Anthurium no. 0537 "Bridgette of Madison County"

One hundred twenty-eight seedlings have bloomed so far, as I write this, and there is a strong argument to be made that Bridgette is the very worst one. This is the prettiest photo I could get, of the prettiest bloom she's produced so far:

But this is a lot more representative of what Bridgette actually does:

The spathe never opens fully, probably because half of it is brown and dead by the time it's mature enough to try. I've seen thrips on it, though I'm not sure that they're what causes the dead patches on the spathes -- the thrips population has declined since I started blasting the plants with water, but Bridgette's spathes are still coming out partly dead.

Even if the spathe burn could be worked out somehow, the blooms are tiny,¹ and not a great color.² The plant is a relatively fast bloomer, but whatever it might gain in enthusiasm, it loses in follow-through.

The leaves have been variable in quality. Overall, they're better than you'd expect from the blooms, but they don't have any notable positive qualities: not shiny, pleasingly-colored, blemish-free, or large. They do tend to be longer and narrower than average. This one's pretty typical:

And the plant as a whole:

So, yeah. Pretty obviously not a keeper, and in fact probably in a landfill by the time you read this. My hope is that when I recycle the name, Bridgette of Madison County II will be prettier. 'Cause I do really like the name.

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¹ The scale is hard to determine from my closely-cropped photos, I realize. The bloom in the first photo of this post measures 1 1/8 inches tall by 5/8 inches wide (2.9 cm x 1.6 cm). Average size for one of the Anthurium blooms is roughly 2 inches tall by 1 1/2 inches wide (5.1 x 3.8 cm).
² In theory there's nothing wrong with a white to light pink spathe coupled with a lavender-pink spadix, I guess; it's not a combination that's appeared in the seedlings before. But combining one really common thing with another really common thing is hard to get excited about, even if the combination's never been seen before.
I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Michelle Obama eating a pie, but I've seen plenty of pictures of pies, and plenty of pictures of Michelle Obama. I think it's safe to predict that I would not be blown away by an Obama/pie combination, however unprecedented in my experience it might be. More so if the photo were half-burnt and tiny.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Sorcerer's Apprentice

We've seen a flower by this name before (2012), but the colors were different then (orange-red in 2012, brown-yellow in 2015), and I don't think the difference can be explained by the lighting or the camera or whatever. I mean, the shapes are different too.

The available online photos suggest that this year's pictures are closer to what the actual registered hybrid looks like than 2012's were. It would then follow that the 2012 pictures were misidentified by me, the exhibitor, or the seller. So what was I taking pictures of in 2012? I suppose we'll never know. (UPDATE: Read the comments. Nycguy knows.)

Anyway. Had some trouble photographing this; the petals are narrow, which makes it difficult to convince the camera's autofocus to pay attention to them. But I got some passable shots anyway, obviously, and it seems like a nice enough flower.

Phragmipedium Sorcerer's Apprentice = Phragmipedium longifolium x Phragmipedium sargentianum (Ref.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 033

Seedling 033A doesn't have many distinguishing characteristics; it's basically one more in a long series of orange/pink blooms.¹ This doesn't make it any less deserving of a name, but it does make it a little bit more difficult to care about the name. So here we go.

TinEye gave me 30 possible names, which I reduced to six, and I considered seven other "emergency" names, but only wound up adding one of those to the list of serious contenders. The themes were "extreme femininity" and "art." I didn't plan it that way. It just happened.

I don't have anything in particular against Stevie Nicks, and she gets points for showing up organically as part of the TinEye search, but I can't say I feel like I've ever really connected with her music.² Also orange and pink aren't Stevie-Nicksonian colors at all.³ And her involvement in season 3 of American Horror Story didn't improve my opinion of her.⁴

And there is technically nothing wrong with Miss Nicaragua as a seedling name, but it doesn't sit well with me. I think I'm worried that it would come across as disrespectful of beauty pageant contestants, or Nicaraguans, or something. (I actually have a lot more respect for beauty pageant contestants now than I did, say, a month ago, because I found the Tom and Lorenzo posts discussing the "national costumes" portion of the Miss Universe pageant from this year and there turns out to be a hell of a lot more drag queen / Miss Universe overlap than I would ever have anticipated. Highly, highly recommended. Part one; two; three; and four. Also see: Genevieve Valentine's coverage of the same segment.⁵)

Femmebomb is, if I understand correctly, the title of some kind of yarn-bombing art-installation sort of thing, or possibly more than one of them. It's really hard to tell. A 2004 Femmebomb has an online installation video at YouTube, though the TinEyed photo is from 2007. Best guess on the 2004 Femmebomb: it appears to be a knit building-cosy, or at least a gesture in the direction of one.⁶ As a concept, I guess I'm on-board (though I wonder what happens to it when it rains. And autumn when the leaves start to drop is probably no picnic either.), but as a seedling name, I don't think so. Maybe if the flower were a little more obviously girly -- pink, double the number of petals, maybe ruffly petals, something. At best, 033A is a Femmegrenade, not a Femmebomb.

I like Impossible Flag as an idea (the photographer has a series of "impossible flag" images, which mostly appear to be carefully-cropped shots that result in a geometric, vaguely flaglike picture, many of which would probably be pretty easy to convert to an actual flag so I'm not sure how he justifies calling them "impossible"), but as a name I don't think it works very well.

Distant Lights is sort of descriptive, I guess, in a way, somehow. I don't know why it appealed to me in the first place, now that I look at it.

Which leaves us with two: Clueless and Dusty Springfield.

This isn't really the sort of color palette I think of when I think of the movie Clueless; it's hard to imagine Cher putting pink and orange together on purpose, or doing anything with orange at all. But the word feels like it fits the flower pretty well anyway, somehow. I think it could work.

The color palette feels a lot more like Dusty Springfield than seedling 106A did (though the paler bloom fits better than the darker one does), which I guess is why she got dragged in as an emergency name.

So then after briefly thinking wait, maybe Miss Nicaragua would be workable after all, who knows, and deciding against it a second time, for the same reasons, I realized that I like Clueless way better than I like Dusty Springfield, and it turned out not to be much of a contest. Obviously, seedling 033A is Clueless.

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¹ It's possible that 033 has two distinct seedlings in it -- looking at the photos, there seem to be both a slightly lighter orange/pink with somewhat ragged-tipped wide petals (first two pictures in this post), and a slightly more saturated orange/pink with pointed narrow petals (last two pictures). I can't know for sure until I get several blooms at once, to compare, and that probably won't happen this year.
² Well, "Landslide." I like "Landslide." But I'm actually more familiar with the Dixie Chicks cover than I am with Stevie Nicks' original. (The Dixie Chicks video, which I hadn't seen until I started writing this post, is terrible, by the way, and should serve as a cautionary tale to all music-video directors: don't do green screen and CGI effects if you don't have the budget to make them look at least a little believable. Unless the director was actually aiming for country-pop-music-video-by-way-of-The-Persistence-of-Memory, in which case the execution was fine, but the concept went horribly wrong.)
For the record: Stevie's version is better, if only for showing some restraint on all the show-offy harmonies. I get that showoffy harmonies are the Dixie Chicks' thing, but hey, Dixie Chicks, know when to throttle back.
And I say this as someone who likes the Dixie Chicks.
³ The first two pages of image searches for her name are approximately 75% black outfits, 24% white, 1% dark gray, and then there's a rounding error of one burnt-orange outfit and one red outfit. The lady likes her black clothing.
⁴ AHS: Asylum or GTFO, is my feeling. Except for Myrtle (Frances Conroy), who was wonderful, and maybe three of Kathy Bates' lines (Llllllliiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeessssssssssss!), Coven was dull and stupid, with no redeeming qualities, and I am a lesser person for having watched it.
⁵ Indeed, it's entirely possible that Miss Nicaragua's entry in this year's pageant makes it literally impossible to make fun of Miss Nicaragua. (Also worthy of special mention: Indonesia, British Virgin Islands, Nigeria, Venezuela, Panama, Argentina, Curacao, and Guatemala. Don't misunderstand: I unironically love all of these -- Argentina's is one of the best things I have ever seen -- as well as several of the others that I didn't link to. But what could anyone possibly say to insult or demean one of the outfits that it wasn't already shouting about itself at maximum volume?)
⁶ (It's possible that only the front of the building is covered.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 093

Seedling 093A is the one the husband got to name. Wasn't sure exactly how to do this: I didn't want to make him write a whole blog post on his own, but I did want there to be some kind of explanation for how he chose the name, which I figured was probably better in his own words. After all, the whole point of doing it was to give y'all some time in someone else's head, since I figure you're probably getting bored with mine.

But. The TinEye process is long and boring, and if the husband had to go through the photos by himself, the most likely outcome was that he'd pick a bunch of names I'd already seen and rejected 700 times, which would make this whole experiment no fun for me, so . . . I did the TinEye thing for him, and presented him with a list of 32 names and said, pick one. (Not one of the terrible ones.)

This is the seedling he got to name:

And these are the TinEyed names he was given to work with:

Sisterhood • Crossed Paths • Heat Signature • Vulcan • Boiled Cranberries • Saxophone • Michelada¹ • Love Story • Proposal • Griffin • Flamingo Burlesque • Hot Bird • Postmodernist • Foursquare • Late Afternoon • Dismayed Angel² • Screw Aerodynamics • Dolly Parton • Seahorse • Torch (or Torch and Pitchfork) • Gramophone • Beach House • Can't Remember • Jupiter • Silence • Bangle • Rundown Barn • Work in Progress • End of Days • Coral-Friend • Warped • Spicule

And here are his comments on those names:³

Sisterhood: Meh.
Crossed Paths: It works for hybrid plants.
Heat Signature: I don’t know why, but for some reason it reminds me of the practice of using cold temps to force blooms.
Vulcan: Initially the name had emotional appeal, but the nomenclature is illogical.
Boiling Cranberries: Gross.
Extreme Saxophones:⁴ I suppose the blossoms could resemble saxophones. The "extreme" is too exaggerated. I suppose you could jazz up the name by adding a color like, Red Saxophones.
Michelada: It makes me think of an unappealing drink.⁵
Love Story: The blossoms take on a "bizarre mating ritual" quality. I think I like this name.
Proposal: I would recommend a name that describes the plant in more detail.
Griffin: The mythological beast associations don’t work. If you think of the blossom as an open mouth and stamen as microphone the Kathy "Griffin" name could work. I suppose there is the more obvious hair color reference.⁶
Flamingo Burlesque: Flamingo Burlesque is my personal favorite. Though I suppose people think of flamingos as being pink.⁷
Hot Bird: it's good, makes me think it is a sexy cousin of the Bird of Paradise.⁸
Postmodernist: It is a little abstract, but I like it. My impression is that the color is too bright for postmodern art.
Foursquare: I can’t get past my associations with the Foursquare Evangelical Church.⁹
Late Afternoon: The orange colors of sunsets occur in the evening.
Dismayed Angel: Seems like the name should belong solely to the photo it is inspired from.

Screw Aerodynamics: It works for that particular car, but not for such a delicate plant and blossom.
Dolly Parton: It is too obscene.¹⁰
Seahorse: It reminds me of the ads in the back of comic books.
Torch or Torch and Pitchfork: Overly dramatic.
Gramophone: It totally works, I like the sound of it, maybe even add a color like "Coral Gramophone."
Beach House: Adding the word "sunset" to make "Beach House Sunset" could work, but then the name is too long
Can’t Remember: Too vague.
Jupiter: Jupiter is a cool name on its own, but I think of the planet Jupiter having white, yellow, orange, and brown stripes. Maybe the red planet of Mars is more applicable.
Silence: Sorry, I’m not getting anything.
Bangle: The bracelet doesn’t fit. The color of a Bengal Tiger is closer, but still not quite there.
Rundown Barn: Color palette is close.
Work in Progress: Description needs more development.
End of Days: Too radical.
Coral-Friend: This name has potential.
Warped: Well I’m not quite sure it fits.
Spicule: It does express an explosion of color.

In the end, his first, second, and third choices were: Flamingo Burlesque, Vulcan, and Gramophone, with Saxophone as an honorable mention, so 093A gets to be Flamingo Burlesque.

As is probably clear from footnote 10, I would have chosen Dolly Parton, had the decision been up to me personally. Had the name been a collaborative effort, we'd probably have wound up at Vulcan, because even though it wasn't either of our first choices, it was his #2 and somewhere in my top five. But I can live with Flamingo Burlesque.

Dolly Parton will of course be transferred to the list of emergency names, where it will come up over and over again until some lucky seedling actually gets it.¹¹

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¹ I'm pretty sure that I had not settled on, or even thought of, 102A Michonne when I made this list. It would obviously be a little confusing to have two names that began with the same four letters.
² The photographer titled it "little angel," and technically it is, but when I look at the photo, I mostly see "dismayed."
³ He's concerned that you'll think that he just hates everything and is mean, so I should note that he was encouraged to find things to be critical of, this being the only way that's ever worked for me to narrow down a long list of name options. (It comes more naturally to me, of course, as I actually do hate everything and actually am mean.)
⁴ "But Extreme Saxophones wasn't the name you were supposed to consider; where did you even get the 'extreme' part from?"
"It was on the Flickr photo. Sorry."
⁵ And holy cow is he right -- I don't necessarily object to the lime juice, salt, spices, and peppers, depending on the specific spices and the relative proportions of everything, but throwing a beer on top of all that just sounds dreadful. (When I drank, I was never able to develop a taste for beer. Granted that I wasn't trying very hard, but I found it pretty repulsive.)
⁶ It had not occurred to me that the name could have anything to do with (comedian) Kathy Griffin until I read this comment; I was going totally off the mythological-creature associations. He's right that it fits Kathy better than the creature.
⁷ The thing is, though, that flamingos are actually orange (or coral, or peach). Not only do they show up all the time in the TinEye results for orange seedlings, but orange flamingos outnumber pink ones in regular image search results by at least 2 to 1, and many of the pink flamingos that do appear in searches are lawn ornaments, paintings/drawings, or photographs that have obviously been processed heavily to make the flamingos pink.
⁸ Better than my mental image: some older, sluttier cousin of Big Bird's.
⁹ Which is a thing. One set of my grandparents went to a Foursquare church for a while, and I went with them at least once; my main memory of it is that I was intensely bothered by the font they used for a Bible quotation on the main stage, which had such elaborate y's that I thought they looked like p's. So God was the same "pesterdap, todap, and forever." I doubt I thought about anything else the entire time we were in there.
"Pesterdap" is a good word, though. Not sure what it means, but I feel like it should be a thing.
¹⁰ "WHAT??!?!," I asked. "HOW DARE YOU."
"The photo is pretty gross," he replied. [It's probably not technically unsafe for work, if you're curious, but he's correct to observe that it's in bad taste.]
"Well, yeah, I guess, but you're not choosing the pictures, you're choosing the words. I just can't even. How could you."
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize to me! Apologize to Dolly, and just pray that she forgives you."
¹¹ I realize as I end this post that I haven't actually made a case for the awesomeness of Dolly Parton, and have been talking about her as if we were all already in agreement about her awesomeness. If you're not, try reading her Wikipedia entry and see if it doesn't get you on board. Or watch 9 To 5. Or Steel Magnolias. Search the internet for memorable Dolly Parton quotes. ("I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb. And I also know that I'm not blonde.") You'll find something. Plus by all accounts, she's delightful in person, one of our few genuinely nice celebrities.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium anosmum 'Superbum'

This looks very pretty, but it seems like the growth habit would make it awkward to grow. I mean, that has to take up quite a bit of space in a greenhouse or whatever, right? Compared to an upright-growing plant of equal mass?

That's the sort of question I could ask the Illowa people about at the orchid show, if I hadn't already spent so much time complaining about the backgrounds and proofreading. But I have, so I'm a little afraid of them.¹ (This one's sign read "anosum" instead of "anosmum." They're just fucking with me now, right?)

'Superbum' turns out to be Latin (Google Translate renders it as "proud," in English, which may or may not be accurate²), but when I'm feeling especially playful or British or something, I like to read and pronounce it as a synonym for "phenomenal backside."

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¹ (As you probably already know, orchid fanciers can be very menacing.)
² I'm never quite sure how seriously to take Google Translate results.

Anthurium no. 0547 "Cate Sedia"

As recent new Anthurium blooms go, Cate is good. She doesn't do anything amazingly well, when compared to all the seedlings at once, but she does most things better than average.

She's not completely thrips-resistant, but is at least not horribly disfigured by thrips scarring. The color isn't some wild new combination I've never seen before, but hey, at least she's not another pink/pink or red/yellow. Purple-pink/white is a perfectly respectable combination, and the spathe color is one of her better qualities.

First bloom, 5 December 2015. Nice enough, but, you know, whatever.
Also good: she seems to be a relatively prolific bloomer, from what I've seen so far. I accidentally broke off her first bloom during watering, but Cate produced a second one within about a month, and it was incrementally better than the first: a little less scarred, a little bit larger, and it photographed much better.

Second bloom, 14 January 2016. Hello, nurse!
As I write this, on 15 and 16 January, a third bud is barely visible at the center of the plant: if that one winds up developing normally and opening, it's possible Cate will qualify as a fast bloomer, like her sister, 0527 "Ms. Lucia Love."¹

If I have a complaint about Cate, it's that her foliage could be better. It's still better than average, I think, and I've promoted seedlings with worse (0386 "Violet Chachki," for example), but it isn't good.²

The whole plant could be fuller, considering she's a little bit past 2 years old now, but I think I can see a sucker beginning to develop, so that might be a temporary flaw.

Granted, this is also an older photo (October); Cate has one or two more leaves now.

I'm not 100% certain these are suckers; neither has yet actually produced a leaf (often the first few leaves on a sucker fail to develop properly; I don't know if the thrips are getting to them or if the baby plant isn't getting enough water or what), but the one on the left, at least, sure looks like a sucker to me.
So, final verdict -- not only is Cate staying around for a while, I've up-potted her already.

Which reminds me: I've promoted a couple other seedlings to 6-inch pots recently, both of which were initially disappointing.

0406 Tricia Nullmaritch, like Cate, had a nice bloom color, but her first bloom was unattractively scarred up and I was disappointed at the time. The second bloom from Tricia was also scarred, but a lot less so, and I decided that I was interested enough in what she'd do that I was okay with moving her to a 6-inch pot.

Tricia's most recent leaf improved significantly on the old ones as well; it's not unblemished, but it's better.

0408 Tex Messich likewise had a lot of spathe scarring, but the second bloom was better, and significantly bigger. The color isn't particularly out of the ordinary -- technically, Tex is merely a pink/beige -- but in some lighting conditions, the spathe is slightly orange or coral or something, which is mildly interesting, and both blooms so far have been held on short peduncles. Short peduncles³ aren't good if I'm aiming for something commercially viable, but I find them sort of intriguing despite myself. (And anyway, not everything in the whole goddamn world has to be turned into money. I'm allowed to keep unsellable seedlings for my own enjoyment if I want to. So there.)

By far the most interesting thing about Tex at the moment is that he's been producing gigantic new leaves. I mean, his leaves were always pretty big for his age, and relatively unscarred, but the latest one is about 8.5 inches (22 cm) long by 5.5 inches (14 cm) wide, which is almost as large as my seedlings' leaves get.⁴

When the leaf is flattened out a little better than this, and you measure from the top of the lobes to the tip, it comes out just short of 8.5 inches. The photo doesn't show this well, I know.
I already believed that it was good policy to give the seedlings a shot at a second bloom before discarding them, but it seems like that policy has been validated quite a bit lately.

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¹ All five seedlings in the BH seedling group ('White Gemini' / 23 October 2013) to bloom so far have been unusually enthusiastic about doing so, though that doesn't necessarily make them good seedlings.
Cate and Lucia have begun their third blooms, 0532 Amber Alert is at least on her second, if not third, though they're bad, and 0544 Ida Claire Warren produced two blooms pretty close together, rested for a bit, then started on a third. Ida's aren't very good either -- they photograph well, because there's like a 36-hour period after they first open when they're very nice, but the thrips love them, and the color dulls quickly.
0537 Bridgette of Madison County has also done two full blooms and one bud so far, but Bridgette is competitive for the Worst Seedling Bloom Of All Time title, down in the bottom 10 with 0373 Shangela Laquifa Wadley, 0218 Noah Fence, 0415 Darby Dragons, 0283 Anne Pursand, and 0558 Amber Waves. You'll get to judge for yourself soon; Bridgette's post is scheduled for February 2.
² Interestingly, the plants that get promoted to 6-inch pots mostly seem to grow out of the scarring, to some degree or another, so it's possible that the thrips aren't solely responsible. Smaller pots also dry out faster and more often, so it could be a thrips/drought combination that causes the bad leaf scarring, or it's possible that having the extra room for roots to grow strengthens the plants and makes them better able to resist thrips. Or maybe the improvement comes first, then the up-potting, and the only reason they seem to get better after up-potting is because I only up-pot plants that are already getting better.
³ (Previously seen in 0335 "Donna Fanuday", who continues to produce them even after getting moved to a bigger pot. So I guess it's genetic.)
⁴ When I grabbed a ruler and went big-leaf hunting, I found four seedlings with at least one leaf bigger than Tex's: 0275 Yvette Horizon, 0330 Faye Quinette, 0334 Jean Poole, and 0360 Heidi Gosique. Another four either tied Tex or came up just short: 0126 Erin Dirtylondry, 0259 Tasha Salad, 0314 Camille Yen, and 0380 Ewan Watarmi.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 089

As a way to change up the whole seedling-naming thing, and liven up what is, let's be real, one more orange/white in a long series of orange/whites, I've exempted 089A from the TinEye process, and instead am going to try to choose from a hodgepodge of emergency names, previously rejected names, names from web pages about the color orange, and wherever else happens to come along. No rules! Anything can happen!

(Anything, that is, except that the seedling will be orange. The seedlings are always orange.)

Also going to skip the pre-screening process, and assess every name I considered, so you can see how that often goes.

089A was apparently not a very heavy bloomer; I only got two photos, of the same flower, and I think there were only two flowers total. One picture turned out fairly well, considering the flower's wonky shape, and the other turned out poorly, so I'm not sure whether this is a good seedling or not.

So what do we have by way of names? Oh my goodness so many names:

• Emergency names -- Apollo, Daylight Factory, Exothermic, Gato del Sol, Molly Ivins, Sly Fox, Sun and Snow
• Previously rejected -- Oompa, She Heard You, Night Cheese, Firewalk, Fervent (or Fervor), Breakin' the Law, Hellkitten, Fornax, Halloween Moon, Bruce Lee, Tamika Flynn, Heatsink, Powerlady, Uh Hey Baby
• Causes that use orange awareness ribbons: Human Rights, Racial Tolerance, Cultural Diversity, Feral Cats, Motorcycle Safety, Underage Drinking, Hunger
• References to orange from around the internet: Persimmon, Benign Warmth, Gut Reaction, Overconfident, Optimistic, Glutton

And okay, let the selection begin.

Well, right off the bat, I regret including the awareness ribbons group, because I feel like if I dismiss any of those names then it means I don't care about the causes they represent. I mean, some of those strike me as more important causes than others, but it's not like I'm all, no, what we need is more feral cats! More drunk middle schoolers!¹ So, yeah, bad judgment on my part, there. Strike the whole category.

And we can't have a Sly Fox and a Gallant Fox both. 'Cause too many foxes . . . uh, spoil the chickens. Or something.²

Glutton is terrible; I don't care if it is historically associated with the color orange. Let's try to stay away from the obviously awful names, yeah? Whoever let that into the list should be fired.

Heatsink doesn't make any more sense than it did the first time. Ditto She Heard You and Uh Hey Baby.

Benign Warmth is somehow both bland and vaguely cloying.

The white is maybe not intense enough for Sun and Snow to work.

Firewalk should be redder.

I don't know what color a Tamika Flynn seedling would be, but it's not orange. This doesn't really feel like the right color for Bruce Lee, either.

Breakin' the Law is kind of ridiculous for this seedling: it's orange and white. How much more normal and law-abiding could it be?

I don't think I like any version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory enough for Oompa, and the Oompa-Loompas are one of my least favorite parts of the movie besides.

Hellkitten and Fervent/Fervor are a little overstated.

Exothermic, Overconfident, Apollo, and Optimistic are all fine, I guess, but I feel like they're not quite interesting enough.

The bloom is perhaps a little delicate for Fornax or Gut Reaction.

Daylight Factory is a specific type of building, with reinforced concrete frames that could accommodate large windows and make use of natural light. See this page for examples and more details. I like the term, partly because it could easily mean a factory that produces daylight, but it doesn't make a lot of sense either way, and most people aren't familiar with the architectural meaning, so ennh.

Powerlady showed up because it is/was the name of a magazine, which makes me uneasy; it also appears to be the name of a chain (?) of gyms, which makes me even more hesitant to use it.

This is a better color for a Molly Ivins than the previous candidate, but I think I'll keep this option in reserve for a higher-quality seedling.

Night Cheese is still funny, and I kind of want to go with this, but the three remaining names are better.

Those three names are: Persimmon, Gato del Sol, and Halloween Moon.

Persimmon is a remarkably good color match, at least going by the photos that come up in an image search. (I'm not sure I've ever seen a persimmon in the flesh.) I'm kind of tempted to go with this name for the color alone. It's also the shortest name.

I'm curious about why a racehorse was named Gato del Sol (Spanish, "cat of the sun" / "sun cat"), but can't find an explanation anywhere. The name amuses me regardless. It's probably more amusing because I can't find an explanation.

Halloween Moon is probably the most evocative image, and color-appropriate, though I'm a little uneasy with it because it would appear to promise blooms on Halloween, from a plant that so far has only ever bloomed in late November. It's also the longest name. I have a "sun" already (111A Morning Sun), which either counts in favor (if I have a sun, there should be a moon) or opposition (enough with the astronomical bodies already). Not sure which.

So we basically have an accurate name, a whimsical name, and a poetic name. Which should it be?

Well. There are a lot of names from this year's batch that aren't in English. I don't care that they're not in English, except insofar as my brain stumbles a little when I'm reading a long column of words from various languages,³ so maybe Gato del Sol is droppable. And of the two remaining, I think I like the poetry of Halloween Moon better than the color fidelity of Persimmon. So I guess this one's Halloween Moon.

The plan for the next seedling, 093A, six days from now, is to let the husband go through the list of candidate names and decide which one will be official. Haven't started doing that yet (as of 14 January), or even asked him, so it may not happen, but that's the plan. I figure y'all could use a little time in someone else's brain.

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¹ I would, however, like to go on record as supporting an increase in the number of drunk feral cats on motorcycles, because that sounds like it would be very exciting.
² I'm sure there must be a folk saying about what happens when you get too many foxes, and I'm sure having too many foxes must be bad. Probably especially for chickens.
³ So far: 034 Wahine (Polynesian, "woman"), 099B Karma Cobra (Sanskrit, though "karma" may be fully adopted into English), 074A Vroom (it's English but "vr" is such an unusual consonant blend for English that it trips me up regardless), 107A Nova Prospekt (potentially Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, or Serbian: it's deliberately ambiguous in the game I took it from), 079A Yayoi Kusama (Japanese given name), 079B Haleakala (Hawaiian, "house of the sun").
Also 018 Nudibranch is English but may as well not be, given the weird pronunciation and its not being an everyday conversation sort of word.
Last year's list: 019A Belevenissen (German, "experiences"), 030A Diwali (Sanskrit, "festival of lights" or "series of lights"), 035A Patito (Spanish, "duckling")

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Venus

I-Hsin Venus is another of the really pretty phals from the 2015 show.

I got curious about all the "I-Hsin" phals (I've only blogged about our good friend I-Hsin Balloon and I-Hsin Black Jack, but the International Orchid Register site lists another 380 Phalaenopsis hybrids, from I-Hsin Abby to I-Hsin Zoo.

The registrant name for some of these, including I-Hsin Venus, is "I-Hsin Biotech," and for the others it's "W. C. Chien." As best as I can determine from their website, I-Hsin Biotech started out as one guy doing some amateur Phalaenopsis breeding in Taiwan and has turned into an international family-owned phal-production juggernaut, with facilities in Taiwan and the U.S.

So if the I-Hsin plants are amazing, well, they damn well should be: they have 70,000 m² (750,000 square feet) of greenhouse space for mass production of their plants, and an additional tenth of that amount set aside for flasks. If I had 6300 times more growing space devoted to Anthurium seedlings, I'd probably come up with some pretty cool Anthuriums, too.^{1, 2} (Also I imagine I'd spend quite a bit more time watering.)

And I-Hsin turns out not even to be unusual, in the Phalaenopsis world. There's another company whose phals show up frequently at the orchid show, OX Orchid Farm,³ who are also based in Taiwan and the U.S. No doubt if I looked long enough, I could find half a dozen more enormous Taiwanese Phalaenopsis companies.

I'm not crazy about the implication. I mean, in theory, there's still nothing stopping an amateur from catching a lucky break and producing an amazing seedling on their own, using a flasking service or whatever. But if you had your own amazing registered hybrid, really all you could do with it would be to sell it to one of the big companies, right? I mean, you can't really do tissue-culture at home,⁴ and if you can't mass-produce your plants, you can't mass-sell them either.

Not sure there's anything to be done about this really. Capitalism's gonna capital. But I don't like it.

Even if it does result in some pretty amazing plants.

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Venus = Phalaenopsis Dragon's Gold x Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Viola Tris (Ref.)

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¹ I mean, not that some of my Anthurium seedlings aren't still cool. They're just maybe not this cool.
² I have approximately 120 square feet (11 m²) of shelf space devoted to Anthuriums at the moment, including seedlings, parent plants, and germination containers. The Schlumbergeras get about 54 square feet (5 m²).
³ OX Orchid Farm hybrids: OX Spot Queen 'OX1460,' OX Prince 'OX1480,' OX Golden Apple, OX Little Moon, and OX Firebird 'OX1495'
⁴ Technically, I think artisanal tissue culture is possible, and something people have done before, but because of the need for incredibly sterile facilities, equipment, and culture medium, one would need to be very lucky, skilled, or persistent. And a 70,000 m² greenhouse for growing out the plants after they're created would help too.