Odontoglossum crispum hybrid, at the Quito Botanical Garden, Ecuador

I had the pleasure of seeing this beautiful orchid from Colombia at the Quito Botanical Gardens.  The orchid was exhibited on a rock platform.  The flowers are long lasting as the whole inflorescence was open when I visited for the first time and when I came back two weeks later they were still in perfect condition.  This plant is a cool grower that dies when exposed to continuous high temperatures.  In this location the plant were on an open greenhouse which had temperatures of close to 45F at night and 75F during the day.

Dendrobium thyrsiflorum, a rare blooming in Puerto Rico

The color combination of completely yellow to orange lip and white floral segments is a salient characteristic of Dendrobium thyrsiflorum

It is very rare to see locally plants with full sized inflorescences.  Plants in the wild and those cultivated in temperate climates can produce even larger inflorescences

This flower shows the round lip of a fully opened flower

Dendrobium thysiflorum is an orchid that is found in the northern areas of India and the Himalayas, China, Thailand and Vietnam.  In Puerto Rico it can grow happily and vigorously.  But it blooms rarely and most of the time with relatively short inflorescences that are a pale shadow of the ones this plant produces in the wild and under cultivation in more temperate climates.  I have often wondered why this plant won't bloom well locally.  I thought that it might be due to the lack of the proper rest period of low temperatures or too enthusiastic fertilizing and watering in its rest season.  But after examining this plant I am starting to suspect that although temperature and rest period may have something to do with the lack of blooming it may be that most local plants are too small to bloom properly.  The blooming plant was significantly larger than most plants I have seen under cultivation locally with canes close to two feet tall.  In more temperate areas  Dendrobium thyrsiflorum can grow into humoungous specimen plants that produce dozens of inflorescences at the same time.  I have never seen a specimen plant in Puerto Rico but after seen this one, there is hope that someone can crack the problem of blooming this plant well in our island.  This plant can be cutlivated the same as Dendrobium farmeri but it is a much taller orchid.  I grow my own plant of this orchid in a net pot.  I have lived there for many years but now I see that it has the potential to grow much larger as my plant is barely nine inches tall.  I plant to give it heavy fertilizing during its growth phase to see if I can coax it to produce larger canes.

Arundina graminifolia an exotic orchid that has become naturalized in Puerto Rico

A flower of the most common form

A flower of the dwarf form

A flower of the dwarf form in the middle of a group of canes of this orchid

A side view of the flower of a form that seems to be uncommon in the extreme

Excuse me for the poor photo but it is the only front view I have of this mysterious flower

Arundina graminifolia is an orchid native of Southeast Asia that has become naturalized in Puerto Rico.   It can be found in the wild from Sri Lanka and India on the Indian Ocean to the Caroline Islands and Tahiti on the Pacific Ocean.  It is a vigorous plant that has escaped cultivation in areas outside its natural geographical range for example the Hawaiian Islands and Puerto Rico.  In Puerto Rico it has been reported from moist areas in the east of the island.

I have seen it growing in gardens all over the island sometimes forming huge specimen plants.  The tallest plants I have seen were in cultivation right on the ground in gardens in the foothills of the Luquillo Mountains, some seemed to be close to seven feet tall.  There is a huge specimen plant growing in a garden that sits by the side of the road that goes from Utuado to Adjuntas that is notable due to the large number of flowers it can have at the same time.  The plants are known locally as bamboo orchid due to a fancied similarity between the tall canes of this orchid and the canes of the bamboo plant.

I have seen several variations of this plant growing in captivity.  The most common form of Arundina in Puerto Rico is the tall one that can grow to six feet or more.  This form is nearly ubiquitous in the gardens of orchid growers.  However a dwarf form has become very popular in the last few years and it not rare to see this form growing as a pot plant.  It can also grow into a large clump of stems but since it is just a few feet tall even large clumps can be accommodated in a limited space.  The flowers of the tall type and the smaller type are quite similar, they differ mainly in the way the flower are presented and in some details of structure of the lip.  In its native haunts there are several varieties that formerly were classified as different species, these are now considered variations of a single species. Recently a white flowered form is sometimes being offered for sale at orchid shows but I have yet to see one blooming in a local garden.

Intriguingly there is a fourth type of Arundina in Puerto Rico.  The lip of the flowers of these plants is very different from the two more common types.  I have searched to see if this type of Arundina has been reported elsewhere but so far it has been absent from the books and Internet sources that I have accessed.   As far as I know this mysterious Arundina type is not in wide cultivation and I have seen mature plants of this type only in one private garden.  I was told that this type of plant was found in a population of feral plants in the south east of the island.

This orchid is easy to cultivate in Puerto Rico and responds vigorously to good care.  To cultivate this plant you need a eight or ten inch wide pot to accommodate its rampant growth.  The media should be coarse and heavy to avoid having the pot tip over.  Cow manure is an excellent additive as a top dressing to the media in the pot.  You need to water this plant abundantly as this helps the plant achieve its tallest size.  Large vigorous plants can produce single or branched inflorescences that can produce blooms sequentially for weeks or even for months.  When the inflorescences stop producing flowers they produce small plantlets.

These little plants can be detached when they stop growing.  I put them in water to stimulate the production of roots.  When the small plants have several roots they are transplanted to a pot with a mixture of potting soil and compost that is kept moist until the plants have been able to develop a significant root system.  This plant root system tends to be superficial so when growing the tall type in a pot it is useful to have a stake in the pot to tie the canes.  Young canes don’t need staking to stay upright but canes seen to become weaker with age and prone to tip over. Once the plant produces its second cane it can be treated as an adult plant.  Unlike most orchids this one is easy to grow into a specimen plant in a comparably short time.

Campylocentrum filiforme, a bizzare native orchid that challenges our concept of what an orchid must be

Campylocentrum filiforme, the stems visible in the photo are new and old inflorescences and not the main plant body which is buried under the roots

The roots you see criss crossing the branch in the photo are the orchid, no leaves or stem is visible, inflorescences with seed pods are visible in the center of the photo

A close view

A close up shows the roots which look silvery white when they are dry but turn green when wet, both live and dead roots are visible in the photo

Campylocentrum filiforme ranks among the most bizarre of all of our native orchids.  What people universally regard to be the “orchid”, and I am referring here to the plant body, in this species has become reduced to an extreme degree.  The stem of this plant has been reduced to the point that it barely reaches a centimeter in length.  And the centimeter of stem that comprises the plant body is practically invisible due to the many roots that surround it.  In this species the roots dominate to such an extent that the plant is predominantly a tangle of roots with the stem forming a vanishingly small proportion of the biomass of the plant.

As a result this plant is the orchid world equivalent of a ghost.  Due to the apparent absence of a stem most people fail to recognize this plant as an orchid or even as a discrete plant.  Perhaps a particularly observant person might notice that there are orchid roots growing around the twigs and branches but since there are no leaves in sight anywhere it is probably that it will fail to perceive that the tangle of roots itself is the orchid.

This orchid is regarded as among the most advanced, from an evolutionary stand point, of all orchids.  The plant has abandoned the stem as a locus of photosynthesis and has shifted this function entirely to the roots.  What advantage can this radical departure from the norm of the plant world can this adaptation give this orchid?

The most accepted theory is that the leave less condition of the plant allows it to survive on the meagrest of resources, in a niche where no other plant can compete successfully or even survive.  These plants are mainly found in places where humidity is abundant such as swamps and moist forest areas but I have them also growing in disturbed areas.   Because they depart from most people conception of what a plant must be they are utterly invisible to the average person.  Because they survive with such limited resources these plants are not known to produce large or showy flowers but there are a few exceptions.

 Dendrophylax lindenii, the Florida Ghost orchid, another leave less species of orchid, made news all over the world when a plant in a reserve produced nine flowers at the same time, an unusual event.  The plant itself could hardly be distinguished in the photos from the bark of the tree where it was growing so, on first sight, the inflorescences with their large showy flowers looked like they were springing from the trunk of the tree.

Campylocentrum filiforme is classified as a rare orchid by Ackermann in his book on orchids of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  But it may be that it is more abundant that records indicate given its stealthy nature.  Apparently nothing is known about the pollination of this species.  It is not in cultivation and probably almost all local orchid growers are unaware that these plants exist.  I have never seen then on exhibition even in shows where there have been displays specifically devoted to native orchids.  Seems to be short lived in the wild as all the plants I monitored died when the twigs in which they were growing decayed.

An extremely rare photo of a Triphora orchid from Puerto Rico

The photo was taken by Dr. Thomas White in the Sierra de Luquillo

A friend of mine Dr. Thomas White was hiking in the depths of one of the largest patches of primeval forest left in the island of Puerto Rico when he saw this flower. He took this photo and went on to do his work searching for rare endangered birds. It turns out to be a tropical Tripora. Photos of Triphora blooming in PR are unheard of as far as I am concerned. My botanists friends in the island are unfamiliar with this plant. It turns out that there are three species of Triphora in the island and this plant doesn't seem to quite fit any of them. Compounding the problem is the fact that reports say that one of the species has never been found with flowers. So with my friends permision I am posting the photo here to see if anyone can ID it. This photo is all we have as the plant appears to have vanished.

This plant was found by chance and the person who took the photo knew it was an orchid but didn't know how rare it is to see photos of this one. There are four species of Triphora reported from PR, trianthophora, hassleriana, surinamensis and lateralis. The specimens labeled trianthophora were reassesed as lateralis. However since lateralis has never been found in PR with flowers this ID is to a certain extent tentative. But the unusual disjunct range extension for trianthophora from Florida to PR, to quote Ackermann, may mean that it is not trianthophora.

Note:  It may be trianthophora after all.  The area where this plant grows was severely damaged by hurricane Maria.  It was an area with very old growth trees.  Hopefully the plant survived.



Phaiocalanthe Kryptonite an easy to grow terrestrial orchid



Four inflorescesces of Phaiocalanthe Kryptonite 'Ursula'



Phaiocalanthe Kryptonite 'Chariots of Fire'

Phaiocalanthe Kryptonite 'Ursula'  an almost fully expanded flower

Phaiocalanthe Kryptonite 'Ursula'  newly opened flower.

A fully expanded, several days old flower

I have a wide variety of orchid genera, all of which delight me with their lovely colors and wonderful fragrances. These genera vary enormously in their cultural needs and ease of care. If one were to rank them according to the amount of care they need Phaiocalanthe Kryptonite would rank as one of the less demanding of all my orchids. However, it is after all an orchid, and because of this it does have certain quirks that need to be accommodated if one is to get the best possible performance this particular plant. In the next few paragraphs I will detail some of the things I have learned from cultivating this Phaiocalanthe.

I grow my plants on the east side of the house. There they get full morning sun filtered through the leafy branches of some huge teak trees and then shade from around 11 am until sundown. I can vary the amount of sun the plants get by moving them farther or closer to the shaded area under the teak trees. In general the plants do better in bright light but the leaves burn and become marked and unsightly when exposed to the full midday sun. So the key here is experimenting carefully with the amount of full sun that the plants can tolerate in your locale. My experience has been that plants grown in the shade will look wonderful but bloom weakly and with few flowers. Plants grown with some morning exposure to the sun will grow and bloom well but the leaves can develop some light spotting. Plants exposed to full sun for many hours bloom the best but look awful with ragged yellowish leaves full of dead spots. Some of my friends deal with this problem by cutting the leaves when the inflorescence is just about to open its first flowers. I have never done this but it might be worthwhile if you want to exhibit the plants in a special setting where the damaged leaves would detract from the beauty of the flowers. I have no idea how this affects the vigor of the plant but my guess is that it might weaken the plant and shorten the blooming period. This however is just a guess. I try to balance the desire for many flowers with the need to keep the leaves presentable. I am not always successful at sticking a perfect balance but most of the time my plants do well enough.

In my location the plants are exposed to temperatures that range from 95F in the most sweltering part of the summer to 55F for a brief span of time at the peak of the tropical winter. My plants seem indifferent to local variations in temperature and grow as well in summer as in winter as long as they are cared appropriately.

Humidity in my location ranges from 70 to 100%. At the peak of the rainy season, in summer, the plants can get thoroughly soaked every day for several months. In the peak of the dry season it can go for a whole month with no precipitation and humidity can drop to 40% at midday. In the dry season my plants are watered once or twice a week and seem equally at home sopping wet as with a marked wet and dry cycle and its attendant fluctuations in humidity.

When the plants are in their growing phase I water them every two or three days depending on the weather. As long as the plant is growing I like to keep their media wet, not moist or evenly moist, wet, wet, wet. When the new growth has reached full size I cut down on watering and in the dry season I might stop watering them if the plant has shed its leaves and become dormant.

Some people I know give their plants liquid fertilizer on a regular weekly or monthly basis, I don’t do this. I incorporate the fertilizer in the potting media and this takes care of my plant’s fertilizer needs.

Since these plants are terrestrial I plant them in a suitable terrestrial media. I mix my own media but they can grow with varying degrees of success in most potting soils. This is the composition of the media I use to pot this orchid. One fourth of the mix is compost from my own compost pile. I have an eight foot tall roll of metal close to my kitchen door and every day I deposit on it kitchen scraps, along old newspapers, waster paper, shredded bank statements and just about everything organic that can be composted except meat and lard. It smells very little and thank to a veritable army of local anolis lizards it mostly fly free. Half the potting mixture is composed of red lateritic soil, this sound exotic but this type of soil is available in practically unlimited quantities all around my house. The last ingredient to the mix is one fourth of manure, horse of cow work equally well. I also add a bit of sand to the mix to keep it from compacting too much. I mix all this in a tub of about twenty gallons, I mix only the amount I am going to use at the time.

Phaiocalanthe Kriptonite is simple to cultivate and only makes modest demands of care during the year but there is one thing that this plant really needs to do well. Unless they are repotted each year in fresh media my plants start to decline, lose vigor and size, and start blooming poorly. I think the reason for this is that these plants are such voracious feeders that they exhaust their soil of nutrients in a single season.

Dichaea hystricina an orchid native of Puerto Rico

The anchor shaped lip is shown to great advantage in this photo

These flowers are tiny and hard to see, the casual observer can easily miss them in the tangle of stems of the plant.

A young plant

A clump of stems

This small orchid is interesting because of its distinctive growth habit and its peculiar flowers. The stems are flattened and have monopodial distichous stems that vaguely resemble centipedes. The flowers are peculiar in the sense that they are build to be pollinated by euglossine bees, their distinctive lips look like tiny anchors. The last point is the notable because there are no euglossine bees in the the Greater Antilles. There were euglossine bees in the Caribbean in the distant past as evidenced on their presence on the amber found in the deposits in the Dominican Republic. But if there were any in Puerto Rico they are now extinct in here as well as in the other Greater Antilles. So what pollinates this flower in the wild in PR is something of a mystery although it would not be surprising if they turned out to be cleistogamic, that is that they self pollinate. I am fairly confident this plant is hystricina because the margins of the leaves are ciliate, a characteristic of this species.


This orchid has a wide distribution in the tropics in America and the West Indies. Given this huge distribution area that covers many islands and mountain ranges I wonder if in the future this species might get split into several species like they did with Epidendrum difforme. However that is for the taxonomist to decide, for the moment it is considered a single species with a large geographical distribution. Its preferred habitat is in the rain forest of the high mountains of Puerto Rico it is locally abundant and, st least for me, relatively easy to find. Finding the flowers is a matter of timing your visit to their native haunts to their blooming season. I have seen plants blooming here in August and September. It is reported that they bloom from August to November in PR. I have had a difficult time finding and photographing the flowers of this plant mainly due to the rainy nature of its favored haunts. In the Luquillo highlands it can rain at any time of the day almost every single day during the blooming season of this plant. High humidity being inimical to the good functioning and survival of cameras it is not without trepidation that one takes an expensive camera into the sopping wet habitat of this orchid. Of course there are dry days on these forests but often they don’t align well with those weekends and holidays on which I can travel to their area of the forest.

I have seen many plants of this species, including some respectable sized clumps of stems, but so far have been able to take a photo of just a single flower. I found this single flower on an August visit to the forest that happened to allow for a brief respite from the constant rain. Hopefully in the future I will be able to return to their habitat to search for more plants on bloom. I am strongly against collecting this plant as its cultural needs condemn it to a sure death when placed in the hands of the casual orchid grower. Plants removed from its highland habitat and brought into the coastal lowland will slowly die from dehydration even when given a lot of watering mainly because it is so hard to replicate in captivity the combination of high humidity, moderate temperatures and breezy environment that occur in this plant favored locations. That doesn’t mean that given the proper care it can’t grow or even thrive in captivity, is just that the time and equipment investment needed to properly grow this plant away from its rain forest habitat is larger than what a vast majority of orchidists are willing to spend in time and money.

Dendrobium primulinum 'DeLeon' an interesting plant

Flower with nearly round lip

flower with a very small scoop like lip

Large flower with oblong lip that has a ridge in the middle

This is a flower that is just opening it will expand until it look that the one in the photo over this one

A fairly good blooming althought the presentation is not the best

Large plant growing in a fairly small wire basket

I brought this interesting Dendrobium a few years ago from Eli Orchids in Utuado, a town in the mountainous interior of the island of Puerto Rico. When I got this plant it was labeled as Dendrobium primulinum var. Leon and for lack of a better name I kept this ID and photos of this plant taken by me can be seen in several orchid forums. However when it bloomed the flowers were oddly different from what most books and Internet photos identified as typical primulinum. I found photos of flowers that had some resemblance to those of my plant, the flowers were those of variety Assamicum. However on closer inspection the resemblance proved to be superficial. Compounding the problem of identification was the strange proclivity of this plant to produce flowers of widely differing sizes and shapes. Even worse some flowers expand quite a bit and may look one way freshly opened and another after they have been open for a week. A few days ago, with the help of Brian Monk who answered a question I posted in the Orchid Source forum, I finally learned that the true identity of my plant is Dendrobium primulinum DeLeon.

But the doubt I had about this plant identity plant, when I first bloomed it, piqued my curiosity so I studied scientific descriptions of the flowers of primulinum to better understand this plant. What I found is that the appearance of the flowers of this species is more variable in color and shape than one would guess judging from the characteristic of those exhibited and grown in the United States. The plants in the US, at least judging from photos of collections and exhibitions used to be, until recently, relatively uniform in appearance. I would like to add that primulinum now has been lumped with cretaceum and the plants are called Dendrobium polyanthum.

The form of primulinum commonly pictured in those books and photos that have been available to me has thick, arched canes that are relatively short. The flowers in these plants have hairy lips of a light yellow color, the sepals and petals are varied shades of mauve. In the lip, usually to the side of the column there are purple lines that have a varying extent in different clones. I have occasionally seen plants of this type in local collections, but I have never seen one in bloom anywhere in PR.

About four years ago a new type of primulinum appeared locally. This new type was part of a huge importation of all types of Dendrobium for the spring show of the PR Orchid Society show. It is clear plants of this type were also imported into the US as photos of the flowers of plants of this type cropped up in the Orchid Source forum. This new type has large flowers with a beautiful bright yellow color covering the center of a white lip, the sepals and petals were a delightful soft pink. But this new plant didn’t resemble DeLeon at all. The vegetative parts of this plant were different from De Leon and the thick short canes of the primulinum I had known previously. This plant resembles those plants known in Japan as var. giganteum.

Information on primulinum DeLeon is pretty sparse. I did several Internet searched and frustratingly and vexingly the results of the searches were either posts that I had made about this plant on the various Internet orchid growing forums or the advertisements of the vendor that sold me this plant. Thanks to Brian Monk I learned that this plant earned a certificate of cultural merit for its owner back in 1968, the plant exhibited had 101 flowers.

My plants grow well without any special treatment but are curiously varied in their blooming. This is a bit surprising since all are descendants of the same plant. Some produce large flowers with huge round white lips other produce smaller flowers. At times a cane can have large flowers near the top and smaller flowers near the tip. The lips of some of the flowers are very round others are oblong and some even have a ridge down the middle. It is unclear what causes this variation in the flowers but in general older plants with several older mature canes produce better flowers than younger plants with just a few small canes. A peculiar characteristic of this plant is that the first few leaves of the new canes can have a bright reddish or purplish tint in the margins, this I have not seen in any other Dendrobium of this type that I have grown.

This plant doesn’t seem to need much rooting media to subtract enough water and nutrients to prosper an achieve a good size. One of my plant has six healthy new canes from three to four feet of lenght and several older canes all growing from a mass of media two inches thick and six inches wide. However it is to be noted that this plant gets drenched every day during summer and fertilized weekly for as long as the canes are producing new leaves. This plant usually finished its growth cycle October and starts shedding its leaves by November.

Some years the plants blooms wonderfully, others they barely produce one flower or two. But I enjoy so much the flowers when they are produced that I don’t mind the fact that some years some plant fail to bloom. I have been looking at the wonderful plants that have been awarded in Japan and I have realized that the flowers of my plants would look even better if I did some grooming of the canes before the buds open to prevent crowding of the blooms. I am looking forward to next year blooming to see if I can make the 2011 blooming the most beautiful and elegant ever.

Grammatophyllum speciosum

Grammatophyllum speciosum, this is a picture of the adult plant 
as it was when it produced its first inflorescence.

Grammatophyllum speciosum produces imperfect flowers near the base of the inflorescence, this may alarm those growers that are not aware of this particular trait of this genus. Flowers that are away from the base are normal.

The lip of the normal flower

This is the normal flower of Grammatophyllum speciosum

I got this plant of Grammatophyllum speciosum as a gift in June 1997. It was a two cane seedling, the largest cane was about two inches tall. It was a gift from Donato Segui. During the first few years, when it still relatively small I used to lavish care on it. But as it grew and became bigger and bigger, I started to care for it less. Eventually it ended up in the garden where it was planted in a pedestal made out of rock.

Last year a car hit the pedestal and destroyed it. The plant suffered only a slight damage but I had to drag it away from the spot where it was growing to where it s now.  Perhaps the change of place triggered flowering and it bloomed after this event.  It started flowering early in March, eleven years after I received it.

The flowers of this plant look somewhat different from the type of Gramm. speciosum that seems to be common in botanical collections. It is greener and has less maroon color. A google search located a photo of a plant almost identical to mine. It is growing in the Khao Yai National Park in Thailand.The parent of this plant was brought to Puerto Rico around the middle of the last century by a college professor, Dr. Juan A. Rivero. He apparently acquired the plant during a visit to South East Asia. 

For many years Dr. Rivero's plant was as far as I know the only one in the west of the island. In the middle nineties he selfed his plant and grew many seedlings. These seedlings were sold by a nursery in Cabo Rojo. There are several of these plants around the west of the island that still survive. Under my care this plant has been found to be fairly undemanding, and practically plague free. In my locality the climate supplies most of this plant’s growing needs as far as water, humidity and temperature.This orchid forms large clumps that can reach amazing sizes, a gigantic one that weighted about two tons was exhibited in Britain in the Crystal Palace in 1851 and was one of the centerpieces of that year’s exhibition.

Media: Bark, after the root basket formed, none.

Potting: First on well drained plastic pots, then on a very strong metal basket.

Fertilizing: 20-20-20 when it was in a pot. When it was large enough to put in a wire basket I stopped giving it liquid fertilizer and started pouring two or three cups of horse manure on top of the root ball at the start of the growing season and kept replacing it as it degraded and got washed away by the rain.

Light: Full morning sun, light shade after midday, It gets this regime because it is what is available on the only spot that I had to put this plant.

Temperature: From 95F high during the day in summer to 60F during the night in winter. Said to withstand temperatures down to 45F.

Care: Staking up the canes when necessary to allow the grass mower to pass. It is important to keep checking for the snails and slugs that may attack the inflorescence as soon as they get the slightest whiff of its existence. Regular grooming to remove dead canes and to keep the plant tidy go a long way toward helping this plant stay healthy.