I found some tiny orchid seedlings, maybe of Leochilus puertoricensis, "in situ" in a single thin branch

Today I took some photos of the flowers of Leochilus puertoricensis and uploaded them to the Internet.  I was asked to take photos of the whole plant.  I went to see the plants and moved around the tree to try to get a better angle for the photos.  Then I noticed tiny green slivers on one of the branches.  They turned out to be orchid seedling.  I have never seen so many orchid seedling or such tiny ones.  Most were only green blades.  A single one had a short root.  My suspicion is that they are seedling of Leochilus, since they are in the same tree with plants of this species.  However I have never seen so many Leochilus plants clumped together, usually they occur as solitary plants.  I suspect the reason there are so many of them there is that it is the dry season and slugs and snails, which love to snack on these things are not very active due to the low humidity.  I will watch these tiny plants to see how many of them survive and how long they take to reach maturity and bloom.

Sobralia callosa L.O. Williams 1946, a tiny representative of a genus know for its gigantic plants

Until a few years ago, all the Sobralias I knew were either large, or gigantic plants.   When I visited Ecuador I saw Sobralia plants with fifteen feet tall canes.    About two years ago I brought a Sobralia decora and was pleasantly surprised at how well it did in my garden.   Encouraged by my success with Sob. decora I decided to try other species.  Among the species I brought was Sobralia callosa.

At first I was overly enthused with this plant as I had never seen it in bloom in any local show or group meeting, a sign that either it was not that popular, or that few people were able to keep it alive.  But I was pleasantly surprised when it grew well without any special attention.  In 2014, it bloomed three times.  The first time it bloomed I missed it entirely and only found out when I noticed the wilted flower.  The second time it bloomed it produced a single flower, then in its last bloom of the year it produced four.

The photos here are of the flowers produced in January 7, 2015.  I expect that as the plant gets larger the number of flowering stems will increase.  The plant is practically microscopic by Sobralia standards, the stems barely reaching nine inches, this makes it the ideal plant for those that want to enjoy the flowers of this genus but lack the space to keep even the medium sized species.

I have yet to repot this plant from its original pot.  My experience repotting these plants have been varied.  I repotted Sobralia decora and it kept growing well without missing a beat.  I repotted Sobralia violacea it died slowly, never producing a new growth.  So my advice would be, if you are repotting these genus, to be careful and try to avoid damage to the root ball.

Sobralia callosa grows well in my climatic area, during most of the year it experiences highs in the middle seventies and low in the middle sixties.   In the summer temperatures can climb into the middle eighties but remain there just for a few hours.  I don’t fertilize this species often, watering is done weekly during the dry season, during the wet season it can rain daily for weeks or months on end.  The plant is in a place where it gets full morning sun from 8:00 until 10:30 am the rest of the day it gets sunlight filtered thought the canopy of trees that surround the house.

Bulbophyllum angustifolium (Blume) Lindley (1830), a miniature botanical curiosity that is quite floriferous

In this photo you can see the long internodes between pseudobulbs

I got this tiny plant as a gift from a friend.  It is a twig epiphyte of the mountainous areas of Thailand, Malaya and Java¹.  This is a plant that is smaller than most commercially available Bulbophyllum, its pseudobulbs less than an inch tall, they are thin and the leaf is much larger than the pseudobulb.  The pseudobulbs are widely spaced along a rambling stem.

I didn’t put this plant in its own mount or pot.  My friend’s plant was an untidy tangle of stems going in every direction around and under a slated basket.  I decided to put the orchid on the top of a basket where a plant of Bulbophyllum Elizabeth Ann was growing so that it could ramble to its heart’s content.  Potting this plant would have is an exercise in futility as, due the long internodes the new growths surely would  end up out of the pot unless a grossly inpractical and oversized pot was used.  The plant grew well and eventually started growing out of the basket.  I kept twisting the stems back to the sides of the basket, because otherwise they grew out into the air.  My plant bloomed profusely with many inflorescences at the same time.

Sadly, I lost this plant.  I lost in a particularly embarrassing way.  Since the plant was growing and blooming well I assumed that it didn’t need much attention, but, as happened to me with other Bulbophyllum, eventually the pseudobulbs started growing away from the basket and into the air.  The result of this was that the stems were hanging from the basket, held back only by the older growths.  When the roots on the older growths died and decomposed, the pieces of the plant with the newest pseudobulbs would fall to the ground where they would lie unnoticed among the leaf litter only to be swept away when I passed the leaf blower.  That is a hazard with this plant, because all the parts of the plant are small and comparatively thin, it is easy to miss it if a piece falls from the mount.

One day I checked the basket and discovered that all the stems were old or dead and none had an active growing tip.   My advice on this plant is to mount it on a plaque that allows it to roam at will but never neglect the task of bending back the new growths that are growing into the air so that they are back in contact with the mount.    This plant grew well under my environmental conditions which are pretty humid during the rainy season.  The inflorescence of this orchid is short and the flowers are small.  The flowers are white with yellow tips.  Although this plant is small it can produce a nice showing when in full bloom, particularly if it has many pseudobulbs.  It is not common among local growers.

¹ Siegerist, Emily S.  2001.  Bulbophyllum and their allies: a grower’s guide

Porroglossum amethystinum a tiny and yet very weird orchid from Ecuador

When I first saw this little orchid I was totally stumped as to what orchid genus it could belong.  My ignorance can be excused on the basis that I had never previously seen an orchid of the genus Porroglossum.  These orchids are known for the particularity that they have a sensitive lip that retracts into the flower when touched.  The movement is triggered by an insect which is forced the lip’s action into contact with the plant pollinia.  There are a few specialists orchid growers in the United States that keep Porroglossum species but I have never seen this one before.  The flowers are lovely but small, the inflorescence is quite long in comparison with the flower size.  Because of the many other orchids with larger flowers in the Cabañas Armonia site I almost missed this one.   I saw this plant in the town of Mindo Ecuador.