Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Bulbophyllum sumatranum




I brought this plant in the summer of 2011 from a vendor in Hawaii.  It arrived in excellent condition with nice plump pseudobulbs and immaculate leaves.  I put it in my terrace and waited for flowers, and waited, and waited.  The plant stayed the same for the rest of the year.  Given that it was an adult plant I had assumed that it would bloom in the summer as do many Bulbophyllum.  I gave routine care to this plant for the rest of the year with little evidence of any effect, good or ill.  In late April 2012 I started watering it almost daily with a weak fertilizer solution.  I did this because almost all of my Bulbophyllum start producing new growths during March or April which locally is the second half of the dry season.  In late April sumatranum finally started producing a new growth.  The new growth came out of a pseudobulb that is part of a chain of pseudobulbs that escaped from the pot and are growing in the air.  Nevertheless because of the frequent watering an local high humidity it is growing quite well.  In the second week of May I was delighted to find that an inflorescence was growing out of one of the older pseudobulbs.  In May 16 the flower opened.  So far the plant has only one active growing point and one inflorescence but I expect that as the season progresses more vegetative, and hopefully, floral buds will start to develop.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It seems like it has a viral disease. I judge it through its color.

Ricardo said...

The color pattern of spots and yellow areas in the flower are not indicative of disease. They are the normal coloring of the flowers of this species.