Dendrobium culture: A shade house for Dendrobium anosmum

Dendrobium anosmum needs exposure to full sunlight to bloom well.   But too much sun burns the plants.   I build this wooden shade house so that I could grow my plants in a place where they got the right balance of sun/shade.   The shade house was oriented so its longest axis was perpendicular to the sunrise in the spring/autumn equinox.   It was eight feet tall so that the long canes of the Dendrobiums could hang down without touching the ground.  It was 10 feet long and four feet wide.  To shield the orchids from the harsh midday sunlight a camo fabric was used.   In places I also used black shade fabric.  Notice the camo fabric has a multitude of holes.  This made a pattern of sunlight and shadow that moved across the plants during the hottest parts of the day.   The desired effect was to achieve something similar to the way sunlight is naturally filtered by the leaves in the forest.

 But the key thing of the shade house was its open sides.  To the east of the shade house there were few trees, so the Dendrobium and other plants would get full strength sunlight from about 8 am to 11 am.   The west side of the shade house faced the closed canopy of the forest, so after midday, the plants were in the shade.   This mimics what happens in the natural habitat, where a plant that is growing in the side of a tree can get plenty of sunlight during part of the day and its on the shade after that.

 I used to have many of plants of Den anosmum.  So many plants that when the shade house was full, I could grow plants that needed lower light levels under the Dendrobium.    I hung the Den anosmum in the east side of the shade house and in the center of the structure, these were the areas that received the most intense sunlight for the longest time.   Under the Dendrobium, in the ground I grew Phaius, Calanthe, Phaiocalanthe, Cymbidium, Paphiopedilum, Vanda and Angraecum.   The shade was narrow to maximize the plants exposure to light while protecting them from the midday sun. 

 During the rainy season, in the afternoon the sky would get cloudy and it would rain, this would reduce the intensity of light in the afternoon.    But in the dry season there would be very sunny days, uninterrupted by any clouds, and this threatened the plants with sunburn, even those that were in their resting phase.  To avoid this, I would put a few old dry palm fronds on the roof of the shade house.  This reduced the level of light to tolerable levels.

When the Dendrobium were ready to bloom, they were moved to the terrace.  You can see the result in the photo below.

The wooden shade house was destroyed by a tropical storm.  It was rebuilt, much stronger, now made of two inch metal pipes.  This one lasted until Hurricane Maria dropped the top of a Teak tree on it.