Question for the Hive Mind: Hippeastrum NOID

A reader sent me this photo of a bloom stalk on their unidentified Hippeastrum.

That sure looks like the plant is building full-sized leaves under the flower buds. I did an image search that turned up a few sort of similar things, but I didn't find any photos that showed anything quite as large and leaf-like as this. Most of the Hippeastrum photos out there don't show anything remotely leaf-like at all.

So I guess the question for readers is just, what exactly is going on here? I know what it looks like -- it looks like this plant is trying to build a plantlet on its bloom stalk, like it's a Phalaenopsis or Agave or something -- but that's not something Hippeastrum actually does, is it?

Schlumbergera seedling no. 009

Seedling 009 finally got around to blooming, but it wasn't really worth the wait. Not many blooms, a color we've seen many times before, lots of thrips damage, and the blooms either opened so hard that the petals practically laid flat against the "tube" or barely opened at all.

Name finalists: In The Moment, Overcorrection, Personal Reasons, Sleeping Dog.

In The Moment is one of the names that honor someone from my life (previously considered for 165A Assertive). Since it's not obvious, I'll note that the reason "in the moment" seems appropriate for this person is because they appear to be completely incapable of anticipating or planning anything ever; it kind of feels to me like this seedling was caught unprepared for blooming, hence the crappy flower.

Overcorrection seemed appropriate for a seedling that would either barely open its petals or would open them way too hard.

I imagine that, if asked why the blooms were so crappy and infrequent, the seedling would claim Personal Reasons and refuse to comment further.

And then Sleeping Dog, because this is an even better "dog" candidate than 104A Needs Practice was, and I don't mind the undertone of menace in the name nearly as much now as I did when I considered it then.

I could probably live with any of these names, and they're all mildly derogatory, so I don't have compelling reasons to choose or reject any of them, but I suppose In The Moment sounds a little more positive than it is, and maybe it would be better to hold that name in reserve for a prettier seedling.

Also Sleeping Dog maybe makes the plant a tougher sell than it would otherwise be, considering what everybody says you're supposed to do with sleeping dogs. Not that it's likely to get sold in the first place, but you know. I should still be prepared for the possibility.

And, of the two remaining options, I find I kind of like Personal Reasons better than Overcorrection, so I guess this will be 009A Personal Reasons. Not entirely satisfying, but whatever, I'm probably not keeping the seedling that much longer anyway.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 097

I seem to be approaching that point in the year where I can't come up with any more names that I like at all. I had four finalist names for this one ready to go, but once it was time to actually work on the post, all four names were problematic in one way or another. (It may also be worth pointing out that each year, more seedlings need new names than the year before: in the 2014-15 season, I had 36 Schlumbergera seedlings bloom for the first time. The next year it was 43. This year it's 50.)

So what qualities of seedling 097A are most notable? Well, the color isn't incredibly consistent. In person, it tended to look red or orange-red, but some of the photos make it look completely orange. The only other thing is that it produced a lot of blooms, though that seems to be fairly common. Like they have a bunch of pent-up blooming energy that has to come out the first time they bloom, and then afterwards are more measured.

Neither quality suggests any particularly good names, alas, and it took me an afternoon of picking through the big list o' names and a question to MetaFilter to come up with ideas I found acceptable. (And then only barely acceptable, but better than the original set of names.)

They are: Apples and Oranges, Dynamite Stick, Hot Nickel Ball, Italian Takeout, and Ladybug Ladybug.¹

So. Hot Nickel Ball falls first, because it's part of the title of a ridiculously repetitive and misogynistic song. I didn't know. That's why I search for the names first.

And I guess I'll drop Dynamite Stick too; the colors fit (in reality, they seem to mostly be red, dull red, or brown, but the cartoon / video-game version is almost always red or orange), but the "tube" of the flower is the most stick-like part, and it's also the only part that's not red or orange.

The color's a little vivid for Italian Takeout. Which leaves only Apples and Oranges or Ladybug Ladybug, both of which have problems. Specifically, this isn't a very appley red, and ladybugs have spots, which these flowers don't.²

So. Apples and Oranges is part of a specific phrase about comparing things which are not alike, which doesn't really apply here. I mean, this particular seedling's going to be compared a lot, but mostly only to the other seedlings, which are obvious and appropriate things for it to be getting compared to, so the name doesn't really apply. Ladybug Ladybug is also a reference, to a nursery rhyme. As with a lot of other nursery rhymes, the original meaning is quite a bit darker -- I'm not sure I even knew there were any lines following "ladybug, ladybug, fly away home" until I wrote this post.

So we'll go with 097A Ladybug Ladybug; it's more interesting.

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¹ For whatever it's worth, I appreciated a lot of the MeFi responses I didn't wind up using: some of the ones that were technically what I was asking for were nevertheless not appropriate for this specific problem. Like, the particular shades of red and orange of the suggested item weren't the shades of red and orange I'm trying to come up with a name for. In some cases, I couldn't come up with a name from the suggestion because there were brand names involved, or I couldn't come up with interesting words to pair it with, or whatever.
² Well. They're not supposed to, anyway. Damn the thrips.

Anthurium no. 0648 "Bianca Del Rio"

Bianca is both special and not. She pretty much reproduces the color scheme of one of her grandparents,¹ which is not special. On the other hand, she's the second white-blooming seedling, and the first white/yellow combination.² And she'd be a pretty nice white/yellow, too, if not for the thrips, which love her, so every photo I've taken of her spathes has little brown scars all over them.

(Sigh.)

Unlike some seedlings, the thrips go for Bianca's leaves as well:

I don't have a very current whole-plant photo of Bianca; I took this one when the first bud appeared, last July,

but that bud aborted, and I didn't see an actual fully mature inflorescence until December. And then there was a backlog of Schlumbergera and Anthurium posts in December, so the whole-plant photo winds up being ten months old. The plant still basically looks like this; it just has a longer stem and more leaves now.

Not sure about the ultimate fate of the seedling; it'd be a keeper if not for the thrips, and, in theory the thrips could be eliminated. I just haven't been able to make that happen so far. So for the moment, I'm undecided.

As for Bianca Del Rio the drag queen, I have really mixed feelings about her. I mostly like her standup (NSFW), but she also does insult comedy,³ and I guess I've never understood the appeal of insult comics. But she also has a movie, Hurricane Bianca,


and, I mean, the movie wasn't high art or anything, but it was a lot better than it needed to be, which is impressive.

Also impressive: at the premiere party for RuPaul's Drag Race season 6, she sewed a passable dress in like three and a half minutes, on stage.⁴


So on balance, I'm pretty fond of Bianca (who, it should be noted, won season 6 of RPDR; it was never even close, really). If nothing else, she's obviously really quick-witted and smart. I just wish she would use her powers for good.

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¹ Bianca is the daughter of 0276 Zach Religious; my best guess is that Zach is the son of 'White Gemini' (known) and 'Pandola' (speculated).
² The first white was 1095 Carolina Pineforest, whose spadix was also white.
³ (I looked, but couldn't easily locate a clip on YouTube)
⁴ Which, it should be pointed out, is not an especially complicated dress, and she used a very stretchy fabric besides, which is a lot more forgiving of irregularities in the cuts and seams than a stiffer fabric would have been. But still: can you sew a wearable dress out of stretchy fabric in three and a half minutes? 'Cause I couldn't.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 215

Not an incredibly interesting Schlumbergera seedling. I mean, it's pretty, but we've seen like ten thousand orange Schlumbergeras by this point and it's difficult to get excited about another one. Also it only produced one bloom, from which I got exactly one photo. So we'd best get to naming.

I had four name finalists but decided that one was stupid, so I dropped it at the last minute, leaving us with Apollo, Aqua Regia, and Unashamed.

Apollo is the Greek and Roman god of music, the sun and light, healing and disease, prophecy and truth, and poetry. I considered the name previously for 089A Halloween Moon and 114A Gallant Fox, and rejected it on the grounds that it wasn't interesting enough and that there's plenty of stuff named for Apollo already, respectively.

Aqua Regia is the mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids mainly used in gold refining. (It has a fancy name because it's been known for a long time.) I considered it previously for seedling 057B Oxomoco, and rejected it on the grounds that 057B was redder than aqua regia normally is (it's usually orange or yellow-orange).

Unashamed doesn't come from anywhere in particular, but I guess seemed appropriate for such a strong color.

So. Unashamed might be more appealing if I hadn't just named a seedling 165A Assertive. Not that the words are synonyms, but they're sort of related ideas, connected via the idea of directness, not being shy, maybe a little confrontational.

The two remaining words both have the problem of being Latin, or Latin-adjacent, which is a no-no for official cultivar naming, but Aqua Regia is much more obviously so than Apollo is. On the other hand, Apollo is much more likely to be in use already; people name things for Apollo all the time.¹ And this particular seedling is unlikely to ever be officially registered, which means that the name is just for me and I can call it whatever I want, Latin or not.

I considered combining the two names. The most logical combination would be Apollo Rex, but that's already taken (a proposed TV show; a band). So I thought maybe an anagram?

The problem with anagrams is that there's a Q involved in "apollo aqua regia," which severely limits the number of ways to use all the letters. However, the anagram site I linked will also, if you ask, give you a list of the words that can be made from the input letters, whether or not the whole set of letters can be rearranged into words or not.² So I looked at the candidate words for a while, and saw "Oriole," which I've considered as a possible seedling name in the past because they're orange birds.³ "Allure" was also on the list, and I kind of like how difficult "oriole allure" is to say clearly. So forget Apollo, forget Aqua Regia, I'm going with 215A Oriole Allure.

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¹ To illustrate, check out what the International Orchid Registry comes up with for orchids named "Apollo:"
• Angulocaste Apollo
• Brassidium Apollo
• Catasetum × apolloi
• Cattleya Apollo (1890)
• Cattleya Apollo (1908)
• Cattleya Apollo Eleven
• Cattleya Apollonia
• Cattleya Seagulls Apollo
• Clowesetum Jumbo Apollo
• Cymbidium Apollo
• Cymbidium Apollo Beach
• Cymbidium Apollo Eleven
• Cymbidium Blue Apollo
• Cymbidium Foxfire Apollo
• Cymbidium Kulnura Apollo
• Dendrobium Apollo
• Epidendrum Apollon Valley
• Epidendrum Big Green Apollo
• Luisanda Apollo
• Oncidium Apollo
• Oncidium Apollo Bay
• Oncidium Apollo Eight
• Paphiopedilum Apollo
• Paphiopedilum Apollo Creed
• Paphiopedilum Hsinying Apollo
• Paphiopedilum Miya Apollon
• Phalaenopsis Apollo
• Phalaenopsis Apollo Eight
• Phalaenopsis Apollo Eleven
• Phalaenopsis Apollo Fifteen
• Phalaenopsis Apollo Fourteen
• Phalaenopsis Apollo Nine
• Phalaenopsis Apollo Ten
• Phalaenopsis Apollo Twelve
• Phalaenopsis Apollo's Emerald
• Phalaenopsis Apollo's Gold
• Phalaenopsis Brother Apollo
• Phalaenopsis Golden Apollon
• Phalaenopsis KC Apollo
• Phalaenopsis Nobby's Apollo
• Phalaenopsis Sogo Apollo
• Phalaenopsis Sogo Apollo Sun
• Phalaenopsis Tai-Kan Apollo
• Phalaenopsis Younghome Apollo
• Phragmipedium Apollo
• Rhyncholaeliocattleya Apollo
• Zelenchostele Apollo
If there's not already a Schlumbergera 'Apollo,' surely it's only a matter of time.
² E.g. the longest word that can be made from the letters in "Apollo Aqua Regia" is the nine-letter "paralegal," though there are no full anagrams containing "paralegal" because the letters left over are a, i, o, o, q, & u.
³ Well, orange and black. And usually the orange is substantially yellowish. Though there are species of oriole closer to this seedling's color.

Anthurium no. 0915 "Parker MacArthur"

I'll cut to the chase and say in the first sentence that Parker is not a keeper. She has exactly one good quality -- she produces a lot of blooms, and does so despite still being in a 3-inch pot -- and about half a dozen bad qualities.

The blooms are uniformly very small, under an inch (2.5 cm) long. They are a common color combination (pink/pink, like Parker's seed parent, the much larger 0066 Barbara Seville). Both spathes and leaves are readily attacked by thrips, and the light spathe color makes any damage really obvious.

Although it's not obvious from the (pretty old) full-plant picture below, the internodal distance is also a bit long, making the plant leggy. And none of this is getting better as the plant gets older. I mean, occasionally the seedlings grow out of problems if given enough time to try, but not this one.

So Parker's toast whenever I get around to pitching her.

(Sorry this post isn't very interesting -- the last week or so has been really busy, and I'm kind of scrambling to get a post together at all.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 193

One cold hard scientific fact I've learned this year (thanks to reader Pattock) is that in Schlumbergeras, whiteness is recessive. It also seems to be the case that all white Schlumbergeras look pretty much the same.¹ So unless you're specifically focused on breeding a bigger, more pest-resistant, more floriferous white Schlumbergera, it's not worth the time and effort to cross a white seedling with a pigmented one. Either the pigmented flower has a recessive white gene, in which case you'll get half pigmented and half white offspring, or it doesn't, in which case all the offspring will look like the pigmented plant.

I mean, the logic there might not be 100% sound, but it sure looks like that's the basic situation so far.

So seedling 193A's seed parent was the NOID magenta, which pretty clearly has a recessive white gene in it. And 193A is a really, really good white, with nicely-shaped, large blooms. It even photographed well for me, which doesn't happen that often with the white seedlings. So I do like it, and it's a keeper, but I don't expect to use it for any breeding.

Our name options: Arcade Gannon, Glass Slipper, Vapor Trail, White Knight. The name meanings are all pretty obvious, I think, except maybe for the first one: Arcade Gannon is a character in the video game Fallout: New Vegas, who I'm fond enough of to name a seedling after.²

So the first name to go is White Knight, because it's become mildly pejorative in the online world and I'm not that into the whole medieval thing in the first place. Chess either, for that matter. And I do try not to put the color of the flower in the name if I can help it.

And Glass Slipper would actually be a pretty good name for some of the white Schlumbergeras, as a lot of them end up looking semi-transparent in photos, but 193A mostly didn't photograph that way, so it seems like it would be more appropriate for one of the four other unnamed white seedlings.

And there's nothing wrong with Vapor Trail, but I'm obviously pretty into Arcade Gannon (even if I haven't explained why very well), so this one has to be 193A Arcade Gannon.

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¹ Some white flowers look better than others, of course. Bigger/smaller flowers, more/less thrips damage, that sort of thing. But as far as the color goes, they're all the same; there's no spectrum of different shades of white to be explored: white is just white.
² It's not completely unprecedented for me to give a seedling a game-related name, but it's only happened three times before: 067A Clyde (Pac-Man), 072A Chell (Portal / Portal 2) and 107A Nova Prospekt (Half-Life 2).
This feels a little weird, and I suppose it's not as classy as a mythological name (013A Tantalus, 057B Oxomoco, 066B Sigrid The Haughty, 077A Grendel), but it's kind of a distinction without a difference: video games are mythology too, like TV (102A Michonne) or movies (090A Lola). So it feels weird, but there's no reason not to do it if I want to, right?
I looked on YouTube for videos that would explain my fondness, but couldn't find anything that wasn't like five times longer than necessary, so you'll just have to take my word for it, I guess. He's one of eight characters you can have follow you around and help you shoot things. I've only played enough to recruit six of the eight possible companions, so I suppose I can't say Arcade is the best one, but . . . he's obviously the best one. He's gay, he's dryly funny, having him around makes it quicker and easier to heal from wounds ('cause he's a doctor), and he shoots things much more accurately than I do. (Though I think they all shoot better than I do.)
(Lily and Boone are also fun. Not a big fan of Rex or ED-E. I've only barely played with Veronica, and have never recruited Raul or Cass.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 165

Seedling 165 was actually one of the last Schlumbergeras to bloom this year, but three of the last five were magenta and I figured it would be good to spread them out a little instead of having a bunch of the last posts all be about more or less identical-looking seedlings.

The problem with moving a seedling up many spaces in the post queue is that I hadn't yet come up with any possible names for it, and I had almost no time in which to try. I tried grabbing a list of random word combinations to see if that would get me something usable, and possibly it eventually would have, but I kind of ran out of time to deal with all of them. So I decided to pick some names related to significant people in my life¹ and figure out which of them worked best for the seedling.

So, our finalists are: Assertive, In The Moment, Magic Words, Our Lady of Assumption, Some Clowns, and Swoss.

And Swoss is gone immediately, because the Urban Dictionary says it means either a blow job or (as a verb) to smoke a joint.² The other five options are all pretty solid, though, which means I have to come up with dumb reasons to eliminate some of them. So:

I really like Some Clowns, both because the name appeals on its own and because it's a really good name for the person it honors. However, this isn't really a color I associate with clowns much; it might be better for a red-blooming seedling.

Not only is the seedling not especially magical, but I'm not completely sold on Magic Words for the person it honors. So that one can go. And while Our Lady of Assumption is perfect, perfect, perfect for its honoree, I feel like magenta's the wrong color for the name.³

Which leaves us with only Assertive and In The Moment, and it's not so much that In The Moment is wrong as that Assertive feels really right. So 165A Assertive it is.

I just remembered to note that 165A Assertive is the first of three offspring of the NOID peach to get a blog post this year. One of the other two (167A) looks just like this, except maybe a little less frazzled; the other (042A) is peach. Just one more bit of evidence that Schlumbergera genetics is not really built to produce new color combinations, and beginning with a 'Caribbean Dancer' cross was ridiculously lucky. I would not have kept doing this if the first hundred seedlings had all been either magenta or peach.

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¹ I don't know if I need to be explaining this every time it comes up or not, but: for unknown reasons, it amuses me to occasionally name a seedling after a significant person from my life without actually using their name. (The ideal is actually to find a name that the person in question wouldn't even recognize as honoring them, though I don't always manage that.) So far, the seedlings honoring specific people from my life are: 023A Stoked, 075A Pushover, 082A Strawberry Madeleine, 095A Perturbed, 096A I'm Really Sorry, 101A Julius Erving, 180A Miss Emma, and 217A Blood Frenzy.
These sorts of names are especially appealing to me now, because, as I said earlier, I'm going through my old journals lately. People from my past are a lot more on my mind than usual.
² As far as I was aware at the time, the person from whom I learned "swoss" had invented it themselves, like 20-25 years ago, and it was synonymous with "good" or "cool," nothing to do with sex or drugs at all. So now I have to come up with some other name to use for that person, which sucks because it was otherwise kind of perfect for them. Damn it.
³ As the name is, on its face, a reference to the Virgin Mary, it really belongs on a blue flower, but that's not going to happen with the Schlumbergeras. The next best option is white, so I'll consider it for seedling 290 in a couple months.