Encyclia Orchid Jungle (Enc. alata x Enc. phoenicia)

This orchid is a hybrid, the cross of Encyclia alata and Encyclia phoenicia.  My plant is the product of a selfing of Encyclia Orchid Jungle.  My plant strongly favors the alata parent and the influence of phoenicia is mostly shown in the enhanced color of the flowers which are more colorful than those of alata.  The flowers are very flat in the sense that the petals and sepals are all in one plane, in a side photo they are barely visible, this makes for a wonderful presentation of the flower when seen from the front.  The flower segments borders are barely recurved back in contrast with those of alata.  I had an alata in which the flower segment would curl back in the mature flower.  The flowers have a dark chocolate color at the ends of the sepals and petals but the color changes into a light green toward the base the floral segments.  The chocolate and green floral segments strongly contrast with the yellow lip.  The lip has ridges and these are decorated with maroon lines, the lip margin has a narrow yellow line along its lower end.

My plant grew vigorously and bloomed well for years but sadly most of the plant succumbed to root rot during a particularly wet summer.  All that could be saved from the root rot was a single pseudobulb.  In time this pseudobulb produced new growths and started blooming again.  The lesson here is to be alert to signs that the media in which your Encyclia plants is becoming decayed and its killing the roots. This is harder that you would think as the media can look quite good on the top and be in a crummy condition under the surface.  That’s why I am planting my Encyclias now either in pots with rock or in very open baskets that allow the roots to have an extremely good access to oxigen and that lets any piece of decayed media to fall away when I water the plants.

Amandara Rafael Sobrino, Epidendrum ciliare x Blc. Toshie Aoki

This orchid is a cross between Epidendrum ciliare, an orchid species native of Puerto Rico and Blc. Toshie Aoki a complex Cattleya hybrid.  Its name is Amandara Rafael Sobrino made by Dr. Rafael Sobrino. The flower of this hybrid favors the shape of the Epi. ciliare parent.  The  Blc. Toshie Aoki influence is obscured to such an extent in this hybrid that if one saw this plant with no information about its parentage, one would have hardly guessed that Blc. Toshie Aoki was involved. This plant represents a departure from traditional orchid breeding.  Most hybridists pursue the goal of very flat flowers with wide floral segments and round lips.  They would hardly use a plant with the idiosyncratic fringed and elongated lip of Epi. ciliare when there are so many Cattleya hybrids that carry in their genome a concentration of the choosiest traits in an already advanced form.  For me this plant represents and experiment to see how the traits of the parental species would mesh and present themselves in a flower.  As for what I think of the flower, I can say I like it. But the truth is, to quote the romans, “De coloribus et gustativus non disputandum”.

Cymbidium Dorothy Stockstill 'Forgotten Fruit'

I brought this plant the annual PR orchid society show in San Juan in 2007.  When I brought this orchid it was a small seedling.  It grew well and soon had large and handsome growths.  Unfortunately it would not bloom.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it tried to bloom frequently but the inflorescences never developed fully.  What happened was this, the plant would start producing an inflorescence, it would start developing but then, when it was barely half and inch long, it would stop growing.  The inflorescence would stay the same size for weeks and then rot and turn black.  I saw this disheartening chain of events happen over and over.

Eventually I stopped paying close attention to the plant.  The plant kept growing and producing new bulbs and I moved it to a larger pot.  It would still not bloom, even though it kept producing what were clearly incipient inflorescences.  Then in February 2012 I noticed that one of the inflorescences had lengthened considerably without rotting.  I kept watch over it and to my delight a few days later a stem full of buds came out of the bracts that covered the base of the inflorescence.

The inflorescence kept lengthening until it reached about two feet long.  It produced thirty flowers of an excellent leathery texture.  The flowers were not as red as I thought they would be but nevertheless the color was nice enough.  The flowers lasted a few weeks in perfection mainly because I protected them from rain and the abundant insects of Rio Abajo which would have probably damaged them pretty quickly.

This is not, by any account, a free blooming plant under my conditions.  But the flowers are so nice when they are produced that I am willing to keep it, if only for the sake of the occasional inflorescence.  I expect that this orchid will bloom again and perhaps next time it will produce more than a single inflorescence.

Dendrobium gouldii 'Black Koa' a yellow colored "antilope" Dendrobium

A mature flower with fully curled petals.

A newly opened flower.

A few years back I brought a seedling of this plant from Tropical Orchid Farm.  I have always liked “antelope” Dendrobium from the section Sphatulata (also known as Ceratobium) because of their resemblance to the heads of antelopes. This plant is native of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islandsm it has a number of differently colored forms.  Unfortunately my first plant proved to be a slow grower and would only produce small squat canes.  Undaunted, I brought another plant from TOF.  The new plant grew vigorously and promptly produced a cane that was at one feet and a half tall, much larger than any of the previous ones.  This cane produced an inflorescence in January and the first flowers opened in March. Now it is the middle of May and most flowers are still in good shape.  The inflorescence had about twenty flowers.

The flowers are yellow with a finely sculpted lip and the upraised twisted petals that are a notable characteristic of the section.  The distal end of the petals is a deep brown color which contrasts well with the color of the rest of the flower.  The flowers last for months in perfection, even when subjected to wind and rain.  My plant is growing in a pot with medium size stones as media as I have lost many a Dendrobium from root rot as a consequence of a waterlogged media.

The cultural advice I can give about this plant is the following.  I grow my best plant in a bright, airy spot.  I have grown my plants both in full sun and under shade cloth and the plant under shade cloth grew better.  Give the plant plenty of fertilizer and water when it is producing new canes.  When they are not growing I don’t fertilize my plants.  Avoid putting this orchid in media that can become so packed and waterlogged that the roots are deprived of oxygen, this will kill the roots.

Myrmecophila grandiflora (formerly Schomburgkia tibicinis var. grandiflora)

A full plant view that shows the six feet plus inflorescence.

The flower against the morning sky, note the ants in the bud.

A top view of the lip showing the exposed column that is said to be an identification mark for grandiflora

This plant was given to me a few years ago by a friend.  My friend had his plant growing on a citrus tree.  His plant was enormous, with many side branches, and had colonized a large area on the trunk of the tree.  She cut a piece with two pseudobulbs and gave it to me.  I was not sure how to pot this plant as I had previously lost some Myrmecophilas to base rot.  So I just put the plant in an empty basket and stabilized it with a few large chunks of bark.  The orchid spent many months in that basket with no sign that it was either growing or declining.  Eventually it started producing a new growth.

The new growth was of a much smaller size than the original pseudobulbs, probably due to the fact that the originalpseudobulbs had a meager amount of roots.  But as the pseudobulb matured it started producing roots.  The next pseudobulb it produced was slightly bigger, not much of an improvement on the first one.  However the plant started producing roots with increased vigor and the basket became filled with the plant’s roots.  It produced its first full sized pseudobulb on the third year on my possession.  Learned that it grew pretty fast once it got going and that it was crucial for getting a good sized pseudobulb that you provided abundant water and fertilizer during the plant growth phase.

When it first bloomed the inflorescence was damaged by some insect that kept nibbling on the stem of the inflorescence.  It produced only a few flowers.  The second time it bloomed the inflorescence was severely damaged and the plant aborted it.  The photos you see in this essay come from the orchids first and third blooming.

The flowers last from a week to ten days.  I suspect they would last more if I kept them away from the wind and pollinating insects.  The flowers open well during the morning but tend to collapse in a heap before midday.  To get good photos of the plant I had to get up early in the morning when the flowers were at its best.  The inflorescence shown in the photo topped out at six feet and six inches.  At one time it became entangled in the shadehouse roof wire netting, that is why the inflorescence has a slight bet to It.  The inflorescence got bent 90 degrees but to my surprise, once it was free of the wire, it slowly righted itself and kept on growing as if nothing had happened.

My plant is grown under shadecloth but the shadecloth allows quite a bit of light to come through.  I water it twice weekly when it is producing pseudobulbs and fertilize it weekly.  Outside of the time when it is growing it only gets water when it rains and it is not fertilized.  Ants love this plant and it is rare to see the plant without ants on it.  However the only ants I have seen in large numbers in this plant are black and don’t bite when disturbed, they just scatter in a panic.  My Myrmecophila humboltii, however, is guarded by a truly vicious type of large yellow ant that has a memorably painful bite.

This plant is fairly common in orchid collections in Puerto Rico and even people that don’t know about orchids sometimes have it in their gardens as a curiosity.  The fact that this plant, if planted in a favorable spot, can grow, and even thrive, with relatively little care helps it survive even in the hands of those that give their plants little or no care.

Rhychodendrum Cabalgata en Verde

This orchid is a cross of Rhyncholaelia digbyiana  and Epidendrum ciliare.  Both species have notable fringed lips.   Epi. ciliare has green sepals and petals and a relatively narrow lip that is white with fringed side lobes and has a long central projection.  Rhyncholaelia dygiana generally has green sepals and petals and a wide, deeply fringed green lip.  The Epi. ciliare parent of this cross is a particularly fine representative of the species, its flower has the largest natural spead of any ciliare awarded under the AOS system and was awarded a FCC in 2011.  The Rhyncholaelia parent is the cultivar “Laura” AM/AOS.  When I saw this Rhychodendrum it had two inflorescences, one with two flowers and another with three.  The flower count is reduced from the number the Epidendrum parent produces because of the Rhycholaelia influence.  

The Epidendrum parent dominates the appearance of the flower of the cross.  The Rhycholaelia influence shows as a widening of the side lobes and of the projection of the lip that is a particular feature of the Epi. ciliare lip.  The plant form is similar to the Epidendrum parent.  Since I saw this plant early in the morning I could discern no fragrance, but since both species are known to produce fragrance at night, I would expect it to be fragrant after the onset of darkness.

I have learned that only a few plants of this cross survived to bloom.  I have been told that there are just two clones of this cross.  I was told the other clone has even wider flower segments and produces more flowers, I hope one day I will see it.  I have seen three Epi. ciliare crosses and in two the Epidendrum is dominant in the shape and size of the hybrid.  I the third, a cross with Blc. Toshie Aoki, the flower is much larger than ciliare but from the appearance of the flower you would have a hard time guessing that the other parent..