Anthurium ("Red Velvet Cake" x "Zara") x magnificum "Mickey"

This is a rematch of sorts - same seed parent I've used before, this time paired against a plant with actual history behind it.

The seed parent, "Red Velvet Cake" x "Zara", came home with me from the IAS Show & Sale in September 2023, off the Doctor Jeffrey Block sales booth, at a price I don't care to revisit. It sulked as a runt for a year straight, tested my patience, then finally took off after a good deal of babying. It's a mother plant now, throwing emergent leaves that swing from soft pink-brown to something closer to an arterial-wound red depending on the day. It's already lent itself to a few other hybrids around the greenhouse, and this is one of them.

The pollen parent deserves more than my usual few lines. This is A. magnificum "Mickey", cloned from a plant likely wild-harvested some 80 years ago. As it was told to me, Mickey Carmichael, a longtime Miami-area orchid grower, kept the original in the foyer of her nursery for years. Enid Offolter of NSE Tropicals saw it about 20 years ago, when the plant was already thought to be pushing 60, and left with a cutting. She later donated a piece of her now-massive clone to the International Aroid Society's Annual Member Dinner and Auction, where I got into a bidding war over it and, thankfully, came out ahead. A. magnificum is thought to be a complex of 20-plus subspecies or ecotypes, and plenty circulate under names like "Norte" or "Silver." I'll take "Mickey" over most of them.

So this seedling carries a runt-turned-mother-plant on one side and eight decades of Miami orchid-world provenance on the other. No pressure, little one.