Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Sort of a Stalin-era statuary / high school senior picture kind of "looking toward the future" vibe with this one. I like it. It's fairly hard to make Nina look like she's thinking or emoting.

(In actuality, she was just looking up at me and/or the camera, trying to determine whether to run away.)


As difficult as it is to get a picture of Nina that looks like thinking or emoting, it's even harder to get a picture of Sheba that's not blurry with motion. She actually spends a fair amount of the day like this, waiting for something to happen, especially on days when I'm not watering. (When I am watering, she can just follow me from the computer to the watering station to the plant shelves endlessly, which is apparently more entertaining than it sounds.) I sometimes feel guilty for not spending more time playing with her or whatever, but the husband has quite sensibly pointed out that she gets a lot more entertainment during a given day than a lot of dogs do. It's probably just the whole big, brown, sad-looking eyes thing that's getting to me.

Pretty picture: "Paphiopedilum delenatii?" Phragmipedium cv.

Yet another orchid from the Wallace's Garden Center show back at the end of March. This particular one kind of blew my mind. An orange Paphiopedilum? Who ever heard of such a thing?

Unfortunately, I suspect the name might not be correct. I mean, P. delenatii is the name that was on the plant, and it does look like a Paphiopedilum, but all of the P. delenatii pictures that come up on a Google image search were various shades of white and pink. Nothing was anywhere close to this crazy yellow and orange thing. So I'm deeply skeptical about the ID, and if anybody has any suggestions for what it might actually be, I'd be happy to hear them.

Pretty flower either way, though. Obviously.

(UPDATE: It probably is a hybrid Phragmipedium, says whygreenberg in the comments.)

Question for the Hive Mind: pretty yellow flowers

I seem to be asking a lot more ID questions this spring than in previous years, but I guess that's sort of to be expected. Previously, I was in a place where everything was labeled, usually, so I didn't have to ask. If these walks with Sheba continue long enough, I will eventually know the identity of every single plant within a 1-mile radius of my home.

Here is today's subject:


This looks like it was deliberately planted next to a building (actually there are buildings on all but the north side, and the north side has lots of trees across the street, so it'd get almost no direct sun). I think it's deliberate because there were also tulips there, and then because it obviously has certain ornamental qualities.


Also, since I originally set this to post, I've run into another group of them, which were definitely deliberately planted, and also more or less in shade (possibly some western exposure for the second ones). Which makes me more certain that it's a deliberate planting.

That's about all I can tell you about the plant, but I took more pictures and some of them were nice, so here you go.

Selling and Trading

This post is to announce that I have plants available now to sell or trade (within the Lower 48 U.S. States only, unfortunately). I meant to announce this about a month ago, but I keep wanting to add explanations, caveats, disclaimers, and so forth, which leads to unreadably long posts.

I finally decided that I was just not entirely comfortable with turning the blog commercial, so if you want to know what I have, what they look like, and how much, send me an e-mail. (PLEASE NOTE: in an effort to foil spambots, the e-mail address at the top of the sidebar is wrong: read the instructions in the sidebar to get the actual address.)

I have 21 species of plant available now, with another 15 I might be willing to sell as unrooted cuttings or offsets, and 16 more that are not ready now but might be at some point before fall. None are patented varieties, as far as I have been able to determine. Almost all are 3" pots, and the most common price is $5. Supplies of some plants are very limited. Details of how to get the money to me will maybe have to be worked out on a person-by-person basis, unless / until I decide I have to sign up for a PayPal account or something. For the moment, this is just a trial to see what kind of interest is out there.

Trading also works, if we can agree on a fair exchange. Let me know what you have, and I'll tell you if any of it is interesting to me.

Random plant event: Rheum sp. flowers

We had a small patch of rhubarb in the back yard when I was growing up; I don't remember anybody ever doing anything with it -- Mom didn't make strawberry-rhubarb pies or anything -- but it was there, and I was sort of fond of it. (Maybe that's where my appreciation for big-leaved plants comes from.)

I don't remember it ever flowering, though. Not once. So this was a surprise:


Pretty sure I would have remembered that.

I assume that probably one is supposed to cut off the flowers, to direct energy to the leaves and stems. I mean, that's usually the way, and I think I've seen one person's plants in town with the flowers cut off and lying next to the plant. I don't think Dad or (especially) Mom would have bothered with this -- like I said, we never actually did anything with the rhubarb; it was essentially an ornamental for our purposes. So bothering to cut off flowers would have been weird. Would being in the shade (between an apple tree and what was either a maple or a walnut) have prevented flowering? Do some varieties just not flower? I'm correct that this is rhubarb, right?

Whatever the explanation, the flower stalks on these plants are huge. They also don't look very much like flowers, unless you get in really, really close. But they are:


Dainty, almost.

Pretty picture: Dahlia 'Dahlietta Jenny'

Saw this at the ex-job sometime in the last week (it's all kind of blurring together lately). I understand abstractly why people like Dahlias, but they don't do a lot for me personally.


I googled in the hopes of finding something interesting to share about this particular variety, and didn't really find anything, though I did run into a couple sites (1) (2) that seemed to be suggesting that people can and do grow Dahlias indoors. I kind of think that this may not be true. The ones we had in the greenhouse last year at work (not 'Dahlietta Jenny:' a couple other varieties, I don't remember what they were) got spider mites so bad that I can't imagine that going well for any kind of extended period. Maybe they mean "grow indoors" in the sense that people "grow" mums indoors, or primulas: i.e., they keep them until all the flowers fall off and then throw them in the trash. I don't know.

In any case, it's a nice flower. I'm a fan of orange.

Unfinished business: Anthurium seedlings

Thought maybe it was time for an update on the Anthurium seedlings again. For those who don't know the story, I bought an Anthurium andraeanum 'Pandola' a while back. It had apparently been pollinated, because it formed berries. I planted the berries and got sprouts, which grew into seedlings, and then half the seedlings died in last Feburary's Great Fernlet Dieoff because of the accidental introduction of some kind of mysterious and evil buglike creature.

The surviving plants were eventually transplanted into regular soil, and have been living with some Begonias in a plastic dome for the last couple months. So far, they appear to be doing okay, though I don't know for sure if this is how they're supposed to look at this point -- they seem pretty tall and leggy, for Anthuriums. More light, perhaps?

For scale: the pot is about 2 inches (5 cm) on a side.
Still, though, they're beginning to be recognizable as Anthuriums, and they've got some pretty serious aerial roots going on now (the white fuzzy things growing more or less horizontally, in the picture). Which seems more or less right, as I think they're semi-epiphytic. The seedling on the far left doesn't look quite right, but the others seem more or less happy, and I think one or two have even offset already.

Bonus Afternoon Tulip, Just 'Cause I Like You

Test-drove the new camera this morning on the walk with Sheba. The verdict so far seems to be that yes, it does take better pictures, but the display shows them all as being much crappier than the old one did. So I'm more likely to get a good picture, but way less likely to know in advance whether any of the shots are any good.