Friday, September 1, 2017

Anthurium nos. 1547 "Shavonna Brooks" and 1546 "Gia GiaVanni"

So it's come to this: I have to start doubling up on the Anthurium seedling posts, because covering a single seedling every other day has led to me getting further and further behind.1 I'll still give really special seedlings posts of their own, but the stuff we've seen over and over doesn't really need the individual attention I've been giving them. So let's look at Shavonna.


I had been somewhat excited about Shavonna when the bud was developing, because the outside of the bud (the back of the spathe) was sort of purple-red, and I thought the spathe would wind up being purple-red as well, but no. Plain red, like we've seen dozens of times before.

The seed parent isn't 0234 Ross Koz; it's the NOID red. But Shavonna has some characteristics in common with Ross -- large, flat leaves, and a certain manner of reflexing its spathe2 -- which makes me wonder if Shavonna's pollen parent might be Ross.



The thrips seem to be getting more of a foothold with the more recent leaves, unfortunately.


So a disappointing color, but nice leaves, and this is only the first bloom, and it was willing to bloom while still in a 3-inch pot, so possibly it'll get better? Somehow?

1546 Gia GiaVanni has a better shot at sticking around, not because I need another borderline orange-pink,


but because the foliage is interestingly-proportioned,



and the plant as a whole seems more thrips-resistant than average. (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's thrips damage in the bottom right of the second leaf photo, but we've seen worse. The spot in the top left of the first leaf photo, on the other hand, is heat damage from touching a fluorescent light bulb, and is totally my fault.)


The second bloom from Gia somehow ripped itself in the process of unfurling. I mean, spathes get ripped all the time, but that's almost always my fault. It's disconcerting for the plants to be ripping themselves up.


Still, though, Gia's likely to have the opportunity to bloom several more times, because the leaves are interesting and the blooms aren't bad.

1546 Gia GiaVanni and 1547 Shavonna Brooks are both from sibling group FK, and are either full or half-siblings.

The real3 Shavonna Brooks is a drag queen from Atlanta; she has a YouTube channel that I didn't have time to investigate fully, but the music on this one is great (it's kind of a slow build, but great):


Gia GiaVanni is based in New Orleans at the moment (as far as I could determine, anwyay); the audio quality on her videos tends to be better than most YouTube drag videos, but the videos are all vertical and tiny. I'd love to see what the Ursula the Sea Witch outfit in this video actually looks like, for example. This one isn't really my thing musically,


but at least the audio's not full of people shouting, and you can see her face.

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1 (also, the Schlumbergera season actually has begun already; so far it's just the NOID white, but the seedlings will follow. I need to rearrange the plant room so I can bring up some more seedlings from the basement and give them a chance to bloom this year.)
2 Though it seems to be partially determined by the environment, different seedlings have different ways of flipping their spathes backward, depending on which part of the margin tries to flip back and how hard it works at it.
The ideal seedling doesn't reflex at all, like 0231 Rhea Listick or 1181 Tajma Stetson:

Some of them only pull back slightly, and then only at the "ears," like 0244 Sara Problem and 0330 Faye Quinette:

Some reflex only at the sides, and the spathe sort of makes a hinge in the center, like 0234 Ross Koz and 1547 Shavonna Brooks,

Some reflex at the sides, but so strongly that the spathe basically rolls itself up into a tube, like 1171 Chris of Hur:

A surprisingly large number of spathes curl back only at the very tip, e.g. 0361 Willam Belli and 0565 MysterE:

A few pull the whole spathe back, often tearing in the process, like pulling an umbrella inside-out; here are 0213 Nadya Falt and 0282 Dave Trading:

And then some give the impression of having no plan whatsoever, like 0002 Alexis Mateo and 0283 Anne Pursand, though I think this might actually be a subset of the "tube" ones, where the spathe got in its own way so much that it failed to actually form a tube:

Though Alexis looks like she might be trying for a hinge instead.
3 (well, "real," anyway)


Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Anthurium no. 1249 "Celeda"

The human Celeda has me very confused; Wikipedia says she was born Victoria Sharpe, which suggests that she was AFAB,1 and yet Wikipedia also says she's a drag performer, and doesn't include her on the list of faux queens. I can't figure out anything about what kind of drag she did/does,2 or whether she performs in drag at all. Not even 100% certain which pronouns she prefers; Wikipedia says "she/her" but this site uses "he/him." Granted, it's not really any of my business, so I'm happy to let the matter drop, but it's weird not to be able to find any clarification.

In any case, everyone is much clearer on what Celeda does: she sings.3 She's even gotten hits on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart, which, okay, that's a pretty narrow category, but -- have you gotten a hit on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart? I didn't think so. I like "Let the Music Use You Up:"


The seedling is a little more straightforward.


Smallish pink-lavender / light yellow, which is reminiscent of some of the seedlings from the 400s and 500s.4 Like most of the 400s/500s seedlings, the bloom didn't look very good for very long; the spathe flipped backward the day after the above photo was taken,


and the inflorescence was dead not long after that. The foliage is even less impressive:


Even without the thrips damage, it wouldn't be great.


So the only thing the seedling does particularly well is the bloom color. It's not a color combination that comes up very often, and it's pretty: a large, blistered spathe with the same coloration would be gorgeous. The problem is that I'm not sure Celeda's capable of producing seeds or pollen, given how quickly the first bloom faded.

Even if it could breed, I'd rather not see the genes for small spathes that reflex really quickly spread in the population of seedlings. So I'm torn about whether to keep her or discard her. My gut feeling is that probably she's going to be one of those painful cases, when I have a seedling with one or two really good traits that I nevertheless wind up having to discard anyway, but I'll let her try to bloom again before making the decision. Maybe she can save herself.

Celeda is from seedling group CB (seed parent 'White Gemini,' sow date 4 to 12 October 2014). It hasn't been a great group so far:

0835 Brenda Dharling (light pink / pink-purple) was thrown out because of scale, officially, but it was going to get thrown out for one reason or another eventually because it was terrible.
• 0886 Zaria Baudit (purple-pink / light yellow) has similar coloration to Celeda but is darker and a bit more robust. Could be a keeper.
0892 Eddie Izzard (pink / pink) hasn't impressed me at all; he's still around, but not for much longer.
0897 Sylvia Womansune (red / purple-red) is a little boring, but not terrible. Maybe a keeper.
1095 Carolina Pineforest (white / white) has already died, from rot or being partly uprooted or both.

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1 (assigned female at birth)
2 (it's also unclear whether she's still performing currently)
3 This complicated the attempts to find out about the pronouns and etc., because most of the search results are for sites hosting her music, which don't generally have any information about her as an artist. So there's a lot more stuff to look at than for most drag queens, but most of it isn't relevant to Celeda personally.
4 E.g. 0428 Helen Bach, 0515 Diane Torr, and 0534 Celia Putty.


Monday, August 28, 2017

Anthurium no. 0808 "Kent C. Forshette"

A small group of seedlings of 0234 Ross Koz -- which produced purple-red spathes with contrasting yellow spadices -- have bloomed in various shades of pinkish-orange and orangish-pink; Kent1 is one of those.2


And that's nice, I guess. I mean, it's not unique or breathtaking, but it's pretty. Kent does have the advantage over most of the pink-orange-pink seedlings in that the spathe color doesn't fade as much over time, and he seems surprisingly thrips-resistant, considering that thrips damage shows up incredibly well on light-colored spathes like this. So we could have done a lot worse. The foliage is also just to the positive side of meh --


-- and the plant as a whole is very full, with lots of suckering. If nothing else, Kent is one of the few seedlings of 0234 Ross Koz whose leaves actually somewhat resemble Ross's.3


Also, although the spathes do flex backwards as the inflorescence ages, they do so to a much smaller degree than a lot of the other seedlings.


So probably at least a short-term keeper; I don't know about the long-term.

In (literally!) related news, Kent's full- or half-sibling 1038 Adlai Lowe is in the process of producing a second bloom. One hopes. The first bloom was so tiny that I wasn't sure it should even count, and it started at least one other bud but aborted it (which was just as well, since that bud was in a similar location and would probably also have had a difficult time opening its spathe), but the current one seems likely to produce a normal-looking inflorescence. I don't expect the new bloom will be especially interesting -- it's all but certain to be a smallish, run-of-the-mill red/yellow -- but it'd still be nice to have, for the sake of completeness.

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1 (The name is a roller-derby name, not a drag name, by the way.)
2 The others: 0805 Triana Hill, 0813 Arya Reddy, and 1721 Leonid the Magnificent.
1344 Boeff Stroganoff has the pink-orange coloring, sort of, though it was so poorly executed that I'm not sure it's actually what the seedling is genetically programmed to do. We'll find out when it produces the second bloom.
3 Ross's leaves are distinguished mainly by being large and flat, without a lot of conspicuous veining.