The 2017-18 Schlummies (Returning awards)

At long last, about six months too late, we have the 2017-18 Schlummies. This post will cover the awards for seedlings that bloomed in previous years, and then the next post will deal with 2017-18's seedlings. Sound good?¹

Most Improved Returning Seedling (2014-15 Season)
"Most Improved" has turned out to be a rougher category than I initially anticipated; I'm never sure whether to choose seedlings that used to be meh and improved to become awesome, or seedlings that used to be crappy and have improved to become mediocre. I think mostly I've gone the latter route, historically, but it's always tough to decide.

This year's winner, 024A Safety Vest, has never been amazing, but it was a serviceable orange / white when it first bloomed, and then it kind of disappeared for a couple years. (024B Bryce Canyon is a much larger and more floriferous plant.) So this year, Safety Vest was back again, hence the award. It's still not as big as Bryce Canyon, and probably never will be, but that's okay.

024A Safety Vest

026A Brick Wall

028A Phil Collen

035A Patito

078A Art Party
The other nominees were all seedlings which have always bloomed at least a little, but went particularly nuts this year; the only one I can explain is 078A Art Party: I turned one of the flats around, so the plant got much better light this year than it had previously.



Best Overall Returning Seedling (2014-15 Season)
The first three nominees are always stunning, though 021B Birthday Dinner and 025A Clownfish both have unfair advantages: Clownfish is in a 6-inch pot, and both of them have unusually good permanent locations. But this year the one that really impressed me was 057A Pyrotechnic / Oxomoco, less for its color² than for producing a lot of blooms, over a fairly long period, last fall. I suspect it's commercially more valuable to have a plant that produces a huge number of blooms and then is finished for a few months, than it is for a plant to bloom more moderately over a longer period, but I personally prefer the latter.

021B Birthday Dinner

025A Clownfish

057A Pyrotechnic / Oxomoco

078A Art Party

113A Helper Dog


Most Improved Returning Seedling (2015-16 Season)
Not a lot to say here; 013A Tantalus and 107A Nova Prospekt both got big enough to produce a lot more blooms than last year, which is nice, and 079B Haleakala had impressive duration and color. (It may have even been more impressive than its potmate, and three-time Schlummie winner, 079A Yayoi Kusama.) But 093A Flamingo Burlesque gets the win for having many, many, many more blooms than last year, and blooming before the thrips had a chance to build up their numbers, so the flowers produced were mostly clean and unscarred.

013A Tantalus

079B Haleakala

093A Flamingo Burlesque

107A Nova Prospekt

208A Raspberry Possum


Best Overall Returning Seedling (2015-16 Season)
Oh. Make that four-time Schlummie winner 079A Yayoi Kusama, I guess. Nice color, blooms reliably over a long period, not overly bothered by thrips, and so forth. Even if it wasn't as magnificent this year, compared to 079B Haleakala, it's still a very, very good seedling.

079A Yayoi Kusama

078B Haleakala

107A Nova Prospekt

208A Raspberry Possum

217A Blood Frenzy


Most Improved Returning Seedling (2016-17 Season)
This was probably the toughest category for this post, since there was a lot of dramatic improvement among last year's seedlings. 120A Barbara Jordan bloomed spectacularly in late January 2018, and then again for most of September and October. 080A Nichelle Nichols was a bit dissheveled last year, but produced a few really nicely-shaped flowers this year. 202A Joan Didion no longer has the distinctive shape of her first blooms, but has made up for it by producing a lot of normal-shaped ones.

077B Bad Reputation

080A Nichelle Nichols

120A Barbara Jordan

202A Joan Didion
271A Not Here To Make Friends has retained its unusual shape, as well as being incredibly floriferous and having the rounded stem segments of its buckleyi parent. (I actually very badly wanted to give Not Here To Make Friends an award, because it was all-around very impressive, to the point that I considered inventing an award for it, but gave up when I couldn't figure out what to call the new award.) But 077B Bad Reputation wins this year, because it produced a lot of blooms and has possibly out-competed the two other seedlings in its pot, 077A Grendel and 077C Flickering (Grendel had previously been the main seedling in the pot.). I hadn't expected much from Bad Reputation, so it was a surprise to see it doing so well this year.

271A Not Here To Make Friends


Best Overall Returning Seedling (2016-17 Season)
Again, the temptation to give the win to 271A Not Here To Make Friends was very strong, but I have to give the Schlummie to 070A Delia Webster instead. Great color, and a truly absurd number of blooms. This award wasn't even really even a contest.

070A Delia Webster

097A Ladybug Ladybug

271A Not Here To Make Friends

281A No Bad Vibez

283A Migaloo
I'm kind of short on time lately, so the post for new seedlings will probably not happen until around 12 December. And please note that I'm not promising 12 December.

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¹ Hope so, 'cause the post is already written.
² A difficult to pin down pink-orange / pink. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just more subtle than a lot of the seedlings.

Schlumbergera seedlings: assorted (end of 2017-18 season)

Last four to name:


172A Proverbs 22:16

Seed parent: NOID magenta

Explanation: There's a lot in Proverbs that I'm not all that crazy about, like for example the verse just before this one,¹ but 22:16 ("One who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and one who gives gifts to the rich — both come to poverty."²) seems pretty darn timely, and has I think been historically demonstrated as well. This name was previously considered for seedling 392A Subjunctive.

I only got one flower out of this seedling, so it's not entirely clear what color it "really" is: best guess is that it's going to be another red / orange / white like 079A Yayoi Kusama, even though it resembles the red / pinks like 078A Art Party more in the photo. I suppose we'll find out eventually. Or not.

Also considered: Get Drunk Make Art, What About The Love


174A Indeterminate Form

Seed parent: NOID magenta

Explanation: This was a weird one. Again, I only got one bloom in the 2017-18 season proper, in February 2018, which is the one in the photo above. But then in November 2018, it bloomed again, significantly lighter and pinker:

(The photo doesn't do a great job of showing the color difference; you may just have to trust me that there was one.) It may just be that I caught the new bloom earlier in its development, when it still had the magenta along the petal margins, but the seedlings with magenta / red / orange / white petals are often very inconsistent about when and whether they do the magenta part.

The name is therefore sort of suitable (some aspects of the flower are not yet quite known) and sort of not (it's not the shape of the flower that's in question); it also honors someone from my life. (It's originally a math term.) In exchange for not having to wait any longer for a name, I'm willing to live with some inaccuracy.

Also considered: Bite Tongue Deep Breath, Hetty Reckless, I Want To Go To There


470A Goodbye Earl

Seed parent: 082A Strawberry Madeleine

Explanation: I only have one flower from 470A to go on as well, so I'm not sure what it's going to do in the future. I figure a certain amount of redness, or maybe red-orangeness, is likely, and beyond that who knows, so I didn't want to reference the color in the name too directly. I like the song³ (video), and am apparently willing to risk having it stuck in my head periodically. This one attracted angry / violent name candidates for some reason.⁴

Also considered: Flaming Arrows, Manocide Vagenda


421A Discard And Draw

Seed parent: NOID magenta

Explanation: Though the photo above is decent, some of the other pictures I took of this one were pretty frazzled-looking. And goodness knows I have enough orange seedlings already. So I'm inclined to discard or sell this one and use the space to grow out a more promising seedling, as if I were playing some kind of card came with Schlumbergera seedlings instead of cards.

Though I haven't gotten rid of it yet, and maybe won't. I do have a hard time getting rid of plants sometimes, even when I know I ought to.

Also considered: Forget It Jake, Marathon, Pumpkin-Roller⁵

So there you have it, the last of the 2017-18 season. Not thrilled with how it's ending, but it's nice to finish.

Probably going to divide the Schlummies into multiple posts this year, so they'll be less daunting to compose and read. Then maybe some Anthurium posts, while I try to figure out how to deal with the 2018-19 Schlumbergeras.

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¹ ("Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far away.")
I don't believe, as many people seem to, that spanking is always harmful for kids -- I and my siblings were spanked, and I don't think any of us were damaged by it -- but I'm glad to see people in the U.S. slowly drifting away from spanking to other punishments. If nothing else, if hitting a child with anything under any circumstances is Just Not Done, then that gives that much less cover to parents who would use spanking as an excuse to be physically abusive.
But then, I don't have kids and am never going to, so you shouldn't even care how I think kids should be disciplined. I'm not sure I even care how I think kids should be disciplined.
² (New International Version)
³ Which I was surprised to learn was not only not written by the Dixie Chicks, but was written by a man, Dennis Lynde.
⁴ Sometimes that happens, not just with angry and violent names but with other kinds of names too. It's probably just that one name sets an emotional tone and then names with similar associations wind up gravitating toward it, but I don't know how I'd go about proving that.
⁵ "An uncouth countryman," says the dialect dictionary. Apparently heard in the Ozarks (Missouri and Arkansas), east to Tennessee, in the 1930s.
Which, if you're getting called a hick in the Ozarks, in the 1930s, you're really fucking unsophisticated.

Schlumbergera seedlings: assorted (for a third time)

Had kind of an odd week, so I didn't make much progress on the seedling names,¹ but we can deal with half of the ones that are left, at least. Perhaps I can make up for the low number of seedlings by showing you more photos than usual?


157A Kapow

Seed parent: NOID peach

Explanation: The NOID peach's offspring have been almost entirely disappointing: many died early, the ones that didn't die have mostly not yet flowered, the few that have flowered have mostly been uninteresting. But 157A is maybe different? It flowered in the basement, which I think indicates that it really wanted to bloom,² and it's one of the few NOID peach offspring to have a nice strong color.³

Also considered: And He's A Doctor, Ching Shih, Sploosh


350A Don't Worry About It

Seed parent: 082A Strawberry Madeleine

Explanation: The initial bloom did that thing where the lower petals didn't develop all the way and remain tightly pressed against the base of the flower, which I anthropomorphized into the idea that the seedling had been unprepared to flower. Subsequent blooms have looked a lot more typical.

This name also honors someone from my personal life.

Also considered: Boketto (Japanese, means something like "staring thoughtlessly into space," or "spacing out"), Forgot The Chorus, On A Galloping Horse



434A Tell It Slant

Seed parent: 'Stephanie'

Explanation: It's an Emily Dickinson reference;⁴ mostly what I mean by it is that the flower didn't initially impress me (just another orange, how boring), but looking through the photos afterward, I was like, oh, actually that's a lot nicer than I'd given it credit for). I don't know whether subsequent blooms will be similarly-colored, so the name may seem less appropriate eventually.

Also considered: Candelabra Glow, Soft Light, Twinsies


197A Here If You Need Me

Seed parent: 'Caribbean Dancer'

Explanation: 197A looks just like so many other seedlings that it would take me fifteen minutes just to link to all the pages of all the other seedlings it looks like. And yet it's also a really good version of that particular coloration: among other things, it's flowered abundantly in October/November 2018, and the flowers are nicely-shaped and not all thrips-eaten. I don't imagine I'm ever going to need it, given so many near-duplicates, but it's nice to know that it's there if I do. Hence the name.

Also considered: Archetypal, Film At Eleven, I Just Want To Be Normal


Only four seedlings left to name, and then I can start agonizing over the 2017-18 Schlummies.⁵

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¹ Among other things, I burned a lot of time taking photos of Schlumbergera flowers. Now up to seventeen new Schlumbergera seedlings for the 2018-19 season. And only, like, two of those seventeen are interesting at all.
² Since conditions in the basement aren't really what Schlumbergeras want before blooming -- the day length is about right because the lights are on timers, but bud set is supposed to require cool night temperatures, and they never get that. One of the more interesting aspects of the Schlumbergera seedling project is the discovery that there can be a lot of variation in how fussy seedlings are about needing dark and cool conditions in order to set buds. I was expecting that breeding had been going on so long that all the variability would have been bred out by now.
³ The others being 143A Big Mama Thornton, 160 Composition In Red & Pink, 165A Assertive, and 167A East Of East St. Louis. All of which came from the same cross, along with a few white seedlings -- I'm still trying to figure out how a single cross of a peach/white plant could give me magenta/white, white/white, red/orange/white, and red/pink offspring.
042A Mary Tyler Moore would count, but it's died; 047A Pluto is very nice but I wouldn't call it a "strong" color. I'm also not positive that Pluto's even going to be Pluto-colored this year: I'm still waiting for it to rebloom.
⁴ The whole poem:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
⁵ Which aren't necessary -- strictly speaking, none of this is necessary -- but the Schlummies, like these naming posts, do serve a useful purpose. The naming posts give me a chance to focus specifically on what each seedling did well or badly, as well as providing a way to remember which one is which; the Schlummies are a chance to choose a small group of each year's seedlings to focus on when I'm deciding which ones to propagate. Without setting aside some time to choose some winners and losers at the end of each season, those decisions would be too overwhelming to make.

Schlumbergera seedlings: assorted (again)

Ready to knock down another eight seedling names in hopes of eventually maybe being able to start on the 2018-19 season? Of course you are.

374A Hi Hungry I'm Dad

Seed parent: NOID yellow (batch #1)

Explanation: Another non-yellow seedling of the NOID yellow, another comedy-adjacent name.¹

Also considered: Idée Fixe, Lawful Neutral, Undefined Expectations


252A Don't Call Me Surly

Seed parent: 025A Clownfish

Explanation: I dunno. It just seems angry to me for some reason.

Also considered: Chestburster, Loud And Clear, New Sheriff In Town


323A Arcturus

Seed parent: 'Exotic Dancer'

Explanation: Though I have still not managed to get a good answer as to what color the star Arcturus actually appears to be to the naked eye (some sources say red, some say orange; photos are no help because of how often colors are adjusted), I feel like this has to be fairly close. Also process of elimination -- when the moment came to make the decision, I liked Arcturus better than the other names I was considering. Previously considered for 056A Demons Begone, 015A Nielub, and 067B Clyde.

Also considered: Dodge The Bullet, Fighting Girlfriend, Sinclair Lewis


225A Pure Energy

Seed parent: 'Exotic Dancer'

Explanation: A previously-considered (for 011A Annie Lennox and 062B Royal Grandma) name that honors someone from my life.²

Also considered: Adrenaline, No Me Juegue, Playing With Matches


426A Epicenter

Seed parent: NOID magenta (batch #2)

Explanation: The selected photo doesn't show it very well, but in the other photos I took of this seedling, the petals were splayed in such a way that there were sort of concentric rings of color around the center of the bloom, in a way that (to my mind) sort of resembles shake maps of earthquakes, but that's probably just me. Previously considered for 420A Franceska Mann.

Also considered: Merry-Go-Round, Ornery, What About My Needs


376A In The Moment

Seed parent: NOID yellow (batch #1)

Explanation: Though Caesar Cut was very appealing, seedlings with unusual shapes are invariably much more typical the next time they bloom. (As an example, compare 379A Can't Find The World's first flower, from December 2017, to its most recent one, from October 2018.) So the name would only make sense for a very short period of time. In The Moment was the one I liked next best; it's yet another name intended to honor a person from my life.

Also considered: Caesar Cut, Tightly Wound, Up Up And Away


467A But You Might Like It

Seed parent: 082A Strawberry Madeleine

Explanation: And it's lucky for this seedling that later blooms tend to be more normal-looking, because otherwise I'd have thrown it in the garbage already. This name was previously considered for 018B Fifth-Year Senior, and the story behind it is told there. I suppose this also counts as an honorific name, though that feels weird to say: the church lady in question wasn't really a big part of my life or anything.

Also considered: More Of An Inner Beauty, Quarter To Five³


147A Lot's Wife

Seed parent: NOID peach

Explanation: Though I still have unnamed seedlings remaining, 147A was the very last seedling to bloom in the 2017-18 season. The name references the story in Genesis chapter 19, where Lot and his family were told to flee the city of Sodom before God destroyed it, and warned not to look back or stop for a moment, so they wouldn't be caught up in the destruction of the city. Lot's wife looked back at the city anyway, and was turned into a pillar of salt.

This story always bothered me as a kid, because I knew that I myself wouldn't have been able to resist looking back, and the punishment seemed so out of proportion to the offense. In adulthood, I've learned that this was probably the author of Genesis throwing in an older folk explanation for the weird rock formations in this particular area as a way to punch up the story (no superhero movies back then; they had to make their own fun), and it bothers me a lot less.

In context of the seedling, the name refers to the color (salt being mostly white) and the timing (looking back at the rest of the season even though I'm kind of rushing to get through this so we can look at the next season).

Also considered: End Transmission, Last Place You Look, Season Finale


The seedlings remaining to be named are all particularly difficult cases, for which nothing I've come up with so far has seemed quite right, so I'm all ears if anybody has suggestions. I keep suggested names around forever, so even if I don't pick your name for one of these eight, it may always come up again for some other seedling. It's happened before.⁴ They are:

157A and 172A.

174A and 197A.

350A and 421A.

434A and 470A.
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¹(Also 369A Punch Line and 375A Who's On First.)
² There are a lot of those now: 023A Stoked, 075A Pushover, 082A Strawberry Madeleine, 094A Some Clowns, 095A Perturbed, 096A I'm Really Sorry, 101A Julius Erving, 138A Jellybean Cake, 165A Assertive, 167A East Of East St. Louis, 180A Miss Emma, 187A Funny Farm, 217A Blood Frenzy, 236A Only God Can Judge Me, 290A Our Lady Of Assumption, 380A Magic Words, and 473A Je Me Souviens.
³ Quarter To Five because it was the second to last seedling of the season to bloom; the metaphor refers to the last fifteen minutes of a 9-to-5 workday.
⁴ Reader-suggested/-inspired names, so far: 067A Cyndi Lauper, 083A Psychedelic Bunny, 095B Pele's Lipstick, 130A Myrtha, and 144A Diaphanous Gown. I'd bet there are one or two others, that aren't on this list because I don't remember where their names came from.