Encyclia plicata culture: Caring for a newly purchased plants with few roots

 A few months ago, I brought an Encyclia plicata.  The plant was somewhat dehydrated from its from its journey (it came from an orchid nursery in Jamaica) but otherwise it was in a fairly good shape.   The plant was sold bare root and has very short roots because they were cropped for transportation.  This presents a bit of a challenge, Encyclias that have lost their roots need a high humidity environment to recuperate, and yet in my experience the are intolerant of media that remains wet for a long time.  My sad experience with Cuban Encyclias is that they can rot away if keep too wet.   I have lost Enc moebusi and Enc. Phoenicia.   I think Enc moebusi died from its mount staying wet too long in the climatic chaos after hurricane Maria.  The reasons for the loss of Encyclia phoenicia are not clear.

So, what I have done is I have put the plant in an empty wire basket with no media.  I am lucky that in my locality the climate offers a level of environmental humidity that is good for tropical orchids.  Once or twice a day, depending on the weather, I soak the plant.  In hot, dry, windy weather, I soak it twice a day.  Before soaking, I check it to make sure it is perfectly dry.  For two months the plant stayed inactive.  But in August I saw three basal buds start developing.  Also a few roots have started growing.

 If this one was one of my other Encyclias, I would have put it in a terracotta pot with coarse potting media.  But with this one I plan to keep it in the basket with no media to see how the roots develop.  If all the new growths mature successfully, I might mount it on a tree fern plaque.  This has worked well in the past with Enc alata, Enc bractecens and Enc Borincana.   Or I might decide to fill the basket its in now with large pieces of tree fern.   Given that the plant has a limited quantity of roots, I don’t expect the new growths to reach blooming size but to stay smaller.  Once the new growths they developed a root system, I will decide what to do with it.  

  

These colonies of Sphatoglottis plicata and Spa. plicata var. alba were obliterated when the road was repaired from damage

These orchids were growing on a fern prairie next to highest point of highway 10 in Puerto Rico.  Unfortunately, the road on this spot, started cracking and slumping.  A massive rework of the down slope side of the road was done to protect the road from further damage and to repair it.  The whole area was denued and reshaped.  Some day I will return to see if the orchids have returned.  However these particular orchids are abundant in the extreme in certain estreches of this road.  In this places even constant removal of plants by people that stop to uproot them, seems to make no dent in the populations.

Sphatoglottis plicata, a weedy invasive orchid, near Mt. Britton, El Yunque, Puerto Rico

I found this orchid blooming on the roadside near Mt. Britton in el Yunque forest.  Unlike Spathoglottis populations at lower altitudes, plants were widely scattered and seemed confined to disturbed areas.  No white flowered plants were seen.  The plant whose flower I photographed had several developing seed capsules.  I recall finding Eulophia plants in this spot in the early nineties, I have visited the area several times in the last few years and have never found them.  Of all the terrestrial orchids in this part of the forest, Spathoglottis is the most conspicuous due to its brightly colored flowers.  No evidence of damage to the flowers by beetles was seen in the plants near Mt. Britton.

A hideous little pest of Bletia patula and other local orchids

The damage to the florar parts of Bletia patula flower betrays

 the handywork of a curculionid bettle that attacks the flowers of orchids.

Checking the flower shows that the bettle is hidden behind 

the lip of the flower, sometimes you find two bettles together.

If the bettle feels the flower is being handled, it tries to hide deeper between

 the lip and the petals.  If it is further annoyed it comes out of hiding and tries to flee.

If the bettle comes out of hiding, its usual strategy is to run to

 the end of a floral part and from there fall to the ground.

This particular flower bettle damages the flowers of many kinds of orchids in my garden.  Its local abundance varies seasonaly.  At certain times of the year I can find from one to five chewing in my flowers.  I think this might have to do with the peak of flower production by local plants, but this is just a guess.  Rather than use insecticide on them, I exploit their fleeing response by putting a cup with alcohol or dishwashing liquid under the flower and shaking the flower gently.  The usual result is that the bettle takes a dive into the liquid and then goes to the great orchid flower in the sky.  Thankfully for most of the year they are not present on the garden,    

These bettles are surprisingly hard for such a small insect.  It is not easy to crush them.   But if you are moved to squash them, they do produce a satisfying crunchy noise when crushed.  I have seen damaging flowers of Bulbophyllum, Cattleya, Dendrobium, Oncidium, Peristeria, Sphatoglottis and Bletia among others.

Spathoglottis plicata, a weedy invasive exotic orchid that can go viral on you.

A mature fully expanded flower

A freshly opened flower still in pristine condition

Notice the many seed pods

A small patch of fern prairie in the Rio Abajo forest showing about a dozen plants on bloom

The purple color form

The damage that the flower beetles inflict on the flowers is clearly evident in this photo

 
The first time I saw this species growing in the Karst region of Puerto Rico it was back on 2005, on the sheer wall of a haystack hill, these hills are called locally “mogotes”. At first I thought they were flowers of the fabled alba form of Bletia patula. But on closer inspection the flowers turned out to belong to a plant of Spathoglottis plicata with white flowers that was part of a small colony growing on a ledge just over a tiny water seep.


I wondered if I could ever find a plant of this species on a more accessible spot so I could photograph the flowers, little I suspected the enormous success this plant would enjoy colonizing the areas around the road. In the next few years I started noticing that the plants were popping up all over the place. By 2010 these plants have become absurdly common on the roadsides of the highway 10 to such an extent that continuous collecting by passerby doesn’t seem to make any noticeable dent in their numbers. I have been to some fern prairies where you can see hundreds of blooming plants and an uncounted number of smaller plants.

On first sight this degree of abundance is a bit shocking given what we know about the difficult odds that orchid seeds face in the wild. But when I examined the plants and their inflorescenses the reason for their abundance became clear. All the plants that had inflorescences were laden with seedpods and it seemed as if almost every single flower was either pollinated or had set seed by self-pollination. As a result of the heavy seed production the population on this fern prairie is broadcasting onto the environment a staggering, mind- numbing quantity of number of seeds. The consecuence of the massive number of seeds that the plants produce is that even if only one seed in a million survives to grow into adulthood to reproduce the population will thrive and grow.

One peculiarity I have observed in Rio Abajo is that the white flowered plants are taller and an order of magnitude more common than the purple colored ones. When I have seen them in the same areas, the white plants dominate the sunny centers of the prairie and the purples ones grow in more shaded spots and the areas where the prairie borders on the forest. Native orchids can be found growing in the same areas as the Spathoglottis but in comparatively tiny numbers. The purple and white forms seem not to cross as I have never seen any intergrades even when the plant are growing cheek to jowl.

In the Rio Abajo Forest Spathoglottis distribution seems related to human activity and the disturbance of the soil. I have not found plants of this species in pristine areas inside the forest, away from the roads. However I am still finding plants here and there in spots along the road that enters into the heart of the forest so it is probable that in the near future this species will be able to colonize new areas deep in the forest.

Generally I am against the collecting wild growing plants, unless for scientific or to rescue them from destruction, because this depletes the populations of our native orchids but in this case this is a moot point. This plant is not native and since it is a wildly successful invasive weed it is not likely to be affected in its abundance or capacity to spread by being collected by humans. But there is a different, unexpected reason not to invite this species into your orchid collection. The reason is related to this plant impressive ability to produce seeds.  You should also be aware that collecting plants in state forests is prohibited by law, even if they are obnoxious weeds.

The reason not to bring this plant into your orchid collection is that the seeds of this plant are much more likely to germinate and grow than any other orchid I know. Whether they are more viable than the norm or less fastidious in the choice of their fungal partner or simply because so many of them are produced but the consequences are the name no matter the cause. As a result of the amazing capacity of the seeds of this Spathoglottis you will start finding seedlings in the pots of other orchids, under the benches and on the flower beds in the garden. I am sure most people will be delighted to see a seedling orchid appear in their collection. But this delight disappears quickly when one discovers that seedling Spathoglotis are growing at rocket speed on the pots of that rare, finicky orchid that only grows, and slowly at that, if watered at dawn with water derived from dew drops gathered by hand after midnight from rose petals and that will die if subjected to the slightest disturbance of its roots.

I have had trouble finding flowers of this species in good condition in the wild. Almost every inflorescence hosts one or more flower beetles that damage and disfigure the flowers. The beetle populations seem to wax and wane so at times it is possible to find a few flowers in pristine condition, but most of the times I have visited the areas where this orchid grows virtually all the flowers were damaged to some extent. Isolated plants seem to fare much better in this respect as I have found a few with their flowers in fairly good shape. But the flower damage doesn’t seem to affect in the least the plant’s capacity to set seed and produce plenty of seed pods.

It seems the humidity of the soil or orchid media dictates whether this orchid can colonize a spot. In one of my relative’s garden the Spathoglottis seedling appear only in well watered orchid pots and in regularly watered flower beds. The rest of the garden remains free of their presence even in areas where one would have thought at first sight that they could do well.