Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Pretty picture: Tetratonia Dark Prince

The purge of the 4-inch Anthuriums has come and gone, and the losses were much less severe than I'd expected,1 largely because I'd underestimated the degree to which the 4-inch plants had been purged already, but also because many of them were still young enough plants that they hadn't developed any serious problems yet. Is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? *shrug* Who knows.

I haven't really tried to purge the 3-inch Anthuriums -- I threw out four plants on 3 January, out of 398 (so 99% survival), but I didn't have the time to examine each seedling individually and make decisions. As I watered, I just threw out seedlings that were obviously in bad shape, which is what I should be doing all the time anyway.2

In any case. Discarding the 4-inch Anthuriums was less painful than expected,3 but the 3-inch purge hasn't really happened yet. And there's your purge report.

Now, the orchid of the day:


We've seen Tetratonia Dark Prince before, in 2014. That post complements this one well, since I got close-up and wide shots this year, and a medium-distance photo then.


Tetratonia Dark Prince is allegedly easy to grow (Ref.), and supposedly blooms a couple times a year for months at a time (Ref.). Though one of those sites is trying to sell you a plant, so some skepticism is probably warranted.

Tetratonia Dark Prince = Broughtonia sanguinea x Tetramicra canaliculata (Ref.)

The patterning on the lip appears to be mostly a Tetramicra trait; see the photos of T. canaliculata near the bottom of this page.

Wikipedia has a page for Broughtonia sanguinea that strikes me as sort of interesting.

Both parents of Tetratonia Dark Prince are Caribbean; Broughtonia sanguinea is native to Jamaica, and Tetramicra canaliculata is fairly widely distributed: Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Hispaniola, Florida,4 and the Lesser Antilles.

Hoping to get a Schlumbergera seedling post up before the next orchid; the delay is mainly because I'm having difficulty settling on names, and difficulty settling on a process for generating names. One seedling had a perfect name show up immediately, so I can write about that immediately(-ish); for the rest of them, I'm keeping a list of plausible names for each seedling, and I guess adding to the lists until I have a certain number of good ones, and then I'll agonize and choose. This means I'm not going to be blogging them in the order they bloomed, like I did in previous years. You won't notice the difference, but it's going to bother me.

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1 (127 seedlings to start with, 33 discarded, 94 kept, 74% survival)
2 I don't always bother because sometimes I'm having to rush through the watering, and throwing out seedlings is a lot more of a pain in the ass than you'd think, because there are so many spreadsheets to update afterward.
3 Most painful loss of this round was probably 0072 Beth Rowe, which bloomed well and had interesting-colored flowers, but also had thrips damage, pretty clear Xanthomonas, and possibly also scale. I tried, but couldn't rationalize keeping Beth.
0515 Diane Torr was hard too. Her blooms never quite lived up to their potential: one bloom had, like, one or two good days, which I was lucky enough to catch in a photo, but she didn't bloom a lot, most of the blooms never had a photogenic day due to thrips damage, occasionally spathes would refuse to open, and the leaves had a lot of thrips damage as well. Really interesting color, though.
4 In my notes, I have a question mark after Florida; the claim is debated.


2 comments:

Betsy said...

I watched the global warming episode of Futurama today and it reminded me of one of my favorite blog posts.

LIGHTNING DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

Paul said...

Love the lip,on that orchid.