Anthurium no. 0597 "Raven"

For the most part, growing my own Anthuriums from seed has been an exercise in spending a lot of time and money to get things I basically already had. I mean, there are subtle differences, none of the seedlings is exactly like one of the original named varieties, and every once in a while I get something different enough to be interesting, but it feels like I reinvent the wheel quite a bit. 0597 "Raven," for example, is awfully similar to my NOID pink.¹

Anthurium 0597 "Raven."

The NOID pink.
That's also a really bad match between name and color -- obviously a "Raven" Anthurium would need to be black. At worst, it should be some very very dark color, like maroon, plum, or brown. Something at least a little gothy. Even red would be more name-appropriate. *shrug* But what're you gonna do.

Reinventing the wheel is, I suspect, something plant breeders wind up doing a lot. Might be a bigger problem with some types of plants than with others -- plants that don't vary tremendously in the first place, like Spathiphyllum, and plants that self-pollinate, like Coffea arabica, both produce extremely similar offspring; I have no idea how breeders manage to choose one plant over another in those cases. On the opposite end, all my Schlumbergeras so far have been, I think, from the same cross, and although they were all pretty similar to one another, only a couple were at all like either of the suspected parents.² So far, for me, Anthuriums have been in between these two extremes. A quick look at photos of the 97 seedlings to have produced completed blooms to date shows me that about 5 out of every 6 Anthurium seedlings strongly resembles one of the parent varieties, usually 'Gemini' or the NOID pink.^{3, 4}

One reason to get into plant-breeding in the first place is because it's a good way to get lots and lots of some particular kind of plant you like. If you have more money than time, you just buy lots of that kind of plant; if you have more time than money, you can breed. So I'm probably less disappointed than you might imagine, when I get a plant like this. I mean, at least Raven has nice leaves; the thrips are leaving them alone so far.

And it's produced two blooms in a short period of time, which is also promising, though the first bloom didn't look much like the second.

The first bloom, in late June.

So is Raven a keeper? At least provisionally: as long as she can keep the thrips and scale at bay, and as long as she produces blooms more like the second one than like the first one, sure, she can hang around.

-

¹ Not that the photos are a particularly good illustration of that, alas. I discovered while I was writing this post that I have very few usable photos of the NOID pink, and no good ones. This is going to be a tough omission to correct, too, since the NOID pink has been really reluctant to bloom for the last couple years.
² 055B "Fort Venus" was pretty close to 'Caribbean Dancer," and 061A "Leather Fairy" was similar to the NOID peach, though in both cases, there was enough space between parent and child that I think I could tell them apart if I needed to.
³ 'Gemini' was the seed parent for like 40% of the seedlings, and its close relative 'White Gemini' is the seed parent for another 40% or so, so it totally makes sense for a lot of the seedlings to look like 'Gemini.' I'm actually kind of surprised that they don't all look like 'Gemini,' to tell you the truth.
The similarity to the NOID pink is harder to explain. I don't think it's actually made that big of a contribution to the gene pool -- it doesn't bloom often -- but it is one of the few parent plants that reliably sheds pollen, so that could be some of it. It's also possible that the NOID pink is just close to the "average" of the plants I've got, that when you cross my parent varieties randomly, pink/pink is just what happens most often, the same way that when you mix lots of different colors of paint together, you're often going to hit some shade of brown or gray.
⁴ And considering that only eight seeds out of a hundred will go on to bloom within three years, and only one in six seedlings will look substantially unlike all the varieties I already have, this means that I have to start 75 seeds to get one interesting bloom within three years. And even then, there's interesting in a good way, and interesting in a bad way.

Anthurium no. 0058 "Betty Larsony"

Betty, Betty, Betty. She was the very first seedling to produce a flower bud, and is still the youngest seedling (14 months) ever to produce a flower bud. And then it took her two and a half years, maybe (?), to produce a flower bud that actually developed and opened. So that's, uh, pretty weird.

Some of the problem is that I had to cut the top off the plant; I don't remember when that was, or why, but that's a pretty substantial setback, and it's not like Anthuriums grow that quickly in the first place. But even then: the first bud never opened, and at least one bud last year (around January 2014) aborted before opening as well. Somewhere in between those two dropped buds, I cut the top off the plant and it grew back from the stump.¹

Two posts from 2014 claim to have photos of a flower from Betty; I decided later that this one was a case of mistaken identity,² and I'm unsure whether the second shows her or not (with 0035 "Alyssa Edwards"), but it strikes me as at least somewhat more likely.

So it's possible that it only took a year to re-bud. Even if that's the case, though, I only got one bloom, and then she was done trying for another year and a half. Two whole blooms in two and a half years is pretty weak. By way of comparison, consider: 0112 "Dottie A. Rebel" produced her first bud in late March 2015, i.e., not quite five months ago, and has already produced at least three blooms (maybe four), plus two unopened buds besides.

I could maybe forgive slow blooming if Betty had anything else going for her, but she's pretty disappointing. (Persistent, granted. But disappointing.) The blooms are average size, in the second most common color.³ They're in the middle of the pack as far as thrips damage, too -- not the worst I've seen, but thrips have definitely visited.

Both the best thing and the worst thing I can think of to say about the foliage is that it is completely adequate: thrips don't bother it much, but it's not an interesting color, size, or texture.

I mean, considering the beheading and all, I think Betty's doing fine, but she's not a keeper. The best thing she had going for her was the early blooming, and it turns out that she can't even do that well enough to be worth keeping.

-

¹ Anthuriums will usually resprout when cut back, though they fail to do so just often enough that I hesitate to do it unless I really have no other options.
² I hadn't really developed my system for identifying which plants were in which pictures yet, and I think I either relied on my memory and got it mixed up that way, or I got momentarily confused between 0058 and 0059, wrote down the wrong one, and then perpetuated the error with the blog post.
³ I don't mind red/yellow. Anything's better than pink/pink. But I've seen a lot of red/yellows already:

Top row, L-R: 0026 "Peaches Christ," 0034 "Alaska Thunderfuck," 0059 "Bijoux Tuit," 0063 "Audrey Quest"
Second row: 0076 "Bob Humbug," 0088 "Charlotte F. Babylon," 0125 "Anya Wei," 0179 "Katie Boundary"
Third row: 0223 "Patty Cake," 0238 "Rudy Day," 0243 "Sal Monella," 0245 "Sawyer Ad,"
Bottom row: 0257 "Summer Bederth-Enuthers," 0264 "Trey Lerpark," 0280 "Jujubee," 0282 "Dave Trading"
And that's not even all of them.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane' (?)

Ugh. This mess again. So when we saw this plant previously, in 2012, I was assured in the comments that the correct spelling was "Sargent," which was taken from the name of the pollen parent (Phragmipedium lindleyanum var. sargentianum). But Google disagrees, as does the orchid registry, and while I could ordinarily overlook one or the other of those sources, I find it hard to argue with both of them at once. So we're going with a different spelling this year. Surely one or the other must be correct.

This is also the plant that led to the "Please do not post pictures of my plants unless you ask my permission" weirdness in 2014. At one point, I thought that I'd figured out (from IP addresses and publicly available membership info for the Illowa Orchid Society) who, specifically, had left the message, but after coming up with a guess, I kind of let the matter drop, because I didn't see anything to be gained by trying to track the person down and explain to them that public things are public.

But then other things happened, and I thought, well, maybe it's not who I thought it was, since that person punctuated their comment in a similar way as the "please do not post" person. Also, the plant in this photo was on a table that belonged to someone other than the person who I'd decided had left the "please do not post" note. So maybe "please do not post" and "I own this plant" are the same person.

On the other hand, plants get sold or traded, and I don't have the impression that Phragmipedium S~rg~nt Eric 'Timberlane' is a particularly rare plant; more than one show exhibitor could own one. And ellipsis-only is a maddeningly common Midwestern punctuation style, for reasons I have investigated, but don't expect to ever comprehend fully.¹ So "please do not post" could have been anybody connected with the show at all.

Worst of all, the plant this year was a completely different color than the one from 2012, so it seems to me like one or the other had to have been misidentified. Image search makes me think that the red-orange one from the 2012 picture is the "real" one, but it's also possible that the cross is variable, or that image search is showing me pictures of other S~rg~nt Eric clones, or something like that. One never really knows, with orchids. So: I don't know how to spell it, I don't know who owns it, I have negative personal associations, and I'm not sure it's even the same plant as the 2012 picture.

So you know what? Next time I see this plant at a show, I'm going to keep walking. Or. Um. Either I keep walking, or I'm going to flip the fuck out and start gnawing on the stem, grunting and frothy-mouthed, until someone throws me out of the building. This particular orchid is just too confusing and upsetting. You win, "please do not post" person. Never again will my camera steal this orchid's soul away from you. Phragmipedium S~rg~nt Eric 'Timberlane' is dead to me.

Phragmipedium Sergeant Eric 'Timberlane' = Phragmipedium Eric Young x Phragmipedium sargentianum (Ref.)

-

¹ The consensus at MetaFilter seems to be that it's only supposed to indicate a pause, and that people only do it in informal writing so what's the big deal. Along with some suggestion that ellipses apparently strike some people as "friendlier" than periods and commas. Which is . . . fine? I guess? But we already have punctuation marks -- several punctuation marks -- that indicate pauses, so I'm not sure why we need to borrow a different punctuation to do this, especially not one that has specific and rare uses in indicating that someone's letting a sentence trail off, instead of bringing it to a decisive stop ("'Oh," said Tiffani, and sighed, 'but I'll surely see Brandon again, someday. . . .'"), or in indicating that words have been left out of a quote ("'Cause if you liked it, then . . . put a ring on it"). My main problem with the nothing-but-ellipses style is that my brain still tries to read all the ellipses as either trailing-off or omitted-words ellipses, so e-mails written this way always sound in my head like William Shatner talking into a cell phone with poor reception. (Try reading it that way yourself: "So...about my plant...lol...I don't know what kind of plant it is...it seems to be rotting...what should I do...do you think it can be saved...") Which is not friendly or informal at all. (Also see languagehat's comment in that thread.)
I suppose this footnote sort of comes off like a joke, so just to be crystal-clear: when I get e-mail like this, I absolutely do take it as hostile, like you're trying to make yourself difficult to understand on purpose to annoy me. Whatever you think you're sounding like, you're coming across as William Shatner, on a cell phone, in 1993, driving into a tunnel.

Anthurium no. 0360 "Heidi Gosique"

Heidi has all but secured herself a promotion to a 6-inch pot, whenever a space becomes available. It's not so much that the flowers are decent, though they are --

-- as that the overall plant is nice and compact. As new seedlings produce finished blooms (97 at last count!¹), the one feature I'm appreciating more than any other is a short internodal length. It looks nicer, sure, but the practical reason is that compact plants are easier to cram together on the shelves without everybody getting tangled up in one another. And Heidi is compact as a motherfucker.²

I'm pretty sure she's a cross between 'Gemini' and the NOID red; the 'Gemini' part I know, because it was the seed parent, and the only option for pollen parent that could produce heavy dark green leaves like this is the NOID red. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but I'm pretty sure that's a NOID red midvein, too -- it's narrower than usual, or its color doesn't contrast much against the rest of the leaf, or something like that. Whatever quality it is.

I don't have any set criteria, exactly, for which seedlings qualify to get moved up to a 6-inch pot and which don't.³ A while ago, I tried making a spreadsheet and giving them multiple ratings on a whole bunch of different factors, which is the way many of the current 6-inch plants came to be in 6-inch pots, but for the more recent batch, there's not a lot of point to trying to rank them against one another, because I don't have any space anyway.⁴ Eventually, I would like to promote at least these five:

• 0360 "Heidi Gosique" (acceptable bloom color, good foliage, resistant to thrips, compact, slow bloom)
• 0206 "Marcia Dimes" (good bloom color, acceptable foliage, resistant to thrips, compact, fast blooming)
• 0357 "Rhea Litre" (acceptable bloom color, good foliage, resistant to thrips, compact, fast blooming), and
• two others, which will be named on September 11 and 17 (if I'm able to keep to the posting schedule I've set for myself).

-

¹ I keep meaning to put together a mosaic image with all the blooms to date in it, just for the hell of it, but I can't keep up. Maybe for the 100th bloom or something.
² (motherfuckers being recognizable primarily by their compactness)
³ Though as with people, success comes a lot easier if you have the right parents: seedlings of 'Orange Hot,' the NOID purple, 'Krypton,' and 'Peppermint Gemini' have a slight edge on getting themselves up-potted, because there aren't many seedlings of any of them to begin with, and I'd like to keep their genes in circulation. Seedlings of the NOID red are also more likely to stick around, not because they're rare but because they have a lot of traits I like.
⁴ I've probably said this before, but in case I haven't: in the same amount of shelf space, I can fit 32 3-inch seedlings, 9 4-inch seedlings, or 3 6-inch seedlings. So moving a plant up a size is pretty serious, because there's then so much less space available for smaller plants. Hence my plan to do a purge of the 4-inch seedlings at some point. As of 5 August, I have 462 3-inch seedlings, 247 4-inch seedlings, and 38 6-inch seedlings.

Anthurium no. 0281 "Laganja Estranja"

Laganja tried to bloom a long time ago, but aborted (likely the result of the "white oil" spraying, an attempt to bring the thrips to heel that turned out to be futile), and then took a long time getting around to trying again. She was arguably not worth the wait:

I mean, nothing especially wrong with that, but I have so many LPAs¹ already, and no idea what to do with them all. Some LPAs have better foliage than Laganja, and most are more compact and less tangle-prone, so she's not bringing a whole lot to the table.

She does have one thing in her favor, which is that like her siblings in sibling group AT,² she seems to bloom quickly and prolifically. I don't think that will be enough to save her, but it might delay the decision briefly.

-

¹ (= Little Pink Anthuriums)
² Group AT: 'White Gemini' seed parent; 19 May 2012 sow date. AT group seedlings you may remember, or will meet soon:
0271 "Wanda Reulthemal" (pink / pink)
0273 "Wes Coast" (pink / pink, deceased)
0275 "Yvette Horizon" (pink / pink)
0276 "Zach Religious" (pink / pink-orange)
0277 "Zach Treplica" (pink, in progress)
0279 "Tristan Shout" (pink / pink)
0280 "Jujubee" (pk-red / yel)
0282 "Dave Trading" (red / yel)
0283 "Anne Pursand" (pink / pink, deceased)
0288 "Cookie Buffet" (pink / pink)

Pretty picture: Masdevallia murex

Some of the photos of this species that I found elsewhere on-line are a lot more appealing to look at than this one; it's possible that the flower has not fully opened or something.

Even more disappointing than the photo of this particular Masdevallia is the fact that this was the only Masdevallia I saw at the 2015 show. (Or at least it's the only one I got a photo of: I assume that means it was the only one I saw.)

I don't quite get the species name, either. It doesn't look like a sea snail, at least no more so than any of the other Masdevallias I've seen. Basically this one's just confusing and/or disappointing all the way through.

Anthurium no. 0351 "Pat McCooter"

When I started assigning drag queen names to the different seedlings, I didn't know how many names I was going to need, or how many drag queens were even out there in the first place. So I told myself that I was going to accept as many possible names as I could, without passing judgment on the possible offensiveness of the name (e.g. "Pat McCooter," hence this preamble), the performer as a person (e.g. Phi Phi O'Hara, who was memorably awful in RuPaul's Drag Race's 4th season), their act (e.g. Sharon Needles, who has occasionally tried so hard to shock or provoke that she's crossed the line into being blatantly racist, which, ugh), or whatever. And mostly I've done that.¹ I've also tried not to investigate any of the real-life queens whose names I'm using, for fear of losing a name option, so you must never, ever, ever assume that getting a seedling named for some real-life queen automatically means that I know or approve of them or their act. As with most large groups of people, some of them are sure to be awful, and a few of them will be saintly, many of them will just be Not Your Kind Of Thing, and most of them will be all three to some degree or another.

This is all my way of noting that yeah, "Pat McCooter" is likely to be offensive or objectionable to some people who read this blog,² and while I'm not necessarily happy if someone is given offense, I made a decision some time ago not to care too much about name offensiveness because I didn't think I could afford to get too picky.

As time's gone on, I've wound up with four separate lists of names. One, the "acceptable" ones which are currently being used, or in the queue to use for future seedlings, is very long (currently: 756 used, 636 queued). Two, a short list of names which would be acceptable except that part of the name names or implies a color, which only works if the plant agrees to bloom in that color, and since I don't know when I assign names what colors seedlings are going to bloom in, color-based names wind up being unusable.^{3, 4} Three, a short list of names which are so distasteful that even though I had previously decided that it was okay to use offensive names, I hesitate to use them anyway.⁵ Four, a long list of names awaiting judgment, most of which will wind up being discarded.⁶

This is all potentially overkill. At the moment, I only have enough room for about 800 seedlings, max, so in theory if I had a list of 800 acceptable names, I could just recycle those over and over. The trouble is that every time I think I've hit maximum capacity, I find ways to squeeze even more plants into the same space. There are no guarantees that I'm going to stay at 800, and odds are good that I'll find ways to keep expanding.

So that is my explanation for why this one is named "Pat McCooter." There is at least one real person who performs under that name, as well.⁷

Which I guess brings us, finally, to the seedling itself.

Pat is one of the seedlings in the mid-300s who have produced pink blooms. Seedling group AW⁸ is about 50-50 red and pink spathes so far, though Pat is the only AW sibling with a slightly orange spadix. Pat reminds me of no. 0276 "Zach Religious" more than any of the other AWs, but then Zach was also a 'White Gemini' seedling. They could easily be full siblings, just sown five months apart.

Pat's bloom photographed well, but the leaves are a little rough,

and the plant as a whole seems to have been struggling with some problem or another. Thrips, probably.

Is Pat a keeper? If forced to guess right now, I'd say probably not, but I'm reserving judgment. Once I've seen how this bloom ages, and seen how long Pat takes to produce a second bloom, I'll be better equipped to make a decision.

-

¹ There is one drag performer whose act is so obnoxious to me that I made a deliberate early decision not to name a seedling after her. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to identify them by name here in the footnote, but you're free to guess. I'll confirm if someone guesses correctly.
² If it isn't, rest assured that there's probably one somewhere in the list that is. Unless you're just really hard to offend.
³ Examples: "Billy Black," "Violet Chachki," "Mr. Green Teal."
⁴ I'm toying with the idea of assigning color-based names retroactively for seedlings where I don't like the current name, or where the current name was assigned before I started worrying about color-based names. Like if 0084 "Chocolate Sunrise" blooms in some color other than brown, as it almost surely will, I might assign it a new, more color-appropriate name. I haven't done it so far partly for fear of what this would do to the Anthurium-seedling paperwork, all the spreadsheets and stuff that would need to be changed. The paperwork fear has also kept me from swapping out a few names that strike me as less clever now than they did when they first went on the list. Probably I'll do at least a few name changes, sooner or later. Spreadsheets be damned.
⁵ A surprisingly large number of these are drag king names, for reasons which would probably become clear if I stopped and thought about it for a while. Examples: "Dixon Cider," "Sarahbelle Palsy," "Tatiana Rexia," "Hunter Downe," "Pussy Tourette."
⁶ Some of them are names that I came up with but think may not be clever enough, or drag-queenish enough, to use: "Blanche D'Almonz," "Angel-Bert Humperdink," "Ayleen Versus-Predator," etc.
Some are names that I haven't been able to decide whether they belong in the offensive-names list or not: "Glennda Orgasm," "Amanda Sue Punchfuk." (Though looking at it now, I'm inclined to say Glennda, at least, is okay.)
Some are names used by actual performers that I think may not be clever or memorable enough (a lot of these are also drag king names): "Jackson," "Mick Swagger," "Billy King."
Some are names I'm working on creating but only have half of, i.e., names in progress: "_________ Von Trapp," "Sprinkles _________."
⁷ I have been assuming, maybe incorrectly, that drag queen names tended to be punny in the past because it was dangerous enough to cross-dress without using your actual name, too. As long as you're a performer, and you're going to have to change your name anyway, why not change it to something that gets you a laugh in your introduction? As drag has gotten more popular and accepted, it seems that the names based in wordplay have been dying out in favor of names which advertise a personal relationship (like, it's not unusual for a performer to take the surname of a mentor; Roxxxy Andrews' name honors her drag mother Erica Andrews, for example), or which project a certain over-the-top glamour ("Trinity Kardashian Bonet"). Plus, it's now useful to have a unique name to perform under, for social media, Google searches, personal (ugh) branding, and so forth. But at one time, there were some drag names that, as far as I can tell, didn't belong to anyone in particular. "Anita Mann," "Ida Slapter," that sort of thing. "Pat McCooter" may or may not be one of those. There's definitely a performer in and around Memphis, Tennessee who performs under that name, but it's a common enough joke name that several of the sites that come up in a search don't appear to be related to that particular performer. Clearly, more research is needed.
⁸ (Seed parent: 'White Gemini;' sow date: 16 October 2012)

Anthurium no. 0255 "Steph N. Wolfe"

Anthurium 0255 "Steph N. Wolfe" isn't particularly unremarkable. With very long petioles holding the leaves far from the core of the plant, and no suckers to fill in any foliage around the base, she winds up seeming very large and spare-looking, though this is at least partly optical illusion: I didn't have any trouble finding plants that were considerably larger.¹

This is sort of the sole point of interest about Steph. Leaves and inflorescences alike are fairly resistant to thrips damage, which is encouraging, and the blooms are, I suppose, about as good as a pink / pink could get.

Don't really have strong feelings about Steph either way, which means she probably gets to hang around for a while. There will be a purge coming, pretty soon, in which some of the stunted, thrips-damaged, non-blooming, or otherwise inadequate older plants will be disposed of somehow, but Steph won't be one of the purged ones.

By the way: I'm not sure whether the planned purge means I throw them in the trash, or take them to the consignment store, or what.² There are too many plants needing larger pots to continue wasting space on plants that won't step up and be awesome, and I think giving a plant three or four years to prove itself is not unreasonable. We'll see how things go.

-

¹ Notably 0314 "Camille Yen" and 0072 "Beth Rowe," both of whom are just monsters despite still being stuck in 4-inch pots. And they're still in 4-inch pots because they haven't tried to bloom yet. I'm considering moving Camille anyway, just to see what would happen if she had more room for her roots, because the foliage is lovely, and the last time I moved a plant up before it had bloomed, just because the foliage was nice, that wound up being 0334 "Jean Poole," who is now in my favorite five or so seedlings and has three blooms going simultaneously right now.
Though my expectation is that even if Camille did bloom, she would probably be pink / pink, like her seed parent (the NOID pink). Possibly a bad idea to expect lightning to strike twice.
² Consignment store would be a more appealing option if I knew for sure that there weren't any thrips on the plants. I suppose I could try wiping off all the leaves by hand or something, immediately before bringing them in. I'd have a better shot at eliminating all the thrips from a particular seedling that way than I ever could by keeping the plant here.