Anthurium nos. 1722, 1685, 1629, 1314, and 1673

Kind of a depressing batch today.


Anthurium no. 1722 "Bourgeoisie"

Bourgeoisie doesn't look depressing. The bloom was actually quite nice. Large, more or less free of thrips damage, and a color combination that's a little unusual, at least (especially considering the red/purple seed parent, 0108 Deena Sequins):

Leaves weren't anything to write home about, but they were fine. Not overly damaged by thrips. And the plant budded while still pretty small.

Alas, after many months of not seeing scale in the basement, it came back, and most of the plants on Bourgeoisie's flat had to be discarded. Not a tragic loss, as there are still seedlings around with this color combination, but I'd had high hopes for this one, given the minimal thrips damage and the larger-than-expected inflorescences. So it's at least disappointing.

Anthurium no. 1685 "Betty Bowers"

I dared to hope for something interesting from Betty. Her seed parent was 0031 Sylvester, who isn't ideal (overly prone to the ghost mites, small inflorescences) but has some desirable characteristics (really striking dark red color on the new leaves, leaves are shiny, unusual orange/beige color combination). But she wound up being just another red / yellow.

The shiny-leaf genes, at least, appear to have carried through, but that's about all she's got going for her. The thrips are a problem,

and although I like the overall form of the plant,

there's just not a whole lot there to justify keeping her around.

I mean, I may keep her anyway, because I do that sometimes. But I'm still disappointed.


Anthurium no. 1629 "Jodie Harsh"

Jodie isn't terrible, but the photo is misleading as to color (this was one of the first photos I took with the new camera, when I was trying to figure it out, and so the color settings were off: in reality it's just red),

and the spathe had plenty of thrips damage as soon as it opened. The leaves, strangely, seemed to be thrips-resistant,

so I'm not sure what's up with the spathe. I've noticed that sometimes the thrips seem to go for the leaves and not the spathes, or the spathes and not the leaves, but I don't know whether that's genetic or luck.

In any case, considering that the seed parent was 0276 Zach Religious, which produces gigantic pink spathes and interesting (if occasionally thrips-scarred) foliage, I'd thought Jodie might be better. I mean, I'm willing to wait for a rebloom and see if things improve. But I'm not impressed so far.



Anthurium no. 1314 Lenna Cumberbatch"

Lenna is also already dead; she got too dry last October and couldn't be revived. Sometimes this happens. Not a big loss; the bloom wasn't particularly interesting, and thrips got to the foliage.

Lenna's seed parent was the also-deceased 0279 Tristan Shout, which was a pretty boring pink/pink, so I don't think anything particularly valuable has been lost here.


Anthurium no. 1673 "Bryce Pilaf"

Finally, Bryce, who is at least interesting, if not beautiful.

Bryce's spadix is considerably longer than his spathe, which is something that happens occasionally. This is easier to see in an earlier photo, taken as the spathe was unfurling:

If the later blooms are more normally-proportioned (which sometimes happens when the first bloom looks like this), Bryce might be worth keeping; I like the darker, duller red. Bryce's seed parent, 0330 Faye Quinette, does a similar thing but with orange (in both cases, I think the explanation is that the spathe also contains some chlorophyll, which muddies the otherwise bright red and orange pigments). Not sure how commercially viable brownish-reds and -oranges are, but I like them. So we'll see how that goes. Bryce's foliage doesn't have much to recommend it.

I mean, that's not the worst foliage I've seen lately (The worst would probably be either 0650 Phyllis Deen or 1317 Calpernia Addams.), but it's not good.

I don't have any objection to the overall shape of the plant, though, so if the bloom winds up being nice, I could live with the foliage.

Sorry this post was kind of a bummer; I'm trying to keep approximately to the same order as the seedlings originally bloomed, and sometimes the seedlings are . . . well, kind of a bummer. I'll do something interesting and/or pretty next post.

Anthurium no. 1679 "Madison Adjective"

I've recently been reminded that "Madison," as a girl's name, was more or less invented by the 1984 film Splash. (Daryl Hannah's character chooses the name by looking at a street sign -- Madison Avenue. At the time, nobody named their girls Madison, which the film lampshades ("Madison? That's not a name!"), but by 2001 everybody named their girls Madison so that joke didn't really work anymore.¹

That's only slightly related to our seedling of the day, but it's still interesting.²

This is another case where my old camera and new camera have different takes on the bloom color; the old camera thought the spathe was a pretty straightforward orange,

whereas the new one puts a little pink into it.

In person, my eye agrees with one camera some of the time and the other camera the rest of the time, so I honestly can't tell you what color this seedling is.

The seed parent is 0330 Faye Quinette; Faye's seedlings are often kind of in-between colors like this. (In particular, 1666 Horrorchata, from the same seedling group,³ is on the continuum between orange and pink as well, though Horrorchata leans more to the pink end, while Madison favors orange.)

The foliage is just okay; there has been some thrips damage. (Not a lot, but enough to be obnoxious.)

I expect to keep the seedling, if for no other reason than to hang on to as many of the genes from 0330 Faye Quinette as possible. Though if the thrips get a lot worse, I may have to reconsider. (No sign of that so far.)

Madison's not so interesting that she should have gotten a post to herself, but I also wanted to recommend a houseplant-specific podcast I've recently encountered, Jane Perrone's On The Ledge, and I didn't want the recommendation to be buried under a bunch of Anthurium photos.

Perrone is in the UK, so sometimes the concerns are a little UK-specific (like, I have no idea why getting a variegated Monstera deliciosa is a big deal, but it comes up a lot⁴), but that sometimes makes it more interesting. And in any case, if you're interested in houseplants, it's probably worth your time to look through the archives and try an episode. If you need a recommendation, I particularly liked Episode 44, because a lot of interesting historical details get dropped in along the way.

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¹ Technically, in 2001, everybody named their girls Emily. But Madison was the second most popular girl's name.
² (Yes it is.)
³ (FE, which also produced 1634 Helena Handbag)
⁴ (As do claims about how ridiculously easy Aspidistra is to grow. I discarded four Aspidistras between 2007 and 2013 before giving up on the genus, so this always makes me grit my teeth a little bit.)

Anthurium nos. 1336, 1714, 0963, 1219, and 1508

The main hangup for posting has been that I didn't have photos ready for the various seedlings that needed posts; I caught up on that a few days ago. (Getting names chosen for the Schlumbergera seedlings is also an obstacle, but at least I can do Anthuriums.)

So I now have 62 unblogged Anthurium seedlings, and 48 Schlumbergera seedlings. If I were to do one post per day, with one seedling per post, then I won't manage to catch up until the middle of November, and by mid-November more of both kinds of seedlings will have bloomed.¹ I don't think I can do more than one post per day (one post per day is already pretty unlikely), so the obvious thing to try is to do more than one seedling per post. So here we are.

So my plan is to lump some of the less-interesting Anthurium seedlings together in bundles of five, and get them out of the way that way, and hopefully that will free up enough time for me to find names for the Schlumbergeras. (Interesting Anthurium seedlings -- and yes, there are some -- will still get individual posts.)

Anthurium no. 1336 "Erica Rae O'Hara"

Erica Rae isn't bad, just nothing we haven't seen before. The inflorescence is a good size, and the spadix is maybe slightly interesting -- don't see brown spadices very often --

-- and the foliage is actually pretty nice. Very shiny, more thrips-resistant than average,

and the plant has a nice form overall.

The new leaves are even kind of ornamental on their own.

So I'll keep her.


Anthurium no. 1714 "Augusta Wynndt"

Similar story with Augusta: blooms are a good size and look nice,

though the two cameras don't agree on what color the spathe is, and I don't remember what it looked like well enough in person to be able to tell you which is the real color. Old camera:

New camera:

Leaves are again nice and mostly unbothered by thrips, though the texture is different from Erica Rae's:

And the overall form is pleasant.

Also a keeper.


Anthurium no. 0963 "Cassandro"

It's possible that Cassandro will do something prettier in the future, or would if given a bigger pot in which to grow, but I'm not impressed so far.

Even if subsequent blooms were bigger and less damaged, he's not doing anything we haven't seen before, and the plant overall is pretty weak-looking.

I suppose the narrowness of the leaves is maybe mildly interesting.

But overall, no compelling reason to keep Cassandro.


Anthurium no. 1219 "Niles Marsh"

Niles has a slightly unusual color.

I mean, we've seen pale pinks before, but not very often, and Niles has produced quite a few blooms since he got started, which is a point in his favor.

Unfortunately, light pink is a really terrible color for thrips damage -- I still haven't determined whether the thrips are more attracted to lighter spathes, but thrips damage definitely shows up a lot better on light-colored blooms. Which dampens my enthusiasm a bit. The leaves are nevertheless pretty nice,

and it hasn't seemed overly bothered by the thrips otherwise. I'm a little concerned about the growth habit -- that stem looks kind of long, for a plant with such a small number of leaves --

but we can probably keep Niles around and see how things go. The spathe color is enough justification to keep the seedling, as long as the thrips don't get too extreme.


Anthurium no. 1508 "Tabbi Katt"

And finally, the very misleadingly-named Tabbi Katt (the name of a real drag queen), which has decent blooms in a boring color,

though the thrips seem to be more of a problem on Tabbi than on the other seedlings from this post. That notch on the left side of the spathe shouldn't be there. The thrips don't seem to be a problem on the foliage, though, which is nice,

And the plant is otherwise pleasant.

So Tabbi's also a wait-and-see kind of seedling, but I like her chances a lot better than Cassandro's. Not a bad group of seedlings overall, just less interesting than I would like.

Next post on Saturday.

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¹ Indeed, the 2017-18 Schlumbergera season hasn't even ended yet. Ordinarily, the blooming is basically over by the end of April, but this year I've had seedlings bloom for the first time in May (470A, 426A, 376A), June (183A), and July (473A, 434A, 421A, 123A). Which shouldn't be happening; my guess is that the air conditioning, plus the downstairs lights being on timers, has convinced some of the seedlings in the basement that it's November year-round. For the sake of being able to do a Schlummies post for the 2017-18 season, I'm going to arbitrarily set the cutoff at 1 September: anything that blooms after that will officially belong to 2018-19.

Schlumbergera seedlings: assorted

Two reasons for the recent long gap in posts: one, I got hung up on a name for seedling 226A (didn't like any of the four names that I'd come up with, couldn't find any names I liked better), and two, Japanese beetle season is upon us once again and it's way, way worse than previous years. Like, if someone told me that a count had confirmed that there were a hundred thousand individual beetles in our yard alone, I'd be like, only? Judging from my estimates of how many I'm catching in a jar of soapy water, the population is about ten times more than it was in 2015, and 2015 made me want to cry.

So I've been distracted and frustrated, is the point. Meanwhile, the Schlumbergeras continue to bloom (two first-time bloomers in July alone, and July isn't over yet), so the longer I stall on one seedling, the more work it's going to be to catch back up. (I am aware that I don't actually have to name the seedlings, but usually I like doing it.) So for the sake of making progress at all, I'm going to announce the names of a few seedlings I can assign names to, and we'll just have to come back around to the difficult ones later.

To begin, let me present Schlumbergera 382A Permanganate:

It's named for the chemical potassium permanganate,¹ a strong oxidizer that also happens to produce intensely-colored solutions in water. Concentrated solutions are a very dark purple, but more dilute solutions are sort of pink-magenta similar to the flowers, so it works for me.

Rejected names:
Calmth (a state of calmness, by analogy with heighth or breadth; from the dialect dictionary)
It Is To Laugh (382A is another non-yellow offspring from the NOID yellow parent. The failure of the NOID yellow to produce yellow offspring is not exactly funny, but it's not not funny either, see 369A Punch Line.)
Jellybread (also from the dialect dictionary; bread with jelly on it. Really only works if you're imagining grape jelly, and even then the color's not quite right.)


And 379A Can't Find The World:

This is a reference to a moment when I was playing around with Half-Life 2 developer console, so I could use the noclip cheat and look around at spots which are normally not visible within the game. I don't remember what I did, but at some point the game gave me the error message "can't find the world." I didn't know what that meant, but the idea pleased me somehow, and I wrote it down as a possible seedling name. Then this seedling started to bloom but never quite finished, and the seedling seemed to match the name. I still haven't found out what "can't find the world" means exactly.

379A is also another non-yellow seedling from the NOID yellow parent. It turns out that mostly the NOID yellow produces more oranges, though for some reason we also got a couple magenta/white flowers out of it, plus a couple new combinations.

Rejected names:
Dysphoria (not really a reference to anything in particular; the flower just kinda looks dysphoric)
Flea-Bit Dog (mostly a reference to thrips damage, plus the "dog" designation for seedlings that don't turn out very well)
Fools Rush In (not actually sure what this one's supposed to mean -- maybe I was thinking that the plant was trying to bloom before it was actually mature enough to do so?)


Here's 424A Speedrun:

Speedruns are where someone attempts to play through a video game, or a level of a video game, as quickly as possible, often using unintended bits of the game code to bypass certain time-consuming scenes, or to travel faster than the game normally allows one to go. It works for this seedling because, while it's not technically a record-fastest bloom, 424A was nevertheless very quick to go from seed to flower.

Rejected names:
Alexis Carrington (character / main antagonist from Dynasty. The husband and I can now say that we've seen every single episode of the original Dynasty, by the way. I tried watching one episode of the rebooted CW Dynasty and it is awful, please do not watch it. Somehow it manages to be just as nonsensical and over-the-top as the original series without ever being even a little bit entertaining.)
Flamboyant Tendency (basically just a description of the flower in general; not really any deeper meaning intended)
Prismatic (a reference to the number of colors in the petals, though obviously they're not arranged in rainbow order like a real prism would produce, and other seedlings have done better at keeping the colors prominent and distinct from one another. Don't mind the name, but this wasn't the best seedling to give it to.)


188A Freyja's Turkey:

This is another chemistry-related name, though in a more roundabout way. I remembered that the element vanadium was named for the goddess Vanadis, which was a reference to the wide range of colors produced by vanadium compounds (Vanadis being the goddess of, among other things, fertility and beauty), but I didn't remember that Vanadis was just another name for the goddess Freyja.

The "turkey" portion of the name comes from the way some of the photos had the petals fanning out like a turkey's tail.

Both 424A Speedrun and 188A Freyja's Turkey are offspring of the NOID magenta.

Rejected names:
Hetty Reckless (a runaway slave and abolitionist, who was part of Underground Railroad, fought against prostitution, worked toward improving education and skills in AA community, and just generally did impressive and good things. She's totally going to get a seedling someday, it's just not going to be this one.)
Rainbow Flag (another reference to the range of colors, though if we're speaking literally then it should be noted that like half the colors in the actual rainbow flag aren't found in the flower)
Vocal Fry (I think this was a reference to the slightly ragged edges of some of the petals? Or the way the thrips had chewed them up a bit? Mostly I just like having a term for the phenomenon, which I would probably otherwise never have even noticed.)


237A Neptunium:

Yet another chemistry name, though since I've talked about neptunium before (in the post for seedling 239A Plow The Seashore, specifically footnote 3), I probably don't need to explain it again. The short version is, this is seedling 237, and isotope 237 is the most stable isotope of neptunium.

237A is also another of the seedlings from 025A Clownfish, along with 239A Plow The Seashore, 240A Schwa, 244A That's My Purse, 250A Glede, and a handful of others that haven't been named yet.²

Clay Court (because it's approximately the color of clay tennis courts, and why not?)
Horseback Opinion (implying that the bloom wasn't well thought-out or well-planned; I found the idiom in the dialect dictionary, but it's apparently still known today, because The Free Dictionary has it. The implication is of an opinion offered so quickly and with so little thought that one hasn't even taken the time to get off one's horse first -- something unconsidered or off the cuff)
Snakeypoo (this one came from the random word combination "serpentine nickname." I asked myself what a good nickname for a snake would be, and "snakeypoo" is what came out. It amused me, so it went on the list. I don't think it signifies anything about this particular seedling: it's probably just that I was still finding it funny when I was generating the list of name candidates.)

The next post will happen when it happens.

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¹ Technically just the permanganate half; a positive ion has to be there to balance the charges, but it doesn't have to be potassium. Potassium is just a common counter-ion, for reasons I didn't bother to investigate. All my personal exposure to permanganate salts has been with potassium permanganate (KMnO₄) as far as I'm aware.
² (236A, 241A, 248A, and 252A)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 272

272 is, as I said in the last post, also from Schlumbergera x buckleyi (pollen parent unknown). Like 256A Yes And No, it's not great, but it does have at least one notable quality, which you wouldn't be able to tell from the photos alone: the blooms were unusually tiny.

Which led me to realize that the flowers I've seen on Schlumbergeras, whether in stores on named varieties or from my own seedlings, are surprisingly consistent in size. This sort of makes sense with the named varieties, because whatever the most lucrative size of Schlumbergera flower might be, you'd assume that breeders would eventually zero in on it and produce only that size, but I'm surprised that there's not more variation in the seedlings.

Even with 272, I'm not positive that the small blooms are going to be a permanent feature: it may be that the flowers were stunted by one environmental condition or another, and next year they'll be normal-sized. We'll find out when we find out, I guess.

Our name finalists are: Canch, Deimos, Hootsle, and Mercury In Retrograde.

Canch is another name from the dialect dictionary; its definition there is "A small portion of anything;" and readers are advised to check the entry for "smidge." (Though I'm not sure why, because the smidge entry doesn't contain any additional information about canch.) It was apparently heard in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina in the late 1920s and early 1930s, though Merriam-Webster knows it from England, as a small stack, pile, or quantity. Wordnik is aware of canch too, but defines it to mean a small quantity of a very specific thing, or a small duration of time. So the meaning seems to be kind of all over the place, but with the central concept of smallness.

The original meaning is mining-related, and refers to the situation of having sections of a mine that are at different heights, like when a single layer of something you want to mine has been pushed up or down, so that one section of the material is higher than the other. The canch is the wedge-shaped section of material you have to remove in order to create a walkable surface between the parts you're mining. (Therefore: a small amount of something.) I'm guessing that English (Scottish? Welsh? Irish?) miners who settled in Tennessee / North Carolina brought the word with them, and it became generalized to other materials, though I don't have any proof of that and maybe it's wrong.

Deimos is the Greek god of terror and/or dread, specifically the personification of the terror and dread caused by war.¹ He doesn't really appear as a proper character in Greek mythology, according to Wikipedia, but is more of a metaphor. One of the moons of Mars is named Deimos, also.² I've thought about naming a seedling Deimos last year, with seedling 211A, but went with 211A Bruce Lee instead.

The thinking about why Deimos works for a smaller-than-normal seedling owes a lot to the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Fear Itself" (episode 4 of season 4); readers who are unfamiliar can get what they need from Wikipedia. Possibly Gachnar (the episode's villain) would make even more sense, under the circumstances, but I think the Buffy writers made up the name for the episode, so it doesn't quite have the same historical gravitas. I don't know.

Hootsle (The "oo" looks like it should be the same vowel as in "cute," but was reported at the time to be the same vowel as in "butt." So more "hutsle" than "hootsle.") is another one from the dialect dictionary: it's an adjective meaning small or contracted,³ or a noun meaning a small person or thing, and was observed in southeast Pennsylvania in 1903. I figure its relationship to this seedling is pretty self-explanatory.

And, finally, Mercury In Retrograde. I assume this is on the list for a reason, but I no longer remember the reason. It has sometimes been a joke around the house, when several things go wrong at once,⁴ but I should stop saying that because it's not true or funny.

So, yeah. As you can tell from my grumpy footnote, Mercury In Retrograde is out. And I'll drop Hootsle too, because nobody would ever pronounce it "correctly," and I already have a dialect word for small.

Which leaves us with Canch or Deimos, and although I'm not thrilled about Deimos, I'm kind of bothered by Canch, which . . . doesn't sound like it should mean "small amount." To me. (I have the same problem with "skosh."⁵) So I guess this is 272A Deimos.

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¹ As compared to Phobos, who personifies fear and panic. They were, of course, twin brothers, and the sons of Ares (the god of war).
² The other is Phobos.
Point of interest which is not related to plants at all: an observer on Mars would see the two moons orbit in opposite directions, with Deimos rising in the east and setting in the west, and Phobos doing the reverse. Both moons orbit in the same direction as the rotation of Mars, but Phobos moves around the planet so much faster than Mars rotates that from the surface, it appears to go "backwards."
(Phobos is in fact so fast that it rises and sets multiple times during a Martian day. Which pleases me for some weird reason.)
³ The specific usage example given is "They lived in a miserable, hootsle way."
⁴ It comes from astrology. Both the planet Mercury and the planet Earth go around the Sun in the same direction all the time, never stopping or backing up, but their speeds, and geometry, are such that Mercury appears, from the perspective of Earth, to move backward in the sky. (Wikipedia will try to explain it to you, though the explanation could be clearer.) This happens a few times a year. Astrology believes that Mercury is the planet that affects communication and technology, and that when it appears to go backward in the sky (even though it is still going forward and has not reversed its direction or speed in any way), this means an unusual number of communication and technological glitches occur on Earth. And confirmation bias does the rest.
I hadn't intended this post to involve two examples of astronomical bodies appearing to move in ways they do not actually move, but there you go anyway. Call it a theme.
⁵ Incidentally: skosh is a corruption of the Japanese sukoshi (pronounced "skoh shee," according to Merriam-Webster). For some reason I had always assumed it was originally Yiddish. But no. It came back to the U.S. with the servicemen who had been in Japan following World War II.