For many years I have admired the
flowers of the Cymbidium hybrids
derived from cool growing species.
However I never grew them because my local climatic conditions don’t
provide the low temperatures needed to initiate blooming in these hybrids. However in recent years a number of “warm
tolerant” hybrids have appeared that hold the promise that they might bloom
under my conditions.
A
few years ago I decided to experiment and see how one of these “warm tolerant”
Cymbidium would fare in my garden. Over
the years I have seen friends buy big standard Cymbidium, which were large
plants with impressive flowers, and then witnessed the slow deterioration of
the plants. I wondered, whether it was
due to the local temperatures of maybe that my friends didn’t cultivate the
plants properly.
So I brought a
small seedling of Cymbidium Swan Lake
'Bayfront Park' from Carter and Holmes.
I potted the plant in a standard six inch pot, in bark with a one inch
deep layer of Styrofoam chips at the bottom of the pot to ensure proper
aeration and drainage. The plant grew
slowly but uneventfully with the same care I give all my other orchids except
that for this plant I put a small amount of horse manure over the media at the
start of the rainy season.
After a year had gone by I took
the plant out of the pot to see how the roots were doing. I was quite pleased to note that the orchid
had developed a good root system. In
fact it almost looked out of proportion with the amount of leaves the plant
had. The plant had completely filled the
pot with its roots. Even the part of the
Styrofoam chips was filled.
I moved the
plant to a taller six inch pot but I worried that the roots would rot in a pot
of this shape. So I cut openings on the
side of the pot at regular intervals (see photo). This might seem as overkill but I have good
reasons to do this. In my locality,
which is at a 1,000 feet of elevation on the mountainous interior of the island
of Puerto Rico, in the summer, it rains every day. And when it rains, it is not a gently falling
drizzle but a fierce downpour that swamps everything. As a result the media inside the pots can
stay sopping wet, not for days or weeks but for months on end. I have
learned, from bitter experience that any plant whose pot lack excellent
drainage and aeration will lose its roots to rot over the summer season.
The plant has
been growing well and by early this year the new growths were at the edge of
the pot. I decided to repot the plant to
give more space to the new growths to develop.
When I took the plant out of the pot I found that the roots were in
perfect shape and filled the pot completely.
I didn’t find even a single spot of root rot. I left the root ball in a single piece and
moved it to a larger pot. Hopefully this
will help the plant produce even larger pseudobulbs in this year and maybe then
it will bloom.
