Schlumbergera seedling no. 102

102A has, I think, only produced two blooms so far, which isn't really enough to go on as far as determining whether it's a good seedling or a bad one or what. 030A "Diwali" sucked for an entire year before straightening itself out, after all. And sometimes flowers just don't photograph well. But so far . . . I'm not that impressed.

After 17 pages of TinEye results, plus two names from the emergency list, I managed to get 37 name options, of which eight seemed like they could be serious contenders. In the order I managed to eliminate them from consideration:

I'm afraid we're going to have to go a couple of generations before Judith regains its mythological associations. Everybody loves a woman who can perform a solid beheading when necessary, but the name currently makes me think mostly of an acquaintance from college (who seems unlikely to ever behead anybody though I suppose you never know) and Rick Grimes' baby in The Walking Dead (who hasn't either, being an infant, though given her circumstances I imagine she's a lot more likely to do so eventually than college Judy). And if we're going to name seedlings after anybody from The Walking Dead, it should be Michonne.¹ (So what the hell: let's add Michonne to the emergency names list.)

Gamma Ray feels almost right, but it should be a different color than this. Like a weird blue-purple, or maybe a science fiction yellowish green. Red-orange is way too normal.

"Shipyard," one of the tags on this photo, brought to mind Shipbuilding, the Elvis Costello song, which I considered for a little while. Unfortunately for the name, this also inspired me to pay attention to the lyrics, which are depressing. (Timely! Always timely! But depressing!) And just seeing the word gets the song stuck in my head badly besides. So I'm going to hurry past Shipbuilding and hope that it doesn't get stuck in my head again.

Tokyo works in the same way that Alberta did, long ago, for seedling 054B: the color fits in some way that makes sense to me even though I can't explain why. There's at least one name I like better for this one, though, and the seedling isn't otherwise connected to Japan, so we'll pass on Tokyo.

I really like the photo on Glass Heart for some reason, and I don't even mind getting "Heart of Glass" stuck in my head, but it seems to me like a Glass Heart Schlumbergera should have a stronger contrast between the petals and tube. A red and white flower, maybe.

Easter Island (or Rapa Nui, the native name) aren't terribly interesting on their own, name-wise (though the photo is cute), but I wound up down a wikihole for quite a while, learning bits and pieces about Rapa Nui and its history. What matters for this post, though, is that the Rapa Nui language has a quirk that I found interesting, which is that in at least some (if not all) cases, doubling a word makes a new, related word. So kume, which means to undo, can become kumekume, to take to pieces. Ako, to sing or recite, turns into ákoáko, to recite hymns in honor of a deity. Some Googling turned up a Rapanui-English dictionary, so I looked around for any Rapanui words that might cover this color, but I didn't really find any -- they seem to have a lot of words for red,² but I'm not sure any of them imply reddish-orange plus pink. Maybe Hegahega, I suppose, if it's related to the red of dawn.

The last name I've got is Casino, which is awfully generic (Which casino? What about the casino?), but appropriate in a couple ways: one, casinos tend to have a lot of red, yellow, and orange in them, and two, I don't know what the later blooms are going to look like. I mean, I can guess the color easily enough, but it hasn't produced enough blooms for me to have a sense as to whether it's going to be one of the good seedlings or bad seedlings, so keeping the seedling around at all is, in a very (very!) loose sense, a gamble.

Initially, because of the ambiguity of the seedling's quality, and the color, my intention was to go with Casino, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like the name would need to be a little more specific for Casino to work. ______ Casino, or Casino ______, something like that. And anyway Hegahega is a more interesting word, I think. (I could combine the two, as Hegahega Casino, but that doesn't really make "casino" any more appealing to me.)

So I have managed to eliminate the entire original list of options. Whoops. There are still Hegahega and Michonne, I suppose, but if those are my choices, it's no contest. I sort of hate to name a seedling of questionable quality after Michonne, who deserves a seedling of obvious awesomeness, but maybe it will, like, motivate the seedling to be better if it has to live up to the name.

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¹ I have not yet seen the most recent half-season of The Walking Dead. If you have, and Michonne has become less awesome, please let me know about this without spoiling me as to how she's become less awesome.
² Hegahega (reddish, ruddy; maybe related to hehega, to dawn?); herohero (crimson, bright red, also the ripe color of any fruit); mea / meamea (light red, rose); retoreto (bright red, flaming red); úraúra (bright red; possibly related to ûra, to flame, blaze, or become furious?)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 112

Seedling 112A may wind up with a bad name, but if it does, it won't be for lack of effort: it took me 20 or 21 pages of TinEye results to come up with enough options for a long list this time,¹ and then after whittling that down to a short list, I added a few emergency name options just in case those weren't going to be enough.

The short list:

Anansi is a West African folklore character who is the keeper of all stories, generally depicted as a spider, a man, or some combination thereof (e.g. a spider with a human face, a spider wearing clothes, etc.) Wikipedia has a lot of interesting information on him.

Ciao is a dual-purpose hello/goodbye word. Like "aloha," but in Italian. (Wikipedia link)

Jellybean you probably know, or can figure out, but if not, here's the Wikipedia link.

Lavaball would most obviously be a ball made out of lava, which is presumably the meaning intended in the Flickr photo (which depicts cinnamon candies); it's on the list because my mind connected it to the practice of lavaballing, a metaphoric term for the practice of spreading one's legs while seated in a way that encroaches on space belonging to neighboring seats. Lavaballing is particularly common on mass transit, and almost solely practiced by men, hence the synonym manspreading.²

Lyle Lovett is one of my very favorite celebrities of all time, and the writer/singer of one of my five favorite songs of all time ("North Dakota"), and Julia Roberts' ex-husband. He is also friends with k. d. lang, apparently, which makes me severely envious of both of them. So it's pretty much inevitable that a seedling will be named for Lovett at some point -- but will it be this seedling?

Michelangelo is a cheat, name-wise: the photo actually has text referring to Leonardo [da Vinci], but I changed it because the flower is orange-red, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle with the orange mask is Michelangelo. (Leonardo's is blue.)

Oxomoco is an Aztec deity with a short Wikipedia page. She was the goddess in charge of night, astrology, and the calendar. She is also, confusingly, the female half of the first human couple, i.e., the closest Aztec mythology gets to Eve, of Adam and Eve. (I couldn't find an Aztec version of Steve.)

I heard about her originally from some page I read about the dwarf planet Ceres, currently being explored by the Dawn spacecraft. Scientists are naming features on Ceres after agricultural deities (Ceres herself being the Roman god of agriculture), and I happened to catch that one of the craters on Ceres is named Oxo. Which I thought would make an interesting seedling name (agricultural deities with palindromic names that could also stand for "hugs and kisses?" How could I pass it up?), but then when I investigated further, I found out that Oxo, Oxomo, Oxomoc, and Oxomoco are all various versions of the same name, with the last being the most official. So the palindrome and the hugs-and-kisses thing are both sort of ruined, but let's run with it anyway.

Paprika is a spice made from air-dried chili peppers, and also, apparently, any damned shade of orange, red-orange, red, pink, yellow-orange, burgundy, or brown-pink you want it to be.

Rockamundo is, among other things, a racehorse who won the 1993 Arkansas Derby as a 108-to-1 long shot. Also a fun word to say.

So, right off the bat, I feel like I can drop Paprika, on the grounds that a name that can refer to any color at all is likely to give people misleading ideas about the bloom color. And I'm not crazy about Michelangelo either. Yes, it's fun to say, but it's also long to type, and he's got plenty of things named after him already, and the flower isn't so pretty that it's like Michelangelo painted it or anything. I mean, maybe it's pretty enough that Michelangelo the ninja turtle might have painted it. But that's not what people would assume from the name.

Ciao, as a name, is perhaps a little too bland.

On the other hand, the colors on this one are probably not bland enough to be called Lyle Lovett. Lyle Lovett should be a really washed-out pink or orange. Possibly even plain white.³

I'm thinking Rockamundo smacks of trying too hard. I mean, that's sort of what I liked about it, but I don't think it would wear well, long-term.

So that leaves what, four? Well, I guess we can drop Jellybean. There is something about the color and petal shape that makes me think of jellybeans, but there will be other seedlings that do that.

Of our two mythological figures, Anansi and Oxomoco, Anansi has more personality, but Oxomoco is more fun to type and say. I suppose Anansi has a slight edge, for showing up naturally as part of the TinEye search. So we'll drop Oxomoco for now.

Which leaves Anansi and Lavaball. In an early draft of this post, I went with Anansi, but after sitting with the decision for about a day, I decided that I didn't like it. I don't know why; sometimes I just don't.⁴ So I guess this is Lavaball.

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¹ The more names I consider and reject, the deeper into the TinEye results I have to go to come up with 30. While I'm not opposed to considering the same name for more than one seedling, if I've managed to talk myself out of a name once, it's easy to talk myself out of it again, so it's rare for me to choose a previously-rejected name. (It's happened twice, for 100A "Circular Reference" -- considered and rejected for 082A "Strawberry Madeleine" -- and 106A "Jaws of Elmo," which was rejected for 019A "Belevenissen.") And in both of those cases, I still very much wanted to use the name, it was just that 082A had a much better story if I chose the other name, and 019A was the wrong color. Anyway. So the more seedlings to name, the more TinEye results I have to look at, and the longer it takes to come up with a distinct list.
I've mentioned this in the comments before, but I don't think I've made it part of an official post: I welcome reader name proposals. I'm trying my best to keep the Schlumbergera seedling gallery current, so if you look at that page and see "[name TBD]" anywhere, I haven't yet chosen an official name for that one, and am at least hypothetically open to suggestions. I won't promise to select reader-suggested names (if more than one name gets proposed for a given seedling, then that becomes impossible anyway), but I'll at least give them the same consideration as anything else that makes it onto the short list, and if I reject it, I'll explain at least a little in the relevant blog post. (Bear in mind that sometimes my reasons for selecting and rejecting names are arbitrary and often amount to, well, it just looked like / didn't look like a __________. I.e., the explanations may not be particularly satisfying. But there will be something.)
² The most effective treatment for lavaballing is a sharp blow to the affected individual's testicles, though relapse is common and multiple treatments are usually necessary.
³ Lyle seems partial to black and white videos (e.g. "Church," "If I Had A Boat"). Even when the videos are in color, the colors are subdued. E.g. "She's Already Made Up Her Mind," "Penguins")
⁴ The same thing happened with seedling 056A: I picked the name that worked the best, tried living with it briefly, and then decided that I just didn't like it, even though I couldn't come up with a specific objection.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum unregistered hybrid #3

When I get all the orchid-show photos uploaded and sorted out and I'm making the orchid-post schedule for the next year, I try to keep from putting orchids of similar shape or color back-to-back. The full process involves spreadsheets, and a little math, and takes several days to get sorted out completely. This isn't a back-to-back repeat with the previous unregistered Paphiopedilum hybrid, but it's close enough (less than a month apart!) to bother me a little.

Both of the unregistered hybrids from the show are really nice, though in completely different ways. I mean, I totally understand why the owners would have wanted to show them off (especially if they created the hybrids themselves).

Anthurium no. 0424 "Jen Antonic"

Recently, I made a comment that I was increasingly thinking of myself as a Schlumbergera breeder who dabbles in Anthuriums, after thinking the reverse for a long time. The switch may not be permanent -- I still have more Anthuriums, after all -- but November and December have put my relationship with the Anthurium seedlings under more strain than ever before.

Start with the way that the new blooms were mostly crap. Here's Jen's:

It wouldn't be a good bloom even if it weren't riddled with thrips scars. And they're all like that lately: as of 25 December, eight Anthurium seedlings have produced their first blooms since the Schlumbergera avalanche, and they range from nice but more or less a duplicate (0115 "Erlene Adopter") to oh-my-god-that-barely-even-looks-like-a-spathe (0537 "Bridgette of Madison County").¹ All except Erlene have also been dismayingly small.

On top of that, the seedlings that haven't bloomed have likewise had a rough time. I threw out 144 seedlings between November 1 and December 24, most due to scale.² That's not necessarily unusual by itself -- I throw out seedlings all the time -- but this particular batch is special because I threw out 86 of those in a single day. (The surviving Anthurium seedlings will tell stories about where they were on December 9 for years to come.) Throwing out a seedling here or there barely registers as something I should have feelings about, but 86 at once is depressing.

The point being that while the Schlumbergeras were doing their glorious mostly-orange thing, the Anthuriums were mostly producing tiny, ugly blooms, or being thrown in the garbage. You can see how I might be tempted to say, "oh, no, I just dabble in those shitty plants over there; my real focus is on these plants, with all the pretty blooms and no bug problems."

The problem, of course, is that Schlumbergera season is brief. Technically, there has been at least one schlum in bloom every day from late October to at least late December,³ but practically speaking, this year's show began on October 25, peaked around November 15, and was essentially over by December 15. There will be a repeat performance in the spring: based on previous years, it should begin in late March and continue through early May, with a peak in late April, and I'll likely see a few more first-time blooms then, but twelve weeks of frantic activity and forty weeks of nothing in particular isn't the most rewarding plant-growing experience. The Anthuriums have their problems, but at least they're always doing something, in a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race sort of way.

So, for the sake of having something to do outside of the 12 weeks a year when the Schlumbergeras are interesting, I'm probably not going to make any drastic changes to the Anthuriums. The relative proportions of each have changed slightly, but the Anthuriums will probably continue to outnumber the Schlumbergeras for the foreseeable future, even if I decide that I'm just dabbling in Anthuriums.

As for Jen specifically, the main problem with her is her bloom, but her leaves aren't great either. Even her good characteristics are bad: she suckers abundantly, which is normally great,⁴ but when you have a bad plant, the last thing you want is for it to be good at reproducing itself. So she will probably be thrown out, but I'm waiting for a second bloom before I do so. Sometimes second blooms really are a lot nicer than the first.⁵

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¹ The list, ordered from most to least acceptable:
0115 "Erlene Adopter"
0366 "Maureen Biologist"
0547 "Cate Sedia"
0527 "Ms. Lucia Love"
0424 "Jen Antonic"
0516 "Brooke Enhart"
0512 "Landon Sky"
0537 "Bridgette of Madison County"
Pictures of each are available in the Anthurium gallery post, if you just can't wait for their individual blog posts.
² The full breakdown:
• 17 (12%) got too dry.
• 9 (6%) hung around for a long time without ever blooming, and I finally decided I'd waited long enough.
• 4 (3%) were too wet, or something, and rotted.
• 81 (56%) either had visible scale, or I suspected scale because of honeydew or other signs.
• 25 (17%) were stunted or weak, compared to other plants of the same approximate age, and seemed unlikely to ever bloom.
• 2 (1%) were so badly ravaged by thrips that I gave up on them.
• 5 (3%) were old and leggy, to the point where I didn't want to keep them anymore. (I think most of these were also slow or reluctant bloomers: all the categories overlap with one another to some degree.)
• 1 (1%) I don't know what was wrong with it. (Stunted/weak is the most likely explanation, but I didn't write it down so I'm not sure.)
³ (I'm writing this on 29 December)
⁴ Since I don't have access to tissue culture as a propagation method (and thank goodness I don't! Can you imagine?), any of my seedlings that I decide to propagate will have to be duplicated through cuttings or offsets. So seedlings that sucker well (e.g. 0031 "Sylvester" and 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha") have a much better chance of making it to the retail world than the non-offsetting seedlings, even though some of my non-offsetters are otherwise much better plants (e.g. 0002 "Alexis Mateo" or 0231 "Rhea Listick").
⁵ Example: 0416 "Holy McGrail." First bloom:

Second Third bloom:

I mean, I'm not saying the second one is some rare, amazing beauty and I'm so happy I didn't throw her out after the first bloom, but the third bloom is undeniably nicer than the first two.
(UPDATE 1/16/16: I didn't realize when I wrote this that the nicest bloom from 0416 was actually its third. This was the second bloom, which is in fact worse than either the first or the third:)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 100

This one's going to be sort of an abbreviated post, both because I knew right away what the name was going to be, and because I only managed to get one usable photo of it.¹

After eleven pages of TinEye results, I'd only managed to get 22 name ideas. I suppose I could have kept going in hopes of finding something even better, but there was a photo of a different Schlumbergera bloom on the very first page of the TinEye results, and I've been wanting to name a seedling Circular Reference since I thought of it last year. The other name options were mostly unusable anyway.²

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¹ Actually two usable photos, but the second one was more or less identical to the first even though it was taken on a different day. Sometimes a bloom will be positioned so that there's really only one photo possible, and I think 100A only produced a single bloom this fall. So.
² All 22:
Circular Reference • Inner Peace • Salton Sea • Powerlady • Doll Furniture • Bossanova • Heiress • Pollen Machine • Ball of Fire • Shining Star • Bearded Lady • Kilkenny • Shortbread • Mahimahi • Galleon • Cheerleader • Spanish Apartment • Fluffy Lumber • Jupiter or Jupiter Tabby • Nightcap • Blushing Bride • Saltwater Taffy
Under normal circumstances, I would definitely also have considered Powerlady and Saltwater Taffy, and possibly also Bossanova, Heiress, Bearded Lady, Cheerleader, and Jupiter, depending on my mood at the time. Saltwater Taffy would, I think, have been the favorite to win. I like saltwater taffy. A lot, actually.

Unpretty pictures: Bulbophyllum oxypterum

Sometimes when I title a post "unpretty pictures," it's a little tongue-in-cheek, and the pictures aren't actually that bad. This is not one of those times, though.

I mean, not that it isn't still interesting. B. pterophyllum is actually sort of fascinating. But pretty it isn't.

It would be a very long project to try to determine whether this is the single strangest orchid I've ever seen, but it's surely a contender, at least. Sort of like an Epiphyllum, but somehow even uglier. At least Epiphyllum have nice flowers.

Sure, I've grown and enjoyed plants whose appeal wasn't immediately obvious, but damn.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 114

Hard to come up with a lot to say about 114A: it has longer, narrower petals than average. Pleasant, I guess. I don't know. I'm afraid the most notable thing about it will be how difficult it is to name, but we'll see.

I had 30 TinEye names, which I condensed down to four.¹ I wasn't crazy about any of those, so I kind of panicked and threw in three names from the emergency names list (all of which were originally racehorse names, I think). So, seven options overall. Not thrilled about the longer list either, but let's see what we get:

Unsubtle would probably apply equally well to all the Schlumbergeras. Flowers are unsubtle on purpose, to attract pollinators. So yeah, the name technically applies, but it doesn't say anything. Pass.

Francis S. is a sort of indirect reference to someone who was important in my life, and in theory I like the idea of naming seedlings after people I actually know, but if I name a seedling after one person I actually know, then do I have to name seedlings after everyone I've ever met? (Obviously, no, but where do you draw the line, right?) So this is maybe a name that would start me down a slippery slope, and is therefore best avoided.

Copper Kismet has things going for it: it's almost certainly not already in use, it refers to the flower's color, and the alliteration makes it kind of fun to say. On the other hand, it doesn't actually mean anything.

I grew up near, and spent a lot of time in, Fairfield, Iowa, so even if the name isn't especially related to the bloom, there's still a strong pull toward the idea of naming a seedling after the town. The husband (who also has significant connections to Fairfield) says that the ideal color for a Schlumbergera "Fairfield" would be a bright yellow or slightly orangey yellow, though; my own mental associations would color the ideal "Fairfield" white or a very pale yellow. So seedling 114A is in the ballpark, but maybe not the right seedling for the name, which I reluctantly drop.

So we're down to three finalists now:

Fervent also appeals for primarily personal reasons, recalling the dog we had briefly before getting Sheba, who we named Fervor. Fervor was only here for four days, but I was pretty intensely upset when my allergies turned out to be bad enough that we had to take him back to the shelter,² and I still think about him from time to time. And a firey red-orange is one of the more appropriate colors for a word like "Fervent," so it works there too.

The down side: it's a little abstract, and possibly a word people aren't very familiar with. That doesn't always doom a name prospect -- plenty of obscure and non-English names among the seedlings -- but it's something to consider.

Apollo is a lot more familiar, and it's even one letter shorter. Apollo was the Greek god of (among other things) the sun and light in general, so orangey-red is borderline color-appropriate,³ and I think he's one of the nicer Greek gods,⁴ which is why so many things are named for him already. This is also the down side, as there's a better-than-average chance that a Schlumbergera 'Apollo' already exists, or would by the time I got around to making the name official.

Finally, Gallant Fox, another racehorse name. It's long, but also unlikely to be in use already, color-appropriate,⁵ and depending on what outfit you imagine a gallant fox wearing, it could even be sort of a pleasant mental image. There's even a very thin Iowa connection, which makes up a bit for dropping "Fairfield." Possible downside: "fox" has taken on some additional meanings lately.

Once again, I slept on the question after narrowing the choices down. The morning after writing the above, I was less enamored of Apollo, considering how many namesakes he has already, but I was completely deadlocked on the other two, so I wound up flipping a coin, which came up Gallant Fox. So there we are.

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¹ Though I want to give an honorable mention to a fifth, Rebolation. I hadn't heard the word (the name of a Brazilian dance style), and looking into what it was meant that I got to see a lot of videos of people dancing impressively. (Made me think of what you'd get if you crossed Michael Jackson with Michael Flatley.) Turn the sound down on your computer/device and watch this:


Finding out about this sort of random stuff that I would otherwise never have heard of is my main motivation for doing the seedling names the way I am: since TinEye results can be, literally, anything that anybody has decided to take a picture of and upload to Flickr, I almost always wind up learning something about the world by the time I manage to pick out a name, whether that turns out to be Dusty Springfield's sexual orientation, the existence of ginger beer, the German word for lipstick, the Spanish word for "cobra," a new tropical fruit, the name for grooved sections of highway that make growling noises when you drive across them, etc.
² He got readopted, eventually (not a given: adoption is often slow for gigantic black dogs). Fervor's fine.
³ Again, a golden yellow would probably be a better match to the name.
⁴ Of course, the benevolence of Greek deities has to be graded on a curve: I don't think any of them were entirely benign. In particular, don't let Apollo challenge you to a musical contest, 'cause that never ends well.
⁵ Appropriate to "fox," not to the racehorse, who was a bay.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 077

Seedling 077A isn't very impressive: just another orange/white, a little smaller than average. It only produced one bloom, which was distorted, unhappy-looking, and not photogenic. I was still happy to see it; it had started a bud at the end of spring 2015, and developed it for quite a while before dropping it at basically the last possible moment. So I knew it was probably going to be an orange, but I'd been in suspense about what kind of orange for about six months.

Since the seedling's not that great, the name isn't likely to matter very much, so coming up with a name is relatively low-pressure. I picked 5 potentially acceptable options out of TinEye's original 30.

The bloom has the approximate shape of a Betta; orange isn't a common betta color, but they're out there.
On the down side, it feels like underwater life is pretty well-represented already, with 018A "Nudibranch," 021A "Spider Crab," 025A "Clownfish," and 091A "Flying Fish."

Grendel isn't what you'd call a particularly sympathetic character (though there are other schools of thought), but I could stand to have more literary references.¹

Boomerang was previously considered and rejected for seedling 054A "Alberta." There's a slight connection between seedling and name this time, insofar as boomerangs are crooked pieces of wood, and the bloom is sort of distorted and crooked in shape, and boomerangs return when thrown, and this plant's bud "returned" after a several-month delay.

Or perhaps a not-great Patrick Swayze movie is the logical name for a not-great Schlumbergera seedling, in which case Roadhouse.²

Finally, this is the midpoint of this season's first-time blooms: 13 seedlings before it, 12 after it.³ So in a sense, one could say that the Schlumbergeras are hitting their Full Stride, with 077A.

The only two names that interested me after writing that out were Grendel and Boomerang, and after sleeping on the decision for a night, I decided that Grendel was the slightly more interesting of the two, even though Boomerang is a more entertaining word. Therefore, I christen 077A Grendel.

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¹ The only literary references so far barely qualify: 056A "Demons Begone," 082A "Strawberry Madeleine,", and if comics count, which I'm not sure they should, 113A "Helper Dog."
² Which I watched on Netflix semi-recently and, in fairness, kind of enjoyed, but I would have enjoyed it just as much with the sound off. (1989 Swayze was pretty.)
³ Though there are four previously-unbloomed seedlings teasing me with some buds as of 19 December -- 003, 058, 204, and 208 -- and I'm expecting at least one of those, probably 208, to produce a full bloom before New Year's.
It would be foolish of me to try to guess what will happen in February/March/April this year, but I will: my guess is that once all the results are in for the year, 077A will wind up being slightly before the middle of the pack.