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.

Brassolaeliocattleya Valley Isle Plum AM/AOS

This Cattleya hybrid was seen at the 2012 Mayaguez Orchid Show at the Mayaguez Mall.  The flower was quite impressive in color and size and presentation.  However it was sadly marred by a bit of damage to the lip.  Since the damage was confined to a very fine line on the lip, I erased it with the help of a bit of computer magic.

Psychilis monensis some observations of plants "in situ"

This form has a flat open flower with green sepals and petals

Cream colored flowers

Yellowish nodding, slightly cupped flowers
 with lips whose sides curl back

Relatively shorter lip on green flower

An inflorescence with five open flowers

A very pale form with cupped sepals

Seed capsule

The orchid Psychilis monensis is endemic of the island of Mona.  Mona Island sits in the Mona channel which located is between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico.  Mona Island is a deserted island only inhabited by a few personnel of the department of natural and environmental resources of Puerto Rico.  It is visited by fishermen hunters and campers but lately, mainly due to a number of deaths on the island caused by sunstroke, dehydration and accidents, the number of visitors has reduced significantly.  Mona Island is part of the United States, it was ceded to the nation after the Hispano-American war along with Puerto Rico and other islands of the Puerto Rican Bank.

The main terrain in Mona Island is a flat limestone plateau mostly at an elevation of one to two hundred feet above the sea.  The island receives a comparatively low quantity of rain, 30 inches a year, and most of the vegetation is composed of drought resistant plants.  The limestone plateau is a particularly challenging place for plants to grow due the harsh conditions that prevail on it.   Most of the ground in the plateau consists of bare, rain eroded limestone, this terrain can severely damage even the most sturdy footwear faily quickly.  There are trees in the plateau but they are small and occur where there is a pocket of soil in the rocky terrain.  Sunlight is fierce and temperatures high which makes dehydration and sunstroke a constant threat.

In these surroundings, which not in the least resembles what most people think as the ideal orchid growing environment,  Psychilis monensis not only lives but thrives.   In certain parts of the islands plants are downright abundant.  I visited Mona Island in July 2012 and one of my goals was to see this orchid.  I went for a short walk to look for orchids about an hour before sunset, when temperatures are tolerable and sunlight is considerably reduced in intensity.  I found that in a particular area of low shrubs these orchids were exceedingly common.  Many shrubs had Psychilis growing in the middle of them, some of the plants were large specimens.  In the largest plants almost every pseudobulb had an inflorescence.

Psychilis plants were growing everywhere in this area, on the ground, on cacti, on dead or dying trees and on the bare rock.  However plants exposed all the time to full sun were stunted, with reddish leaves and few if any inflorescences.  Plants growing in soil seemed in worse shape than either those in bare rock or growing as epiphytes.  In fact a number of the plants that were located directly in contact with soil were dying or had dead parts.   The largest and healthiest plants were those located one or two feet over the ground on a shrub that shielded the plant from the worst of the midday sunlight and yet allowed a considerable amount of sunlight to pass through.

The flowers of Psy. monensis are surprisingly variable.  I heard a presentation where a student that had done some field research argued that this was due to the fact that they don’t give a reward to pollinators and they need to have variability so that potential pollinators won’t learn to avoid them before pollination is affected.   Unfortunately my camera stopped working on my second day in Mona so I have only a few photos of the flowers of this orchid, taken on a small area near the Sardine Beach.  Nevertheless I saw a bit of the variation that one can see in the whole island.  In the flowers I saw the floral parts could be short or long, perpendicular to the lip or almost parallel to it, green, pinkish white or pale yellow.  The lip could be richly colored, white, long, short, flat or with its sides recurved back.  Some flowers were nodding with the lip hanging straight down and others held the lip almost horizontal.  The inflorescences can bloom repeatedly, I saw one with evidence of having bloomed six or seven times.

No other orchid compares in abundance with Psychilis in Mona island.  You can find a few plants of Domingoa here and there, Oeceoclades in forested areas of the coast and Vanilla, Tolumnia and Broughtonia in particular locales in the interior of the island, but all of the previous orchids have a patchy distribution and, when compared to Psychilis, take an effort to find.  I have read accounts of orchid collectors from the eighteen and nineteen century that remark on finding orchids in the hundreds and even in the thousands growing all over the landscape.  In Mona Island you can still see a glimmer of how a pristine orchid population looked to those early explorers.

 Happily the orchids of Mona Island are pretty safe from human depredations and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.  The main thing that protects these orchids is that the average orchidist reaction to the flowers of Psychilis is probably “meh”.   The relatively small flowers of Psychilis can hardly compete, in the eyes of an average orchidist, with the very many brightly colored, large flowered hybrids that are currently the norm in the orchid market.  I know that visitors occasionally take plants, but this collecting doesn’t seem to make even the tiniest noticeable dent in this orchid population and must be very light indeed as you can find large plants at a few minute walk from the camping grounds, something that would not happen if any amount of collecting was happening as usually it is the largest and most handsome plants the ones that are collected first.  Without a doubt probably almost all of the plants that have been taken from the island have died.  In all my years of orchid growing I have only seen a single plant of Psychilis monensis growing successfully out of Mona Island.  It was twenty years ago in Cupey, in the garden of a non-orchidist that had tied the plant to a wooden post in his garden when he had arrived back from a visit to Mona and had subsequently given it absolutely no care or attention to it.  I have heard that there are a few plants in cultivation, but unlike Psy. kranzlinii, Psy. macconellia and Psy. krugi which show up regularly in orchid shows, I have yet to see a Psy.  monensis at a show.  My suspicion is that Psychilis monensis just can’t survive the way in which most orchidist treat their plants as it is radically different from what these plants experience in their natural habitat.

This Psychilis is so common in its habitat because it is supremely well adapted to conditions that few other plants can tolerate.   In the coastal areas of Mona, where conditions are much more moderate you are hard pressed to find plants of Psychilis growing anywhere.   These plants have adapted to high levels of sunlight, strong desiccating winds and weeks or even months without any measurable rain.    Move a plant such as this to a shady, humid spot with stagnant air where it gets drenched with water every two or three days and im all probably it won’t survive, particularly if its roots are buried in bark and kept wet all the time.  So my advice is simple, leave these plants in its natural habitat.

Large plant with many inflorescences

A common hazzard in Mona Island

Psychilis monensis inflorescenses can rebloom several times

Domingoa haematochila (Rchb. f.) Carabia 1943, in situ in Mona Island in the Caribbean

This flower opened in the morning after a spell of strong rain

A whole plant view.  This plant had five inflorecenses, two with flowers.

For many years, in the eighties and nineties, I used to visit Mona Island on a yearly basis.   One of the things that lured me to Mona was that it is full of many interesting species of plants and animals.   I was particularly intrigued by the orchids of Mona.  The environment of Mona Island is not one that most people would associate with orchids. 

Most of the island is a plateau composed of limestone.  Here and there are pockets of soil in which shrubs and trees eke out an existence but most of the surface is bare limestone.  Rainfall is seasonal and can be scant, weeks, sometimes months, can go without measurable rain.   Temperatures can rise over 100F out in the plateau, I still remember my surprise (on a previous visit) when a thermometer I carried with me on a walk during the hottest time of the day measured 120 F.   The dominant vegetation on the plateau is shrubs, cactus and low trees.  There are places where the limestone has eroded to the point that sunken depressions have formed and accumulated a layer of soil where more substantial trees can grow.  But almost all of these depressions are small.  One of the largest one, the Bajura de los Cerezos has large trees and is moister than the surrounding terrain.  Domingoa in Puerto Rico lives in this severe but beautiful environment.

The last time I visited Mona Island, around 1996, I found many stemmed plants of Domingoa in the moister environment of the “bajuras”.  I had also found plants in the hot and very sunny plateau, but those were much smaller and much less common than the ones in moister surroundings.   In particular I found a good sized plant within easy walking distance of the camping area.   Sadly, the photos I took of the plant at this time were not good.

I visited Mona again between the 20 and 24 of July of 2012.  It was a wonderful experience.  One of the first things I did was to seek out the Domingoa plant to see if still survived.   I went looking for the place where I had seen it last and sure enough the plants were there.  I was dismayed by the fact that all the plants I found had developing buds or spent flowers.  Not a single one had an open flower.  However, one of the nights there was a spell of rain, the next day I found an open flower.  The plant I found had five inflorescences, one with a newly opened flower another with a bud just opening and one with a tiny developing flower bud.

Unlike many orchids Domingoa is pretty secure from collecting pressures.  Most of the island is off-limits to visitors and, even in those places where hiking is allowed, high temperatures, fierce sunlight and hordes of mosquitos tend to keep away all but the very hardiest of hikers.  I don’t know if Domingoa plants are in cultivation on the island of PR, I don’t recall ever seen plants exhibited in local orchid shows.  Domingoa haematocheila is reported from Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Ackerman in  his book An Orchid Flora of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands reports that the forms from Mona are vegetatively much smaller than the forms from Cuba.

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.