I brought this plant
about five years ago. Initially it didn’t
do well. For reasons that I could not decipher
the new growths kept dying from rot.
This is a very unusual thing to happen to a Coelogyne in my garden. None
of the other Coelogynes I grow, Burfordiense, mayeriana, parishii and an
unknown one similar to schielleriana, has ever lost a new growth from black
rot. After the plant had initiated, and
lost several new growths I decided that it was just not doing well in my growing
area in the mountains of Puerto Rico. I
took the plant to my other growing area, which is in the lowlands near the northwest
coast of the island. It is warmer and
drier that the other location. Since the
plant didn’t have that many roots and no new growths, I put it over a pond,
where it would be in a humid environment but without the constant wetness of
the other area in the mountains.
The plant slowly began
producing new growths and thankfully they didn’t rot. I was not paying too much attention to it since
I worried that I might have been killing it with kindness. The plant spent years over the pond,
including staying there during two hurricanes, which didn’t have the slightest
effect on it.
Last week as I was
walking in the garden, I noticed that it had some green growths, I initially
thought they were young pseudobulbs, but on closer inspection I found out they
were inflorescences. I was
delighted. The plant produced an
inflorescence las year, but it was short and not impressive.
I took the plant with
me to the mountains so I could enjoy the flowers. The flowers opened today, the 22 of October. Initially the fragrance was slight. But by 10 am the fragrance was powerful, in
fact so much so that it was cloying. It
is a nice fragrance, but as I stood close to the two inflorescences, it was so
strong I could almost taste it. In the
afternoon, the flowers started to close and the fragrance abated considerably,
by night fall I could detect no smell.
Many of the photos I have seen in the internet show flowers that are
partly closed.
I plan to grow this
orchid into a specimen plant. It grows
well with little special care. My suspicion
is that I was watering it too much. It seems
to like environmental humidity but not being wet all the time. I plan to use a flat plate to grow it to
allow it to ramble at will, the conical pseudobulbs are separated by stolon
that is a few inches long. This means
that this orchid will escape from a typical pot in one or two years at most.
