Schlumbergera seedling no. 070

Seedling 070A is maybe a little more pink than the usual orange/pink, and looks to have suffered more thrips damage, but it's otherwise unremarkable.

I had four name finalists this time around, just like usual, but once I started to write about the first name, I realized that the other three were kind of irrelevant: I want seedling 070A to be Delia Webster.

So who was Delia Webster?

Delia Webster was a Kentucky art teacher and abolitionist who was part of the Underground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves escape to free states in the 1840s. She was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years hard labor in the Kentucky Penitentiary, the first woman to be imprisoned for assisting escaped slaves.

(Webster was also the only woman in the penitentiary; she was housed in a small wooden cottage in the center of the prison yard, which isn't really relevant to why she was a badass but I think it's interesting.) Anyway. So the penitentiary warden, Newton Craig, liked her. It's unclear to me whether there was a sexual relationship or not; one source says he was tempted into a compromising relationship with her, which presumably means they did, but is vague enough that I'm not positive. In any case, Craig urged the Governor of Kentucky to pardon her. Which he did (Webster only served five weeks of her sentence), though she did have to say she wasn't an abolitionist, as one of the conditions for her release.

(And then Webster had the nerve not to contact Craig right after her release, so he was pissed that she'd "tricked" him -- which, come on, dude, you were the warden and she was a prisoner, she wasn't exactly in a position to say no to you about anything.)

All the sources agree that she traveled around a bit after that; Wikipedia says she was governess for Craig's family for a while in the early 1850s, too, though I'm not clear how that worked. In any case, eventually she returned to Kentucky and bought a 600-acre farm there for $9000 with help from investors, Northern abolitionists, and Newton Craig of all people (to the tune of $1100, which in 2017 dollars is at least $27,000¹). She employed freed slaves, and then farms in the area started to have a problem with missing slaves again, so naturally (and correctly) everybody assumed that Webster was responsible.

So they cut down her trees, burned her buildings, threatened her life, and so on. As you do. She was re-arrested in 1854 and released on a technicality. Then they indicted her again in 1854, for charges related to her 1844 arrest, but she managed to escape before they could arrest her. She hid in Indiana for a while, but they eventually found her, took her to Kentucky to stand trial for the 1844 charges, released her again on a technicality, and then she came home to find about $9000 in damages and theft to her farm.² Abolitionists from Boston gave her enough money to enable her to keep making her loan payments, and she planned to build a school on the property, but arsonists started setting her buildings (and the materials for the school) on fire in November 1866, and she eventually lost the farm in 1869.

Webster never married. She returned to Indiana and taught African-American children in Madison, IN for a while,³ then lived with her sister Martha Goodrich in Wisconsin briefly, then they both moved to Iowa;⁴ after Martha died, Webster lived with her niece, Alice Goodrich,⁵ in Des Moines, where she died in 1904, at the age of 86.

So. Yeah. It just kinda has to be 070A Delia Webster.

Refs.:
www.Womenhistoryblog.com (recommended)
Wikipedia
Vermonthistory.org
Explorekyhistory.ky.gov

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¹ For reasons I didn't have time to look into, the inflation calculators on-line won't go any earlier than 1913.
² At least $220,000 in 2017 dollars.
³ (Significant because African-American children weren't permitted to attend public school at the time.)
⁴ First to Le Grand, Iowa, then to La Porte, Iowa.
⁵ Who is interesting in her own right: Goodrich was the first woman to graduate the University of Iowa's medical school.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 190

After the mess of naming 089B Haunted Houseboat, I'm apprehensive. Let's see how it goes.

It wasn't an especially good seedling: I think it only produced the one bloom, it's a boring color, and consequently I wasn't looking terribly hard for good names for it. The finalists were: Europa, Snezhana, White Album, and Whited Sepulcher.

Europa is a lot of different things, but I was thinking of it mainly as the moon of Jupiter or the figure from Greek mythology. It's a pretty neat moon, as moons of the solar system go;¹ the mythology is, as with most Greek mythology, pretty bizarre-sounding: Zeus takes the form of a white bull because he's hot for Europa (a Phoenician woman), she sees the bull and is like, whoa, what a hot bull, and climbs on top of him, at which point Zeus runs to the sea with her on his back and swims to Crete, reveals his true identity, gives Europa some magic shit, and makes her the queen of Crete.

Snezhana is a Slavic, Circassian, and Lithuanian feminine given name, which Wikipedia thinks probably derives from the words for "snow" and "woman." I find it a pleasant-sounding name, and it seems appropriate enough for a white flower, so why the hell not, right?

White Album could be taken, I guess, as the Beatles album from which we get "Dear Prudence," "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," and "Helter Skelter." If you want to, that is. For me, it's more a not-very-well-thought-out pun on the meaning of "Album" ("white," in Latin; the story of how it came to mean record album, when records were mostly black, is complicated). But think whatever you like.²

Whited Sepulcher is Biblical, from Matthew 23:27. In the New International Version: "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean." (Jesus was so judgey.)

So. Timely though Whited Sepulcher always is, and as amusing as I find White Album, it feels slightly tacky or something to use the bloom color as part of the name. Plus the former's pretty hostile. And it's not even necessarily certain that future blooms will be white, considering how the seedlings have collectively behaved this year.

Which leaves Europa or Snezhana, and I feel like Snezhana has to be white more than Europa does: snow's pure white, but Phoenician women were presumably not. I mean, the part everybody remembers about the story of Europa is the white bull, but the point is that I feel like Europa gives me more leeway if the color's different next year. So: 190A Europa.

Update, 23 June 2017: I changed my mind.

It turned out that actually I hated Europa as a name for this particular seedling, so I took the unprecedented step of changing a name after it had been officially decided. 190A is now 190A Snezhana instead.

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¹ Though my heart will always belong more to Jupiter's Io and Neptune's Triton. In fact, I kind of wish we could get a rover to drive around on Io and take some pictures, 'cause I bet they would be metal as hell. There are a lot of reasons why we're unlikely to do that -- the surface contains lots of reactive chemical compounds, and charged ions; it's both very cold (most of the time) and very hot (at the volcanoes), and there's intense radiation from Jupiter. Hard to build a robot that could do anything in those conditions. But I keep hoping.
² I looked at the Wikipedia track listing for the White Album and was like, ennh, probably not my favorite, I should look at some of the Beatles' other albums to see which one has the songs I like best, and then I can make a throwaway comment about being more of a Revolver man, or whatever. But after looking at the track listings, I think maybe I'm just not a Beatles man. Which is weird, 'cause . . . I kinda thought I was?

Schlumbergera seedling no. 089 (again)

Had a terrible time naming this one. It's a nice seedling, in a color I don't see very often (it most closely resembles 208A Raspberry Possum, but 054A Helpful Gesture, 078A Art Party, and the still-nameless 132A are also similar), and I really wanted to get a good name for it, but on the first attempt, I managed to eliminate all four name finalists, and then I had trouble coming up with replacement names that seemed any better than the ones I'd eliminated. Possibly I was in an overly critical mood; possibly I just have trouble naming seedlings that are this color.¹ I don't know.

So now it's been a week, and this is like the fourth time I've written this post, and as nice as the flower is,

I'm honestly pretty sick of looking at its face. And I need to name it something so I can move on to the next post, so even though I kind of didn't like it, I'm going to go ahead and go with one of the rejected options, Haunted Houseboat.

The reason I rejected it originally is, when I did a search for it, I found a "Spongebob Squarepants" connection, and I find Spongebob pretty grating.² But I found the name inexplicably appealing until then, and it's the least problematic of the four options I started with.

The other three were Galveston, Joycelyn Elders, and Pink Disco Trilobite; it may not be immediately apparent to you why these couldn't work, but I assure you that there were problems.³

It might not be obvious why they could have worked, either, I suppose.⁴

Anyway. Next up will be Schlumbergera seedling 190A. I'm not crazy about the names I came up with for it, either.



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¹ 208A Raspberry Possum's post also failed to select a name the first time through and had to be rewritten.
² Apologies to any readers who are also Spongebob fans. It's just not my thing.
³ Galveston and Pink Disco Trilobite weren't color-accurate, in my opinion. (Galveston should be a light yellow, or maaaaaaaybe a yellow-orange, and this seedling is too red to be "pink.")
Joycelyn Elders was Bill Clinton's first Surgeon General (1993-94), and was controversial on a number of subjects (sex education, primarily) because half the country is out of their damn minds. Also there was a lot of deliberate misrepresentation of what she had said. As lots of people get really upset about anything having to do with sex, or anything having to do with the Clintons, it seemed unwise to give a name that would evoke both sets of associations.
Pink Disco Trilobite is also pretty long.
⁴ I visited Galveston a long time ago and enjoyed it; at one point I was even going to move there.
Joycelyn Elders is obviously amazing, but if you don't already think that then I'm probably not going to be able to convince you.
I don't actually know what I find so appealing about Pink Disco Trilobite either. I just do.

Anthurium no. 0802 "Dana International"

Dana's the first good Anthurium news I've had in quite a while. The color doesn't photograph all that clearly (the camera lightens it substantially), but in person, it's a fairly dark purple, only barely lighter than her grandparent (the NOID purple), and substantially darker than her parent (0200 Mario Speedwagon).

Not only that, but the spathes on Dana are larger than those of the NOID purple and Mario, as well, and she's remarkably productive. I don't keep track of every single bud produced by every single seedling, but I think she's just started building her sixth bud since the first one appeared five and a half months ago.

Even the new leaves are pretty.

Which I guess just goes to show you that if you pull the lever enough times, sooner or later it'll come up BAR - BAR - BAR. Or whatever the winningest combination is for slot machines these days.¹

Here's the plant as a whole, back when the first bud appeared.

It doesn't look like that at the moment, because not long after that, I moved the plant up to a 6-inch (15 cm) pot. It's remained fairly compact (short internodes). Not much suckering, unfortunately, but there is a little bit. The overall habit is on the good side of average, at least.

There is also some thrips damage on the leaves from time to time; I don't see much of it on the spathes, but it's hard to know if that's because purple isn't attractive to thrips or it's just dark enough to hide the damage better. Possibly some of both.

Anyway. Very happy with Dana.

A couple other seedlings are doing things I haven't seen before -- I've mentioned 0648 Bianca Del Rio before, I think, which isn't doing anything you've never seen before, but Bianca's something the seedlings haven't done before, so that's interesting. And 1268 Li'l Miss Hot Mess produced a bloom, which isn't like any of the others either. Two other seedlings currently in bud, 1299 Sinthia D Meanor and 1325 Dixie D Cupp, have the potential to be something brand-new, if the bud colors are at all related to their final color, but it'll be a while yet before we find out.

Anthurium, the genus, still needs to do an awful lot of really amazing shit if it wants to get back into my favor, but seedlings like Dana, Bianca, and Li'l Miss Hot Mess are a good start.

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¹ I've never played one in a casino, or even particularly wanted to. This is partly because one of my grandfathers had a hobby buying and refinishing old slot machines, and one day when we were visiting him, he gave my brother and I each a roll of quarters and had us play one of them until the money ran out. Which took very little time at all. If I had been thinking at all, I would have put the roll of quarters in my pocket and merely pretended to play with the slot machine. I don't remember how long ago this was, but I do remember feeling like $10 was a substantial amount of money. I mean, it wouldn't have been in the spirit of the thing, and I guess the actual experience effectively immunized me against gambling for the rest of my life, so it's probably saved me $10 in the long run anyway.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 069

The four name finalists for seedling 069A are: Lucky Bounce, Stalemate By Repetition, Sweetie Darling, and Torch And Pitchfork.

Lucky Bounce is difficult to explain, but there's something about the way the flower in the above photo is angled that evokes a football bouncing off the ground. Maybe it only makes sense to me.

Stalemate by Repetition is a term from the game of chess: if, near the end of a game, one side's pieces are so limited in their ability to move that the pieces all wind up in the same position three times, whether in successive turns or not, one or the other player can claim a draw (stalemate). I feel like there's a plant-breeding parallel in here somewhere, once enough seedlings produce identically-hued flowers.

Sweetie Darling, an Absolutely Fabulous reference, has been a name candidate twice before, for 083A Psychedelic Bunny and 208A Raspberry Possum. When I rejected it for the latter, I noted that it seemed more appropriate for an orange seedling, as the character who says it is much more given to wearing orange than pink. And now, here we have an orange. So maybe?

Torch and Pitchfork are the traditional markers of an angry mob.

So. When I selected Torch and Pitchfork for this seedling, I thought that by the time I wrote this post, it would seem a lot more timely than it does. So I'll drop it. And Lucky Bounce would work better if the seedling had been lucky in some way, or dropped on the floor, or something, but I can't think of anything along those lines, so I reject the name as nonsensical.

Which leaves Stalemate By Repetition or Sweetie Darling. Both more or less work, but I don't have a strong preference for one over the other, so I'll go with the shorter one: Sweetie Darling it is.

Hopefully future flowers will show a bit less thrips damage; this seedling did most of its blooming in sync with the other plants in the tray it was on, which means that there were lots of hungry thrips in the vicinity. I get prettier-looking flowers from the seedlings that bloom very early (before the thrips have built up sufficiently large populations in the plant room) or very late (after the thrips population has already mostly starved to death).

Schlumbergera seedling no. 092 (again)

Not especially new, again. I've made a number of mistakes in the course of breeding my Schlumbergeras, and growing out too many seedlings was one of the bigger ones. At the time, I was a couple years away from having seeds from any other crosses, and I didn't know how variable the offspring would be, so it made sense to pot up everything I could get, but now that I have other combinations to try, and so much space devoted to the first batch of seedlings, I wish I'd restrained myself a little more.

092B is also a good example of the other main mistake I made: putting multiple seedlings into the same pot. The plants don't mind, but it complicates record-keeping, and in some cases I don't know whether I have a pair of differently-colored seedlings or a single highly variable one.

I've at least learned from those mistakes: I've potted up fewer individual seedlings from subsequent crosses,¹ and individual seedlings get individual pots.

Anyway. The four name finalists for 092B: Dorothy Parker, Naughty Santa, Nine of Hearts, Rooster.

Three of the four name finalists are there because the first bloom (above) was mostly red: Naughty Santa (originally suggested by Nadya W-G) makes sense for a red / white seedling. Nine of Hearts implies a red seedling (I think it was originally a random word combination). Rooster is maybe a little more ambiguous, since rooster feathers can be a lot of different colors, but the comb is always (?) red.²

Which means that, then, when the same plant produced this much oranger flower three months later,

I was pretty much stuck with either Dorothy Parker or choosing a whole new set of finalists. And choosing one set of finalists is difficult enough. So 092B is Dorothy Parker.

I don't remember when I first became aware of Dorothy Parker, but my guess is that it was probably in high school; I went through a spell where I read all the books of witty, famous, or otherwise notable quotes I could find, and copied them by hand into a notebook.³ And Parker is nothing if not quotable, so she wound up in there a lot. Some of them you probably already know: on being challenged to use "horticulture" in a sentence, Parker came back with "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." She drank a lot (was almost certainly an alcoholic), which led to "One more drink and I’ll be under the host." The one I liked the best that I hadn't heard before researching this post was:

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.⁴

Parker was not a happy person. The impression I got from this piece at The New York Review of Books (which I strongly recommend reading) is that she could be delighted at how wonderful the world could be, and yet was so often disappointed by how mediocre, lazy, unjust, and pretentious it often actually was. The cynical, caustic exterior she presented wasn't because she hated the world and wanted to die; it was a defensive response to being disappointed so often, by so many, including herself. Few of us would (or could) make a career out of disappointment, but we've all felt it, which is maybe partly why we still remember what she had to say.⁵

When Parker died in 1967, her will left her entire estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; on his assassination in 1968, it was transferred to the NAACP, and her ashes are now buried at the NAACP's Baltimore headquarters.

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¹ Lately, I'm even keeping track of the pollen parents. Those seeds won't be doing anything interesting for at least a couple years, but at least I won't have to try to guess where their colors came from when they do.
² Embarrassing but true: until I looked this up, I was not aware that hens generally also have combs. They're often smaller, duller in color, or both, and they don't appear until chicks are at least a couple weeks old (often longer; it depends on the breed), but the combs are nevertheless there.
³ In the snow! Uphill!
⁴ (It's funny because it's true.)
⁵ No doubt an oversimplification. And I may be overidentifying with Parker a bit too. But that sure seems to be the foundation of the piece from The New York Review of Books.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 062

Seedling 062 is pleasant, maybe a little lighter in color than the usual, but not otherwise terribly remarkable.

(see?)
The four name finalists are: Bashful Whisper, Booster Separation, Fred Rogers, and Open World.

Bashful Whisper sounds a lot like a random-words name, though it does have in its favor that it describes an actual thing, and people who saw the name would understand what it meant.

Booster Separation is the point, during the launch of a Space Shuttle or other item, when the rockets used to propel the item out of Earth's gravity detach themselves and fall to the ground, where they can be recovered and reused later. (This is apparently by design, though I'm kind of amazed that it's possible to design an object to fall 28 miles / 46 km to the Earth and then use it again.¹) This was inspired by the way the petals curve away from the flower in the above photo, though it would make more sense if the flower had been pointing up, rather than down.

Fred Rogers is of course the children's TV show host.

Finally, Open World is a video gaming term, describing games in which the player has the option to wander more or less freely around the game world doing whatever they like, rather than being forced into following a specific plot.² Some of the bigger open world games are Minecraft, Fallout 3 / Fallout: New Vegas / Fallout 4, the Grand Theft Auto series, No Man's Sky, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, Sims 3, etc.

So I want to drop Bashful Whisper first. Initially I was fine with it, but at some point it got "Careless Whisper" stuck in my head and that drives me crazy. And I think we can lose Booster Separation too, since the flowers aren't consistently shaped like the one that inspired the name.

The problem with Fred Rogers is one that's come up before: while he's seedling-worthy, he's also got a ton of things named for him already, including an asteroid, just like Sojourner Truth. This shouldn't count against a name, except that I figure names honoring heavily-honored people are more likely to have been used by someone else already. Since I'm trying to choose final, official names for the Schlumbergera seedlings,³ I'm kind of hoping to come up with things I won't have to change later.

Open World is a little bland. I suppose it still sounds nice (except maybe to agoraphobes), but if you're not a gamer it doesn't have a clear meaning. It does have going for it that I really love open world games (according to Steam, I've spent over a thousand hours of my life playing Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas combined, for example), but then, I was a pretty big fan of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood at one point too, so I'm not sure that works as a tie-breaker either.

What did wind up working for me as a tie-breaker was running across an article via MetaFilter that talks about a specific game that doesn't quite work, despite being able to generate a very large number of possible game puzzles. I mean, Covert Action doesn't appear to be an open world game, technically, but it does talk a little about whether games should be primarily about telling a story (like in more linear games) or about the experience of being part of the overall world of a game, where one makes up the story as one goes along (like in open world games).

So I think I'm still happy with calling this one 062A Open World. I'm sure the name Fred Rogers will come up again, given enough seedlings⁴ and enough time in which to name them.

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¹ (I mean, I have a LCD-display kitchen timer that got dropped about four feet onto a carpeted floor and has never worked quite right ever since.)
² As distinct from linear games, with a single plot that doesn't progress until you do whatever thing it is the game wants you to do (e.g. Half-Life 2), or games with branching plots, where the player occasionally gets to make choices that influence how the rest of the game plays out, but are linear between branch points (like reading a "choose your own adventure" book).
³ As opposed to the Anthurium seedlings, where the names I use here are basically placeholders, so that I can talk about them without getting confused by all the numbers. I mean, some of the Anthurium seedlings' names might eventually be official patented names too, should things get that far, but I work harder on the Schlumbergera names because I think of them as being the final word on what a seedling will be called. Not that most of these -- or maybe any -- will ever be patented anyway. But I still might want to, someday. So.
⁴ Speaking of which -- I potted up another 68 Schlumbergeras on 25 March. The Schlumbergeras may outnumber the Anthuriums now; it depends on whether you think the relevant number is how many distinct pots I have to move around and check for watering and so forth, in which case the Schlumbergeras win, or the number of genetically distinguishable plants I have around, in which case the Anthuriums (barely) win.

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Delightfully Wood

And the very last of the orchid show orchids, possibly ever,¹ is Paphiopedilum Delightfully Wood, which is either a dramatic climax or an anticlimax, depending on your feelings about Paphiopedilums.

This particular one is another Lehua Orchids hybrid, though I can't prove that because the page is no longer there. I copied the text on the page, though, because I've been burned before by trusting commercial sites' pages to stay up, and this particular text raised so many questions.

The start of our oxymoron series (what can be delightful about Wood?). We were conned into naming 12 mottled leaf Paphs. Naming the last one we were drawing a blank on a name. One of its parent was Zellwood Station. What could be more natural than Wood Wonder (because you always have to wonder about Wood). Paphiopedilum Wood Wonder went viral. At the time it was, and probably still is, the only AQ awarded in Japan to a non-Japanese cross. Just classic great spots.

Like, I don't know what most of that means (What's an AQ hybrid? How does an orchid go viral?² Why are the spots "great?" What would "crappy" spots look like? How does one get conned into naming paphs, how much does it pay, and how could I make that happen to me?³), and I'm a little irked by "what can be delightful about Wood?" part. What isn't delightful about wood?⁴

Anyway. Now that that's out of my system --

This seems like a nice enough flower, I guess. Lots of different colors in it, and the leaves are attractively speckled.

Paphiopedilum Delightfully Wood = Paphiopedilum Wood Wonder x Paphiopedilum Odette's Charm (Ref.)

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¹ (For the next year, at least: I didn't go to the show this year. Maybe starting in April 2018, if it turns out that I really, really miss the orchids.)
² (I assume they mean viral in the social media sense. I know how orchids go viral in the biological infection sense.)
³ I mean, seriously, if you know of a job out there somewhere where a person just names plants all day, shoot me an application, because that sounds wonderful. I'm not fast, but I am thorough as a motherfucker. And enthusiastic, obviously.
⁴ No, seriously. It's strong, it's flexible, it removes carbon from the atmosphere, it's solar-powered, it's endlessly renewable, it's long-lasting (or at least can be), it comes in every color of the (brown) rainbow, it's biodegradable, it's (mostly) nontoxic, you can make paper, rayon, furniture, cellophane, vomit-absorption material, fuel, baskets, imitation vanilla extract, musical instruments, art, and cardboard out of it. Even rocks, though that's a slow process. Probably not very practical, while we have so many rocks just lying around all over the place.
It's worth having for the metaphors alone: wooden acting, morning wood, not out of the woods, two roads diverged in a wood, knock wood, coming out of the woodwork. The only things I can think of that aren't wonderful about wood are its susceptibility to termites and fire. So, seriously: how dare Lehua question the delightfulness of wood. If they hadn't already taken the page down, I would have to write them an angry e-mail.