Anthurium no. 0610 "Nina Levin"

And I'm back! Or at least that's the plan: I suppose I haven't proven anything yet.

Good news: new posts scheduled almost every day from now until early October.¹
Bad news: most of them are going to be Anthurium seedling posts, and not very interesting.
Good news: a few of them actually are slightly interesting.
Bad news: I'm not going to have a lot of time to work on them, as quickly as I'll have to write, so even the interesting ones will be pretty short, and probably less interestingly written than they could be.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether this is overall a good thing or a bad thing.

In any case, here is Nina:

My Anthurium-breeding book says speckling is a dominant trait, so there was reason to think Nina (the first seedling of 'Peppermint Gemini' to bloom) would be speckled, but alas, the only thing about the bloom that comes close to speckling is the thrips-scarring. I was disappointed about this for a while, but I've sort of come around -- at least I like the bloom color, and the leaves are decent:

The new leaves are even unusual in a good way:

I mean, I get that brown isn't maybe the prettiest color, but it's striking. I've seen worse foliage.

Nina's main flaw is her habit: she flops around a lot when I move her in and out of the tray for photos and waterings. Plants with long internodal distances have this problem a lot -- long internodes mean long stems, and long stems can twist more easily where the stem goes below the soil line -- but in Nina's case, I think it's more a matter of having to share flats with other plants. It's hard to put them all back in exactly the same places, so sometimes plants wind up growing in one direction for a while, and then a different direction, and the stems wind up permanently kinked and flop-prone.

Verdict: keeper, mostly for breeding purposes. Haven't actually been able to pollinate her yet, though.

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¹ (40 posts, scheduled over the next 49 days)

Pretty picture: Cattlianthe Blazing Sun

The camera wanted to make it slightly orange for some reason, but in person this was a bright pure crayony yellow.

Not much else to say about it; it was nice, but aside from the color, nothing about it was out of the ordinary.

Cattlianthe Blazing Sun = Cattlianthe Kauai Starbright x Cattlianthe Blazing Treat (Ref.)

Ctt. Blazing Sun hasn't appeared on the blog before, but it's the grandchild of an orchid that has (Ref.): Ctt. Trick or Treat, which was previously seen in 2012.

ALSO: it's looking like I have many, many more Schlumbergera berries ready than I will ever be able to use, so if any readers are interested in trying to grow some Schlumbergeras from seed, e-mail me (address is in the sidebar; read the instructions) and I can hook you up.

The seed parent will obviously be known; the pollen parents won't (though I will often be able to give you a short list of possible pollen parents).

Pretty picture: Stenorrhynchos speciosum

This was the second year I've seen Stenorrhynchos speciosum at the orchid show (the first being 2011). Better full-plant photo this time around, but the close-up was worse.

There are, of course, even better photos to be found of this species on other sites. I'm particularly interested in the photos at davesgarden.com, which show a specimen with spotted leaves. I like the foliage on this species anyway, but the spotted version is even more interesting.

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.