Dendrobium amboinense Hook. 1856, The flowers are ephemeral and highly beautiful.

I grow this plant outside in a spot where it gets a few hours of full morning sun and shade for the rest of the day.  The plant has thrived in my garden which is located at an altitude of 300 mts in the central mountains of the Island of Puerto Rico.  This is the first time it has bloomed and it is clear it still has quite a bit to grow to achieve full sized adult canes.  In the last few months it has been raining almost every day but this has not bothered this plant at all.  The flowers last a single day, but I don't mind, there are many things in life that are like that.  

Leochilus puertoricensis M.W. Chase 1986, today I found three plants in the trees around my garden

This small orchid can be found sporadically growing on the Camasey trees that surround my garden.  They are short lived for an orchid.  In last year dry season, all the plants I knew died, some young plants were unable to survive the unusual severity of the dry season, other had already bloomed and fruited and were larger but this didn't seem to help them.  Today I found three plants, I will monitor them to see how they fare in the coming year.

Dendrobium batanense, first blooming in my garden

I brought this Dendrobium back in the spring out of curiosity.  The plant adapted well to the climatic conditions in my garden and proceeded to produce several new growths that are still inmature.  The two largest canes, which were fully developed when I brought the plant were the ones that bloomed.  The canes are about two feet long but I am sure that as the plant get larger and older it will produce longer canes.  At the rate it is producing new canes it is entirely possible that in two or three years it will be an impressive specimen plant.  Unlike the flowers of the Dendrobium crumenatum which last only a single day, the flowers of batanense last three days.  The canes are flattened and hardly resemble a typical Dendrobium.   In this blooming there were only eight flowers, four in each of the two inflorescences.  This plant has been classified as an Aporum and as Ceraia.