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| Male flower |
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| Intersex flower |
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| Intersex flower |
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| intersex flower
I have had this plant of Catasetum Orchidglade for about twenty
years now. It has bloomed many times
during those years. One thing that is
interesting of Catasetum is that they
normally produce imperfect flowers, those are flowers that instead of carrying
both male and female parts are either male or female. The
male flowers are brightly colored, have a mechanism for shooting pollinia and
are relatively numerous. The female
flowers are green, sack like, and only a few are produced in an inflorescence. It seems that plants need to get full sun to
be able to produce female flowers.¹
Rarely, Catasetum produces hermaphroditic intersex flowers. In the case of my plant, all three flowers
were slightly different in the expression of the male and female parts. The male flowers, in the case of Catasetum Orchidglade, are bright red
with some yellow/white spotting. The
female flowers are apple green. Given
this, you can easily see in the photos which parts of the flower express the
male appearance and which are female. I
don’t have a clue as to what prompted this event. With a single exception in which the plant
produced female flowers, when I had this plant in full sun, all other bloomings
to this date had been male flowers.
The wide variability in color,
number and shape on the flowers of Catasetum
was a real headache of orchid taxonomists when this genus was first found. Much confusion occurred in England in the
heyday of the orchid fever in the nineteen century when plants sent from Center
and South America would bloom with flowers that were radically different from
what the plant exporters had described to the buyers. For amateur orchid growers this means that
the culture they give the plant can make it produce flowers that don’t look
like what they expected.
¹Northen, Rebecca T. 1990.
Home Orchid Growing. Fourth revised edition
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