Dendrobium farmeri, a significant blooming six months after its blooming season.

My plants of Dendrobium farmeri blooming season is in March and April.   Their blooming pattern is fairly predictable, the plants produce a number of inflorescences in March, and then about a month later, they produce a second blooming.   Not all plants bloom that way, in my area Dendrobium farmeri albiflorum produces a single flush of inflorescences and that’s it for the year. 

Sometimes the plants that produce pink tinged flowers produce single inflorescences long after the blooming season has passed.  These inflorescences are produced erratically and don’t seem to conform to any blooming schedule.  But in 2013 my largest plant produced four inflorescences in September, the largest blooming event ever outside its normal blooming season.  This is not the only plant to bloom six months after its normal blooming season, a large Coelogyne parishii also produced a few inflorescences in September.  

What really sets these blooming events apart from the ones that occur in Spring is the fact that all the inflorescences came from latent buds low on the stems of older pseudobulbs.  In the normal blooming season the inflorescences come from the highest bud in the previous year growths.  This means the inflorescence is produced just under the leaves of the stem.  The autumn inflorescences in my plants were all produced from buds halfway down on the stems of old pseudobulbs.