The thieves orchids

When I was a college student, back in the early eighties, I had a small collection of orchids.  I would spend the week in the town where the university was and come back to my hometown on weekends to take care of my orchids.  My mother would water the plants during the week if it was exceptionally dry but outside that,  she didn't pay much attention to them because she was not really interested in orchids.

One Friday, when I arrived home I went into the shade house only to find someone had broken in.  Only one plant was stolen, a Phalaenopsis aphrodite that was in full bloom.  I was really, really angry and upset.  At that time those orchids were quite rate locally and pretty difficult to get.  It was clear, from the size of the hole on the side of the greenhouse, that the thief had been a child.   I inquired among the neighbors, no, not the adults, the children, they were the ones that really knew everything since they were free range children (is that still a thing nowadays? but, I digress).  But no one had seen anything.   I was unspeakably angry but there was nothing I could do.

I repaired the shadehouse, reinforced the sides so that nobody could make a hole in them and, as I was doing that, pondered on what to do.  The first thing I did was put out some bait.  The bait were some pieces of Oncidium sphacelatum.  They were hung from the sides of the shadehouse in spots where they could be easily reached.  But I decided that this was not enough to appease my thirst for revenge.  Whenever a plant became virused, pest covered or had lost all their roots and capacity to grow or bloom I would take them out of the shadehouse and hang them in the trees around the garden.

I called these plants, the thieves orchids.  To me they were an early warning system in case there was someone was stealing plants in the area.   I an addition I had pleasant, calming, fantasies of the stolen orchids infecting all the other plants in the collection of whoever brought them with all manner of loathsome diseases.  I admit this was very vicious thing to do, but I was young and angry,  nevertheless I still think there is a specially hot place in hell for people that buy stolen orchids.

Contrary to expectations, no orchid was ever again stolen from my garden.  As the years passed by the thieves orchids met a variety of fates.  Some departed for the great, happy, terracota pot in the sky.  Others were given to particularly masochistic people that fully believed they could be cured, and in some cases they were indeed cured.  Lastly, a few were cured by the judicious application of chemical agents and were welcomed back into the shadehouse.

In due time I became less wary and things in my garden returned to their usual blissful tranquility, except for that time a relative decided that by hook or crook, she would get a piece of my huge specimen plant of Myrmecophya humboltii, but that is another story.

An orchid story: The Oncidium altissimum that would not bloom

When I was a college student, I was going to attend some athletic events in the capital city of Puerto Rico. I lived at several hours driving distance from the capital, so a friend invited me to stay at his house which is near where the events were going to take place, so I would not have to do a long drive.  It was the first time I had visited my friend's house.  His mother knew that I cultivated orchids and asked me to take a look at one of her plants.  She told me that even thought quite large and healthy,  inexplicably, it would not bloom.

When I looked at her orchid I was impressed, the plant was easily three feet across and had a large number of adult sized and quite fat pseudobulbs.  The plant was in excellent condition and free of pests.  I was baffled, a plant of such size in the wild should have been full of the remains of old flowering stems, which in this species can reach ten feet long.  On her plant there was no evidence that the plant had ever bloomed.

I started asking her questions and soon realized she had no idea how the flowers of the plant looked.  Actually she knew very little about the plant, only that it was an orchid, and that was that.    I could not find anything wrong with the plant or with the care she was giving it.   Then she told me that she had one problem with the plant.  There were some vine seedlings that kept invading her plant and growing on the media.  She had to continually cut them, but to no avail, they, very stubbornly, kept invading her plant in spite of her ruthless campaign against them.

When she said that, I asked her to show me from where the pesky vines would grow.  She pointed me to the bases of the pseudobulbs.  She thought that inflorescences were invading weeds!!  She didn't recognize the inflorescences of the Oncidium because she know nothing about the plant and because the inflorescences grow quite a bit before they produce the branches where the flowers are.   She had spent years cutting the inflorescences.  You might be surprised that such an absurd thing could happen, but this happened in the ancient times before the Internet, when information sources about orchids in Puerto Rico were few and you had to go to a mayor library to get even basic information on common types.

I told her about the inflorescences and how to tie them so that they would show their best.  I had to do this because the plant was growing in a large pot in the ground in an inside garden.   Eventually. the plant finally bloomed with many inflorescences to everyone's delight.