Monday, August 22, 2016

Anthurium no. 0339 "Johnny Lufschachi"

Best thing about Johnny is his foliage. Or at least that was his best feature while he was still alive: he got thrown out a couple months after these photos were taken, because his roots were rotting, or poorly anchored, or something. Not sure what the cause was exactly, but his problem was that he was falling more and more out of the pot.1

I suppose now, his best feature is his name, though I'm guessing the joke is lost on anyone under the age of 40.

The flower was pitiful enough that I'm not too upset about the loss: small, thrips-scarred, boring color.

The foliage was really nice, though. Few blemishes, dark green, large: the plant looked really good last September, when the first bud appeared.

September 2015.

The first bud aborted, and it seems like a couple others must have as well, because it took eight months from first bud to first finished bloom. By that point, a number of leaves had come off. Can't remember why, but there are only two possibilities, neither good. Either the plant dropped a bunch of leaves spontaneously, or I saw scale and was hoping it was isolated to just a few leaves, so I pulled them off.

May 2016.

Johnny didn't reproduce, and won't be passing on any of his qualities, good or bad, so I suppose he's irrelevant, but I like to be thorough. There's a better seedling coming up tomorrow.


1 Sometimes this happens. Usually the precipitating event is that I pull the plant out of the pot accidentally, breaking roots in the process, and it fails to grow new roots to replace the ones that got broken. In cases like Johnny's, though, it seems like there were never many roots in the first place. I suppose root quantity and quality are genetically variable, just like everything else, so there will be root winners and root losers.

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