Thursday, March 12, 2015

Anthuriums no. 0083, 0555 and 0556

Anthurium no. 0555 "Mystique Summers Madison" bloomed quite a bit earlier than Anthurium no. 0556 "Frank Lee Grande," but they're both divisions from #0083 "Carmen Adairya," and it looks like they are probably even clones of Carmen.1

Mystique bloomed first:


This was pleasant enough, I guess. I was a little disappointed about the amount of thrips damage,2 but the pale pink color, combined with the light yellow-orange spadix, was nice enough. (I'd only seen that combination of colors once previously, on #0214 "Anita Knapp," who also had a lot of thrips damage.3)

Frank followed about three weeks later, and I was initially excited because the spathe looked like it was going to be less chewed up:


but by the time it actually opened, it was worse than Mystique's:


Since these photos were taken, Mystique's spadix has darkened, and she's now a pink / pink; it remains to be seen what Frank will do, but I'm expecting the same. I don't know if I'll ever be able to say for certain, but it looks to me like both were probably suckers of #0083 "Carmen Adairya," and consequently all three plants are clones of one another. Here's the side-by-side comparison:

Top: #0083 "Carmen Adairya." Middle: #0555 "Mystique Summers Madison." Bottom: #0556 "Frank Lee Grande."

Making allowances for the fact that the blooms were photographed at different ages, I'd say they're similar enough to be plausible as clones. If they're merely siblings, well, they're freakishly similar siblings.

If I could just do something about the thrips, they'd all be very pretty plants. Carmen has photographed really beautifully before. Just need to figure out something to do that won't freak all the plants out.

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1 When I divided some of the plants last April, I couldn't distinguish easily between multiple seedlings planted together in the same pot, and single individuals that just produced lots of baby plants ("suckers") from the original stem. Older varieties of Anthurium were somewhat selected for high suckering, to make mass-production easier, but now tissue culture can give you as many identical plants as you want without having to wait for the parent plant to produce suckers, so nobody cares whether plants sucker or not.
Which means that some of my seedlings sucker a bunch, and some of them sucker hardly at all, and it can be difficult to tell which is which, even if I take the time to brush away the dirt and see how they're connected to one another. (Suckers arise from the roots, not from the stem, so a sucker can look a lot like a small seedling that's just happened to grab onto the roots of another, larger plant.)
Even when they're not suckers, the way I do things here means that plants from the same original pot are probably from the same cross, so they should have a family resemblance whether they're identical or not. Which makes it that much tougher to determine whether they're suckers / clones or just siblings.
2 Supposedly thrips prefer yellow blooms and plant parts, but the ones around here seem more inclined to go for light pink, the lighter the better. Though as far as I can recall, I've never had any problem with them on "White Gemini," which is actually white. Possibly it's spared because it's in a different part of the house.
I don't think it's just a matter of the lighter colors showing damage better, though I suppose it could be. Haven't really done a formal survey of the pictures.
3 #0214 "Anita Knapp:"


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