I brought this plant in the summer of 2011 from a vendor in
Hawaii. It arrived in excellent
condition with nice plump pseudobulbs and immaculate leaves. I put it in my terrace and waited for
flowers, and waited, and waited. The
plant stayed the same for the rest of the year.
Given that it was an adult plant I had assumed that it would bloom in
the summer as do many Bulbophyllum. I gave routine care to this plant for the
rest of the year with little evidence of any effect, good or ill. In late April 2012 I started watering it
almost daily with a weak fertilizer solution.
I did this because almost all of my
Bulbophyllum start producing new growths during March or April which
locally is the second half of the dry season.
In late April sumatranum
finally started producing a new growth.
The new growth came out of a pseudobulb that is part of a chain of
pseudobulbs that escaped from the pot and are growing in the air. Nevertheless because of the frequent watering
an local high humidity it is growing quite well. In the second week of May I was delighted to
find that an inflorescence was growing out of one of the older
pseudobulbs. In May 16 the flower
opened. So far the plant has only one
active growing point and one inflorescence but I expect that as the season
progresses more vegetative, and hopefully, floral buds will start to develop.
