Schlumbergera seedling no. 103 (again)

103B is sort of good news / bad news, in that I like the color a lot (Not orange! It's a Valentine's Day miracle!), but it's only produced one bloom so far, so I don't have much of a sense of its actual quality.¹

Not only does it have very good coloration for a Valentine's Day post, the colors seemed to prompt TinEye to come up with a more Valentine's-friendly set of names than one would otherwise expect. Out of nine options on the short list, five are love-and-romance themed, with a sixth that isn't really about love or romance but is certainly love-and-romance friendly. The remaining three names are probably at a disadvantage, but who knows. Let's see what happens.²

The nine options, in alphabetical order, are:

• David Lynch, which, okay, not romantic at all, but it made me laugh to see it in the results, and it actually showed up twice in TinEye, so it's certainly trying really hard. And there's an argument to be made for certain parts of certain Lynch films being romantic to some degree or another. I mean, it's not a good argument. But a person could still try. Mulholland Drive, at least. Maybe. A little. In places.

• Go Radish Go is a combination of Radish, which is actually super color-appropriate but has the naming-a-plant-for-a-plant problem, and
Go Sinner Go. I liked the "Go _______ Go" idea, but not with "sinner" in the blank. Therefore, Go Radish Go. It's dumb, but I like the way it sounds.

• Laser is only barely appropriate, but red is a common enough color for lasers to be, so.

• The first of the actual love/romance options is Make-Out City, which has been considered previously.³ I liked it well enough to put it on the emergency list, and this was the only emergency-list option that seemed reasonable for this seedling.

• Must Be Love is sort of obviously a Valentine's Day kind of name, though one wouldn't say the photo is particularly romantic.

• Pomme D'Amour is, if I understand correctly, the French name for the English "candy apple," and translates literally as "love apple."⁴

• Remote Kisses is actually referencing Hershey's kisses, in the photo, but there are a lot of ways one could interpret the name: someone being kissed by a remote control, someone kissing someone else while thinking about some other thing entirely, a couple sharing a passionate kiss in some jungle / desert / tundra / boat far from civilization, etc. Whether the ambiguity makes me like it more or less, I'm not sure, but it's at least one of the more complicated options.

• Valentine's Day is super obvious, but hey, TinEye gave it to me, and I could hardly leave it off the list.

• And then finally Zooey Deschanel (twice), who isn't maybe particularly known for love and romance and whatever but is, at the very least, love-and-romance-friendly. Plus I really like "New Girl," and she seems pretty unlikely to become horrible.

So all right. I think I'll drop Zooey Deschanel first. Though she seems unlikely to become horrible, that's no guarantee of anything. I mean, I can think of at least five celebrities who once seemed fine but turned out to be awful in surprising ways.⁵ And she's still young enough to change plenty.

And Laser is a little plain. I mean, it could work, but it doesn't excite me at all. Probably needs a second word.

Valentine's Day is fine except for implying blooms on Valentine's Day. Which is pretty early, for spring blooming, and I don't want someone to expect something that the seedling can't deliver.

Go Radish Go is perhaps too silly.

As tickled as I am by the idea of David Lynch, and as relatively safe as I think he is as an honoree compared to other celebrities (certainly you can read a lot of awful stuff into his movies if you're determined to do so, but I don't think that depicting something on a screen is the same as endorsing it. And whatever his movies might be like, I feel like we probably know as much about his personal inner horribleness as we're ever going to learn, and he's not so bad.), I'm not ready to name a seedling after him yet. Maybe eventually, but not today.

Which leaves me with four love-and-romance names: Make-Out City, Must Be Love, Pomme D'Amour, and Remote Kisses.

My brain seems to want to interpret Remote Kisses to mean someone kissing another person while distracted or preoccupied with something else. I know there are other interpretations, but that's the one that comes to mind first, and it's kind of a downer. Which probably says more about me than it does about the name, but in any case I can't shake the impression, so I'll drop that one.

Make-Out City seems a little crass, compared to the other two. I don't necessarily have a problem with crass, but considering the occasion, it might be nice to have a name that sounds a little sweeter.

And given the choice between Pomme D'Amour and Must Be Love, well, I could only pronounce the latter with any confidence, ever. So it must be Must Be Love.

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¹ (The other red/pink Schlumbergeras -- 054A "Helpful Gesture," 074A "Vroom," 078A "Art Party," and 208A [name TBD] -- haven't produced many blooms either; I think this is coincidental, not related to them all being red/pinks, but it's a little worrisome all the same.)
² I really do almost always figure these out as I write the post. You can tell by the way the posts meander, backtrack, repeat themselves, and occasionally fail to select a name.
³ (for 056A Demons Begone and 111A Morning Sun)
⁴ And the Thing I Learned from writing this particular seedling-naming post is that caramel apples are not the same thing as candy apples. All these years, I've thought "candy-apple red" was a weird color description, because the only sugar/apple combination I was familiar with is caramel apples, and caramel is brown and not red. But candy apples are a totally separate phenomenon. And having now seen some photos, "candy-apple red" makes a lot more sense.
In retrospect, it should probably have been obvious that caramel apples were not candy apples. But that's why it's fun to learn: a tiny sliver of the world that didn't make sense to me before makes sense to me now.
⁵ I won't name them specifically, because it sucks to find out that someone you liked and related to -- even if you only knew the characters they played and not the actual person -- is awful. I mean, do you really want to know?

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight'

I loved this one so much. The photo disappointed me (especially the out of focus and overexposed flower in the top left), but it was gorgeous in person. Plus there's sort of a white-tie tuxedo thing happening with the labellum.

The closest I got to a jaw-drop moment from the 2015 orchid show was the black Paphiopedilum (Black Cherry x sukhakulii) I showed you last June, but I also really liked the Papilionanda Erika Cizek Dann from October, and this Phalaenopsis. I don't know whether it means anything that my favorite orchids from the show were all much darker than the typical varieties. Maybe I was just in a dark purple mood that day. Either way, this is one of the few Phalaenopsis varieties I've seen that I actually covet.

Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight' = Phalaenopsis schilleriana x Phalaenopsis Malvarosa Valentine Pearl (Ref.)

Phal. schilleriana is pretty consistently lavender/pink in photo search results (e.g.); Phal. Malvarosa Valentine Pearl doesn't seem to show up in searches (you get results, but they're all pictures of Phal. Kaoda Twinkle).

Schlumbergera seedling no. 067

067A, like a couple seedlings before it, has complicated coloration, where the petals shade through white, orange, and red before ending on a magenta margin. I don't know whether this will turn out to be a consistent trait; 067A has only produced one bloom so far.¹ The seedlings have started the spring blooming cycle already,² so there's a chance that maybe I'll have the opportunity to confirm the coloration, but in the meantime, I need to name it something.

So. You know the drill. Bunch of name possibilities, narrowed down, widened again by adding some emergency names, narrowed down again: seven maybes.

First one to go is Fruit Punch. I wanted to eliminate it on the grounds that any particular brand of fruit punch is always a single color: you don't pour a glass and wind up with orange on the left and magenta on the right. But then it occurred to me that sometimes, if the glass is tipped, or you have the punch in a really wide, shallow punch bowl, it actually can appear to be different colors, depending on how much liquid the light has to travel through before it reaches your eyes. So instead, I reject it on the grounds that it's not a very interesting name.

Prism seemed remarkably appropriate at first -- a flower with multiple bands of different colors named for something that splits sunlight into multiple bands of different colors -- but it's been used for so many things already that it's tainted. I mean, try to convince me that a name with ties to government surveillance, a compact car, and, most damningly, Katy Perry,³ is a good idea.

Circus Conference is what Google Translate thinks the tagged "circus renz" means in German. I didn't look into it too deeply. I like the contrast between the freewheeling, gaudy "circus," on one hand, and the dull, sedate "conference" on the other, but it feels like it's trying too hard.

Mae West is safely dead, so we'd probably know if she were an especially awful human being, and she's got a lot of great quotes,⁴ but this is probably not the right color for a Mae West seedling: she apparently preferred to wear white in public, and decorated her home in white and gold.⁵

Which brings me to the final three names.

Dandy is notable for supporting a double meaning -- both "fine and dandy" and also a man excessively concerned about appearance and clothing. Having two meanings that both work reasonably well is unusual, and makes the name worth consideration.

Carousel Horse was previously considered for 107A "Nova Prospekt," and would be a good fit here as well.

Cyndi Lauper has likewise been previously considered, for 083A "Psychedelic Bunny" and 079B "Haleakala."

Image search results for "carousel horse" turn up mostly subdued, realistic colors, or at least more subdued and realistic than I expected to find. Cyndi Lauper's image search shows that at one point or another, she has had her hair dyed in every color 067A contains, plus quite a few others, so if I was looking for a substitute for Prism, Cyndi Lauper would be a good one. And if image search results are any indication of reality, historical dandies were not necessarily inclined to vivid color so much as extreme tailoring, cravats, and fur. Dandy also suffers a bit from association with the character in American Horror Story: Freak Show.

So Cyndi Lauper is the only one of the name options that is accurate at all, which I suppose makes the choice easy. Cyndi Lauper it is.

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¹ Which seems to be normal for the seedlings with this coloration: 107A Nova Prospekt has also only produced one bloom, I think; 083A Psychedelic Bunny has produced one per year for two years. This isn't enough seedlings to draw conclusions from, but I don't like what it's hinting at: that I can have lots of blooms, or complicated hues, but not both.
² As I write this, on 24 January, there are repeat blooms open on 'Caribbean Dancer' ('Caribbean Dancer' never completely stopped blooming), the NOID white, 027A "Kiln," 082A "Strawberry Madeleine," 030A "Diwali," 021B "Birthday Dinner," 099A "Dessert Room," 099B "Karma Cobra," and some first-time blooms on 003A [name TBD], 058A [name TBD], and 072A [name TBD].
³ Time has not softened my Katy-Perry-related feelings. I admit to enjoying "Last Friday Night," and I can tolerate "Teenage Dream," but "Firework" is the worst earworm for me (to the point where I am a little concerned that it might have been a bad idea for me even to type out the title here), "Roar" and "Dark Horse" make me want to claw my ears off, and I feel like I have to dislike "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot N Cold" on principle. (I have managed to miss the rest of the Perry oeuvre and ask that you do your part to keep it that way.)
⁴
• "I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it."
• "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better."
• "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere."
• "Love thy neighbor -- and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier."
• "Men are like linoleum floors. Lay 'em right and you can walk all over
them for years."
• "If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."
• "When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before."
⁵ (Ref. Though it's not difficult to find photos of her wearing dark colors, so I'm not sure how true that is. The white/gold apartment thing is confirmed by a first-person account.)

Anthurium no. 0516 "Brooke Enhart"

I'm afraid there isn't a lot to be said about Brooke; she's only produced one bloom so far, which was of pretty lousy quality (small, half-dead, boring color).

The leaves aren't terrible, and the plant overall is fine (or at least fine-ish). It's possible that if I give her a second chance, the next bloom will be better, but she's hard to get excited about. So I won't ask you to. Instead, I had another thought about Cleve Backster's plants-have-feelings theory (previously covered at PATSP in a three-part post: one, two, three) recently, and wanted to bounce it off of you.

By the end of those posts, I had pretty much concluded that the whole "primary perception" thing was less about the emotional life of plants and the deep interconnectedness of all living things, and much more about human egos (particularly but not exclusively Cleve Backster's¹). The reader may or may not agree, but that's what it looked like to me.² The new idea is another bit of support for the all-about-ego hypothesis, which is:

If plants having feelings is evidence for some deep interconnected psychic link between all living things, why do signals from that link only ever go in one direction?

Which is to say, Backster claimed that plants were sensitive³ to the emotions of specific people known to the plant,⁴ over a relatively short physical distance,⁵ and they reacted to those emotions⁶ by altering the conductivity of their tissues.⁷ He took this to mean that human thoughts and feelings are capable of affecting plants and influencing their consciousness, or whatever the plant equivalent of consciousness is.

But as far as I can tell, Backster never attempted to see whether that worked in the opposite direction, whether something happening to a plant would affect a person. Which if primary perception is about the deep psychic interconnectedness of all life, there's no reason why it shouldn't work the other direction. Life is life, after all. No obvious reason why plant thoughts/feelings/actions shouldn't be just as important as human thoughts/feelings/actions. Backster should have done experiments where a person sat alone in a room, hooked up to a polygraph, reporting their feelings, while someone turned the lights out in another room containing a plant. Or waved caterpillars around near a plant. Insulted and threatened a plant.⁸ Whatever.

But, you know, I don't feel a sudden pang of irrational terror when I throw a plant into the garbage. I can turn the light off in a room with plants present without suddenly feeling hungry, or tired, or angry, or whatever plants should feel when lights go off. Not once has a panic attack tipped me off to a scale infestation. I don't feel sexually frustrated if a bee flies past the window; I am not terrified by butterflies.⁹ I can hold a plant upside down for repotting without feeling dizzy.

Why not? Well, it's possible that I am some kind of soulless golem who is forever cut off from the splendor of psychic communication with salads. It's also possible that everybody is theoretically capable of having this kind of response, but we all learn to suppress it over time because if we actually did experience all those feelings 24/7 we would be rendered unable to function, what with all the lawnmowers, forest fires, herbivores, and flower shops around. Not to mention shit like the EcoLog 590D:



¹⁰
So. Uh.

The third installment in the original Cleve Backster series concluded that Backsterism was about ego, in that it gives you credit for everything a cultivated plant in your care does right (it bloomed! It must love me!) without giving you any of the blame for anything that it does wrong (it died! Well, I guess the air was too dry.). This is just another angle on that same idea: primary perception gives you the chance to believe plants feel my pain! I must be really important! without having to believe at the same time I feel plants' pain! They must be really important!

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¹ Who, according to Wikipedia, died in June 2013. Which we all remember, because that was the month when all everybody's plants freaked out.
² If you want to disagree with me on the subject here, that's totally fine. I don't mind discussing it. However, if you're going to disagree, please do me the kindness of actually reading the posts in question first.
³ (except when they weren't)
⁴ (except when the test subjects were people not previously known to the plant)
⁵ (except when the people having the emotions were hundreds of miles away)
⁶ (except when they didn't react at all, reacted after a significant time delay, or reacted in advance)
⁷ (because that was the only thing Backster knew how to measure)
⁸ ("And your . . . uh, roots. Your roots are so puny. It's a wonder you even know what water is, with roots like that. And your foliage is not a deep and robust green. I bet your stomata are all like, duuuuuhhhhhh, all the time. If I was you, I wouldn't even bloom. You don't need to pass on your genes: you're so weak, all the other plants would grow taller and shade you out, if you were planted in the ground. Algae make fun of you. Pollinators say nasty things about you behind your back," etc.)
⁹ Butterflies would be a difficult and interesting problem for people studying plant emotions, were anyone still doing so (I'm not aware of it personally, but I assume someone must be: bad ideas never actually go away), since butterflies' and plants' lives are tangled in complicated ways. Some butterflies are pollinators, which the plants should like. But butterflies also lay eggs on plants, which hatch into caterpillars and devour the plants, which the plants should not like. Except that butterflies are usually pretty particular about which plants they lay eggs on, and ignore others. Can the plants distinguish butterflies that intend to eat them or pollinate them from those that would ignore them? And how could we tell the difference between increased electrical conductance caused by excitement at a potential pollination and increased electrical conductance caused by terror of being chewed by caterpillars? So an ideal test of plant feelings about butterflies, and their transference to humans, would be pretty complicated.
(Or, at least, it would be complicated if we assume that plants can tell different butterflies apart. It's possible that plants aren't that smart, in the Backsterverse. I mean, the claim is that they have feelings, not that they're geniuses. Nobody denies that 3-year-old humans have feelings, but we don't put them in charge of butterfly taxonomy, do we?)
¹⁰ Which in fact does inspire certain emotions. Admiration for the engineering, dark amusement at the name (I can see how a device like this might actually be ecologically preferable to constructing logging roads and whatever, but it's still hard not to see "EcoLog" as some kind of ironic black humor, given its purpose.), a bit of delight at the -- as a MetaFilter comment had it -- "casual, almost lackadaisical dexterity of the thing," and then, you know, the terror, horror, and revulsion.
Hypocritical terror, horror, and revulsion, 'cause it's not like I don't use lots and lots of paper products. Better tree harvesting than petroleum. And this is probably a tree farm in the first place (how else to explain the uniform spacing and trunk diameter?), so this is all those particular trees were ever destined to be anyway. But still.

Pretty picture: Dendrobium bracteosum f. alba

I hadn't meant to stick two Dendrobiums so close together (last one was only 12 days ago), but they look so different from one another that I feel like it shouldn't count.

The usual form of Den. bracteosum is apparently lavender to pink; some of the more photos that emerge from an image search (e.g.) remind me a bit of crocus, especially the images that lean more to the lavender side of things. I'm less impressed with the white form, but it's possible that that's due to my terrible photo, rather than the plant's inherent inferiority.

Dendrobium bracteosum has a ridiculously long list of synonyms, according to Wikipedia, and I'm not sure what the hell was happening: after being described once in 1886 and christened D. bracteosum, it appears to have been re-named every few years (1894, 1899, 1901, 1910, 1912, 1922, 1923), then in 1983 somebody got all excited and named it four times. Since the same surname is appended to all four of the 1983 botanical names, and that person placed all four in the same genus (Pedilonum), I'm guessing that somebody just really, really wanted to create a new genus from within Dendrobium, but it doesn't appear to have worked; all Pedilonums are still officially Dendrobium as far as I can tell. Curious about why it got so many names, so far apart from one another, but for all I know, that could just be how plant taxonomy worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 066

Most notable characteristics of 066A are the slightly unusual color, and the weird rumpled look to the petals. Doesn't make it beautiful, but it maybe qualifies as quirky.

I wound up with 32 possible names from TinEye, and liked seven enough to give them serious consideration. Also threw in two names from the reserve names list, because they kind of fit and why not. So nine options in all. Here we go.

Pterosaur initially seemed kind of workable, but nothing about this flower is smooth enough to evoke the kind of majestic alien soaring that I associate with pterosaurs. Too many petals to serve as wings, and they're pointing in all different directions, sometimes kinked -- I just can't see it, alas.

Daiquiri is also close, but not quite there. For one thing, daiquiris come in a lot of different colors, depending on the fruit involved, and judging from image searches, the closest color match would be the strawberry daiquiri. However, I already have a strawberry name (082 Strawberry Madeleine), as well as a berry name (105A Berry Rhubarb Fool). So plain "Daiquiri" doesn't specify color well enough, and the names that specify color are too close to other names. If I were desperate to keep it in the daiquiri family and still match the color, I could maybe go with Watermelon Daiquiri, but I always imagine daiquiris as light yellow-green anyway. So I can keep the name in mind for later seedlings, but I don't think I'm desperate enough to use it here.

Hydrogen works in that way that certain words and colors go together in my brain (actual hydrogen gas is colorless), but there are other names on the list that work without me having to appeal to my pseudosynesthesia.

The orientation of the flowers in my photos makes the flowers look a little defeated (facing down, petals a little droopy at the ends), which make Rampage and Resistance both seem a little inappropriate, even if the color works.

And now we're at the point where the options stop being easy to eliminate.

Drunk Dancing kind of fits the shape, but I suppose I don't know, from the one flower the seedling has produced so far, whether the blooms are always going to be this shape. Should that matter? Not sure.

The reader-suggested Spicy Coquette works better for me without the "spicy" part, but Coquette is a good name.¹ Plus I sort of have a crush on The Coquette, based on her advice blog.

When TinEye gave me Joker, I was pleased, because the bloom shape is a little like that of the jester hats that the jokers in decks of cards usually wear.²

And then Antisocial sort of works with the spiky, slightly off-kilter shape too.

Antisocial is appealing to me, but probably not so much to other people, so I suppose I don't have to keep it. And Drunk Dancing sounds kind of fun and friendly to me, but I don't know how drunk the people you're picturing are; maybe it's not quite as positive in your brain. Plus actual drunkenness is maybe not to be encouraged.

So Joker or Coquette, I suppose. And as much as I think the bloom resembles Joker, I'm feeling more drawn to Coquette, so I'm going with Coquette.

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¹ Somehow, I got the impression that "coquette" was approximately synonymous with "tramp" or "slut," but the dictionary meaning is "a woman who endeavors without sincere affection to gain the attention and admiration of men," according to Merriam-Webster, which is kind of nice. I suppose the contemporary male counterpart would be "player."
There is probably a contemporary English word corresponding to "coquette," but I'm not going to look for it because I imagine it's probably mean-spirited, if not fully misogynistic. "Coquette" at least sounds classy 'cause it's French.
² (I looked, but couldn't find a specific name for the hats; everybody seems to just call them "jester hats," which is boring. There should be some special, Old-English-sounding name for them, like "vingabbit" or "roopscock" or something. Maybe I just didn't look long enough.)

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.)