Pretty picture: Coelogyne tomentosa

Coelogyne tomentosa was unusually difficult to photograph, largely because it was backlit by a greenhouse wall instead of a backdrop. The individual flower pictures came out passably well, because the pot was wrapped in black cloth,¹ but the full-plant photo was bad, and even after working with it a lot, I could only clean it up partway. I'm including it anyway because the leaves are interesting.

This was the first time I'd seen C. tomentosa at the show, and Kev's Orchids has an explanation why: the flowers bruise very easily, so they're very difficult to transport. (That link is also worthwhile for some much better photos of the species than I have.)

The species name is officially C. tomentosa, though it's still often sold as C. massangeana. I was happy to see the tag acknowledge this,

but disappointed that it did so while inserting a typo. Ah, well.

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¹ Are roots and pots considered unsightly now? Something that needs to be covered up? It's possible that I'm just late to notice, but it sure seems like I'm seeing a lot more references to top-dressing soil with decorative rocks / glass / sand / moss / etc. than I used to. Perhaps Pinterest is to blame.
Or is it maybe that C. tomentosa roots are as delicate and easily-damaged as the flowers, and the pot covering is protective?

Anthurium no. 0217 "Vivacious"

Apologies, but this post is going to have to be pretty quick and basic, because yesterday's post took me an awful lot of time to write¹ and I had been hoping to get yesterday's, today's, and tomorrow's posts all written in one sitting. So.

0217 Vivacious has pretty nice blooms, or would if the thrips didn't chew them up so much:

Nothing particularly new, colorwise; they're similar to those of 0083 Carmen Adairya, 0214 Anita Knapp, or 0440 Elsa Friesanova.² The blooms are medium-large, and decently long-lived, though the thrips continue to attack them throughout their whole life, so by the time the spathe begins to die, the inflorescence is no longer even remotely attractive. Bloom frequency is about average.

The foliage has improved since I started blasting the leaves with water,³ though not enough.

Nothing particularly notable about Vivacious overall; there are a moderate number of suckers. It doesn't show up well in the photo below, but the internodal distance is something of a concern too:

Vivacious would probably be a keeper if the thrips could be eradicated. But that's quite the if.

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¹ Not that most of the words I wrote were actually published -- I wrote a lot and then deleted a lot. Which, honestly, you should probably thank me for. I was pretty upset.
² (as well as Carmen's likely clones 0555 Mystique Summers Madison and 0556 Frank Lee Grande)
³ Though there are indications lately that spraying with water might be encouraging and spreading a bacterial pathogen. Because I need a third thing to fight. I'll have to tell you more about that when I have more time.

Anthurium no. 0716 "Herbie Hind"

And now we have the first real second-generation Anthurium seedling.¹ Herbie is the son of 0239 Russ Teanale, a nice reddish-pink / yellow; Russ's positive qualities mostly didn't get passed down to Herbie, alas.

Herbie would be fine -- maybe not fantastic, but good enough to keep -- if not for the thrips. When the first spathe initially opened, it had a few little scars on it, and one smallish hole, which were both enough to distort the bloom's overall shape, but at least the spathe was a nice strong highlighter-pink color. Thrips damage got more severe as the bloom aged, though:

and the second bloom was pretty heavily scarred from the moment it opened, with a less intense color.

There's a third bud on it as I write this, but considering how the first two have gone, I don't have a lot of hope that number three will turn the whole thing around for Herbie. Prolific blooming is good, but if the thrips resistance isn't any better than this then it sort of cancels out. If you want a nice F2 seedling, you'll have to wait for another month, for 0805 Triana Hill.

Herbie's foliage isn't terrible -- for whatever reason, the thrips have focused on the spathes and nearly ignored the leaves.

And there's something to be said for an early bloomer, too.² On balance, Herbie's good enough to keep, but only just. We'll see how long that lasts.

[Multiple ragey paragraphs about the whole Orlando thing redacted; just read John Scalzi on the subject of "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families during this difficult time."]

Speaking of doing easy things in lieu of making substantial changes: I've changed my Blogger avatar picture to a rainbow flag made out of Anthurium photos.

I had to cheat on the blue,³ because no part of any Anthurium I have is blue, but the other five bars are all slices taken from photos of a spathe (red, orange, purple), spadix (yellow), or leaf (green). The decision to do this has less to do with a desire to show support for the families and victims of the Orlando shooting (obviously I do support them, but this has no actual impact on their lives and they all have other things on their minds right now than how a plant breeder / blogger 1500 miles away feels about them) and more to do with this MetaFilter question, which reminded me that there have been times in my life when seeing a rainbow flag made me feel less alone. Times have changed since then, but obviously not quite enough. And then also it was an opportunity to play around with the Anthurium pictures.⁴

Changing my avatar doesn't make me feel significantly better, and it's no substitute for actually doing something. I suppose the next step is trying to contact my representatives in Congress about, you know, maybe passing some laws that would make it tougher for people to massacre crowds of people. I get angry just imagining the form letter Chuck Grassley will send me in response,⁵ so it may take some time for me to work up to that. I'll let you know.

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¹ Technically, 1038 Adlai Lowe, son of 0234 Ross Koz, was the first F2 to bloom, but Adlai was so strange, in so many different ways, that his first inflorescence doesn't quite count.
² Herbie produced his first bud at 18 months old: not a record, but in the earliest 10% of all seedlings.
³ It's a photo of 'Florida,' with the blue and red channels swapped in Irfanview.
⁴ Though about half an hour after I finished, I realized that I should have used one of the Schlumbergeras for the orange stripe, as they make oranger oranges than the Anthuriums do. As it is, I don't think the red (I think from a photo of 0059 Bijoux Tuit) and orange (0031 Sylvester) are too close in hue to read as distinct stripes.
⁵ I've contacted his office before, in 2007 or 2008, though I can't remember what about. Reading between the lines a bit, his reply was basically, wow, you sure do feel strongly about this; congratulations for having strong feelings! However, Sen. Grassley is a lot smarter than you, and wants you to know that your letter will have no impact on the decision he eventually makes. Please sincerely fuck off, Sen. Chuck Grassley. Not an encouraging response, but I suppose that's probably intentional.

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

The photos make this plant look a lot larger than it actually was. I was actually surprised by the size.

Last year's show had a Phalaenopsis Kaoda Twinkle as well, with no varietal name; this is probably not the same specimen as that one, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Don't really have much to add to this; in February I said it was one of the few Phalaenopsis I would actually want to have personally, and that remains the case. My track record with orchids is bad enough that I'm not actually trying to locate one (I'm actually pretty desperate to get rid of plants right now: I need more space for Anthurium and Schlumbergera seedlings and have nowhere to put them.), but I'd have a tough time turning one down if I saw a reasonably-priced one in a store.

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

Anthurium no. 0581 "Adam All"

Adam is one of the divisions from 0115 Erlene Adopter. His flowers look the same as all the other Erlenes,

0581 Adam All.

(L-R): 0115 Erlene Adopter, 0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, 0586 Vera Special.
he offsets just as much as the rest of them, and his leaves do that weird thing where some of the smaller veins turn yellow for no discernible reason.

0581 Adam All, on 25 February 2016.
Theories regarding the yellow veining have been advanced, one at considerable length. I don't think that's the actual explanation,¹ but I don't have an alternate theory that fits the facts.

Hell, I don't even know for sure that this is a problem: on all the Erlenes to bloom so far, the leaves are huge and shiny, the blooms plentiful, and pests leave them alone (mostly).² Not a lot of other seedlings I can say that about. Maybe I'm trying to pathologize a harmless idiosyncrasy. Maybe it's quirky. Maybe I have a manic pixie dream Anthurium on my hands.³ I suppose the odds are against it, but I can't prove that I don't. So.

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¹ It makes no sense to insist that my soil, water, and fertilizer are all so terrible that they've led to iron-deficient plants and the soil and water must be changed immediately, while at the same time ignoring the not-quite-1600 closely-related plants in exactly the same conditions which are not yellowing.
It also doesn't make any sense to insist that yellow veining on a green background is green veining on a yellow background. So I'm not sure making sense is a high priority.
It even might not ever make sense to propose iron deficiency in any Anthurium, considering that a study specifically set up to produce iron deficient-Anthuriums, by withholding it entirely from plants for four years, concluded:

Anthurium plants showed no deficiency symptoms from lack of iron. Plants were large and green and large flowers were produced regularly. Tissue Fe content (103.25 ppm) was similar to that of control tissues (105.25 ppm). Iron reserves in plants at the start of the experiment were apparently sufficient to maintain plant development. Alternatively, there may have been a source of Fe contamination in the experimental setup.

And my growers' guide (Griffith, Lynn P., Jr., Tropical Foliage Plants: A Grower's Guide, 1998, Ball Publishing, Batavia, IL, USA, pp. 12-13) uses that 1984 study as the basis for its own discussion of nutrient deficiencies in Anthuriums, suggesting that nobody had been able to induce it in subsequent experiments either. So how likely is it that I, who am deliberately adding iron to my plants every time I water, have plants with lower iron content than plants grown completely without any iron at all for four years? My feeling is that it's not very damned likely. You can tell me in English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Polish, and Italian that Anthuriums renounce calcium and all of its works (high calcium is known to impair iron uptake in some plants, so extremely hard, calcium-rich water could induce iron deficiencies in susceptible plants: this is a known, scientifically-supported thing), but that doesn't make iron my problem, it doesn't turn yellow veins green, and it doesn't explain why seven genetically identical plants are the only ones to show this symptom, out of hundreds.
I was more sympathetic to Pat the Plant's theory that it's a magnesium deficiency, as Anthuriums are known to need a lot of magnesium. The growers' guide:

Anthuriums may have the highest magnesium requirement of any foliage plant, though a relatively low demand for trace elements. Lack of magnesium results in chlorotic margins in the older foliage, and in some varieties there are chlorotic bands moving in toward the midrib. Magnesium requirements are higher in bright light.

If you tilt your head the right way, the yellow veining is plausibly "chlorotic bands moving in toward the midrib," but no amount of squinting is going to make those margins yellow, and the description of magnesium deficiency from the previously-quoted study doesn't match up with what I'm seeing at all:

Older leaves and edges of younger leaves became yellow. At 18 months, plants were severely stunted, older leaves showed interveinal chlorosis, and new leaves were bright green and distorted. At 20 to 24 months, all except very young leaves were yellow with necrotic areas. Main terminals died and small side shoots were produced on which leaf deficiency symptoms were also apparent. Very few medium-sized flowers were produced; when symptoms became severe, flower production ceased.

In contrast, my plants are a very nice, dark green aside from these small veins, the margins are unaffected, plants and leaves both continue to get larger, and blooming is frequent, with decent-sized spathes.
I tried adding a small amount of Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) to the fertilizer for a few weeks, on the theory that if the plants were magnesium-deficient, this would give them magnesium and the yellow veins would go away, and if hard water was making them iron-deficient, making the water even harder would make the problem worse. I didn't see any change in either direction, which means that 1) magnesium isn't the issue either, 2) I didn't add enough of it, 3) I didn't add it for a long enough period, or 4) there's some second factor to address, in addition to the magnesium.
² I spot thrips in the photos often enough that I'm sure they're not leaving the plants alone entirely, but I'm not sure I've seen any actual thrips damage on the Erlenes.
³ (That would explain all the offsetting.)

Anthurium no. 0440 "Elsa Friesanova"

I've been surprised at how few white spathes I've seen on the Anthurium seedlings. Considering that almost half of the first generation were from 'White Gemini' (white / yellow), I figured I would encounter a lot of whites, but it's apparently recessive; I get occasional very light pinks,¹ but never a spathe that's actually white. Elsa's not white either, but she's close:

And the foliage is large, and has improved dramatically since I started blasting the leaves with water.

However. Thrips still damage the spathes, as you can see from the first photo. She's also had ongoing problems with scale, as have a lot of her neighbors. I've reluctantly resorted to imidacloprid on that whole shelf of plants, because while imidacloprid never seems to completely remove all scale from the house, in the short term, it does seem to be a good way to remove them from specific areas. Elsa was apparently already wet, and when I added a little more water to wash the imidacloprid toward the roots, a lot of her older leaves went yellow.

(on 7 June 2016)
So it's possible that I've successfully eliminated the scale by killing the plant; I'm waiting to find out.

(on 25 February 2016)
Even if the overwatering hasn't killed Elsa,² though, she's probably not a keeper. I like the leaves a lot (really the picture above doesn't do them justice), but they're kind of all she has. As the number of plants solid enough to move up to 6-inch pots increases, I have to get pickier about all steps of the process -- which blooms are pretty enough to hang on to, what level of scale infestation is minimal enough to be optimistic about, that kind of thing.

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¹ The palest seedling to date is probably 0215 Nathan Ofithlam ('Gemini' x unknown), who was cool. The only bloom I ever got from Nathan had a small, secondary spathe, and I really wanted to see if that would happen again, but alas, he had problems with his roots, or I overwatered, or both, and he died before he could build a second bud.

(Not really pertinent to the post, but: the only other seedling to ever make a secondary spathe is 0282 Dave Trading. Dave has occasionally even hinted that he might want to make spathes for each individual flower on the spadix,

though none of Dave's secondary spathes have ever been as well-developed as Nathan's.)
² Anthuriums will forgive you for too much water a lot more readily than for not enough, but there are limits in both directions.
I haven't counted it up, but my guess is that I've lost about twice as many plants to drought as I do to rot.

Unfinished business: Leuchtenbergia principis

An update on the Leuchtenbergia seedlings today. I haven't had a lot to say about them because there hasn't been all that much going on. None of them have died since the last update, I think, though I've sold a few. Of the original fifteen, I'm down to seven, and I just moved those up to 3-inch pots on 2 June. (The first one of those I did may have been damaged in the process: the roots had stuck hard to the side of the pot, and I couldn't figure out how to get them out, so I tried jamming a thin metal rod in through the drainage hole, which broke the tip of the root because the root was right on top of the hole. I figured out how to get them out with less trauma after that, but until I did that first one, I had no idea what sort of roots I might find.

Seedling no. 2. Pot is 2-inch (5 cm) in diameter.
The seedlings don't look much like the young plants I've seen occasionally in stores, like these:

Specifically, my seedlings have more of a trunk on them already, and the leaves are curved instead of straight. Both things are probably due to me not having quite enough light for them, though I'm not sure. In their natural habitat, they're often shaded as seedlings, so they really ought to be more flexible about this than a lot of other cactus seedlings might. I don't know.

Seedling no. 6. Pot is 2-inch (5 cm) in diameter.
In any case: still here, doing fine. They've possibly sustained some thrips damage on the upper surface of the leaves; a while back I noticed that there were little scars appearing. I haven't actually seen thrips on any of them, and you'd think the seedlings' skin would be too tough for thrips, but that's the only explanation I can come up with. I've heard tales of woe regarding Leuchtenbergia and scale, but so far, I haven't seen scale on them. The species of scale I've been dealing with here seems to be particular about which plants it likes to eat (Agave, Yucca, Anthurium, Aloe) and which plants it doesn't (Dracaena, Coffea, Spathiphyllum, Schlumbergera), so maybe scale in general are a problem for Leuchtenbergia, just not my personal pet scale.

Seedling no. 12, after the repotting. Pot is 3-inch (8 cm) in diameter.
I started these seeds in May 2013, getting the seeds from an on-line supplier, so seedlings are just over three years old now. I've also cross-pollinated two adult plants in 2013. Both plants produced fruit, though I think I only collected seeds from one: I can't remember. In any case, I still have lots of self-produced seeds, in addition to the leftover online seeds, and I've thought about trying to start the self-produced ones outside this summer, but I'm not sure what I'd do with them all if they germinated. The species is an acquired taste, and not in particularly high demand, so although the seeds cry out to me to be sown (as all seeds do), I can't come up with a perspective that makes me feel like it would actually be a good idea to start them. So we wait.

Pretty picture: Masdevallia Bella Donna 'Lehua Snow Blush'

This was the only Masdevallia I saw at the 2016 show, which is a shame. I know they're often not very exciting, by comparison with all the fancy Cattleya alliance orchids, and it's possible that their cultural requirements don't mesh well with those of flashier plants, but I like seeing Masdevallias all the same, and felt a little cheated that there was only one. It wasn't even a particularly good one, in my opinion.

As for the ancestry, Masd. Bella Donna definitely exists, and is

Masdevallia Bella Donna = Masdevallia coccinea x Masdevallia datura (Ref.);

and there's definitely a clone called 'Snow Blush.' But 'Snow Blush' is, as you'd expect from the name, white. It's not clear to me whether Lehua Snow Blush is an actual, official separate clone, but orchidsbyhausermann.com lists it as a separate thing and gives it a HCC/AOS designation besides (Ref.), so . . . probably? Hiloorchidfarm.com shows both white and purple forms of "Lehua Snow Blush," with only the purple one getting an HCC/AOS tag, and I'm not sure what that means -- possibly the color is variable depending on cultural conditions?

I assume the "Lehua" in "Lehua Snow Blush" refers to the producer / breeder Lehua Orchids, but they have, they say, "lost interest in" Masdevallias, so they no longer sell them, and no longer have a page listing their cultivars. They include "Lehua" as part of the name for their two Phalaenopsis, though, so they've named plants partly after themselves before: it seems a safe bet that "Lehua Snow Blush" originated with them even if they no longer acknowledge it on their site.