Anthurium ("Michelle" x "Zara") x ("Red Velvet Cake" x "Zara")

(Michelle x Zara) x (Red Velvet Cake x Zara)

There's a joke in here somewhere about incest, but I'll let the plants make it for me - both parents share Zara as a partner, which makes this batch something like a family reunion nobody RSVP'd to. The seed parent was a roadside find off Krome Ave, summer 2023, tucked in among orchids and platycerium at a nursery that clearly didn't know what it had - still wearing the old 'Nurturing Nature' tag with a QR code that hasn't worked in years, a cast-off from the same mid-COVID Doc Block releases everyone either has three of or pretends they never bought. It's a good plant regardless of its humble parking-lot origins, throwing deep red-pink emergents and genuinely nice veination, which it can thank Tim Anderson's 'Wonder Boy' for, sitting somewhere behind both its seed and pollen donors.

The pollen parent I paid too much for, at the IAS Show and Sale in September 2023, straight from the Doctor Jeffrey Block booth itself, no roadside markdown this time. It sulked as a runt for a year before finally deciding to grow, and now it's a proper mother plant, shifting its emergent color from soft pink-brown to something closer to an open wound depending on the weather's mood that week. It's already lent itself to a few other hybrids in the greenhouse, so this cross is really just it doing what it does best.