Anthurium dressleri x magnificum "Mickey"

dressleri x magnificum "Mickey"

The seed parent is a pickup from Scott Cohen, and his handwritten tags don't go any deeper than that. It's Anthurium dressleri. That's it. Sometimes that's all you need.

The pollen parent, though, comes with a story I like telling more than is probably reasonable. This magnificum ecotype was wild-harvested something like 80 years ago, and for decades it lived in the foyer of an orchid nursery in the Miami area, tended by Mickey Carmichael, a prominent grower in that world for as long as anyone can remember. Enid Offolter of NSE Tropicals saw it about 20 years ago, when the plant was already thought to be at least 60 years old, and left with a cutting because of course she did. Enid eventually donated a cutting of her own now-enormous clone to the International Aroid Society's Annual Member Dinner & Auction, where I got into a bidding war over it and, thankfully, came out the winner.

A. magnificum is thought to be a complex of 20 or more subspecies or ecotypes, and plenty of them circulate in trade under names like "Norte" or "Silver." I'm partial to this one. Putting a plant with that much history behind it onto a straightforward dressleri with no pedigree at all felt like the right kind of mismatch.