Weirdo Loner-Type (Leuchtenbergia principis)

Leuchtenbergia principis is a lonely guy. For one thing, it's the only species in the genus Leuchtenbergia, what botanists call a monotypic species.1 For another, in its native habitat (pretty much everything in the northern half of Mexico, except the coasts), it's typically found as single individuals, often growing next to a clump of Agaves and tall grass. (I guess they're not comfortable in

Pretty picture: Rhyncholaeliocattleya Dick Smith 'Aloha Spirit'

This photo is the first orchid picture in quite a while that I thought turned out well, so I feel like I ought to write something about it, but it kind of speaks for itself, so I'm not sure what to say. I'm not crazy about the whole ruffly frilly Cattleya thing, but those colors! So pretty!


Rhyncholaeliocattleya Dick Smith 'Aloha Spirit' = Rhyncholaeliocattleya Hisako Akatsuka x

Unfinished business: Episcia-eating caterpillars

I am pleased to report that there has been a breakthrough in the whole camera-uploading-photos-to-dumb-locations business. The overall situation is still not great, alas, but that much has been settled, and this gives us hope for the future. Except where it comes to the scale-and-caterpillar part of the future, because my optimism has limits.

I do, at least, now have pictures of one of the

Excuses, excuses

Hi again.

Whatever you might have heard, I have not run off to Ecuador with everybody's donations. (I don't even speak Ecuadorian.) What's happened instead has been sort of a perfect storm of blogular interference.

• As I've mentioned before, my computer has been essentially out of memory for a few months, so it's been difficult to get photos to post to the blog.
• But -- I've gotten a new

Pretty pictures: Odontocidium Sunlight 'Pacific Sunset'

Odontocidium Sunlight 'Pacific Sunset' = Oncidium Mexico × Odontocidium Crowborough, though the orchid registry online doesn't know of the cross, so it's not clear how official this is.

Random plant event: Codonanthe serrulata

Still working on the Leuchtenbergia profile; things keep coming up and preventing me from getting as far on it as I would like. I'm hoping to finish by the end of this week.

Meanwhile, I felt bad for going so long between posts, so there's this.

I've had Codonanthe serrulata since May 2011, when I got three cuttings from a reader.


It didn't look particularly promising. And it's still not my

Pretty pictures: Ascocenda Princess Mikasa

Yeah, okay, so clearly the Leuchtenbergia profile didn't happen yesterday, either. Whoops. I've been trying to take yearbook pictures this week, which involves lots of sweating and lifting. And then it got cold at night on Monday and Tuesday so I had to move some plants inside for the evening and then back out again in the morning, which also involved some sweating and lifting. And then we made a

Random plant events: Anthurium seedlings #59 and #282

Thanks to the generosity of four readers, I now have enough money to buy an entire used computer, and get most of a dental checkup/cleaning. So that's good. (More than just "good," really -- both of those things have been nagging small worries in the back of my mind for a long time, then in the last month or so became screaming huge worries directly in front of my face, so that's a couple fewer

This is not the special post.

In my previous post, I said would not be posting over the weekend, because I was trying to get a special post ready for today.

But I have failed.

Some of the problem is that I have almost filled up the memory of my eleven-year-old computer (37.2 GB capacity, 1.51 GB remaining), which makes photo-editing more complicated and time-consuming, for reasons I predict you will not care about. The

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Belle Hougue Point

The International Orchid Register website and Google don't agree on the spelling here; Google says it's Belle Hogue Point, and the register says Hougue.

So of course the tag at the show said something that wasn't either of those options. ("Belle House Point") I went with the IOR version, on the theory that they're more likely to proofread. (If not, please don't tell me.)


Phragmipedium Belle

Random plant event: Hoya carnosa

I have had at least one Hoya carnosa at all times, for the last seven years. My best guess is that I was averaging about three or four at any moment; the current count is five. In all twenty-five(-ish) of those accumulated Hoya-carnosa-years, not once has any of them ever attempted to bloom. H. lacunosa, sure, all the time. H. bella, quite a bit lately. But never H. carnosa.

Until now.


Which,

Six Plants I'm Currently Mad At

This turns out to be a pretty competitive field (wait'll you see the Dishonorable Mentions), but I've narrowed it down to six. By "I'm Currently Mad At," I mean "the idea of throwing the plant away entirely and never attempting it again has crossed my mind," though that's only a serious possibility with three of the six plants on the list.

1. Phalaenopsis NOID
I am so tired of orchids and all

Pretty picture: Cattleya Purple Cascade

This is the most severe example of my inability to get close to certain orchids at the show. I find these flowers really interesting, and I had hoped that I'd get a usable photo of them from far away, but now that I look at this, I'm not sure that I did. I suppose it serves the purpose okay, but I'm not going to be entering it in any photography competitions or anything.


Although it's tagged

Saturday morning frog pictures

So a month ago, when I posted pictures of a frog I happened to see in the Ananas comosus 'Mongo,' I said I thought the frog in question was only passing through, since it wasn't there the following day. Since then, I've seen some identical-looking frogs hanging around the yard, on a few occasions, so maybe we do have a permanent resident.

Mostly I've seen them (or him, or her) when I had to move

Unfinished business: Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold'

I'd thought maybe, but it looks like I don't get a repeat of the Clivia flowers this year. Ah, well.

The seedlings are doing all kinds of different things. Some just sit there. Some get periodically covered with a white fungus. Some have leaves. I started the first batch in a glass jar: I put in soil and some water, microwaved it to heat and sterilize the soil (which apparently didn't work,

The Black Bees

I mentioned in June that I've been watching very intently for honeybees this year. I'm not doing it for any particular reason; I've just been curious, what with all the talk of colony collapse disorder, about whether honeybees visit the yard, and if so how many, and so forth.

For a very long time, the closest I got was the bee-mimic fly (picture at the end of the above link). At some point in

Question for the Hive Mind: Roadside Weeds / Wildflowers

The second and third of these are technically not roadside plants, but the first one is:



I don't recall ever seeing it before, but they're everywhere all of a sudden.

UPDATE: it's a Vernonia (ironweed), possibly V. baldwinii. Thanks to Claude and joeym.

The other two plants were in a heavily wooded park in Iowa City about a week ago. The first, I'm fairly sure, is some kind of Arisaema. I

Pretty picture: Dendrobium Frosty Dawn 'Yen'

I've spent the last five days moving plants in at night and out in the morning -- we had a run of temperatures below 60F/16C. A lot of the plants that are outside will handle that fine (Agave, Strelitzia, Breynia, Amorphophallus), but a few won't so well (Coffea, Aloe, Synadenium, Araucaria), so they have to go back and forth. There are also some (Ananas, Furcraea, Euphorbia, Pachypodium) that

And then

And then the scale came back. In a room where I hadn't seen them previously (husband's office; the plant was the parent Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana). Posting may be a bit off and on for a while, as I try to determine the extent of the problem and figure out what to do about it.

I'm also setting aside some time to pound my head on my desk, curse the day I was born, and that sort of

Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica

Blogging in a hurry today, again, because I've realized that the post I'd planned for today is going to require me to get some more pictures; this was also the problem with the post I'd planned for Wednesday. Things do still keep happening, though, some more impressive than others. For example, my Sansevieria cylindrica. I didn't have it when it only had one leaf, though I assume that stage