Anthurium no. 0338 "Anne Fibian"

With some of these Anthurium-seedling posts, I've been trying to answer a question that I don't think anyone is actually asking: "should I try plant-breeding, too? Would I like it?" I mean, obviously the answer is going to depend on your personality and what kind of resources you have available, and even if I knew those things I still probably couldn't answer it very accurately. But it's been sort of fun to contemplate how plant breeding as a hobby is different from growing houseplants as a hobby, and the sorts of rewards (and penalties) that belong to one but not the other.

Not that I'm finished doing that; I mention it because, one, the seedling of the day is not very interesting so I'm going to need to talk about something else, and two, because I'm about to come up with another take on answering the question. But let's do the seedling first.

So Anne is: not great. At least so far. This is possibly a case where I should wait to make a decision until the second bloom. The first bloom, though, is a little spadix-heavy (or a little spathe-light, I suppose), and since it's also in the second most common color (red / yellow), I'm not really into it at all.

The foliage could be nice, if it weren't all pockmarked. I still haven't figured out what causes that. I assume it's the result of insect or mite damage on developing leaves, but I usually can't see any actual insects or mites, and from time to time, plants appear to grow out of it completely, which you wouldn't expect from a pest problem.

The overall habit¹ is decently compact, though for a two-and-a-half-year-old plant, I'd expect more leaves than this. At least Anne's trying to offset.

I could imagine keeping Anne around, if she started to produce some better leaves, and if the second bloom is a little more normal-looking. I'm not in any rush to throw her out, at least. But I'm guessing she won't still be in the house in five years.

As far as the "should I try plant-breeding?" question:

Long ago, when my only real source of information was houseplant books -- and I read a lot of houseplant books -- I would never have had any idea that a lot of plants even could be grown from seed, because the authors never mentioned it. Presumably some of this comes from the assumption that readers would want exact duplicates of the plants they already had, and growing plants from seed won't usually give you that. Plus space is limited in a book, and growing plants from seed is a pretty niche interest. Growing plants from seed indoors is going to appeal to even fewer people, and you want people to buy your book. So I get it.

With that said, though, few books even mention that it's possible. Of the seven houseplant books I have handy,² only two (Toogood, Griffith) so much as mention that Schlumbergeras can be grown from seed, and both of those are specialty books, one aimed at large-scale plant producers (Griffith) and the other specifically about plant propagation (Toogood). The situation is slightly better for Anthurium (Toogood, Kramer, Crockett, Griffith) and Spathiphyllum (Toogood, Kramer, Griffith), though none of the books have much to say about how one would grow either from seeds, or how one would get seeds to sow in the first place: they just note that it can be done. A surprising number of books fail to mention Coffea at all, and of those that do, only Crockett bothers to mention that they can be grown from seeds.³

So for the longest time, I assumed that there was no way to get more of certain plants I really enjoyed, like Anthurium, aside from the long, slow process of waiting for offsets.^{4, 5} So one of the incidental benefits of plant-breeding, at least when it comes to the Anthuriums and Spathiphyllums, is that it's opened up new things I can do with old, slow, or boring plants.

Sometimes that doesn't exactly pay off, as with Anne. But trying things is more interesting than not trying things.

-

¹ Am I the only one who occasionally has a quick mental picture of plants as nuns and/or addicts, when reading about their "habits?" Just me? Okay.
² • Stuckey, Maggie. The Houseplant Encyclopedia. The Philip Lief Group, Inc., Garden City, NY, 1993.
• Crockett, James Underwood. Crockett's Indoor Garden. Little, Brown & Company, Canada, 1978.
• Simons, Paul, and John Ruthven. Potted Histories. BBC Books, London, 1995.
• Powell, Dr. Charles C., and Donald M. Vining. Ortho's Complete Guide to Successful Houseplants. Ortho Books, San Francisco, CA, 1984.
• Kramer, Jack. The Illustrated Guide to Flowering Houseplants. Peerage Books, London, 1985.
• Toogood, Alan, ed. Plant Propagation. DK Publishing, Inc., New York, NY, 1999.
• Griffith, Lynn P., Jr. Tropical Foliage Plants: A Grower's Guide. Ball Publishing, Batavia, IL, 1998.
³ In fact, it usually seems to be taken for granted that if you have one Coffea, you're not going to want any more. I disagree, but you're probably not going to want a lot more. They do get really big.
I think I've read somewhere that Coffea can be grown from cuttings as well, though I've never tried it, and I'm pretty sure none of the books mention it. No idea where I might have seen that, but I keep meaning to try it some day, just to satisfy my own curiosity about whether it's possible.
⁴ Sucker production used to be something that breeders selected for, both because a plant with a lot of suckers looks fuller and can produce more blooms at once, and because the more suckers there are, the faster you can propagate a plant asexually. Now that tissue culture is the industry standard for propagation, suckers matter less: if you want a full plant with lots of blooms, it's easy enough to pot several tissue-cultured plants together.
That said, suckering has probably never been the main thing Anthuriums were selected for, and if your hybrid could resist bacterial and fungal infection, produced lots of large flowers on long, straight stems, had a novel bloom color, shipped well, and lasted a long time in a vase, you had a gold mine, whether it suckered a lot or not. Consequently, cultivars available in stores now vary tremendously in how many offsets they will produce, and the speed with which they will do so, so if you buy a plant you really like with the expectation of dividing lots of suckers from it, you may or may not find yourself disappointed.
⁵ Plant books usually don't mention that you can take top cuttings of Anthuriums either, though in that case it kind of makes sense: the plants that have been cut back recover slowly and may not rebloom for a couple years, and my experience has been that cuttings fail a lot more often than suckers do. (Usually they root in water fine, but then fall apart after getting moved to soil.)

Anthurium no. 0365 "Murray Hill"

Murray Hill is one of the world's better-known drag kings.¹ Which isn't saying a lot -- drag kings haven't gotten nearly the same amount of attention that drag queens have -- but still. I don't know exactly why drag kings haven't yet become A Thing, but I have theories:

• It's possible that it's more technically difficult to fake stereotypical male features like big muscles and facial hair (especially facial hair) than it is to fake breasts and put on a wig. Though I suppose shoulder pads, at least, are easy enough.
• Maybe women, as a group, just aren't that interested in doing drag. (Though that doesn't really explain anything: if they're not interested, why are they not interested?)
• Maybe sexist club owners are less inclined to book drag kings than drag queens, so it's harder to find an audience, and budding drag kings give up. Or, conversely, maybe club owners are perfectly happy to book drag kings, but there's no audience interested in watching them. (This article explains the situation thus: "Straight women find [male drag] threatening because it’s like, Does this mean I’m a lesbian if I think this guy’s cute? Straight men find it threatening because, after all, that’s supposed to be their domain. And lesbians find it threatening because it seems like this is the stereotype of what a lesbian is — a women who wants to be a man.")
• The husband suggested that maybe it's a matter of exaggeration -- drag queens aren't just dressing up as women, they're dressing up as super-glamorous women, with eye-catching dresses, huge hair, and the outsize personalities to match; exaggerate men too far and you wind up with Ron Swanson. Who is funny, sure, but you can only exaggerate the strong silent type so far before it shades into catatonia. ("Maybe a country music star?" the husband suggested, and I was like, oh, yeah, actually one of the bigger drag kings, Gage Gatlyn, has been doing Tim McGraw for years, that makes sense.) Though there are plenty of male stereotypes besides just strong-silent.
• Maybe the world is just waiting for a breakout star to appear and create an audience for drag kings, like RuPaul did in the early 90s. RuPaul is actually in a good position to make that happen, with her show (RuPaul's Drag Race), there's some support for the idea from previous contestants, and drag kings have auditioned for RPDR; it's just a matter of actually, you know, doing it.
Also, just to underline it: that last link is a video of a woman, pretending to be a man (and, in spots, pretending to be a man who is pretending to be a woman), who is lip-synching to a song perfomed by a man who's famous mostly for pretending to be a woman.
• Maybe I'm out of the loop, being out here in Iowa, and everyone who matters (i.e. the people in large cities on the U.S. coasts) knows about drag kings already.
• I found one really interesting article about drag kings in which a king blamed "shaming from the drag queen community" for stifling a fairly robust late-1990s drag king scene in New York. So maybe it's an internal LGBT problem. A few performers interviewed for that article say that audiences who come for drag queens are usually very bad audiences for drag kings: "audiences at male drag venues are so conditioned to cheer for queens that they sit in baffled silence through even the best king’s performance." Which is interesting. Why would that be?
• All of the above?
• None of the above?

Whatever the reason why kings haven't taken off yet, I feel like the moment is right for a drag king to break into the mainstream within the next decade, and Murray Hill seems like a good candidate.² He's got a definite shtick, not "man" or even "exaggerated man" but "slightly lecherous drunk mid-1960s Rat Pack comedian," and does it well --

-- so, you know, remember the name.

All of the above is to distract you from the fact that I don't have a whole lot to say about the seedling "Murray Hill."³ He's another member of the social science clique: dark red spathes; green spadices that turn white; fairly compact habit; dull, dark green leaves.

He's not doing anything new, and to be honest 0357 "Rhea Litré" and 0360 "Heidi Gosique" are both better, by virtue of having superior foliage.

But Murray is certainly good enough to consider a keeper for now. (There's no rule that I can't have as many dark red / greens as I want.) If I ever get the scale and thrips under control, I might sell him, but that's a hell of an "if."

-

¹ Not to be confused with his namesake, the Manhattan neighborhood of Murray Hill. Also, Hill hates to be called a "drag king:" I gather that the problem is that it implies that he's not actually male. He stays in character all the time, apparently.

'It's fascinating to me how Murray keeps up this boozy, B-grade Rat Pack persona 100 percent of the time,' says Earl Dax, who produces the "Direct From NYC" performance series in Philadelphia. 'One time Murray stayed at my apartment. First thing in the morning, there he was, in boxers and a T-shirt. I said, "Good morning," and he said, "Hey, kid! How ya doin?"'

(Ref.)
I assume Murray the human being is aware of being a drag king, but obviously it would be upsetting to Murray the character, and if Murray the human never breaks character, then, well. . . .
² And there has in fact apparently been some interest in developing a Murray Hill TV pilot, though I gather from this article that that's never gone past a sort of wouldn't-it-be-nice hypothetical thing. For what it's worth to any producers who might be reading this: I'd be interested! Do it!
³ I mean, I also think it's interesting stuff to talk about, but I always worry when I stray too far from the topic of plants, because that's all that I know you (the generic / collective "you") like to read about.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Violet Fizz 'Luna'

I might side-eye the use of the word "violet" here (even "magenta" might be a stretch), but if it weren't for nonsensical and factually incorrect orchid names, we would have no orchid names at all, so I suppose I'd allow it anyway.

The show didn't have many Dendrobiums this year, but this was probably the prettiest of the ones they had. I was kind of amazed by how thick the stem was: I knew Dendrobium was a large and varied genus, but I wasn't expecting anything like this.

Dendrobium Violet Fizz 'Luna' = Dendrobium Happy Honey x Dendrobium Cassiope (Ref.)

Anthurium no. 0373: "Shangela Laquifa Wadley"

The less said about Shangela, the better, I think. Boring color, a spathe so pockmarked by thrips (or something) that it looked polka-dotted,

crappy foliage,

just an all-around mess.

The only nice thing I can think of to say about 0373 is that yes, it did bloom, and not all of the seedlings do. Which is practically the definition of damning with faint praise.

You'd think I would have thrown it out already, but, you know: inertia, the inexplicable hope that just maybe the second bloom will be awesome somehow, resistance to throw any seedling out until it's proven itself irredeemable, etc. It's definitely out of here as soon as I work myself up to a second purge, though. Earlier, if it gets scale. Which would be totally in character, so it'll probably happen.

Anthurium no. 0371 "Deb Autry"

So round 1 of the Anthurium seedling purge has ended, and a total of 32 seedlings are gone (plus nine others that just happened to die during the purge period).¹ This is sort of unpleasant, but at the same time, hanging on to a bunch of lazy, non-blooming, long-internoded seedlings had been preventing anything else from happening. No room to expand, no way to promote promising 3- or 4-inch seedlings up to 4- or 6-inch pots, no room for potting up any new seedlings. So I threw out 32 4-inch plants, and initiated a "repotting cascade:" empty space lets me shuffle plants around, which creates room for new plants to move up, which creates more empty space, which means some of the next-smallest size of plants can move up, which produces empty space in a different area, etc.

I haven't actually followed that through to its inevitable end just yet; time has been short, and I seem to have injured a shoulder besides, so keeping everything watered is work enough, but soon, I'll have a new batch of seedlings moving out of the cupcake containers and into pots.

I'd feel bad about the purged seedlings, but the minimum for being a purge candidate was that it had been around for at least three years, without producing any buds (whether or not those buds went to completion or not), and I still kept roughly three out of every four plants I considered throwing away.

(None of this really has anything to do with the seedling du jour, 0371 "Deb Autry," but it's news, and I have to record this sort of thing somewhere.)

Deb is one of a group of seedlings in the mid-300s that produce red or dark red spathes along with green or yellow-green spadices (others include 0357 "Rhea Litré" and 0360 "Heidi Gosique"), all of whom are probably 'Gemini' x NOID red crosses. Deb's spathe is a lighter red than the others, and a little bit smaller than Rhea and Heidi so far, but she's still good.

Most of the group (which I think of as the "social science clique," because that's where their numbers fall in the Dewey Decimal System²) has pretty nice foliage, which also fits the theory that they're 'Gemini' x NOID red; Deb's leaves aren't the clique's best, but they're above average when compared to all seedlings.

Same comment for the plant as a whole -- not the best in the clique, but better than average among the seedlings generally.

So although the competition is continually getting tougher, as more and more seedlings bloom, I don't think Deb has anything to worry about. I'm not necessarily going to up-pot her, but I won't throw her out unless she's irresponsible enough to get root rot or scale or something like that.

-

¹ The list of purged plants:
0007 "Coco Peru"
0009 "Dame Edna Everage"
0012 "Heklina"
0030 "Sister Roma"
0034 "Alaska Thunderfuck"[a]
0037 "CoCo Montrese"
0050 "Roxxxy Andrews"
0093 "Claire Leah Goodpick"[b]
0094 "Clara Path"
0098 "Julee Antonellis"
0124 "Fox Saik"[c]
0143 "Gracie Spoon"
0156 "Igor Tulerne"
0179 "Katie Boundary"[d]
0210 "Myra Venge"
0242 "Saffron Sisko"
0250 "Sheila Blige"[e]
0256 "Sue Parduper"
0261 "Tim Berwulf"
0277 "Zach Treplica"[f]
0278 "Hailey Escorpus"
0301 "Serena ChaCha"
0308 "Gladys Bentley"
0348 "Yara Sofia"
0561 "Belinda Chinashop"[g]
0563 "Marian Cousins"
0566 "Bebe Zahara Benet"
0569 "Sherry Vine"
0572 "Autumn Bahn"
0573 "Adore Delano"
0576 "Pearl Harper"
0587 "Susan Sokhsov"
plus the nine that just happened to die, who don't count.
[a] Alaska had bloomed before, but developed root rot. Two suckers survived, but the bloom wasn't special enough to make it worth nursing the suckers along until they hit blooming size. Alaska deserves a more interesting seedling named after her anyway. Maybe the next Alaska Thunderfuck will be better.
[b] Claire had produced a bud like a week prior to the purge, but I didn't remember to look for it when I was throwing plants away, and it didn't jump out at me, and the rest of the plant was crappy-looking. From the pre-purge photo of the bud, we're not missing anything -- it was very pale, which means it would probably have been pink, and it had a bunch of brown spots on it besides, which may or may not have been from thrips.
[c] Fox had attempted to produce a bud once, more than a year ago, but had not shown any inclination to try again, and had weird, misshapen leaves besides.
[d] Katie had bloomed previously (red / yellow, medium size), and I liked her fine, but she went and got scale. As with Alaska, I liked Katie, but she wasn't special enough to try to fix.
[e] Sheila had also attempted to bud, twice, but she dropped the first one before it got anywhere, and the second attempt was so small and light in color that I missed seeing it. She had a very long internodal distance, so I don't feel too bad about throwing her out either.
[f] Zach had started and aborted two buds already, which was frustrating, and they were both pale and scarred-up, like Claire's, which made me think the blooms would have been crap anyway. Also his internodes were really long and the leaves were small and he was just generally crap.
[g] Belinda had a bud briefly in June, but aborted. The bud seemed potentially nice while it was around (red, unblemished), but the rest of her was terrible.
² (specifically 357 to 371: from "mounted forces in warfare" to "schools and their activities / special education")

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum (Adam Hausermann x Winston Churchill)

See that orange-brown spot on the lip, just to the right of center? I bet orchid show entrants hate it when their plants do something like that right before a show. I mean, it's plenty irritating to me to find thrips marks on an otherwise pristine Anthurium, and there is nothing at stake there. I show them to you, and you might have feelings about my Anthurium seedlings and their flaws, but you're not literally judging me on them.¹

I like the bloom anyway. The spot doesn't ruin anything for me. Just imagining what it must be like to see a bud get bigger and bigger and start to open and then, boom -- a spot, in the most obvious possible place.

Anyway. We haven't encountered this particular cross before, but there are a couple related orchids from past years: both its parent, Paph. Winston Churchill, and its half-sibling, Paph. Cheryl Ann Boyd, showed up in the 2012 show. (Paph. Winston Churchill) (Paph. Cheryl Ann Boyd)

Paphiopedilum Adam Hausermann = Telesis x Gigi (Ref.)
Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill = Eridge x Hampden (Ref.)

The family tree doubtless goes several layers deeper than that, but that's more than most of you wanted to know already.

-

¹ Or maybe you are, in which case: how am I doing? Have I won yet?

Anthurium no. 0586 "Vera Special"

First, a couple bits of unfinished business:

I e-mailed my local Iowa State Extension Office on July 29, asking about tests for dasheen mosaic virus (DsMV), as discussed in the comments to this post. They replied immediately, and recommended I ask the ISU Plant and Insect Diagnostic Clinic about it. So I sent the same e-mail to the ISUPIDC.

On August 20, I heard back from the ISUPIDC. The answer was: no, they do not test for DsMV, but they did know of a company that might, Agdia, Inc.

Agdia does in fact do DsMV testing, which is great, but they won't tell you on the website how much the testing costs. I assumed that that meant that it was an if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it situation, but e-mailed Agdia to ask anyway, and got an autoreply "I will be out of the office until ______" message, because everything has to be fucking impossible today.¹

In the end, it's not going to happen: testing one sample is $67 at Agdia ($9 per additional.), which is more than I want to spend to answer this particular question. But if I change my mind later, I have somewhere to go. So thanks, ISUPIDC. I guess.

The other unfinished business is related to the ongoing thripstastrophe.² Ivynettle suggested in the comments on this post that I try getting parasitic mites to eat the thrips, that she had done so this year and had been pleased with the results.³

That didn't go very smoothly either, and is also expensive ($63.70, shipping included, for 50,000 mites.⁴), but it at least has the advantage of being something I haven't tried before. Imidacloprid doesn't seem to affect the thrips at all; white oil is cheap and somewhat effective, but also extremely messy, time-consuming, and the Anthuriums respond by dropping all their blooms, so I don't want to try that again unless I'm truly out of other options. Hand-picking is ludicrous, spraying with a non-imidacloprid insecticide (e.g. pyrethrin) is prohibitively expensive, giving up and living with the thrips is depressing,⁵ zero-tolerance for thrips infestation would end with all the seedlings in the garbage except one, and it would probably be a pink/pink. So this is something I can try. Even if it fails, as it almost surely will, doing something feels better than doing nothing.

With all that out of the way, then, let's talk about seedling 0586. The name assigned to her, "Vera Special," wound up being sort of a joke, because Vera is almost identical to 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha," and awfully similar to 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis."

Which one is Vera?

It was this one! (L-R in the first photo: 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis," 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha," 0586 "Vera Special."
It happens to be a look I'm really fond of, and even if it weren't, I see orange so rarely that I'd be inclined to keep and cherish it even if it were terrible. But it's not terrible! Hooray! The spathe is a decent size, and so far doesn't seem to want to flip backward. Add in the color, and I think that easily puts Vera into the top 25% of all seedlings.

The leaves are also basically identical to Marsha's, which makes sense because Marsha and Vera were both divided from 0115 "Erlene Adopter," and are either clones or siblings.⁶ Marsha, Adam, and Vera have another thing in common, which is that they have all done this at some point:

A weird 0586 leaf, by reflected (L) and transmitted (R) light.
Not all the leaves, or even most. Just a few per plant. In all three cases, it appeared basically overnight, I hadn't done anything any differently that I could remember, the leaves otherwise appear perfectly healthy, and it doesn't seem to be spreading or intensifying. I don't have any very satisfying theories about what's going on: it sort of resembles certain rare kinds of virus damage, and sort of resembles some kinds of fertilizer deficiency and mineral toxicity, but if it's fertilizer-related, then it's weird that of all the Anthuriums here, it's only affecting three very closely-related plants. I mean, they all get basically the same fertilizer, and I water heavily enough that anything toxic should all have been washed out of the soil long before the leaves changed colors. The coloration doesn't look much like most viruses I've seen, either. So I don't know what's going on.

The unaffected leaves are unremarkable. Nice when new, dull and kind of plain when older. Resistant to thrips damage, though, which is always nice.

Like her relatives, Vera suckers thickly, another strongly positive trait. It remains to be seen whether Vera will be like her relatives in being impossible to pollinate. I don't know how many blooms have appeared and withered without any pollination on 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis," but, like, several. And I haven't had any luck with 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha" either. I suppose sexual reproduction doesn't seem as urgent when you can make so many suckers.

So overall? Vera's not perfect, but she's a keeper. No question about it.

-

¹ (I'm writing this on Friday August 21. It really was a pretty rough day, internetially speaking. Absolutely nothing worked the first time I tried it.)
² Not to be confused with the scalepocalypse, or the miteaclysm.
I'm pretty sure I haven't mentioned the miteaclysm before, so:
The Anthuriums in the living room, i.e., the parent varieties of most of my Anthurium seedlings, have developed some kind of mite problem, though the mites in question don't appear to be spider mites. Or at least they're not particularly inclined to spin webs. I suppose they could still be really lazy spider mites.

(on the NOID red)
I'm not super worried about the mites, which I figure will probably go away once the days get shorter and colder. (This has happened in previous years.) The predatory mites are also alleged to go after spider mites, so hypothetically, the predatory mites could kill two birds with one stone although come on how are you ever going to kill two birds with one stone unless the birds are like lying on the ground with one of them resting its head directly on top of the second bird's head and they're both holding perfectly still? And even then, if the birds saw you walk up with a stone they're not going to keep sitting like that, they're going to fly away, right? I question the whole premise of the idiom, is what I'm saying. (And don't even get me started on "the more the merrier." I mean, some of the "more" might be assholes! How's that going to make anybody happy? And how are you supposed to transport eggs if you don't put them all in one basket? Two baskets? That's not efficient at all! Do you even know how much baskets cost these days?)
Anyway. The point is, it's possible that the predatory mites could solve all kinds of problems for me, though at this point my best-case imaginary scenario is that they slow down the thrips, a little. Expecting more than that seems like a recipe for disappointment.
³ As did another reader, by e-mail, some time ago, though if I remember right they didn't claim to have tried predatory mites personally; they were just suggesting it as an option.
⁴ I cannot imagine how much it must suck to be the employee who has to count out 50,000 individual mites to put in the bottles. No wonder they're expensive: that must take weeks. And what tiny tweezers they must have to use!
⁵ At least in the short run. In theory, I could maybe breed thrips-resistant seedlings, given enough time, but the thrips reproduce so much faster than the Anthuriums that I suspect the thrips could come up with new attacks more effectively than the Anthuriums could come up with new defenses.
⁶ Erlene herself has never bloomed, but offsets thickly and has similar foliage, like Vera and Marsha, so it wouldn't surprise me if all three plants were genetically identical. A fourth plant divided off of Erlene, 0581 "Adam All," has similar foliage and produced an orange bud once, but Adam sucked at follow-through and hasn't tried again. Wouldn't be surprised if he were a clone also, though.
Erlene/Vera/Marsha/Adam are from sibling group AG (seed parent 'Orange Hot;' sow date 12/7/11). 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis" is from sibling group AH ("Orange Hot" and 12/17/11), which is close enough in sow date that it's entirely possible that Eliza is a half- or full sibling of the others, but she's probably not a clone of any of them.

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.

-

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.