Psychilis macconnelliae, from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands

In January of 2013 I had the pleasure to visit the island of Saint Croix.  I was invited by Edna Hamilton (the President of the St. Croix Orchid society), to talk about the culture of Dendrobium species and hybrids.  I took advantage of the occasion to see the forests and beaches of St. Croix.  This, of course, included looking out for orchid plants in bloom to photograph.   I had the pleasure to spend some time talking to Mike Evans the wildlife manager of the Sandy Point national wildlife refuge.  We know each other from pretty far back, in fact he worked for the Puerto Rican Parrot project (the project in which I work now) when it was starting back in the seventies.  I also met Rudy O’Reilly (President of the St. Croix Bonsai Society), which studied at the Mayaguez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico at the same time I was studying there.  But I digress, let’s go back to the orchids.

I saw a population of Psychilis macconnealliae growing on low bushes over sandy soil.  Most of the plants were growing a few inches over the sand, perching near the base of low bushes.  The condition of the plants was variable, the healthiest ones I found were growing on larger bushes and were not too close to the soil.  The larger plants were those that were sheltered from the sunlight by a layer of leaves that was not so dense as cast a deep shadow.  Plants growing exposed to full sunlight looked stunted and had lots of anthocyanin in the leaves giving them a reddish coloring.  I didn’t find any really big, multi-pseudobulb plants, but this is probably a consequence of the fact that my schedule only allowed me to see a small patch of their habitat. 

I visited their habitat in the morning so that I didn’t experience the worst of the heat and sunlight, but it is clear that the climatic and environmental conditions in which the plant grow in St. Croix is pretty much the same as that in which other Psychilis grow.   From looking at the way the plants grow in the wild I can assert with confidence that these orchids would surely die under the care of the average hobbyist.   I can think of nothing more lethal for these plants than putting them in a bark filled pot and keeping them slightly moist (a common recommendation about watering orchids on older orchid books).   By the way, I don’t collect wild orchids, I prefer to enjoy them in their natural habitat.  If you are doing botanical research on orchids and want access to plants of these species, I advise you contact Prof. Ackerman from the University of Puerto Rico.

Although, from time to time, you can see clones of Psychilis macconelliae exhibited in orchid shows in Puerto Rico, all the ones I have seen are from Vieques Island or from Puerto Rico.  The St, Croix Psy. macconnelliae is quite distinct in color and easily distinguished from them.  To me the form from Puerto Rico and the form St. Croix look more different from each other than Psychilis monensis and Psychilis krugii from Puerto Rico.  But this is work for a taxonomist, perhaps one day someone will look at this question.

Bulbophyllum tingabarinum Garay, Hammer, Siegrist 1994, has proven to be wildly attractive to a species of local fly.

The flowers of Bulbophyllum tingabarinum opened about two days ago.  This morning when I walked into the garden I found the flowers had attracted four or five flies that were walking all over the flowers.  I sampled the fragrance and found it stinky and disgusting.  However it appears the flies found it highly attractive.  The fragrance, at least in my orchid is not strong, you have to get close to the flowers to "savor" the full effect.  Most of the flies fled when I moved the orchid to a new location to take photos of the flowers.  But a stubborn one hanged for dear life from the flower and would not leave it even when I got very close with the camera.  The fly seemed particularly taken with the lip, in particular the area just under the column.  This particular fly was too small and light to properly activate the pollination mechanism in the flowers of Bulb, tingabarinum.   The fly seemed to be looking for something in the flower and explored every single part, the sepals, the petals, the lip and even the column.  When I finished taking photos, the fly was still busy and oblivious, moving over the inflorescence.

Bulbophyllum inunctum J. J. Sm. 1906, a small orchid with relatively large flowers

This orchid was a present from a friend.  Unfortunately it arrived at the height of the dry season.   The bare root pseudobulbs were put in a shallow dish, over a layer of sphagnum moss.   Keeping the sphagnum moss wet was a constant chore as in the local dry season humidity during the day can dip as low as 40%.  Although the plant had two developing new growths, these gave no sign of further development and stayed the same size for weeks and then months after the plant arrived.  I found this mighty peculiar as it is my experience that new growths that stop developing due to stress often die.

But when the rainy season arrived and humidity climbed into the 90% range the plant came alive and the new growths finished their growth turning into small replicas of the older pseudobulbs.  Since the rainy season started the plant has been growing slowly but surely.  But in the past month, a very, very wet month humidity was so high, apparently this affected one of the new growths and it rotted away.  I was startled by this as Bulbophyllum love wetness, the event of one pseudobulb  rotting away due to too much water is unknown among my other plants.  So it appears that this plant is sensitive to both dryness and too much water.

My plant bloomed in early June from an old pseudobulb.  It produced a two inch inflorescence with a solitary flower.  The flower was nice but a bit small for the species, perhaps due to the fact that the plant is not fully established in its new home and lacks an extensive root system.  The flower seems sensitive to humidity levels.  I took it into the relatively dry indoor environment and the flower stayed slightly cupped.  I took it out in the garden and the flower perked up and opened fully.

This plant has been in my possession for too short a time to really judge how well it will grow in the long run.  I am giving it the best care I can as I love the flowers.  The plant gets full morning sunlight  until 10 am, and from then on dappled sunlight.  It gets watered daily when the weather is very dry and twice a week when conditions are more humid.  It is fertilized once a week when it is growing, no fertilizer is given when it is not growing.  Local temperatures fluctuate between 85F/29C during the day to 70F/21C at night.  In the local tropical winter night temperatures can drop to 60F/16C, for some months.  This orchid is native from Malaysia and Borneo.

I have not seen this plant in local collections.  There might be some specialist that keep them but I have not seen it exhibited at local shows.  If the date when it bloomed in my garden is any indication, its absence from shows might be due to the fact that it blooms after the spring orchid shows but before the fall shows.

Bulbophyllum tingabarinum Garay, Hammer, Siegrist 1994, on bloom in July.

I brought thisplant at a 2012 meeting of the Orquidistas de Puerto Rico, group that originated in Facebook.  I wanted it because I was seduced by the beauty of the photos of this plant in the Orchidsforum.com group.  You can see these photos in Flickr, just look for PiotrM photostream and be prepared for your mind to be blown away.

 I found the plant surprisingly small given the size of the flowers.  Initally my plant had a few pseudobulbs, only two of which seemed to be large enough to bloom.  At home I put it in a spot where it could get full morning sunlight up to 10 am and the rest of the day it got the dappled sunlight that filtered through the canopy of trees that surround my house.  The plant didn't do anything until February 2013.  Then it started producing new growths with impressive vigor.  Unfortunately this period of the year is in the start of the dry season in locality.  So everyday I had to drench the plant so that it would not abort the new growths due to lack of moisture.  I also fertilized it after every watering with a weak fertilizer, I waited until the water had stopped dripping to fertilize the plant. 

By May the plant had finished producing pseudobulbs.  In late June I saw the first signs of an inflorescence, the first one opened its flowers in July 26.   The plant has opened three inflorescences and two more are on their way.  The bright color of the flowers is quite eye catching.  If its performance so far turns out to be the norm, this Bulbophyllum with become my third most floriferous Bulbophyllum plant, the champion is Bulb. lepidum and on second place is Bulb. blumei.

Until recently I had never seen these plants in local collections.  However in the last year a number of my friends have adquired this plant.  Given that we live in different locations it will be interesting to see how this species performs under the various conditions.

Domingoa haematochila (Rchb. f.) Carabia 1943, photo from the 2013 visit

In 2012 I visited Mona Island and was able to take photos of Domingoa haematochila plants near the Sardinera camping area.  Unfortunately the plants there were small and in poor shape.  Also my camera died on my second day on the island and I had to use a camera loaned to me by a friend.  I knew there were far larger and healthier plants in the interior of the island, but getting there is a challenging and dangerous endeavour, even for a trained biologist.  Happily I was allowed to tag along a group of botanist that planned to go deep into the island interior.  The botanist set a punishing fast walking pace in their hike because they wanted to get as far into the island as possible before the temperatures became dangerous.  How high did the temperature climb?  By 1:00 pm the bare limestone was at a toasty 136F/58C, our boots were themselves at 100F/38C.  The hair at the top of the head of one of the botanist was at 103F/40C.  It was some strenous walking and I spent most of the time drenched in sweat, but I managed to get some good photographs of large plants with flowers in good condition (with my new camera Yeah!).

The conditions in the limestone plateau of Mona Island are incredibly harsh for human beings but some orchids have evolved the capacity to grow and even thrive under them.  However there are spots here and there on the island where the ecosystem provides for microclimates that are less extreme, it is in these spots that Domingoa grows best.  However you can find plant of Domingoa in places in the island where conditions are difficult and don't allow for large plants.

This plant is very rare in cultivation locally.  Mostly due to the fact that local growers prefer large flowered orchids but also due to the fact that most growers here are unfamiliar with native orchids.  Given that this plant grows in a habitat the is inimical to human life, it doesn't at present faces any threat to its survival.

Soft cane Dendrobium, end of growing season flowers

Dendrobium Bohemian Rhapsody, end of growing season flower

Dendrobium Bohemian Rhapsody, normal flower

Dendrobium anosmum, dark colored variant

Dendrobium anosmum var. huttoni

When the growing season ends for soft cane Dendrobium, the canes stop growing and produce a terminal leaf that is smaller than previous leaves.  But sometimes, instead of a terminal leaf, the plant produces one or more flower buds.  I have seen this happen in Den. anosmum. Den. pieradii, Den. loddigessii and Den. Bohemian Rhapsody.  These end of season flowers can be larger, differently shaped and brighter colored than flowers produced during the normal blooming season.  I don't know why this happens.  Some people, particularly those that have plants that have never bloomed, can take these flowers as a normal blooming event, but it isn't.  The flowers can sometimes be significantly different from typically shaped flowers, with a prominent raised area in the middle of the lip and pointy sepals. This variation can cause confusion as to the identity of the plant, on the part of growers whose plants otherwise have never produced flowers.  At times the flowers can be deformed or crowded in a bunch at the tip of the cane.  I don't find the appareance of these flowers a cause of concern as those of my plants that produce these flowers from time to time, bloom well when their blooming season comes around.

Vanda Pachara Delight 'Pachara' AM/AOS

This large flowered Vanda hybrid was part of Edwin Alberto Perez award winning exhibit at the Mayaguez orchid society orchid September 2012 show.  The exhibit won the AOS trophy for the best exhibit of the show.  This plant was on one side of the exhibit in a place that was slightly under a shadow.  This made the flowers look even darker than their real color.  A truly extraordinnary Vanda, and well cultivated too, an FCC plant doesn't necessarily produce FCC quality flowers if it is cared for in an indifferent manner.

Brassolaeliocattleya Samba Splendor 'Puerto Rico'

Photographed at the 2012 Mayaguez orchid society Orchid Show, at the Mayaguez Mall.  I used sunlight streaming through a skylight to photograph this orchid to really bring out the bright color of this flower.

Brassia Edvah Loo 'Nishida' specimen plant

All the inflorescences would orient in the direction of the strongest ligh, this caused some to overlap which caused the flowers to become crowded due to their large size.

This orchid produces huge flowers well over one foot tall.  The inflorescences are massive and the fragrance is delightful and powerful.  I used to have this huge specimen which produced amazing displays of flowers when it bloomed.  When it got so large it was difficult to move I decided to divide it.   I cut it in seven pieces and to my horror six of the pieces started dying from rot.  Only a tiny piece, that I had left out and had not potted because it had few roots, survived.  After four years of precarious growth that piece bloomed for the first time this July.  Hopefully it will grow well enough to reclaim its past glory.

Previous to that awful loss of plants, this orchid had proved to be easy to culture, a vigorous grower and a reliable bloomer.  It is not clear why the pieces got rot.   This orchid used to be very common, however it has been some years since I have seen plants of this hybrid shown anywhere.  It would be interesting to know if others have had the same experience I had with this orchid.  I remember seeing some pretty impressive plants shown in orchid group meetings.

The stunning Dendrobium devonianum

A few years back I saw a photo of a flower of Dendrobium devonianum that was so spectacular that it took my breath away.  The photo was by Dale Borders and it was posted in the Orchid Source Forum.  I wondered if I could grow it since by all indications this was a high elevation plant whose range encompassed areas with more temperate weather than PR.  I asked Dale how he cultivated this plant and he told me that he grew it next to its Dendrobium primulinum.   Since I had a few years of experience growing and blooming Den. primulinum I decided to try this plant.

When I brought my first two plants of Dendrobium devonianum, back in 2008, I must confess I was underwhelmed by the sight of the plants.  The larger plant seemed scrawny, I had expected that, but the smaller one with its larger cane barely six inches long, was so unimpressive I thought it might not survive the process of becoming acclimatized to my local climatic conditions.  Eventually both plants started producing new growths, the larger one with vigor, and the smaller one at such a slow pace that it was glacial in comparison with the first one.  This pattern repeated itself every year, the larger plant growing ever faster and the smaller one barely making progress.  In 2010 I was quite excited to see buds on the larger plant, alas I was utterly disappointed when the larger one produced flower buds and it became clear it was Dendrobium aduncum.   To my defense I have to say that Dendrobium devonianum is an exceedingly rare plant in Puerto Rico and I had never seen one so could not tell it from Den. aduncum on sight.

The smaller plant kept growing exasperatingly slow and producing absurdly wiry stems.  The incredible thinness of the stem near the base is almost unbelievable.  The cane produced in 2010 was eight inches long but the width near the base was .8 millimeter.  Yes that is no typo, I actually used a caliper to measure it, the stem was less than a millimeter wide!  Even the 2011 cane, which is the one that bloomed measured three feet eight inches long but was a tiny fraction of an inch wide near the base of the cane.  To put it in metrics, the cane near the base is 1.2 millimeters wide, the cane is 1.17 meters long, around a thousand times bigger.  I want to clarify that the very thin part is only a short stretch near the base of the plant,  the rest of the cane is thicker, a little less than half a centimeter thick.

In 2011, to my surprise the plant started producing a new cane with previously unknown vigor.  The cane kept getting bigger and bigger unlike previous ones that would stop at a few inches after lackluster growth.  The cane eventually measured, as noted previously more than three feet long, which was five times bigger than the size of the previous cane.  Eventually the cane lost all its leaves and all I had to do was wait for the blooming season to come around.  And I waited, and waited and waited.  By the start of May all my other deciduous Dendrobium had bloomed, I assumed that the plant would not bloom.  One day in the first week of March, as I was watering the plants, I noticed that there were some slight swellings in the side of the cane.  By then the local rainy season had started and I wondered if it was really going to bloom or that it was going to produced keikis. 

The next few weeks were depressing. The plant kept producing flower buds and they would start to develop but after a while they would turn pink and fall from the flower.  This happened seven times.  I despaired of ever getting to see the flowers.  The fact that this is a Himalayan Dendrobium and at the time the plant was producing the buds the temperatures were sweltering and humidity sky high.

The last two buds managed to develop all the way to maturity and opened on May 5.  They are so beautiful that all frustration was forgotten.  I expect that as the plant develops larger canes and an even more extensive root system it will be able to bloom better.  The new growth is already nine inches long and it is slightly huskier than the preceding ones, the quoted size for the cane of this species is three feet long, but I expect this plant to exceed this size in the 2012 cane.

This is not a species for a beginner, particularly in Puerto Rico.  It demands patience and consistent care.  I grow this species at an altitude of 1000 feet in the interior of PR, I don’t know how it will fare in the coastal lowlands which in summer can reach high temperatures in the nineties degrees range.  

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.

Dendrobium gouldii 'Black Koa' a yellow colored "antilope" Dendrobium

A mature flower with fully curled petals.

A newly opened flower.

A few years back I brought a seedling of this plant from Tropical Orchid Farm.  I have always liked “antelope” Dendrobium from the section Sphatulata (also known as Ceratobium) because of their resemblance to the heads of antelopes. This plant is native of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islandsm it has a number of differently colored forms.  Unfortunately my first plant proved to be a slow grower and would only produce small squat canes.  Undaunted, I brought another plant from TOF.  The new plant grew vigorously and promptly produced a cane that was at one feet and a half tall, much larger than any of the previous ones.  This cane produced an inflorescence in January and the first flowers opened in March. Now it is the middle of May and most flowers are still in good shape.  The inflorescence had about twenty flowers.

The flowers are yellow with a finely sculpted lip and the upraised twisted petals that are a notable characteristic of the section.  The distal end of the petals is a deep brown color which contrasts well with the color of the rest of the flower.  The flowers last for months in perfection, even when subjected to wind and rain.  My plant is growing in a pot with medium size stones as media as I have lost many a Dendrobium from root rot as a consequence of a waterlogged media.

The cultural advice I can give about this plant is the following.  I grow my best plant in a bright, airy spot.  I have grown my plants both in full sun and under shade cloth and the plant under shade cloth grew better.  Give the plant plenty of fertilizer and water when it is producing new canes.  When they are not growing I don’t fertilize my plants.  Avoid putting this orchid in media that can become so packed and waterlogged that the roots are deprived of oxygen, this will kill the roots.

Myrmecophila grandiflora (formerly Schomburgkia tibicinis var. grandiflora)

A full plant view that shows the six feet plus inflorescence.

The flower against the morning sky, note the ants in the bud.

A top view of the lip showing the exposed column that is said to be an identification mark for grandiflora

This plant was given to me a few years ago by a friend.  My friend had his plant growing on a citrus tree.  His plant was enormous, with many side branches, and had colonized a large area on the trunk of the tree.  She cut a piece with two pseudobulbs and gave it to me.  I was not sure how to pot this plant as I had previously lost some Myrmecophilas to base rot.  So I just put the plant in an empty basket and stabilized it with a few large chunks of bark.  The orchid spent many months in that basket with no sign that it was either growing or declining.  Eventually it started producing a new growth.

The new growth was of a much smaller size than the original pseudobulbs, probably due to the fact that the originalpseudobulbs had a meager amount of roots.  But as the pseudobulb matured it started producing roots.  The next pseudobulb it produced was slightly bigger, not much of an improvement on the first one.  However the plant started producing roots with increased vigor and the basket became filled with the plant’s roots.  It produced its first full sized pseudobulb on the third year on my possession.  Learned that it grew pretty fast once it got going and that it was crucial for getting a good sized pseudobulb that you provided abundant water and fertilizer during the plant growth phase.

When it first bloomed the inflorescence was damaged by some insect that kept nibbling on the stem of the inflorescence.  It produced only a few flowers.  The second time it bloomed the inflorescence was severely damaged and the plant aborted it.  The photos you see in this essay come from the orchids first and third blooming.

The flowers last from a week to ten days.  I suspect they would last more if I kept them away from the wind and pollinating insects.  The flowers open well during the morning but tend to collapse in a heap before midday.  To get good photos of the plant I had to get up early in the morning when the flowers were at its best.  The inflorescence shown in the photo topped out at six feet and six inches.  At one time it became entangled in the shadehouse roof wire netting, that is why the inflorescence has a slight bet to It.  The inflorescence got bent 90 degrees but to my surprise, once it was free of the wire, it slowly righted itself and kept on growing as if nothing had happened.

My plant is grown under shadecloth but the shadecloth allows quite a bit of light to come through.  I water it twice weekly when it is producing pseudobulbs and fertilize it weekly.  Outside of the time when it is growing it only gets water when it rains and it is not fertilized.  Ants love this plant and it is rare to see the plant without ants on it.  However the only ants I have seen in large numbers in this plant are black and don’t bite when disturbed, they just scatter in a panic.  My Myrmecophila humboltii, however, is guarded by a truly vicious type of large yellow ant that has a memorably painful bite.

This plant is fairly common in orchid collections in Puerto Rico and even people that don’t know about orchids sometimes have it in their gardens as a curiosity.  The fact that this plant, if planted in a favorable spot, can grow, and even thrive, with relatively little care helps it survive even in the hands of those that give their plants little or no care.

Epidendrum , ackermanii Hagsater 2004, formerly known as Epidendrum secundum from Puerto RIco

A plant from Maricao

Side view of the callus of the lip

Front view of the lip

The inflorescence of a plant from Maricao

Cultivated plant, Aguadilla, note that the lip shape and callus are diffent from
 ackermanii, the provenance of this plat is unknown

Plants growing in a landslide, note the purplish color and the small size.

Very small plants blooming 

Epidendrum secundum?  This plant is from Ecuador, growing in great numbers in the roadaside
in the road from Quito to Mindo.

Epidendrum ackermanii is a native orchid of Puerto Rico.  It can be found at middle elevations in many places in the mountainous interior of the island, particularly to the west of the island¹ .  I have found this plant growing in roadsides, landslides, fern prairies and places were the local vegetation has been disturbed or damaged in some way.  I have seen it near Toro Negro and Maricao.  In thirty years of visiting the local forests I have seen it growing epiphytically only once, all the other time it is always growing in the ground, most often under the shade of small, sparsely leafed shrubs that allow a lot of light to reach the orchids.  In Puerto Rico the plant size of this orchid varies wildly, I have found some that were only a few inches tall (which were blooming!) to some that reached two to three feet in length.   The larger and healthier plants are those growing over fast draining rocky ground overlain with a layer of decaying leaves and woody material.   Plants that are exposed to full sun for part of the day but are sheltered from the strongest sunlight at midday by neighboring bushes or trees and have their roots in a spot where there is a substantial accumulation of forest floor litter that is shaded from full sun are usually the largest. 

The size of the flowers and the inflorescence is affected by the vigor of the plant, larger plants produce both larger flowers and more of them.  But in general the inflorescences of ackermanii are quite small and relatively few flowered when compared with plants identified as secundum in horticulture.  I have seen the tiniest flowers and the fewest flowered inflorescences in plants growing in recent landslides, in places where there is little or no leaf litter and the roots are exposed.  Sometimes the plants in these situations are so small it is amazing to see them blooming.

 The leaves also vary in their color, plants growing among the rocks of a recent landslide were only a few inches tall and had a deep reddish purple color, plants growing in a shady location were a deep green.  Flower color is lilac but the shade and saturation of the color varies, some plants have flowers that are a pale rose, other plants have flowers in deeper shades of lilac.

Epi. ackermanii, although it is superficially similar to the cultivated plants identified as secundum that are commonly grown all over the island,  has some differences that easily set it apart.   Wild plants are never seen to form the large tangles of many blooming stems that make secundum so attractive.  Compared with cultivated forms of secundum the inflorescences are few flowered.  The flowers are always smaller than secundum and tend to be closely clustered.  I have never seen Epi. ackermanii in cultivation anywhere, even among fanciers of native orchids, perhaps it is because of the availability of secundum plants with larger flowers in horticulture.   I once took a keiki from a mature plant to see if it would grow in captivity but the plant failed to thrive and eventually died. The Epi. secundum that I have always grown without complaint, it may be that this orchid doesn’t do well under the heat and dryness of the coastal lowlands.

One curious thing about this orchid is that when you visit its native haunts, even thought you can see what seems like plenty of suitable habitat, the plant distribution is patchy, with groups of plants here and there.  The largest group I have ever seen only had a few dozen plants widely distributed over an area of a recent landslide.

¹ Ackerman, James D.  1995.  An orchid flora of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

A large flowered red Maxillaria species from the Quito Botanical Gardens, somewhat reminicent of nigrescens

I found this orchid growing among the rocks in the display area of the Quito Botanical Gardens, Ecuador.  The plant was growing at ground level and I would have missed it entirely if I had not looked between the boulders.  It is a relatively small plant and it was overshadowed by the much larger plants that covered most of the display area.  The flowers are brightly colored and reminiscent of Maxillaria nigrescens, although the flower in this photo is not exactly alike the plant in the book “Orchid Species of Peru”.   But in orchids it is not advisable to make a definite identification of a plant just because of the color of its flowers.  

Pleurothallis gargantua seen in Mindo, Ecuador

I saw this plant in the gardens of Cabañas Armonia in Mindo Ecuador.  This very large pleurothallid orchid has the largest flowers in a genus that is most commonly known for small plants with tiny flowers.  This plant is native of Ecuador where it lives in mountain forests at heights of between 4500 and 7500 feet in cool and wet locations.  In the location where I saw this plant there is little if any seasonal variation but temperatures fluctuate widely from between 75F during the day to 45 at night.