Question for the Hive Mind: Purple Flower

My mother would like to know what this is, and I have no idea:

Location: shady yard, Iowa. She didn't plant it deliberately but would like more of them. Anybody recognize it?

UPDATE: Thanks.

By the way: Mom acknowledges that it maybe isn't the healthiest larkspur in the world, but considering that she's done nothing to care for it (she never even planted it there in the first place), she figures it's doing pretty well for itself.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum rothschildianum

The vertical-sticks background makes anything placed in front of it unphotographable, but I gave it a shot anyway. I guess it sort of worked. As well as it could, anyway.

Wikipedia has a bit on the species, but parts are so oddly phrased ("The flower has a green and red spotted petal, which attracts any parasitic flies that think it is a crowd of the aphids they lay eggs on. As they try to do so, the flies brush against the stigma, releasing any previously collected pollen, and then getting some more from the anther.") that I figured someone was making it up.¹ How do we know what parasitic flies think? Turns out it's actually pretty obvious. From slipperorchids.info:²

The simplest explanation for this pollination system seems to be that it is a case of brood-site deception as evidenced by egg-laying behavior of the flies and presence of eggs on the staminode, the paucity of larvae found among the flowers, and the lack of reward available once the pollinator is trapped.

In other words, they're laying eggs, but the larvae don't survive (presumably they starve for lack of aphids), and the flower doesn't offer anything to the flies to reward them for showing up. The simplest explanation is that the orchid is tricking the flies.

As I probably say every time there's one to talk about, I love love love love love the stripey orchids like Paph. rothschildianum, Paph. philippinense, and their hybrids. Paph. rothschildianum itself hasn't shown up at the show previously,³ but we've seen three of its primary hybrids⁴ before:

Paphiopedilum Prince Edward of York (rothschildianum x sanderianum) (2013)

Paphiopedilum Lady Isabel (rothschildianum x stonei) (2013)

Paphiopedilum St. Swithin (philippinense x rothschildianum) (2011)

St. Swithin is still almost certainly in my top five orchids ever, if not the BOAT⁵ itself, but I have yet to see a striped paph that I don't love.

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¹ I'm not sure what, specifically, it is that I'm hearing here, but Wikipedia usually at least tries to sound like an encyclopedia, and this . . . doesn't.
² Which is itself quoting an actual published paper: Atwood, J.T. "Pollination of Paphiopedilum rothschildianum: Brood-Site Deception." National Geographic Research 1, no. 2 (1985): 247-54.
³ (or if it did, I didn't get a picture)
⁴ Primary hybrid: a hybrid between two species, as opposed to crosses between two hybrids, or between a species and a hybrid.
⁵ (= Best Orchid of All Time)

Pretty picture: Aerides krabiensis

. . . And we're through the conventions without any shootings. In fact, it now feels sort of ridiculous to have feared violence in the first place -- though I'm pretty sure it wasn't. So give me a moment to start breathing again.

Aerides krabiensis is a lithophyte¹ according to Wikipedia, but the photos I ran across didn't show it being cultivated that way, so it must be more flexible than that makes it sound.

Most of the on-line photos also show green (sometimes bright green) leaves, too: not sure if this specimen was miserable or just caught at a particularly bad moment.

The flowers are supposedly fragrant, but as usual, I'm unable to confirm this.

The common name for the genus is "cat's-tail orchid" or "fox brush orchid," which I imagine makes more sense if you're looking at an older specimen with a longer stem.

In other news, four out of five pots of Amorphophallus have now leafed out; the one straggler has a leaf emerging but it's doing it so slowly. I won't make any promises about when, exactly, but I do expect to start making some non-orchid posts soonish, so you'll probably be seeing the Amorphophalluses eventually, as well as several other things.

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¹ (grows on the surface of rocks)

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Andree Millar

Well. We made it through the RNC with no deaths. Not even any assaults, as far as I'm aware. This should be normal, of course, but I wouldn't have bet on it, so congratulations to the city of Cleveland and their police.¹

Only 105.5 days left until the election.²

I'm thinking about ending the orchid-only posting after this week, but no promises; I'm enjoying the break from blogging a lot more than I expected to (I even have time to work out again!). And I still have the problem that nothing new is happening with the plants: lots of new Anthurium blooms (and one very late Schlumbergera), just like it was before the break. We'll see.

Meanwhile, there is an orchid to consider.

I'm unhappy with the photos I got. I don't remember it being nearly this intense of a yellow in person, and the blooms have a sort of . . . hunched-over? look to them that I'm not particularly into, where the tepals bend over to cover the lip. The number of blooms is impressive, I guess, but I'm actually more interested in the foliage, particularly how broad the leaves are. I haven't seen a lot of Dendrobiums with leaves like this.

The patterning on the flowers' labellums (labella?) is interesting, too; I wish it had photographed better.

I couldn't confirm this one at the International Orchid Registry site, but I don't know why. I did find it elsewhere on the net, so I assume it exists, but it's weird for something not to be in the IOR database. The photos I found elsewhere on-line don't match my pictures very closely -- in particular, a lot of them have purple lips, rather than brown, as my photos show. The closest match I found was at davesgarden.com.

• http://wifemothergardener.blogspot.com/2013/01/dendrobium-andree-millar.html
• http://www.rv-orchidworks.com/orchidtalk/cattleyas-vandas-dendrobiums-bloom/38834-dendrobium-andree-millar.html
• http://www.rv-orchidworks.com/orchidtalk/cattleyas-vandas-dendrobiums-bloom/34804-dendrobium-andree-millar-atroviolaceum-x-convolutum.html

The few places that had ancestry for Dendrobium Andree Millar have it as:

Dendrobium Andree Millar = Dendrobium atroviolaceum x Dendrobium convolutum

and I suppose I'm prepared to believe that that's the truth.

This is the first time I've seen this particular plant at the orchid show, but there have been some relatives in previous shows, which all look like Den. Andree Millar to some degree or another.

Related via Den. atroviolaceum:
Dendrobium Aussie's Chip (2013): 1/2 Den. atroviolaceum
Dendrobium Spider Lily (2011): 1/4 Den. atroviolaceum

Den. convolutum previously:
Dendrobium convolutum 'WK' x self (2014)

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¹ No, seriously. I mean it.
² I feel like there might be bipartisan popular support for limiting the length of our election cycles, as many other countries already have. It's certainly no fun to be in a early primary/caucus state, which is also a swing state, for the 24 months leading up to an election, and I bet residents of New Hampshire would back me up on this.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Black Rose

I'm pretty meh about the actual flowers here, though I remember them seeming larger than standard, so that's something. And I can't deny that it's not well-grown. I just don't, you know, care.

The tag had "Jiuhbao Black Rose #1" on it, but I didn't see anything confirming the "#1" as part of the official name and am not sure what it's supposed to signify. A clonal designation, maybe?

Ran into a confirmatory image here, so I'm pretty sure the plant was accurately identified.

Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Black Rose = Phalaenopsis Lioulin Black Rose x Phalaenopsis Jiuhbao Sweetie (Ref.)

In other news, as I write this on Tuesday morning, the U.S. has successfully passed through the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio with only the usual number of national shootings. It sucks that I've had to set the bar that low, but at least the RNC has managed to clear it.

I'm going to stop writing now, while the above is still true.

Pretty picture: Bulbophyllum lobbii

I responded to some of the comments people left on the previous post, but if you don't feel like checking on them:

The U.S. has not devolved into a Mad Max-style wasteland full of people shooting at one another, as it appeared might be the case following Dallas. So we have that going for us, at least, and I'm genuinely a little surprised. I remain really anxious about next week's Republican National Convention -- it would be difficult to create a more powder-keggy situation on purpose -- but maybe that, too, will pass without the country falling to pieces. Maybe there will even be no bloodshed. We can hope, at least. 2016 really should throw us a break sooner or later.

And as far as taking comfort from nature goes, of course that's a good thing. Election years are always¹ hard on me, but this year has been especially bad. It's much easier for things like Orlando / Philando Castile / Alton Sterling / Dallas to knock me off balance if there's also an election happening. And things get even worse if I start making weird assumptions like "calm" = "unconcerned," as I was kind of doing in that last post. So if looking at pictures of orchids is part of how you manage to stay functional, I apologize for making it more difficult to do that.

At the moment, I would really like to find something to do, but either don't have the resources or the temperament or both for most of the Black-Lives-Matter-related things I can think of, and to be honest I'm probably not in the right frame of mind to be useful at the moment even if presented with something useful to do.²

But we have an orchid, at least. And it's a pretty nice one, even. Bulbophyllum lobbii is apparently another really variable orchid species; the previously-seen B. lobbii specimens haven't looked much like this at all:

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Kathy's Gold' (2013)

Bulbophyllum lobbii 'Sonoma Gold' (2015)

I suppose the other possibility is that some of these are misidentified, but on-line image searches show a lot of different-looking plants. I'm assuming it's probably just that variable.³ This year's plant is easily the prettiest of the three. Lucky for us.

In other news, I can now report that all five Amorphophallus are alive and working on leaves (or maybe blooms, but I'm assuming leaves):

It's still ridiculously late for this to be happening, and some of the leaf buds are still so short you can barely see them in the picture, but everybody's accounted for, and at least I don't have to worry that they've rotted. Hopefully they'll have time for photosynthesis before fall arrives.

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¹ (For values of "always" greater than or equal to 1998.)
I paid attention to elections, and cared who won, prior to 1998, but it became personal in '98 because that was the year that all politicians of both parties ran against Ellen DeGeneres, and I was pretty newly out to people myself, and it was really, really tough to hear some of the things people were saying about LGBT Americans.
2004 and 2010 were also unusually difficult -- '04 because that was the year of "maybe we need a Constitutional Amendment to prevent the gays from getting married," and '10 because that was the year when Iowa's elections were partly focused on recalling the judges who had ruled in favor of gay marriage in 2009. So every six years, I guess, is an especially bad election for me, but none of them are ever actually good. And none of the especially bad ones were competitive with 1998 until this year.
² But e-mail or comment anyway, if you hear of something.
³ Like Rhynchostylis gigantea, it has a pretty large natural habitat -- Borneo, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines -- which probably explains a lot of the variation. It's also possible that they look different depending on growing conditions; I believe the 2015 and 2016 specimens were entered in the show by different exhibitors, based on how they were tagged and displayed.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Samuel Crothers

(Video may be barely NSFW, due to one word.)

See also.

I spent all day Friday upset. Again. And I'm torn between using this post to say look, not everything is awful, there is still beauty in the world, on the one hand, and being so rage-depressed about my country that I rant-sob at you for several paragraphs, on the other.

What good is an orchid? Should my priority really be to try to be soothing and calming right now? Wouldn't anger, directed at the appropriate targets, do more good in the long run? Ah, but: who or what are the appropriate targets? And which do you start with? What do you say?

And why yell at you? You didn't kill anybody. You're probably as upset about it as I am (if you're American, anyway; I wouldn't expect non-Americans to care as much). You don't have any more power to change this than I do, or have secret knowledge about how to turn everything around.

So I think I'm going to split the difference and just stop talking.

Here's your stupid orchid. Don't you dare find it comforting.

Phragmipedium Samuel Crothers = Phragmipedium kovachii x Phragmipedium fischeri (Ref.)

Related via Phrag. kovachii:

Phragmipedium Peruflora's Cirila Alca (2012 show), Phragmipedium Haley Decker (2013), Phragmipedium Peruflora's Spirit (2015).

Pretty picture: Dendrochilum latifolium / Random plant event: Amorphophallus konjac

Most of the photos of this plant I found on-line show the flowers closer together than on this particular specimen. I don't know if this is significant or not, but it seemed worth noting. The species naturally varies a bit, and D. latifolium has at least two natural varieties (D. latifolium var. latifolium and D. latifolium var. macranthum, so the difference could be genetic, cultural, or both.

Though the individual flowers aren't particularly beautiful, the sheer number of them is striking.

In other news, one of my five Amorphophallus tubers has pushed above the soil line, finally. They're all running very late this year, which makes me either anxious or angry or both, depending on how responsible I feel for the delay.

I've also recently discovered the Amorphophallus offerings at Plant Delights Nursery, and am very tempted by A. henryi and A. ongsakulii in particular. Any readers have experience with either of these?

Failing that, would anyone like to try to reassure me that the rest of my A. konjac (plus one A. bulbiferum) bulbs still intend to do something?