Pretty picture: Psychopsis Kalihi alba 'Green Valley'

Not that I hate Psychopsis or anything, but I often feel like I should appreciate them more than I do. I like unusual, and they're unusual. I like striking patterning; they've got striking patterning. They often strike me as not quite finished, though. Is it just me?

Haven't seen this particular flower before, but we saw the non-alba form of Psychopsis Kalihi last year, as well as Psychopsis Mariposa 'Twins', which is Kalihi x Psychopsis papilio. 2012 had another mostly-yellow Psychopsis, Mendenhall alba 'Yellow Butterfly.'

Psychopsis Kalihi = Psychopsis krameriana x Psychopsis papilio (Ref.)

Schlumbergera seedling no. 063

(Potting up the Anthurium seedlings, which I mentioned in the previous post, wound up taking me just under ten hours to do. If you were curious.¹)

The only unusual feature of Schlumbergera seedling 063A is that its petals are a lot more rounded than average. Not super-exciting, but it might be enough to make naming easier. Let's see.

The five-category naming scheme seems to be working well enough for us so far, so let's try that again.

Shape-related: Broad Brush, because of the sort of squared-off ends of the petals. It's a bit of a stretch, I suppose, but my blog, my rules.

Color-related: Robin after the American robin (Turdus migratorius).

Previously considered: Ad Abundantiam, previously (and recently!) considered for seedling 072A Chell.

Pop cultural: Tigger, after the character from the Winnie the Pooh books.²

Whatever: though I am tempted to go with a reference to a famous person I saw on another site semi-recently (Short-Fingered Vulgar Business Yam), I'm hoping that that reference will become so horribly dated by 2018 that no one will even remember who it refers to. So how about the similar but much more pleasant Sweet Potato Pie instead?

For some reason I am afraid that Tigger would get me a cease and desist order from Disney (Disney has owned the rights to Winnie the Pooh since 1961 and are notorious for being aggressively litigious), but even if that's irrational and paranoid of me, Tigger is the Winnie the Pooh character I always related to the least. Much more of an Eeyore here. Which you probably knew already.³ So ennh.

Robin can go too; I like robins fine (and still wonder from time to time how Marcia, Jan, and Cindy are doing, or whether they're even still alive⁴), but an actual robin this color would be alarming; they're a duller, slightly redder orange.

Similarly, Sweet Potato Pie would be more appropriate for a bloom that was a lighter, yellower orange than this, at least going by online photos.⁵

So that leaves Broad Brush and Ad Abundantiam. The former actually does something to describe the seedling in question, whereas the latter could be used for any orange seedling. And we know there's very little chance of making it to June without naming one of them Ad Abundantiam, so I guess we're going with Broad Brush. Not really where I thought this post was going to wind up, but there you go.

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¹ An hour to fill 126 pots with soil and wet the soil down, an hour and a half to do the actual transplanting, an hour to type, print, and cut the text out of the paper for the tags, about two and a half hours to actually make the tags with my poor-man's-laminator, four hours to update the spreadsheets and other records.
² and films, and TV shows, and lunch boxes, and stuffed animals, and pencil-toppers, and Halloween costumes, and video games, and figurines, and dresses, and ceramic wall plaques, and candy, and blankets, and vinyl wall decals, and pacifiers, and Beanie Babies, and bibs, and iPhone chargers, and tote bags, and laundry hampers, and shoes, and cupcake toppers, and stamps, and Q-Tip dispensers, and necklaces, and comb/brush sets, and
³ (thanks for noticing)
⁴ Wikipedia says probably not; average lifespan of a robin is 2 years, and the Brady sisters were hatched 5 years ago. I mean, it's not hopeless -- they're known to occasionally live to be 14, even in the wild -- but odds are pretty good that all three are gone now. *sigh*
⁵ It is distinctly possible that I have never encountered a live sweet potato pie in the wild. We were more of a cake / cookies family than a pie family.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 057 (again)

Well. We all knew this day would come. Eventually, the Anthuriums were going to get distracted for a moment, and then the Schlumbergeras would be back. So brace yourselves, 'cause it's mostly Schlumbergera seedlings from now until mid-May.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to come up with a suitable name for this particular seedling:

TinEye has become too repetitive to be useful, but I like the randomness of it. Random-word generators do exist on-line, but I've found them mostly disappointing for name-generation, because so many of the words they come up with are so uncommon or technical that they sort of defeat the purpose of having a memorable, clear moniker for a seedling. I mean, what can you really do with something like Perish Verbarrectus? Nothing, that's what. What I need is a list of random words that's been filtered for me a little bit, to remove jargony words ("enstatolite," "theriolatry," "cholecystonephrostomy"), words with clear meanings but clunky ways of expressing them ("uncomprehendingness," "coadministratrix"), words that are perfectly fine but not great things to name seedlings ("penis," "Nazi," "rotten"), etc.

So I made one. Or, well, I'm in the process of making one. Copied a list of about 240,000 words from the internet, and started sifting through it about three weeks ago, giving thumbs-up or -down on each word individually, which will eventually give me a filtered list useful for naming things. I hope. As of 10 April, I'm only barely more than halfway through it (114,800ish words left to decide on), because that's a hell of a lot of words. I can only do about 2500 or so at a time before my brain blows a tire and I have to do something else for a few hours.

The ultimate goal is to re-sort the list at random and let the novel combinations of words suggest name ideas. Not all of the combinations are useful that way ("thinker harp"), but if I'm in the right mood, the combinations can give interesting mental images, at least, which aren't that far off from the sorts of things I'd get from TinEye. We'll see how it goes once it's all fully operational.

And yes, I am aware of how crazy this sounds. Make comments about how much time I clearly must have on my hands if you must.

Besides the words list, I have previously-rejected names, names I thought of with my own brain like a normal person would name things, and the emergency names list to work with. So. Let's do what we did last time, and limit the options to one name from five different categories.

Shape-related: Voladora (Spanish for flying.¹)

Color-related: Exothermic, the word for chemical reactions that release heat, previously considered for 056 Demons Begone and 089 Halloween Moon.

Previously-considered: Oxomoco, the Aztec deity in charge of night, astrology, the calendar, and agriculture; previously considered for 112 "Lavaball."

Whatever: Aqua Regia, the fuming mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids strong enough to dissolve gold and platinum, which is usually some shade of orange or another.

Pop cultural: That's My Purse. I'd link a video if I could find a decent one, but alas. It comes from King of the Hill, episode 1 of season 6 -- Bobby gets beaten up by some bullies, is encouraged by his father Hank to attend a boxing course at the local YMCA, but the boxing class is full so he attends a women's self-defense course instead, where students are instructed to kick attackers in the groin while yelling "That's My Purse! I don't know you!" Which turns out to be pretty effective against bullies. Pamela Adlon, who voiced Bobby Hill, wound up winning a Primetime Emmy (Outstanding Voice-Over Performance) for this episode.

So. As amusing as That's My Purse is, it's maybe too dependent on knowing the episode it comes from. Not sure it's forever unusable, but I'm thinking I should at least not use it for this particular seedling. And Exothermic always seems good when I'm making the short lists of names, but then it's always one of the least interesting options, so maybe I should stop trying to make Exothermic happen.

The color is maybe a little too red for Aqua Regia -- I don't think I've ever encountered it in person, but most of the on-line photos available show it as more of a yellow-orange than red-orange.

So it's down to Voladora or Oxomoco, and I wish I had more photos to look at. This seedling has only bloomed once, though, so the two pictures in this post are all I have to go on. Based on those, it feels less like "flying" and more like "Aztec agricultural deity," so I think I'm going to go with Oxomoco.

This whole post feels a little rushed, for which I apologize, but as I write this, it's 12:27 PM on Sunday and I still intend to pot up another 126 Anthurium seedlings today (fill pots, transplant seedlings, make tags, update spreadsheets, etc.). That will take at least six hours to do, probably more like nine, so I've probably already dedicated more time to this naming decision than I had to spare.

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¹ Also hanging in the air, blowing up with gunpowder, a rocket, or a flying fish, according to the link. They all kind of work.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Winwine x fairrieanum

Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill (seed parent for Paph. Winwine) must be a magical paph to breed with, because it seems like he's everywhere.

• Paph. Cheryl Ann Boyd
• Paph. (Adam Hausermann x Winston Churchill)
• Paph. Keyeshill

And that's just so far. There'll be a fifth Winston Churchill cross in the 25 December post. Not sure if there are others. Probably. Lots of Paphiopedilums this year.

Not really seeing the influence here, but then this plant is only 1/4 Winston Churchill, so I suppose I wouldn't necessarily. I'm more surprised that it doesn't especially resemble the pollen parent, Paph. fairrieanum, which is fairly light-colored, with purple and/or green veining. There were a lot of fairrieanum hybrids in the show this year, it seemed like (you'll see two more this year), and none of them particularly resembled it, nor have the fairrieanum hybrids from past shows:

• Paph. Jade Dragon (though note that the ID is uncertain)
• Paph. Faire-Maud
• Paph. Golden Crest

I mean, yeah, recessive, dominant, Punnett squares, I get it. It's just that usually there's enough of a resemblance to be able to say oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense, I guess, and with this particular plant there's not.

Wherever it comes from, it's lovely, and I approve of it.

Paphiopedilum Winwine: Paphiopedilum Winston Churchill x Paphiopedilum Joanne's Wine (Ref.)

Unfinished business: Araucaria bidwillii

On 17 September 2013, I got three seeds of Araucaria bidwillii from seedman.com.

I got germination on only one of them, the following January,¹

25 January 2014.
and it was large enough to move into a 4-inch (10 cm) pot by April (though the photo below was taken in May):

21 May 2014.
And then, apparently, I stopped documenting its progress. (This post, from May 2014, is the last time I mentioned it here.) But it's been doing fine:

4 April 2016.
Which is about the size it should be, as a 2 1/2 year old. I think I'm going to need to relocate it soon, because it's getting too tall for the kitchen window where it's been living, and the location is becoming unsuitable in other ways: I suspect the lower ring of branches is pointed downward because all the light is coming from the side of the plant. If the light were coming from above, like it's supposed to, they might be more horizontal. I suppose I'll find out whether my suspicions are correct when I move it.

A much older plant I bought in December 2006 (as a plant: I didn't start it from seed) has become way too large to photograph easily. The last time I did so was, coincidentally, September 2013:

I estimate that it was about a year old when I bought it, which would make it seven and a half when that photo was taken; it's nearly ten and a half now. I can't get pictures at the moment,² but I'm making a note to try when it warms up a bit, because it's impressive. (Even if it weren't impressive, I'm apparently overdue for a photo.)

A. bidwillii has been an exceptionally trouble-free plant for me. No bugs, no rot, very little branch drop: I am apparently simulating the exact environment it's looking for. The worst problem I have with it is that the leaves are as sharp and pointy as they look, so it's kind of a pain to bring upstairs to water, but I only have to do that every four weeks, so even that isn't that big of a problem. Heartily recommended, should you happen to encounter one somewhere.

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¹ Which is typical. Maybe even better than average. I don't have much problem with seeds I've produced, but I'm not great with seeds from elsewhere. Whether this is the fault of the source, or I'm not germinating them properly, or what, I'm not sure: I just know that when I buy seeds, I generally don't wind up getting plants out of it, so it's mostly a waste of time and money.
² No location large enough for a photo in the house, and it's too cold outside at the moment.

Anthurium no. 0300 "Monica Beverly Hillz"

Monica's not the best ambassador for Anthurium Nation either, though she does better than 0470 "Heather Haldane," from last Monday. Here's the bloom:

The real-life color is a bit darker red than this, so the thrips scars don't show up as obviously in person, and the foliage is mostly unbothered, so the plant looks pretty okay in person.

However. Monica is also sort of pulling herself out of her own pot, from being top-heavy, which is weird, because she has short internodes and so shouldn't be flopping over, but she's still flopping over. It's possible that some of the problem is that I've washed a lot of soil out of the pot in the course of watering; plants that stay in 4-inch pots often need additional soil sooner or later. Another possibility is root rot or some other kind of root injury, though I haven't seen any evidence to support that yet.

The other issue with Monica is that the peduncle on this bloom is short. How short? So short it can barely unfurl itself. There's only been the one bloom so far, so I don't know if this is normal first-bloom incompetence or some sort of adolescent nonconformist Jesus-Dad-nobody's-doing-long-peduncles-anymore-you're-so-embarrassing thing.¹ Since the foliage is good, I'll probably let her try again before making any big decisions, though I'm a little nervous about that: I've seen scale in that part of the basement, and just because Monica's been fine so far doesn't mean she's necessarily going to stay that way. We'll see.

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¹ Less anthropomorphically: it may be genetic, as appears to be the case for 0408 Tex Messich, 0335 Donna Fanuday, and a few others. I don't normally mind this, and in fact liked Donna and Tex well enough to promote them to 6-inch pots despite their peduncles, but Monica's a more extreme case.

Pretty picture: Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon

And now we have the first orchid of the 2016 show. I don't think this happened deliberately, but it seems somehow fitting that the year begin with Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon, who has also appeared in 2014 and 2015. (The 2015 pictures are the best set.)

I-Hsin Balloon is probably the Phalaenopsis I most covet, from all the ones I've seen at the show.¹ I'm also happy to see it show up for a third consecutive year -- it's weird, because normally I'm all about seeing new stuff, but there are a few plants I look forward to seeing at the shows, and I-Hsin Balloon is one of those.²

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Balloon = Phalaenopsis Sogo Lisa x Phalaenopsis I-Hsin Gem (Ref.)

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¹ (Though arguments could also be made in favor of Kaoda Twinkle 'Dusty's Midnight', Brother Goldstone, Brother Sara Gold, and the last NOID from this set.
I probably don't covet any of them enough to actually buy them, though. Partly this is because I don't really buy plants anymore, except for the occasional Anthurium or Schlumbergera, and partly it wouldn't make any sense to bring new orchids in, because I'm not a competent orchid grower.)
² The king of repeats is Guarianthe aurantiaca, which I've gotten photos of every year except for 2013. (I imagine it was probably there in 2013 too, and I just missed it.)

Anthurium no. 0470 "Heather Haldane"

Not just a little pink Anthurium, but a ratty and gross little pink Anthurium.

Although the plant overall isn't particularly buggy,

there is still some damage from thrips, and there's actually a scale insect visible in the representative-leaf photo below:

It's almost exactly in the center of the leaf, just to the left of (and touching) the midrib.
I'm going to give myself the benefit of the doubt there and assume that I didn't notice it when I took the picture.

I haven't thrown Heather out yet for two reasons. First, the scale appears to have been eliminated -- no signs of it recently -- and the thrips damage isn't very bad on the leaves. The scale photo notwithstanding, she's not a particularly buggy plant. Second, there was a second bud in progress, and I wanted to see if it would be an improvement on the first bloom or not before I made my decision.

It wasn't. I mean, maybe technically. But not enough of an improvement.

Heather's still here as I write this (2 April), but I'm not expecting to hold on to her much longer. She's not in good enough shape to sell, she's not interesting enough to breed with, she's not really serving any useful purpose.