least three blooms (maybe four), plus two unopened buds besides.

I could maybe forgive slow blooming if Betty had anything else going for her, but she's pretty disappointing. (Persistent, granted. But disappointing.) The blooms are average size, in the second most common color.³ They're in the middle of the pack as far as thrips damage, too -- not the worst I've seen, but thrips have definitely visited.

Both the best thing and the worst thing I can think of to say about the foliage is that it is completely adequate: thrips don't bother it much, but it's not an interesting color, size, or texture.

I mean, considering the beheading and all, I think Betty's doing fine, but she's not a keeper. The best thing she had going for her was the early blooming, and it turns out that she can't even do that well enough to be worth keeping.

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¹ Anthuriums will usually resprout when cut back, though they fail to do so just often enough that I hesitate to do it unless I really have no other options.
² I hadn't really developed my system for identifying which plants were in which pictures yet, and I think I either relied on my memory and got it mixed up that way, or I got momentarily confused between 0058 and 0059, wrote down the wrong one, and then perpetuated the error with the blog post.
³ I don't mind red/yellow. Anything's better than pink/pink. But I've seen a lot of red/yellows already:

Top row, L-R: 0026 "Peaches Christ," 0034 "Alaska Thunderfuck," 0059 "Bijoux Tuit," 0063 "Audrey Quest"
Second row: 0076 "Bob Humbug," 0088 "Charlotte F. Babylon," 0125 "Anya Wei," 0179 "Katie Boundary"
Third row: 0223 "Patty Cake," 0238 "Rudy Day," 0243 "Sal Monella," 0245 "Sawyer Ad,"
Bottom row: 0257 "Summer Bederth-Enuthers," 0264 "Trey Lerpark," 0280 "Jujubee," 0282 "Dave Trading"
And that's not even all of them.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane' (?)

Ugh. This mess again. So when we saw this plant previously, in 2012, I was assured in the comments that the correct spelling was "Sargent," which was taken from the name of the pollen parent (Phragmipedium lindleyanum var. sargentianum). But Google disagrees, as does the orchid registry, and while I could ordinarily overlook one or the other of those sources, I find it hard to argue with both of them at once. So we're going with a different spelling this year. Surely one or the other must be correct.

This is also the plant that led to the "Please do not post pictures of my plants unless you ask my permission" weirdness in 2014. At one point, I thought that I'd figured out (from IP addresses and publicly available membership info for the Illowa Orchid Society) who, specifically, had left the message, but after coming up with a guess, I kind of let the matter drop, because I didn't see anything to be gained by trying to track the person down and explain to them that public things are public.

But then other things happened, and I thought, well, maybe it's not who I thought it was, since that person punctuated their comment in a similar way as the "please do not post" person. Also, the plant in this photo was on a table that belonged to someone other than the person who I'd decided had left the "please do not post" note. So maybe "please do not post" and "I own this plant" are the same person.

On the other hand, plants get sold or traded, and I don't have the impression that Phragmipedium S~rg~nt Eric 'Timberlane' is a particularly rare plant; more than one show exhibitor could own one. And ellipsis-only is a maddeningly common Midwestern punctuation style, for reasons I have investigated, but don't expect to ever comprehend fully.¹ So "please do not post" could have been anybody connected with the show at all.

Worst of all, the plant this year was a completely different color than the one from 2012, so it seems to me like one or the other had to have been misidentified. Image search makes me think that the red-orange one from the 2012 picture is the "real" one, but it's also possible that the cross is variable, or that image search is showing me pictures of other S~rg~nt Eric clones, or something like that. One never really knows, with orchids. So: I don't know how to spell it, I don't know who owns it, I have negative personal associations, and I'm not sure it's even the same plant as the 2012 picture.

So you know what? Next time I see this plant at a show, I'm going to keep walking. Or. Um. Either I keep walking, or I'm going to flip the fuck out and start gnawing on the stem, grunting and frothy-mouthed, until someone throws me out of the building. This particular orchid is just too confusing and upsetting. You win, "please do not post" person. Never again will my camera steal this orchid's soul away from you. Phragmipedium S~rg~nt Eric 'Timberlane' is dead to me.

Phragmipedium Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane' = Phragmipedium Eric Young x Phragmipedium sargentianum (Ref.)

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¹ The consensus at MetaFilter seems to be that it's only supposed to indicate a pause, and that people only do it in informal writing so what's the big deal. Along with some suggestion that ellipses apparently strike some people as "friendlier" than periods and commas. Which is . . . fine? I guess? But we already have punctuation marks -- several punctuation marks -- that indicate pauses, so I'm not sure why we need to borrow a different punctuation to do this, especially not one that has specific and rare uses in indicating that someone's letting a sentence trail off, instead of bringing it to a decisive stop ("'Oh," said Tiffani, and sighed, 'but I'll surely see Brandon again, someday. . . .'"), or in indicating that words have been left out of a quote ("'Cause if you liked it, then . . . put a ring on it"). My main problem with the nothing-but-ellipses style is that my brain still tries to read all the ellipses as either trailing-off or omitted-words ellipses, so e-mails written this way always sound in my head like William Shatner talking into a cell phone with poor reception. (Try reading it that way yourself: "So...about my plant...lol...I don't know what kind of plant it is...it seems to be rotting...what should I do...do you think it can be saved...") Which is not friendly or informal at all. (Also see languagehat's comment in that thread.)
I suppose this footnote sort of comes off like a joke, so just to be crystal-clear: when I get e-mail like this, I absolutely do take it as hostile, like you're trying to make yourself difficult to understand on purpose to annoy me. Whatever you think you're sounding like, you're coming across as William Shatner, on a cell phone, in 1993, driving into a tunnel.