Anthurium no. 0317 "Dred"

Dred was divided back in 2014 to make 0596 Alisa Summers, and all signs point to Dred and Alisa being clones of one another. In fact, I can't tell them apart just by looking at pictures of their blooms.

But here, you try. I haven't altered the color on any of these photos. Four are of 0317 Dred, and five are of 0596 Alisa Summers. Which is which?

Here's the story
Of a lovely lady
Who was bringing up three very lovely girls
All of them had hair of gold
like their mother,
The youngest one in curls

It's the story
Of a man named Brady
who was busy with three boys of his own
They were four men
living all together
Yet they were all alone

Till the one day
when the lady met this fellow
And they knew that it was much more than a hunch
That this group must somehow form a family
That's the way we all became the Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch
That's the way we became
the Brady Bunch
And . . . time's up. Here are the answers:

So.

I don't know why it took Dred so much longer to bloom than Alisa; it's possible that Dred was just the smaller of the two plants after division, and had more rebuilding to do before it could bloom.

In any case. There isn't that much to say about Dred, since I've already talked about Alisa. The blooms are still good, even if they do change to pink a little quickly, and Alisa has been amazingly productive -- I think she's even beaten the record for most blooms at a time, with five. Dred's already up to two simultaneous blooms, and she only started two months ago.

I haven't noticed the new growth being unusually-colored on Alisa, but I did get a picture of a new leaf on Dred.

The mature leaves are oddly textured.

My main objection to Alisa/Dred is that they have longish internodes. Not record-setting or anything, but Alisa has gotten big and floppy enough now that she's inconvenient to water. Dred's significantly smaller, so it will be a while before she reaches the same point, but you can see that it's coming.

I feel like I would also be remiss if I didn't mention Dred's namesake, a drag king I first encountered in the documentary Venus Boyz.¹ I found the documentary itself of uneven quality, but Dred's parts were kinda neat. It's surprisingly difficult to find a decent video of Dred on YouTube, but there's one here that is mainly Dred talking about herself and her act, and then there's a blurry video of an actual show, with some awkward edits, here. For anyone who might be interested.

Quick note about a previous post: yesterday, JizzaBella left a comment² on the post for 0457 JizzaBella. This is the first and only time a queen (or king, for that matter) has acknowledged one of my Anthurium seedlings,³ which I think is pretty cool.

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¹ If you were wondering: "Dred" is a shortening of the given name Mildred Gerestant.
² I'm assuming the actual JizzaBella is the person who left the comment; no evidence to the contrary, anyway.
³ And JizzaBella is only the second queen that I'm reasonably certain knows that they have a seedling named after them, the first being 0026 Peaches Christ, which incident was described in footnote 3 of this comment.

Anthurium no. 0105 "Deanne T. Christ"

I've mentioned Deanne once before; the context was that I was talking about the varying colors of the seedlings' new leaves. Deanne's have been, at times, a sort of purple-red. The color didn't photograph very accurately, and doesn't even seem to be a consistent thing from one leaf to the next, but it was interesting enough to save her from a few purges. I didn't think this necessarily indicated anything about the bloom color -- the seedlings with brown new leaves don't bloom brown; the seedlings with red new leaves don't necessarily bloom red.¹ But behold:

Which makes Deanne one of a very small number of indisputably purple seedlings. And it's about damned time.²

Deanne holds the record for the longest time from sowing to first bud (54 months), and I haven't seen a second bud yet. Her foliage is abundant,

but shabby. Both the little raised bumps on the leaves and the flat brown patches are, I think, thrips damage. It's possible that the bumps are from something else, but the only alternate explanation I can think of would be scale, and I don't think I've seen much scale on Deanne.³

I tried to pollinate the spadix, of course, and it looked like maybe I'd been very minimally successful, with one or two berries possibly beginning to form, but then the whole inflorescence died anyway. So I don't get any seeds yet. Maybe eventually, though. Fingers crossed. I suspect that if I moved her to a larger pot, I'd see some buds pretty quickly, but not only am I out of shelf space right now, we're getting very close to the point when the few plants that got to spend the summer outside will have to come inside again. I desperately want to, but I can't figure out how to promote Deanne. I may be forced to throw out some of the less-impressive 6-inch plants.

So Deanne is slow to bud, didn't manage to produce seeds the one time she flowered, has kind of crappy/buggy foliage, and is not only a rare main color (purple) but an entirely new color combination (purple / orange⁴). She also stayed more or less purple as the spathe aged, unlike Mario Speedwagon.⁵

The progression as the spathe opened. Images are from (top to bottom:) July 9, 11, 12, and 16.
Unusually strong flaws, unusually strong virtues. Deanne is not quite the purple seedling I've been waiting for, but I'm still pretty excited, and obviously she's a keeper.

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¹ (Though some do. There are so many red-blooming seedlings that it would be remarkable if the spathes never matched the new leaves.)
² The only other one I'm certain about is 0200 Mario Speedwagon; most days, I would also include 0386 Violet Chachki. Several other seedlings have violet tendencies, but I tend to think of them as being primarily pink or red, just a slightly purplish shade of pink or red. Draw your own lines to separate purple from non-purple below, if you like:

Top row: 0386 Violet Chachki, 0105 Deanne T. Christ, 0200 Mario Speedwagon, 0231 Rhea Listick.
Second row: 0085 Carson Trucks, 0515 Diane Torr, 0480 Walterina Markova, 0406 Tricia Nullmaritch.
Third row: 0259 Tasha Salad, 0534 Celia Putty, 0333 Isaiah Littleprayer, 0514 Lauren Ipsum.
Bottom row: 0610 Nina Levin, 0234 Ross Koz, 0547 Cate Sedia, 0206 Marcia Dimes.
³ Admittedly, it's difficult to keep straight exactly how scale-infested all the seedlings are and ever have been. There are a lot of them, the severity of the problem fluctuates, and the seedlings below number 600 have all been around for a long time.
The scale situation has been, overall, pretty good lately, partly because I threw imidacloprid at basically all the Anthuriums at once, and it actually seems to have worked. Perhaps. Better than I was expecting, anyway. I'm not under any illusions that the scale is gone, but the imidacloprid has certainly made a difference. (Forgive me, Ginny. If I had anything else that worked. . . .)
I have also tried spraying a pyrethroid downstairs, for the thrips. It does not appear to have done had any effect, though it was probably not operating at full strength anyway: it was an old bottle, which had been stored outside in the heat, and I only sprayed it on the plants once. Expecting to see something happen was probably delusional.
⁴ Well. "Orange" is maybe an exaggeration. I'm not actually sure what color to call that spadix, but by comparison to 0200 Mario Speedwagon's spadix, it's much less purple and much more orange. Look back at footnote 2 again if you need to.
⁵ Mario starts out a very nice, solid, purple, which lasts for less than a week before he turns noticeably pinker. Very old spathes start turning a bit green as well, ultimately landing on an unattractive muddy orange.

Deanne's spathe didn't get that old, so I don't know what colors it would have eventually turned, and I didn't get any photos of it after the first week or so that the spathe was open, but my memory is that it was a grayish-purple, but still purple, when it died. With some brown thrips scarring.
Both Deanne and Mario have the NOID purple as their seed parent. Which I suppose is kind of obvious.

The NOID purple.

Anthurium no. 0457 "JizzaBella"

It will be fun to see if I can get through this post without having to refer to seedling 0457 by name.¹

I usually try to start the posts with the best / prettiest / most representative bloom photo I have, so here it is, of the second bloom the plant produced:

Not terrible, right? Pink but not too pink, spathe that's unusually long and narrow, non-matching spadix. It's okay. Maybe it's even a little interesting, with the shape.

However, the first attempt looked like this, and never opened any further, which was aggravating:

And the second bloom, the one that looked not-terrible, turned into this after a month.

Which is still not bad, but it's a lot more ordinary. I'm not happy about the thrips damage, either; I'm having one of those moments where I'm convinced that I'll never actually get rid of the thrips.²

The foliage isn't anything to get very excited about either,

though it's good enough that I could forgive it, if the plant had interesting enough blooms.

I think I'm going to have to wait and see what the third and fourth blooms look like before I can make a decision on this one.

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¹ It's not one of my names (link goes to JizzaBella lip-syncing Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time"), which should be obvious but I feel like I have to say it anyway.
² The despair might be over by the time you read this; I'm writing on 10 September.

I am also increasingly certain that the bacterial infection I mentioned in the 0372 Tina Angst post is in fact happening, and maybe has always been happening? I know I've been asked about margin burns on Anthurium leaves, and I knew what the question was talking about, and guessed drought stress. But maybe it's always been Xanthomonas campestris.

Question for the Hive Mind: Unknown Weed

This plant had leaves similar to those of the strawberries it was growing among; I didn't realize it was something else until it had gotten noticeably taller than the strawberries, and started blooming. I suppose I don't actually have to know what it is, but I'm curious, and a bit of poking around online didn't help. Anyone know?

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Marsha White

The tag said "Martha White,"

which isn't in the IOR database; I was able to find a Marsha White, which looks a lot like this, so presumably there's been a typo somewhere along the way. These things will happen. It is sometimes frustrating to be the only person who cares, though.

The flower's nice, at least.

Paphiopedilum Marsha White = Paphiopedilum Diana Broughton x Paphiopedilum Langley Pride (Ref.)

Unfinished business: Lenophyllum texanum

The reader may or may not recall that back in August 2014, I put up this post, in which I said that it had been twenty months since I was officially been growing Lenophyllum texanum in the house, that I'd thrown out the potted plants I had and marked it as officially deceased on the spreadsheets and everything, but I still technically had some.

L. texanum is terrible about dropping leaves any time it gets moved or bumped, and each leaf is capable of growing a whole new plant, which was the reason why I got rid of it in the first place -- I was sick of having to constantly pick leaves and plants out of pots. But, when I threw away the original pots, of course some of the leaves fell off, and some of those leaves landed in the tray the plants had been sitting in, and they were too big to get washed down the drainage holes, so twenty months later, I had whole L. texanum plants growing in the bottoms of the flats. Here's the picture from August 2014:

So the months went by, and plants came and went above them, but the Lenophyllum texanum plants formed a little mat and collected a little water every time I watered the official plants in their flat, and after a certain point I was like, okay, so let's see how long you can survive this way. This post is because I have concluded that Lenophyllum texanum can, in fact, survive indefinitely with no soil or pot and very little light, water or fertilizer. This is the same bunch of plants in June 2016, three and a half years after I was officially no longer growing this species:

A close up of the group on the left side of the previous photo.
Not looking quite as healthy, sure (I think that I'd pulled them up at some point to look at the roots, which is at least part of why they're floppy: I couldn't put the mat of plants back in exactly the same spot.), but obviously still alive and everything. So I was like, okay, guys, I'll let you have a pot and some soil, good job, you win. I didn't even try to plant them. I just got a pot, filled it with some moist potting mix, and set the little mats on top of the soil. And the change was almost instantaneous. The above photos were taken on the day that I put them into pots, 16 June 2016. Here are the exact same plants on 18 August 2016, a mere 63 days later:

I assume the color change was due to stress (a lot of succulents turn redder when stressed, though the usual reasons -- cold, excessive sun/UV -- wouldn't apply here), as they were always gray-green when they had soil before, and turned back to gray-green as soon as they had soil again.

So, I mean, I still don't especially like L. texanum as a houseplant: it's messy, and invasive, and not even particularly pretty at its most beautiful. But I feel obligated, after what I've put them through. All that, and they're fine.

Obviously they will never not be fine.

Anthurium no. 0538 "Ada Buffet" / Unfinished Business

And we're back to the crappy seedlings again. Ada's a little quirky, in that she seems to have trouble keeping her spadix inside the spathe, even as a bud,

but that's one of those things that seedlings tend to grow out of eventually.

If they're allowed enough time, that is. Which Ada probably will not be, because the finished bloom doesn't have anything going for it. Small, scarred, uninteresting color.

The leaves are better. In fact, they're occasionally even nice.

But only occasionally.

Ada might get a chance to try again, so I can be sure there's nothing special going on here, but I'm already pretty convinced. Best-case scenario, we've got a serviceable pink-red / yellow from the BH seedling group, and at this point, those are worth basically nothing to me.

I should mention, though, that I've seen something interesting happen on an older BH seedling. 0527 Ms. Lucia Love, the seedling that changes spadix color from (spathe-contrasting) white to (spathe-matching) red, has really gone on a tear making blooms, and in the process has revealed that there's another color-change, after the red. She goes from white to red to green, as the spadix ages. Here's a bad photo showing all the spadix colors at once:

This may not be particularly desirable, but it's interesting, because the spadix starts out with no red, flushes completely red, and then goes back to no red again. Normally if a spadix starts turning a little green, the previous pigment remains, and it winds up going kind of brown overall (if the base color was red or pink), or gray (if the base was purple). Lucia was already sort of an oddball for being the first (only?) seedling to start out with a contrasting spadix which becomes a matching spadix, so this is doubly odd. I'm glad I kept her.

Anthurium no. 0694 "Brad Romance"

Finally, another good Anthurium seedling. The blooms are similar to, but smaller than, those of 0805 Triana Hill. Just as with Triana, the spathe was a better color when it first opened

12 June 2016.
than it was after it had been around a while,

7 July 2016.
but that just seems to be how the peach-leaning spathes work: 0097 Colin Ambulance, 0328 Polly Esther Blend, 0596 Alisa Summers, and 0805 Triana Hill all get more pink and less orange with age, to varying degrees and at varying speeds.

Brad's foliage is less abundant than Triana's, with a lot less suckering,

but so far, at least, the few leaves present are unscarred, and have an interesting texture besides (maybe the texture is why there's not as much scarring?).

Brad's definitely a keeper, in any case. Even if the spathes never get any larger, the bloom color is interesting enough that I look forward to seeing what it can do, genetically. A couple of the other peach-bloomers have produced viable seedlings now,¹ but the more sets of genes in the mix, the better, I figure.

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¹ Both 0097 Colin Ambulance and 0328 Polly Esther Blend have produced some seedlings. Neither group has been potted up and made into official seedlings with names and ID numbers yet, but it's only a matter of time: Colin's are from June and July 2016, and Polly's are from March, May, and June 2016. Some of Polly's really should have been moved into their own pots a long time ago, but I just don't have anywhere to put them.
0596 Alisa Summers has been pollinated, and is working on berries, but they're developing veeeeeeerrrrrry slowly.
I've been trying, but there's no evidence of pollination on 0694 Brad Romance or 0805 Triana Hill yet.