Encyclia plicata culture: Caring for a newly purchased plants with few roots

 A few months ago, I brought an Encyclia plicata.  The plant was somewhat dehydrated from its from its journey (it came from an orchid nursery in Jamaica) but otherwise it was in a fairly good shape.   The plant was sold bare root and has very short roots because they were cropped for transportation.  This presents a bit of a challenge, Encyclias that have lost their roots need a high humidity environment to recuperate, and yet in my experience the are intolerant of media that remains wet for a long time.  My sad experience with Cuban Encyclias is that they can rot away if keep too wet.   I have lost Enc moebusi and Enc. Phoenicia.   I think Enc moebusi died from its mount staying wet too long in the climatic chaos after hurricane Maria.  The reasons for the loss of Encyclia phoenicia are not clear.

So, what I have done is I have put the plant in an empty wire basket with no media.  I am lucky that in my locality the climate offers a level of environmental humidity that is good for tropical orchids.  Once or twice a day, depending on the weather, I soak the plant.  In hot, dry, windy weather, I soak it twice a day.  Before soaking, I check it to make sure it is perfectly dry.  For two months the plant stayed inactive.  But in August I saw three basal buds start developing.  Also a few roots have started growing.

 If this one was one of my other Encyclias, I would have put it in a terracotta pot with coarse potting media.  But with this one I plan to keep it in the basket with no media to see how the roots develop.  If all the new growths mature successfully, I might mount it on a tree fern plaque.  This has worked well in the past with Enc alata, Enc bractecens and Enc Borincana.   Or I might decide to fill the basket its in now with large pieces of tree fern.   Given that the plant has a limited quantity of roots, I don’t expect the new growths to reach blooming size but to stay smaller.  Once the new growths they developed a root system, I will decide what to do with it.  

  

Epidendrum lacerum Lindley 1838, in the 2019, PR orchid society show.

Cranichis tenuis Reichenbach f. 1865, on a decade old landslide in Maricao

I have always found the Maricao Forest a very interesting place to visit.  I have visited it for decades now.  Close to the year 2000, I found a truly huge patch of Prosthechea pygmea.  Unusually for the species many of the flowers were wide open.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera with me at the time so I made a resolution to return to photograph the species.  Sadly when I returned a rockslide had happened and all the plants were buried under meters of rock.  The thriving community of plants was replaced by an utterly lifeless expanse of serpentine rock.

With the hope that the Prosthechea would eventually come back, I have kept visiting the place.  The first few years there was little to see aside from algae and lichens.  Then a few grasses and bromeliads appeared.  Now after more than ten years a small community of plants have taken hold on the rockslide surviving on a meagre layer of leaf litter.

The first orchid that appeared was Epidendrum ackermanii, you could find stunted plants of the species growing in a few places.  But the plants were small and their leaves bright red from the fierce sunlight.  I also found Eltroplectis calcarata, usually at the edges of the rockslide on bushes that survived the rockfall by a hair.

In my last visited I explored the whole length of the rockslide and again failed to find Prosth. pygmea, however I spied some tiny white flowered plants growing between the stones.  To my delight, I realized that I had found an orchid plant that I had never seen before.   It turned out to be Cranichis tenuis.    I had seen photos of this plant in the Maricao forest in 2012, in Flickr, taken by Lucas Limonta so it was fairly easy to identify them.  There were only few plants in the patch I found.

The rockslide is not a pleasant spot to be and the complete lack of trash makes it clear that very few people ever go by that area so I think the plants are fairly safe from collection.   Also the plants are inconspicuous and very easy to miss among the rocks and other small herbs, In fact I would have missed them completely if I had not been specifically searching for an orchid that is itself small statured.

This plant is a Greater Antilles endemic, it is found in Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico (Ackerman et al.).  The plant is classified as rare.  It grows on limestone and serpentine soils at heights 650 and 800 mts.

Ackerman, James. D. et al. 2014. Orchid Flora of the Greater Antilles. Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden Volume 109.