Encyclia alata [Bateman]Schlechter 1914

I brought this plant many years ago, at a small stall in a local Mall.  It would produce gigantic pseudobulbs, easily avocado sized.  The inflorescences were massive, at one time one produced one hundred flowers at the same time.  Unfortunately I lost it to root rot when I moved to a place high in the mountains that was way more humid than this plant can tolerate.  It differed from almost all the Enc. elata I have seen in cultivation in that the flower segments were longer, with curled back sides and the flowers were larger.

Lycaste xytriophora Linden & Rchb. f. 1872

It is always a treat to see Lycastes on display locally as only very few people cultivate them in the island of Puerto Rico.  This may change as showy, large flowered, warm tolerant hybrids become available.    Warm growing Lycastes grow well in Puerto Rico but apparently they are not popular among the local growers.

Anolis cristatellus, in the RIo Abajo forest, Puerto Rico

Encyclia Renate Schmidt (Ency. Orchid Jungle x Enc. alata), May 2015 blooming

This plant struggled for a few years with a stubborn scale insect infestation.  Last year, thought a combination of strategies, I was able to completely rid this plant of the pesky brown scales that had stunted its growth.  The 2015 flowers are the largest and more numerous it has ever produced.  It still has a way to go before it matches the size of the inflorescences of its parents but it is getting there.

Cyclopogon elatus (Sw.) Schltr. 1919, a native orchid in a shaded ravine in the Rio Abajo forest

Today I visited a shaded ravine deep inside the Rio Abajo forest, near the center of the island of Puerto Rico.  This plant was growing near a tiny creek that flowed between the haystack hills.  I almost missed seeing it due to its small stature and dull colored flowers.  But because it was early morning, sun rays were coming at an angle and one of them hit the inflorescence and made it stand out from the rest of the vegetation.  The area has very tall trees which means the forest floor is quite gloomy.  There is a population of manaca palms, Calyptronoma rivalis in the place.  The palms are still young, they were planted there by the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources.  The place had many interesting plants but I was there only briefly and barely had time to see a small patch of the ravine.  The place is quite safe from visitors as it can only be reached after an strenuous walk through rugged terrain.

Paphiopedilum Genevieve Booth (Paph. Mount Toro x Paph. rothschildianum)

Adult plants of tropical ladyslippers are not easy or cheap to get in Puerto Rico.  That means that you have to buy small seedlings by mail and then wait until they achieve blooming size.  For some plants you can wait quite a bit for them to reach adult size. This was the first blooming of this plant.  A snail ate a hole in the stem of the inflorescence.  When I moved the plant, the inflorescence broke.  You can imagine how mad I was.   Hopefully it will bloom next year and I will be able to enjoy an inflorescence with all its flowers open.

Encyclia Borincana (Encyclia alata x Encyclia bractecens)

I few years ago I tied this plant to a piece of a teak branch,  I hung it from an ornamental bush in the garden, and that was that.  I had not been fertilized in years, it gets watered infrequently and irregularly, if it doesn't have flowers I don't look at it for months.  And yet it survives very well and blooms better than some plants that I fuzz over and cater to their every wish.  This hybrid is well suited to the hot tropical climate of coastal Puerto Rico.  It can get by entirely with the local rainfall and the dry season doesn't bother it at all.

Encyclia Orchid Jungle (Ency. alata x Ency. phoenicea)

I brought this Encyclia as a tiny seedling.  It grew vigorously and eventually turned into a large plant.  Then root rot struck and almost all the plant died.  Only a single scrawny two pseudobulb piece with hardly any roots survived the debacle.   Having learned my lesson, I potted the pseudobulbs using medium sized pieces of charcoal and a few stones so that even if the media decayed somewhat it would still remain relatively open.  The plant responded well to the repotting and has been blooming for the last two years.  This year inflorescence is larger than the one it had last year.  The plant has develop a good root system and I expect and even better blooming next year.  After I water this plant I don't water again until the media is approaching dryness.

These plants grow well in the hot coastal lowlands of Puerto Rico.  I live near the coast and the wind and humidity is favorable for these orchids.  They tolerate the worst of the dry season and, if potted in the right media, the wettest spells of the rainy season don't bother them either.  Perhaps the only thing that can be a bit bothersome is the long inflorescences which can become damaged when the wind blows strongly.

Coelogyne pulverula Teijsm. & Binn. 1862

Photographed at the 2014 Ponce orchid society show, Ponce, Puerto Rico.  This is the first time I have seen this species exhibited at an orchid show locally.  It is very nice, I hope it becomes widely available.

Anolis curvieri eating a tarantula

In January of 2013, I noticed that there was a large lizard eating, with some difficulty, a tarantula it had caught.  Apparently, this normally canopy dwelling animal, saw the tarantula in the ground and decided that it was just a too tempting a prey to pass up.  I was able to take a number of photos before it headed back up to the canopy.  The color of this particular animal is unusual as it is rare to see brown adult individuals, it is even rarer that this form is photographed.  The normal color for adults of this species is green, inmature individuals are brown.  Note the very long tail, more than twice as long as the whole body.

Dendrobium Chan Chao, an impulse buy at a hardware store

Note the flower with the yellow callus on the lip

One day I was in a Hardware store in the town of Mayaguez when I noticed there was for sale a Dendrobium hybrid of the type called “antelope”.  The term “antelope” is given to species of the Sphatulata (previously Ceratobium) section of the Dendrobium genus because of a fancied similarity between the petals and the horns of antelopes.  This Dendrobium hybrid was clearly a descendant of a cross of Sphatulata species.  The flowers were nice enough although the color looked paler than I liked.  Nevertheless, I brought the plant, once I was out of the fluorescent lamps of the store, I discovered that the color was far more pleasing under natural light.

This orchid is not difficult to cultivate as long as one follow some simple guidelines.  First the media has to allow for ample air to reach the roots, this means they do better in coarse media.  The second is that they need regular fertilizing while producing their canes, any slacking in this matter and the plant will produce smaller canes which will not bloom to the full potential of which this hybrid is capable.  Third, this plant needs plenty of light, I don’t give my plant full sun to avoid sunburn, but I grow it just under the saran shadecloth where it gets strong light all day long.  

Cymbidium Dorothy Stockstill 'Forgotten Fruit'

I brought this plant the annual PR orchid society show in San Juan in 2007.  When I brought this orchid it was a small seedling.  It grew well and soon had large and handsome growths.  Unfortunately it would not bloom.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it tried to bloom frequently but the inflorescences never developed fully.  What happened was this, the plant would start producing an inflorescence, it would start developing but then, when it was barely half and inch long, it would stop growing.  The inflorescence would stay the same size for weeks and then rot and turn black.  I saw this disheartening chain of events happen over and over.

Eventually I stopped paying close attention to the plant.  The plant kept growing and producing new bulbs and I moved it to a larger pot.  It would still not bloom, even though it kept producing what were clearly incipient inflorescences.  Then in February 2012 I noticed that one of the inflorescences had lengthened considerably without rotting.  I kept watch over it and to my delight a few days later a stem full of buds came out of the bracts that covered the base of the inflorescence.

The inflorescence kept lengthening until it reached about two feet long.  It produced thirty flowers of an excellent leathery texture.  The flowers were not as red as I thought they would be but nevertheless the color was nice enough.  The flowers lasted a few weeks in perfection mainly because I protected them from rain and the abundant insects of Rio Abajo which would have probably damaged them pretty quickly.

This is not, by any account, a free blooming plant under my conditions.  But the flowers are so nice when they are produced that I am willing to keep it, if only for the sake of the occasional inflorescence.  I expect that this orchid will bloom again and perhaps next time it will produce more than a single inflorescence.

Cyrtochilum serratum an orchid from Ecuador

I first saw this orchid in a greenhouse in Quito Botanical Gardens.  But later I saw it growing in cultivation near Centro del Mundo and in Mindo.  The plant seems to be a vigorous grower and all the plants I saw had inflorescences.  The fact that I saw no seedlings anywhere I went makes me think that the plants were taken from the wild and planted in the places where I saw them.  All the plants I saw were adults.  The inflorescences are very long. I saw one that was about nine feet long and had several short branches along its lenght.  The flowers seem to be produced continuously along the inflorescence, all the inflorescences I saw had only a few flowers on them, near the tip of the inflorescence.  I saw a plant tied to a bamboo pole about eight feet up from the ground, its inflorescence had been trained along the lenght of the bamboo pole so that people could enjoy the flowers at eye level.  This plant is a cool grower from the Andes where it grows at elevation that can surpass the 9,000 feet.  This means that it is wholly unsuited for cultivation at sea level in hot locales.  It comes from western Ecuador and Peru.

Epidendrum anceps, a green flowered native orchid of Puerto Rico

Bottoms up look of the inflorescence

A secondary inflorescence 

Flowers with a greenish yellowish tinge

A plant in situ

Epidendrum anceps is a epiphytic and lithophytic orchid that is native of Puerto Rico.  It has a vast geographical distribution that goes from Florida in North America to the West Indies and tropical South America.  It has been reported from several of the Virgin Islands.

 I have seen this plant in the wild in forests in Maricao and in Rio Grande.  In Maricao I have seen it growing on gravelly soil under low bushes that protect it from full sunlight.  In Rio Grande I have found it growing low on the trunk of a tree that bordered an area that had been cleared by man of its forest cover.

The plants I have seen in the wild follow a growing and blooming schedule that is coordinated with the wet and dry seasons.  In the wet seasons all the plants I have found are growing, not a single one was blooming although it is reported that they bloom year round.  I is said to smell like vegetables that are starting to rot.  

The plants I have found blooming have had an inflorescence that is hanging downwards and presents the flowers in a short dense cylinder called a raceme.  Some inflorescences are shorter and dome shaped.  Some plants can rebloom from axillary buds in the year’s inflorescence.  The flowers I have seen in PR have been green and yellowish but else where they can be bicolored with the lip being purple and the rest of the flower muddy brown, in a plant that was apparently photographed in Japan the flowers had red over the margins of the petals and lip. 

  

Although this flower is not as showy as many other orchids it does have its followers and it can be seen with some regularity at orchid shows that feature local orchids.  I have seen some plants in captivity over the years but most local orchidists are not interested in this plant.  It seems to adapt well to captivity and those plants that I have seen were big and bushy.  Unfortunately the fact that the flowers are very small in comparison to the plant that produces than and that they are an unremarkable green color militates against this plant becoming a popular horticultural subject.

I have never cultivated this plant so I can’t give any tips on its culture in captivity.  In the wild it seems to prefer places that get plenty of rain during the wet season and are not severely affected by drought in the dry season.  The largest and healthiest plants I have ever seen were in Maricao in an area where there were many of the bromeliads known as “water tank” bromeliads growing in the ground.  The water stores of these ground dwelling bromeliads help to maintain a high level of environmental humidity around them even when there has been no rain for a while.

There have been some confusion over the years about the proper name of this plant.  I think this quote from Dr. Ackermann book on the orchids of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands can be very illuminating in this respect.  From Ackermann’s book, “ Garay and Sweet (1974) and Liogier and Martorell (1982) listed this species as 

Epidendrum secundum, but this is a misapplication of the name caused by confusion over typification.  Subsequently the problem has been resolved: the Committee for Spermathophyta of the I.A.P.T.  declared that Jacquin names should be typified by Jacquin specimens (Brummitt, 1978; see also Dressler and Williams, 1975, 1982; Hagsater 1993.”   In  October 2009 Kew Gardens in England released a name list that sunk Epidendrum galleotianum into the Epi. anceps name.

Adelpha gelania arecosa, a butterfly endemic of Puerto Rico

Top view

side view

Many years ago somebody told me never to leave my camera behind because you never knew when the opportunity to take an amazing, beautiful, odd or strange photo would arise.  I took this advice to heart and now I rarely go anywhere without my camera.  The photos of this butterfly are an example of an unexpected find.  I just by chance happened to be in the right place to take these photos.

Adelpha gelania arecosa is a butterfly that has been reported in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.  Subspecies arecosa is endemic of Puerto Rico. These butterflies were photographed in Quebradillas, it is also found in Cambalache, Maricao and Toro Negro.