Anthurium no. 1224 "Perry Watkins"

Perry's a pretty good seedling; the most interesting thing to me is the way the spadix changes colors as the inflorescence ages. On first opening, the spadix is orange,

(9 May 2017)
then it becomes white and pink:

(19 May 2017)
It's not the most dramatic shift, and neither color is unprecedented,¹ but red/orange, red/pink, and red/white are all relatively rare combinations, so it's neat to see a seedling do all three. It also looks like it might be an obake bloom,² and obakes are slightly more interesting to me than solid-colored spathes, so that's a point in its favor as well.

The foliage is pretty good -- longer, larger, and narrower than average, and only slightly thrips-damaged.

So Perry's a keeper.

The real-life Perry Watkins isn't primarily known for performing in drag, though he did (as "Simone"); he's known for winning a court case against the United States Army, because they revoked his security clearance in 1981 because of his sexual orientation.

This even though they knew his sexual orientation: in 1968 when they drafted him, in 1970 when he reenlisted, in 1972 when they considered removing him from service (but decided against it because they considered his own admission of homosexuality insufficient evidence that he was gay³), in 1974 when they allowed him to enlist again, in 1975 when they considered expelling him (but concluded that he was too good of a soldier to let go), and in 1979 when they allowed him to enlist for a fourth time. And presumably they also knew in 1971 or 1972 when he was performing in drag at shows sponsored by the U.S. Army, first in West Germany and then later in other clubs for enlisted men around Europe. But for some reason, it was suddenly a thing in 1981.

Long story short, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1988 that this was bullshit, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case so the Ninth Circuit's decision stood. Watkins had intended to enlist yet again (he was going for 20 years of service, the point at which you get a pension upon retirement) but instead wound up settling with the Army for: $135,000 in back pay (not quite $250,000 in 2017 dollars), full retirement benefits, an honorable discharge from the Army, and a retroactive promotion to sergeant first class.

Watkins has since died (in 1996, in his late 40s,⁴ of complications related to AIDS).

I've barely scratched the surface of his story; there's more detail in the above links. Watkins is also covered quite a bit in Randy Shilts' book Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (1994, St. Martin's Press), according to Wikipedia.

Watkins is also unexpectedly timely these days, as the same logic used to support his case against the Army in Watkins v. United States Army -- that it would be unjust to exclude a soldier who had specifically been encouraged to stay and serve in the army over something the Army already knew about him -- would probably also apply to excluding transgendered military personnel now.⁵

[NOTE: It's possible I've gotten some things wrong here; I knew literally nothing about Watkins until yesterday afternoon,⁶ and I've written this in a hurry besides. If you see factual errors, or have particularly good sources of information about Watkins, please let me know.]

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¹ 0842 Pretty Punasti does basically the same thing, though Pretty's spathe is more of a brown-red; Perry's is just red.
² Obake (Japanese for "ghost" or "change") are Anthurium varieties in which the spathe has one color near the center (white, red, orange, coral, or pink), with green at the spathe tip, "ears," or all the way around the margin. Obakes frequently also produce very large spathes, and are often vertically elongated. You can see several photos of obakes on this page. Production is variable; young plants will often produce solid-colored spathes initially, and begin producing obake spathes on maturity. There's also a seasonal component, with obake spathes more likely to happen in winter and spring.
I'm not sure where the obake trait would be coming from; I had an orange obake ('Florida') for a long time, but it never produced berries, and I never saw any pollen on it either, so I don't think its genes are present in any of my seedlings. I think my NOID pink with large spathes was 'Pandola,' which is an obake, though the photos of 'Pandola' available online don't show a lot of green coloration, just a thin edge of green along the "ears." It's also possible that my NOID red was an obake type, though I don't have photo confirmation of any green coloration on the spathes.
As best as I can remember, none of the first-generation seedlings were obakes; several seedlings in the second generation have a little green along the ears, like 'Pandola.' (Most notably and obviously 1268 Li'l Miss Hot Mess and 1299 Sinthia D Meanor, but also 1209 Raven Samore Holiday, 1213 Miss Foozie, and 1300 Gia Sunflowers. Nothing very striking so far, but the coloration is supposed to develop with age.
³ (!)
⁴ Wikipedia says he was 47; the New York Times says 48.
⁵ Twitter proclamations do not, it turns out, have the force of law. Not yet, anyway. So transgendered service members are still part of the military, if maybe slightly more nervous about it than they were a few months ago.
⁶ His was just one more name in a long list of drag queens somewhere; I almost skipped looking him up.

Anthurium no. 1217 "Charles Ludlam"

Seedling "Charles Ludlam" is from the DV seedling group (started 10 June 2015, from berries collected from the NOID red). It turns out that its inflorescence is the least interesting of the DV seedlings. So, I mean, we can look at Charles,

but I'm not sure if he's a keeper. The strongest argument in favor of holding on to him is the new foliage, which is a pretty vivid red-brown or red-orange, depending on your viewing angle:

The leaves do sustain a lot of thrips damage, though,

and when there isn't a new leaf in development, the plant isn't very interesting:

So I'm not sure what I'll do in this particular case. In the meantime, we can look forward to the other DV seedlings (1203 Peaches West, 1220 Mario Montez, 1224 Perry Watkins, 1299 Sinthia D Meanor, 1300 Gia Sunflowers, and 1301 Symphony Alexander-Love) which are not only surprisingly diverse in color but also includes the one with the very strangest and least expected color I've gotten from the seedlings yet. (Which I spoiled for you a while ago, but I have more and better photos now than I did then, as well as a second bloom, so that post should still be at least a little interesting once it happens.)

Anthurium no. 1256 "Mr. Completely"

There's basically nothing about this seedling that's interesting, but let me try anyway. If I can't come up with anything then I'll talk about some other subject. (Which won't be interesting either, but by then it will be too late for you not to read it.)

Pink / pink. Has bloomed at least twice while still in a 3-inch pot, so points for enthusiasm. Not-great foliage, though I guess the plant is at least fairly compact so far.

It's in the same sibling group as 1153 Tintim. (As predicted, I've thrown Tintim away; it wasn't re-rooting, and had wilted completely.) Tintim and Mr. Completely are the only seedlings from the CQ seedling group to have bloomed so far; there are four remaining CQ seedlings (1149 Nicole Murray-Ramirez, 1155 Glitter Monster,¹ 1167 Lucy Balls, 1307 Electra Lites), and my expectations for them are obviously pretty low.

Anyway. Not the worst thrips damage ever, but the seedling was already not getting a lot right, so the scarring doesn't help its chances. Pretty clearly a discard.

And I guess I can do a Japanese beetle update; I've seen some indications that this is maybe just an unusually bad year for Japanese beetles in Iowa, that it's not just my yard and my plants. Which isn't exactly reassuring,² but it makes me feel less singled-out, at least. I haven't been counting the beetles as I collect them, because it's sometimes difficult to tell how many I've gotten, but I've been visually estimating the numbers by looking at the jar when I'm done, and from the estimates, I think I've killed about 4300 beetles so far in July.³

I have not yet attempted the neem oil. Still considering it, but it has two really big disadvantages: one, all I have to apply it with is a single mister which maybe holds a quart at best; I would need to stop and refill it often, assuming that my index finger would survive that much misting, and two, the neem oil has warnings all over it about how you shouldn't use it on plants that are in direct sunlight, shouldn't spray it on hot days, and so forth. So to make it work, I'd have to go out at dawn or dusk to do the spraying. (I still might try it on a section of the Cannas, to see whether it makes any difference, and use the results of that to decide whether or not it's worth spraying the rest of them, but I may not be able to get the timing to work out.)

I've also considered buying some Japanese beetle pheromone traps. I know everybody says you're not supposed to buy they traps, because they just attract more beetles to your property than would otherwise be there, and you'll attract more beetles than the traps manage to kill. Thing is, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference: there are so many of them here already that I kind of wonder whether the Cannas aren't already functioning as beetle attractors. In which case, I might as well bring in an attractor that will kill the damn things, too. I mean, probably not going to, because I don't want to see what a worse beetle problem would look like (plus there are the neighbors' gardens to consider -- a trap that attracted beetles to my yard would also bring beetles to theirs), but I've thought about it.

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¹ Glitter Monster isn't my favorite drag queen name ever -- that's probably always going to be Estée Lauder Harder Faster -- but it's way up there.
² As far as I know, nothing here eats them, so in my darker moments it's easy to imagine them returning in greater and greater numbers every year until they consume literally all of the plants. Or at least all of the plants they're willing to eat, which since that includes a couple common weeds (I've seen them eating Chenopodium album and Abutilon theophrasti here this summer, though they overwhelmingly prefer the Cannas), they'll always be able to find something to eat. I think they've even been experimenting with the crabgrass lately, which surprises me.
Between the thrips, scale, and Japanese beetles, I'm beginning to think that there's no point to enjoying the cultivation of plants at all.
Maybe I should look into collecting stamps; stamp collectors always seem like they're having a good time.
³ (As of 30 July.)
1000 of those on July 29 alone. Every other year, they've appeared everywhere for about 1 or 2 weeks and then they disappear. Why aren't they going away this year?

Anthurium no. 1209 "Raven Samore Holiday"

And now we're into a short run of seedlings that aren't doing anything very weird, unfortunately. Not that Raven's doing anything particularly badly,

and she's a little weird in that both spathes so far have been very wide and short -- the proportions in the above photo are pretty much what you'd see if you were looking at it in person -- but the color isn't anything new. There's maybe a little bit of green on the lobes, at the bottom of the spathe in the photo, but that's about it. Just a weirdly-proportioned red / yellow.

Raven's the offspring of 0223 Patty Cake, who was also a red / yellow, notable mainly for having very long peduncles.¹ Patty's main problem was that she had long internodes;² Raven doesn't seem to have that problem yet, though it's maybe a little early to tell.

The foliage is distinguished mostly by being very flat -- the secondary veins aren't particularly thick or heavy, and the texture is overall very smooth.

There's some thrips damage. Nothing too terrible.

Overall, the spathe proportions are the most interesting thing here, and I'm not sure "interesting" is quite enough, but it's not a disaster, so I'm probably keeping Raven around for a while. We'll see how it goes.

There is a real performer who goes by "Raven Samore Holiday," but I had a really difficult time digging up information about her, so I don't have any to share. Sorry.

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¹ (the "stem" connecting the inflorescence to the rest of the plant)
² (internode - the distance between two nodes; nodes are the places on the stem where leaves emerge. Long internodes are a problem because it means that the stem gets long quickly, which means the plant flops over and starts getting viney)

Anthurium no. 1171 "Chris of Hur"

Seedling 1171 is unremarkable on first glance:

I mean, Chris doesn't have one of the most common color combinations, which is worth something, but it doesn't look weird. And yet, Chris is weird.

For one thing, its ancestry. 1171 is another 'Joli' seedling, like 1325 Dixie D Cupp. And the only hint it gives of the relationship is in the buds, which are pink, rather than the red or orange one would expect.

A number of seedlings have started out orange (or pinkish-orange) and aged to pink, but this is the first time I've ever seen that go in the opposite direction. Probably this can be explained by observing that the two sides of a spathe don't always match: usually if it's pink on one side, it'll be pink on the other, but 0330 Faye Quinette, for example, is brown on the back of the spathe and orange on the front,¹ and I've recently been incredibly disappointed by 1594 Roxy-Cotten Candy [a real performer name; spelling sic] because she's dark brown with nearly-black veining on the back, while the front is just red.² So there's precedent for buds of one color opening as spathes of a different color; I've just never seen this particular combination before.

Which is probably enough weirdness to justify keeping Chris; he probably wouldn't be otherwise, though. The leaves are okay,

and the plant as a whole is fine. Not horribly leggy, at least.

On the negative side, not only do the spathes flip back from the spadix (which is pretty common, if undesirable), but they often get more and more reflexed with age, to the point where they almost start to roll themselves up into a tube.

The thrips do seem to leave it alone, at least. Not entirely, but mostly. So that's good.

There is an actual Chris of Hur; her style of drag isn't to my personal taste,³ but she sounds like an interesting person, based on this interview. I especially like the idea of the "draggle" (drag + Fraggle) aesthetic; reading that in the interview, I was like, what?, but then I saw the video embedded in that article and I was like, oh, right, that's actually the perfect description for what she's doing there.

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¹ (i.e., the green pigment is being expressed only on the back)
² I mean, if you want to give it maximum partial credit for interestingness, you could maybe say it was a brownish-red, like 0842 Pretty Punasti. But that's a stretch.
³ Though as I've noted previously, almost nothing is to my personal taste the first time I encounter it, and the "I don't like this" reaction doesn't seem to have much to do with how good it is or how much I end up liking it. Which is why the rare occasions when I do like something the first time (most recently with Shearwater's "Quiet Americans") are big deals.

Anthurium no. 1325 "Dixie D Cupp"

Dixie is the second seedling of 'Joli' to bloom, and is the only 'Joli' seedling that actually resembles her parent at all. (At least of the three to bloom so far.)

Like 'Joli,' Dixie's blooms are lavender / light orange to begin with, and end pink / pink.

(6 April 2017)

(25 April 2017)
Like 'Joli,' the thrips find Dixie delicious.

And that includes the leaves.

Dixie also has a tendency to begin unfurling a spathe and then give up on it partway through; not only does this not look very nice, but it gives the thrips that much more room in which to hide, and makes them that much harder to remove.

'Joli' eventually became very long and floppy, which was the main reason I discarded it (possible Xanthomonas infection and thrips damage were also factors); it remains to be seen whether Dixie will have the same issue, but . . . given the performance so far, I don't have any reason to doubt that she will.

Which makes the decision about whether to keep Dixie or not a very difficult one. I only have so much room, and any pink/pink or red/yellow that was this scarred and ratty-looking would go in the trash without hesitation, but I only have just so many purple-blooming plants, and it would be nice to have the genes around for breeding purposes even if the plant itself isn't so great.¹ For now, the decision is to keep Dixie, I guess, but I don't like her chances of still being here in a couple years.

There was a real Dixie D Cupp, a drag queen from Atlanta, Georgia; I couldn't find much information about her on-line, though. Basically just this memorial page, which identifies her as being active in raising money for causes related to HIV/AIDS; she died in 2010.

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¹ 0105 Deanne T. Christ, 0200 Mario Speedwagon, and 0802 Dana International are actually purple. Deanne and Dana have pretty significant thrips problems, and Mario is very leggy and doesn't produce a lot of blooms.
There are also seedlings that have enough of a purple tint to their pink or red spathes to get me hopeful that their seedlings might be purple: 0231 Rhea Listick, 0234 Ross Koz, 0259 Tasha Salad, 0514 Lauren Ipsum, 0886 Zaria Baudit, and 1249 Celeda.
And then there's a third group which have a purple parent or grandparent and consequently might contain recessive purple genes: 0097 Colin Ambulance, 0108 Deena Sequins, 0758 Miles Long, Esquire, 0771 Nina Flowers, 0789 Marsha P. Johnson, 0791 Joslyn Fox, 0799 Hope Sandreams, and 1181 Tajma Stetson.
Of the three groups, the only one to produce purple offspring was 0200 Mario Speedwagon, the seed parent for 0802 Dana International. None of the children of 0234 Ross Koz have even hinted at purpleness, and the only purple in the descendants of 0108 Deena Sequins is in the spadices: the spathes have all been red or pink-red.
So you can see why hanging on to a purple-blooming seedling might seem like a good idea, even if it's not a great seedling. There might not be any other way to get a decent purple.

Anthurium no. 0788 "Owen McCord"

I mentioned at the end of the last post that 0788 was, like, 0728 Sister Dimension, one of the seedlings from 0273 Wes Coast. Wes was a pink/pink without a lot of notable qualities: the most interesting thing about him was that the pink was unusually vivid, in that unphotographable way that seedlings sometimes just glow. (Even then, it didn't happen with every bloom, so I'm not sure what I was actually seeing.) Wes's seedlings, on the other hand, always had two things: huge leaves, and scale. 52 seedlings, of which only 5 have survived (10%); more than half (30 of 52, or 58%) were thrown out due to scale infestation. Not very promising territory in which to be looking for awesome seedlings. And yet:

And it's not that we've never seen an orange/orange before; there are several.¹ However, Owen is, I think, the first seedling to do both orange/orange and orange/yellow:

Not sure which he prefers; so far I've only seen one bloom of each. The orange/orange is most recent, so odds are that's the "real" color, if there's a real color.

But that's not even the best part. I mean, I like the orange blooms, but the main story in Owen's case is actually the foliage. Not many individual leaves,

but they're huge, and vary considerably in color as they age. True, they end up at the same boring green as most Anthurium seedlings:

But they get there through a pretty colorful progression, from red through brown and olive:

I feel like this would be awfully pretty in a mass planting, should there ever be enough of them for a mass planting, in a place where they could survive being outside.

Which is getting pretty hypothetical since so far there's just the one plant and it's in Iowa, but we can still imagine.

In any case. Really happy with Owen. He's developed kind of a sideways lean in the last few months; probably at least some of that's because he's been growing towards light, as plants do.² Hopefully that will be fixable if/when he's promoted to a 6-inch pot.

Definite keeper, not even a question. The next seedling up is a much more difficult decision.

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¹ Though mostly they're the same seedling under different names, or close relatives thereof: 0115 Erlene Adopter, 0580 Marsha Marsha Marsha, 0581 Adam All, and 0586 Vera Special are all divisions from the same original plant, all with interchangeable orange/orange blooms and the same peculiar tendency to yellow along the leaf veins; I still don't understand why that happens, or whether it's a bad thing.
Then there's 0120 Eliza Boutisecksis, the half-sibling of the Erlenes, and 1727 Mercedes Sulay, daughter of one of the Erlenes.
Other seedlings sort of lean toward orange/orange blooms, but are too red (e.g. 0116 Eileen Dover), green (0330 Faye Quinette), pink (0813 Arya Reddy), or pale (0317 Dred) for me to consider them fully orange/orange.
² He has totally adequate overhead light, and no reason to need to move in on another shelf's lighting, but the problem is that his own shelf is pretty crowded, and the adjacent shelf is full of short germination containers that don't obstruct their light at all. So the light looks better to the side, and we get a lean.

Anthurium no. 1265 "Inez Paloma"

Inez is surprisingly wonderful. "Wonderful" is, of course, always something of a surprise, but even more surprising is that she's got a white spathe, and I'm not ordinarily that excited about white flowers. But what with 290A Lady Of The Assumption winning Best New Non-Orange and Best New Seedling this year, and now Inez, I'm having to rethink my position on white flowers. Maybe sometimes they're not so bad.

This isn't the first white seedling from the Anthuriums, but it's only the third genuinely white white,¹ and it's the first blistered white.² Which is not that exciting, except that I didn't start out with any blistered whites, and I'm pretty much counting it as a win anytime I get a seedling to do something that the ancestral group didn't do. Which has happened a surprising number of times, now.

Also worth noting that the spathe shape is nice. Or at least interesting. (I think it reads as sort of a bouffant, but maybe that's just me.)

Inez also has surprisingly decent foliage,

and produces lots of suckers, so the plant is nicely full and robust-looking:

She's even producing a decent number of blooms: I think she's on number three now, and she only started in April.³

There's just one thing not to like about Inez, and unfortunately it's substantial: the thrips. They seem to leave the foliage more or less alone (a nip here and there, but it's not to the point of heavily distorting the foliage or leaving lots of giant ugly scars, like happens with some other seedlings), and don't actually seem to be that big of a problem on the spathes, really, but the spathes are such a pure, snowy white that even the tiniest pinprick of damage is visible.

I mean, there are worse things, and Inez has so many other nice qualities that I don't think it's worth getting hung up about this particular shortcoming. In principle, thrips can be eradicated,⁴ so in a way, her one problem isn't even that much of a problem.

1265 Inez Paloma's seed parent was 'Pandola,' a large, blistered, pink/orange or pink/pink.⁵ So maybe the cross was 'Pandola' x 'White Gemini?'

Next up, we've got another seedling from 0273 Wes Coast (the previous one being 0728 Sister Dimension). Wes was not a great seedling, and most of his offspring were discarded because they were unusually prone to scale, but I've been pretty pleased with the survivors.

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¹ (After 1095 Carolina Pineforest and 0648 Bianca Del Rio)
² Though 1268 Li'l Miss Hot Mess might argue the point, I don't count her as white white because the spathes have (so far) all had green "ears," as well as an overall faint greenish cast to the spathe.
³ First bud on 1 March 2017, and then the spathe was open in the first week of April. Inez is either on bloom #3, and they last a normal amount of time for Anthuriums, or she's on bloom #2, and they last an exceptionally long time. Not sure which.
⁴ I mean, it seems not to work that way in reality, but I know individual thrips can be killed, and it's not a huge logical leap from killing individual thrips to killing all the individual thrips.
⁵ 'Pandola' was unusually variable, for a named cultivar. The spathes were always pretty big, but the spathes ranged from red to pink, and the spadices were orange, yellow, or pink, often all three at different times on the same inflorescence.