The Orchid a book by Lauren Gardiner and Phillip Cribb, a beautiful book with 40 botanical prints

 

This book is my birthday present to myself.   Why I brought it?  Because its beautiful.  The authoritative text is the frosting on top of the cake.  Along with the book there are 40 botanical prints.  The orchids in the prints are described in the text.  The prints are suitable for framing. 

Bulbophyllum maximum (Lindl.) Rchb. f. 1861, was ID in the exhibit as Bulb. oxypetalum

I saw this orchid in the 2016 Puerto Rico orchid society show in the Rio Piedras Botanical Garden.  This plant has a strange otherworldly look with its large flattened inflorescences on the sides of which the tiny flowers are produced.  Given that the flowers were pretty much invisible from a distance, I have to give thanks to the PR Orchid Society which gave me permission to enter the exhibit to give a close up to the tiny flowers.  The plant body of this orchid is hardly distinct from many other Bulbophyllum species, but the inflorescences are outstandingly weird looking in a genus where weird infloresences are common.   The plant is mounted on a tree fern plaque and is doing well.  The massive inflorescences dwarf the plant body and, to the uninitiated, look utterly unorchid like.  

Bulbophyllum patens King 1896, an orchid with upward facing flowers

Photographed at a friend's shade house.  This Asian orchid need high humidity and hot temperatures to grow well.  The flowers open facing upwards.

Bulbophyllum Doris Dukes (Bulb. fascinator x Bulb. rothschildianum)

I saw this Bulbophyllum hybrid in the Mayaguez Orchid Festival of September 2013.    It is a hybrid of Bulb. fascinator and Bulb. rothschildianum.  It produces pretty red flower that look intermediate between the parents.  Both species are relatively easy to grow in Puerto Rico although they are not often seen outside the collections of specialists growers.  

Bulbophyllum rothschildianum (O’Brien) J.J. Smith (1912) , not difficult to grow in Puerto RIco, but susceptible to scales

This species comes from India and Thailand.¹  I brought some small seedlings about a decade ago.  They proved to be easy to care for and grew well under the climatic conditions (warm) that are prevalent in my local area.  Unfortunately the plants turned out to be vulnerable to infestation by hard brown scale.  The plants were successfully treated for this insect pest but they apparently suffered considerably and were weakened by the scales.  Scales are an insidious and persistent pest that needs constant vigilance to keep under control.

My plants spent several years without blooming.  The flowers in the photos of this post are the first ones since the infestation.  My plants come from seedlings that were the product of crossing two plants, not from meristem cloning of a selected plant.  As a result my two plants produce somewhat different flowers.  One produced mostly red flowers whose petals at times separate.  The other produces flowers that are variable and can be solid red, stripped in red and green and even have one red sepal and one green/red stripped sepal in the same plant.

The flowers in this blooming of my plant are few and small compared with the inflorescences of an awarded clone that is in optimum conditions.  However I expect that in coming years my plant will grow stronger and better.    A selected clone of this species can have lateral sepals measuring from 13.5 to 15 cm, hopefully my plants will some day approach this size.¹

¹Siegerist, Emly S. 2001. Bulbophyllums and their allies: A grower’s guide

A Mesospinidium sp,?

I saw this plant in a garden in Mindo, Ecuador.   My best guess at the genus of this orchid is Mesospinidium.  It is said to be closely related to Ada.¹  The flower in the photo is not totally opened, which doesn't help with getting an identification.

¹Zelenko H. et al. 2002.  Orchids, The pictorial encyclopedia of Oncidium

Odontoglossum halli Lindley 1837, in Ecuador

I saw this plant in the orchid house of the Botanical Garden of Quito, Ecuador.  It is found in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.  This species is part of the Epidendroides group inside the group of orchids related to Oncidium.¹   There were plants of this species inside and outside the orchid house.  The plant growing outside in the trunk of a tree, growing under shade had more flowers.  The plant growing inside the orchid house was sitting in the ground and exposed to a much higher level of light.    The flowers of the two plants I photographed were subtly different, the one outside had lips that were not flat, the one in the orchid house had a flat lip, the marking and the coloring of the flowers were also slightly different.

  

¹Zelenko H. et al. 2002.  Orchids, The pictorial encyclopedia of Oncidium

Maxillaria sanderiana Reichenbach f. ex Sander 1888, at the Botanical Garden in Quito, Ecuador

I saw this plant in the orchid house of the Botanical Garden of Quito, Ecuador.   Although this orchid was not identified with a tag, the flowers resemble the flowers of Maxillaria sanderiana that are in my books.  Max. sanderiana is native of Ecuador and Peru, where it is epiphytic or lithophytic on stony slopes.¹   The flowers of this species are variable in the extent of purple around the base of the floral segments, and the size of the lip.²  This orchid was in a raised bed composed of coarse gravel, if there was a pot buried in the gravel it was impossible to say.

¹La Croix, I. F.  2008. The new encyclopedia of orchids: 1500 species in cultivation

²Zelenko, H., Bermudez, P. 2009.  Orchid species of Peru

Bulbophyllum blumei also know as B. masdevaliacum

Close up of the lip of the flower, it is mobile.

This Bulbophyllum is found from west Malasya to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific ocean.  SInce local conditions resemble its natural habitat it grows very well in my garden.  Perhaps this is both a blessing and a curse.  It quickly escapes from pots and posts and baskets, even relatively large ones.  If you allow the plant to grow entirely out of the pot, with all its pseudobulbs out in the air, it can deteriorate and die, this almost happened to my plant as I grew complacent about it.  It blooms frequently, in fact it will bloom and bloom and bloom, even if the plant is not in good shape.  It can produce a big clump of growths if given good care.  The only fault I find to this plant is its tendency to grow out in the air, away from whatever place you have planted it.   

In the above photo you can see the plant growing out of the dish all the while blooming riotously.

Media:  Has grown equally well in fine bark and on tree fern

Potting:  it grew very well in a ten inch shallow dish and bloomed constantly.  Unfortunately it grew out of the dish and into space relatively fast.

Watering:  During the summer this plant gets rain every single day in the afternoon, the media stays constantly wet for months.  During the dry season, if it is not growing it gets a soaking once a week or a bit more frequently if the bulbs start to become furrowed.

Humidity: The local weather provides the right amount of humidity for this plant most of the year.  Humidity locally fluctuates between 70% and 90% during the day.  At the height of the dry season humidity might go down to 50% for a few hours a day but climbs over 70 at night.  At the height of the wet season it can stay close to 100% during the night.

Fertilizing: A fertilizer with a high nitrogen content,  two times a week when it is producing new growths.  I stop fertilizing when the new growths achieve mature size.  I don’t’ fertilize if the plant is not producing either new growths or roots.

Light: It gets bright light, it is with my Cattleyas, it gets full sun early in the morning and the rest of the day it is under the shade of trees.  It is not in deep shade.

Temperature: From 95 F high day to 75 F at night during the summer, 80F to 60F during the night in winter.

Care: Under my conditions, this plant thrives with routine care.

Pests:  None so far, insects have not attacked the plant, it is in a place innacesible to slugs.  Black rot has been an issue when transplanting pieces to new media, it usually starts when one of the leaves of the piece gets damaged.  For some reason this never happens with established plants.

Porroglossum amethystinum a tiny and yet very weird orchid from Ecuador

When I first saw this little orchid I was totally stumped as to what orchid genus it could belong.  My ignorance can be excused on the basis that I had never previously seen an orchid of the genus Porroglossum.  These orchids are known for the particularity that they have a sensitive lip that retracts into the flower when touched.  The movement is triggered by an insect which is forced the lip’s action into contact with the plant pollinia.  There are a few specialists orchid growers in the United States that keep Porroglossum species but I have never seen this one before.  The flowers are lovely but small, the inflorescence is quite long in comparison with the flower size.  Because of the many other orchids with larger flowers in the Cabañas Armonia site I almost missed this one.   I saw this plant in the town of Mindo Ecuador.

Erythrodes hirtella, a Puerto Rican terrestrial orchid that is inconspicuous to a fault

Erythrodes hirtella, inflorescence

Plant body, note the shiny leaves with characteristic venation

Another view of the inflorescence

The orchid Erythrodes hirtella is one of those orchids that is so small, so unorchid-like and so inconspicuous that you could live for years next to a population of these plants and never realize that there were orchids nearby.   This happened to me with this species.  In fact I am sure I would have never noticed it if it had not forced itself on my attention.  Living in the middle of a forest, where it can rain every day for months on end, means that if you have any kind of plant in a pot you have to wage a constant war against invading ferns, melastomaceae, figs and all kind of invasive weeds that feel that the delicate, pampered and well fed denizen of the pot can be displaced by a more aggressive grower.  So I have to constantly weed the pots of face the loss of my plants.  One day meanwhile engaged in the unending weeding I was struck by the peculiar pattern of veining in the leaves of a small weed that had grown in the pot of one of my lilies.  The veining pattern, typically monocotyledonean was suspiciously orchid like.  I decided to spare the intruder and to keep it under observation.  Although initially excited by the mysterious intruder, a search of the literature quickly made clear that the orchid would probably belong to a species that produced small unshowy flowers.

When the plant did bloom the flowers were, as predicted small and unremarkable.  However the blooming did afford me the opportunity to document this species for my photo collection of Puerto Rican orchids.  Once I had become familiar with this plant I spotted others growing in the forest floor in scattered locations near my home.  This species is not in cultivation except perhaps accidentally.  It is the living embodiment of the old dictum “an orchid only of interest to botanists”.  I observed the plant for some time after it bloomed and set seed.  After the seed was dispersed the plant started to deteriorate and it died almost completely.  Some tiny pieces of stem remained alive and started to grow back, but by then my interest in this species had run its course.  The small stem pieces were relocated into a suitable habitat into the forest to live or die in their own terms as nature goes through its yearly cycle.