Bulbophyllum sumatranum flowers, produced by the same mass of growths two weeks appart in March.

Grammatoheadia Boynton Leopard, with most of its flowers opened.

Most of the flowers of the inflorescence of my plant of Grammatoheadia Boynton Leopard are now opened.  Although initially the inflorescence had about seventy five buds, it started dropping a number of them at the tip after most of the flowers were open.  I don't now if this is a natural occurrence or because I moved the plant from its original location to a place next to the house. and hanged it in a shady spot.

I was surprised that the flowers all turned toward the direction of the strongest light.  That means that on one side of the inflorescence you are looking at the flowers front and on the other you are looking mostly at their backs.  This inflorescence has a number of flowers that surpasses the inflorescences of all my other Grammatophyllum, except the massive inflorescence of Gramm. speciosum.  However this plant is positively tiny compared with an adult speciosum.

The specimen that wasn't

When I go buying orchids I look out for things that are different from what I have in my collection and that are showy and eye catching.    Generally I avoid impulse buying, although I have at times been guilty of buying plants I know nothing about because I am overwhelmed by their beauty.  This is what happened me about a decade ago when I was buying orchids at an orchid show.

The annual orchid show of the Sociedad de Orquidistas de Puerto Rico, is the largest orchid show on the island.  There are plenty of exhibits and many vendors.  In this particular show, one of the vendors had a large plant of Dendrobium spectabile on his table.  The plant had many canes and had several inflorescences.  When I saw it I was in love!  When I asked for the price it turned out the plant was quite expensive.  But that didn’t deter me, I brought it and was very happy with my plant.

The pot and the base of the plant was tightly wrapped with tape, and I surmised that it was so that the potting material would not fall during transport.  But when I arrived at home, I was dismayed to find out that the specimen plant was in fact a bundle of single blooming canes artfully arranged around a small plant that had a single inflorescence.  I was angered and dismayed.  I called the vendor, which was not from the Island, and complained bitterly.  To their credit they said the plant had been sold by mistake by an untrained helper, they offered to refund the money.  That alleviated the monetary loss but I was heartsick about the plant. 

 In my garden things didn’t go well for this orchid, the plant in the center failed to thrive and died relatively quickly for reasons that are not clear.  The single canes rotted and died one by one until only a single one remained.  This cane was large, didn’t have roots, and was leafless.  I gave the cane the kind of tender loving care only an obsessive compulsive orchidist can give to a prized plant and eventually it produced a tiny new cane.  In due course the new cane rooted firmly in the plastic pot where I had planted it.  Then next year it produced a larger cane, and the next year the cane was even larger.  Finally, after several years the orchid bloomed.  I was in ecstasy!

The plant has continued to grow and to bloom faithfully year after year.  Sometimes it blooms twice a year.  I have brought other Den. spectabile plants over the years and all have, for unknown reasons, declined and died.  But the original one continues to thrive, it is indestructible!

To finish this story, I would like to add some advice, if you ever see a plant for sale with many blooming stems, check the bases of the canes.  If they are buried in the media to such a degree that you can’t see the base from where the roots grow, and the media is taped over so that it won’t fall, there is reason to suspect that you are looking at a composite plant made out of two or more plant puts together in a pot.  

An orchid story: The Oncidium altissimum that would not bloom

When I was a college student, I was going to attend some athletic events in the capital city of Puerto Rico. I lived at several hours driving distance from the capital, so a friend invited me to stay at his house which is near where the events were going to take place, so I would not have to do a long drive.  It was the first time I had visited my friend's house.  His mother knew that I cultivated orchids and asked me to take a look at one of her plants.  She told me that even thought quite large and healthy,  inexplicably, it would not bloom.

When I looked at her orchid I was impressed, the plant was easily three feet across and had a large number of adult sized and quite fat pseudobulbs.  The plant was in excellent condition and free of pests.  I was baffled, a plant of such size in the wild should have been full of the remains of old flowering stems, which in this species can reach ten feet long.  On her plant there was no evidence that the plant had ever bloomed.

I started asking her questions and soon realized she had no idea how the flowers of the plant looked.  Actually she knew very little about the plant, only that it was an orchid, and that was that.    I could not find anything wrong with the plant or with the care she was giving it.   Then she told me that she had one problem with the plant.  There were some vine seedlings that kept invading her plant and growing on the media.  She had to continually cut them, but to no avail, they, very stubbornly, kept invading her plant in spite of her ruthless campaign against them.

When she said that, I asked her to show me from where the pesky vines would grow.  She pointed me to the bases of the pseudobulbs.  She thought that inflorescences were invading weeds!!  She didn't recognize the inflorescences of the Oncidium because she know nothing about the plant and because the inflorescences grow quite a bit before they produce the branches where the flowers are.   She had spent years cutting the inflorescences.  You might be surprised that such an absurd thing could happen, but this happened in the ancient times before the Internet, when information sources about orchids in Puerto Rico were few and you had to go to a mayor library to get even basic information on common types.

I told her about the inflorescences and how to tie them so that they would show their best.  I had to do this because the plant was growing in a large pot in the ground in an inside garden.   Eventually. the plant finally bloomed with many inflorescences to everyone's delight.

Palicourea croceoides Ham, a rainforest plant with colorful red inflorescences and yellow flowers

This is a bush in the rainforest, I saw it growing by the side of a forest clearing.  

Dendrobium aduncum Lindl. 1842, some curious translucid flowers

In January 2010, the flowers of one inflorescence of Dendrobium aduncum became translucid.  I had never noticed this happening before.  The flowers looked oddly beautiful.  I don’t know what caused this or whether it is normal for the flowers to become translucid under certain circumstances. 

Catasetum Orchidglade, curious hermaphroditic intersex flowers

Male flower

Intersex flower

Intersex flower

intersex flower

I have had this plant of Catasetum Orchidglade for about twenty years now.  It has bloomed many times during those years.  One thing that is interesting of Catasetum is that they normally produce imperfect flowers, those are flowers that instead of carrying both male and female parts are either male or female.    The male flowers are brightly colored, have a mechanism for shooting pollinia and are relatively numerous.  The female flowers are green, sack like, and only a few are produced in an inflorescence.  It seems that plants need to get full sun to be able to produce female flowers.¹

Rarely, Catasetum produces hermaphroditic intersex flowers.  In the case of my plant, all three flowers were slightly different in the expression of the male and female parts.  The male flowers, in the case of Catasetum Orchidglade, are bright red with some yellow/white spotting.  The female flowers are apple green.  Given this, you can easily see in the photos which parts of the flower express the male appearance and which are female.   I don’t have a clue as to what prompted this event.  With a single exception in which the plant produced female flowers, when I had this plant in full sun, all other bloomings to this date had been male flowers.

The wide variability in color, number and shape on the flowers of Catasetum was a real headache of orchid taxonomists when this genus was first found.    Much confusion occurred in England in the heyday of the orchid fever in the nineteen century when plants sent from Center and South America would bloom with flowers that were radically different from what the plant exporters had described to the buyers.  For amateur orchid growers this means that the culture they give the plant can make it produce flowers that don’t look like what they expected.   

¹Northen, Rebecca T.  1990.  Home Orchid Growing. Fourth revised edition

Bulbophyllum Wibur Chang, the beauty and the zombie rat stench that won't leave

Bulbophyllum echinolabium, one of the parents of Wilbur Chang,
 due to the lenght of the inflorescence 
the actual plant body is out of the picture

 Bulbophyllum Wilbur Chang echinolabium x Bulb. carunculatum

You can see the texture of the lip which is slightly spiny
 and resembles raw or rotten meat 

The carrion fly that was trapped by this flower didn't have the strengh to overcome the hinged mechanism of the lip, it died trapped between the lip and the column

Like a stunningly beautiful but powerfully flatulent beauty queen Bulbophyllum echinolabium draws us close with its beauty only to gag us with its stench when we approach.   It used to be that to be an orchidist meant growing Cattleya, but in modern times there has been a shift of focus among the most dedicated orchidists toward other genera of orchids that previous growers dismissed as “of interest only to botanists”.   As a result today’s orchid vendor’s offer a staggering variety of orchids, from really tiny Platystele to gargantuan Grammatophyllum.

 One genus that have gathered some popularity among the fans of  “botanicals” is Bulbophyllum.   With more than a thousand species this genus shows a tremendous variety in flower size and pollination strategies.   But there are some groups in this genus whose peculiarities make them stand out from the crowd, among these are the members of the section Lepidorhiza, which have among the largest flowers of all Bulbophyllum.   Probably the best  known species of the Lepidorhiza group, at least in Puerto Rico, is Bulbophyllum echinolabium. 

Bu the fact that this is a well known plant is relative, Bulb. echinolabium plants are not common among local orchid growers and in consequence you see adult plants of this species in orchid shows only occasionally.   Given the large size of the flowers, 16 inches from top to bottom, bright colors, unusual  flower configurations and a sequential blooming habit you would think that these plants would be wholeheartedly embraced by many orchid growers.  But in this you are wrong, unfortunately these Bulbophyllum have among the most appalingly disgusting fragrances in all the Orchidaceae.

It so happens that these orchids are pollinated by carrion flies.  The bright colors we find so attractive are the way the plant mimic the appearance of the slightly decomposed cadaver of a small animal.  The strangely shaped lips disguise a mechanism to trap the flies against the column to ensure the pollinia is glued to their bodies.   And the fragrances are designed to fool the carrion flies into the belief that the flower is a piece of rotting meat..

The fragrance of echinolabium has the unmistakable smell of a pretty ripe decomposing rat.  The first time I had the opportunity to examine a flower of this species was at an orchid society meeting in which Dr. Julio David Rios brought a plant with a single flower.  The flower was impressive and the stench was easily detected but I was left vaguely dissapointed in finding that the descriptions of the stench of this plant were apparently exaggerated.  The second time I found a plant of this species was at an orchid show in San Juan.  I foolishly decided to take a close whiff at a flower that looked quite fresh to see if the smell was the same as the flower I had smelled earlier.

I inhaled deeply and immediately regretted my stupidity.  It was as if a horrible stink bomb had gone off inside my nose, I even felt a few seconds of dizziness because the unexpected might of the loathsome stench was almost overwhelming.   I spent a moment in bemused amazement at the unsavory experience.  The stench of the flower is indeed powerful at close quarters and truly gut churning.  And you are getting this impression from someone who has dissected all sort of worms, insects, amphibians, birds, rats and even road kill when he was studying biology.  After that olfactory experience I pondered in wonder about the people that had transported the plant to the show in their car.  I don’t think they can be put in the trunk as the flowers are somewhat delicate and can become damaged if exposed to temperatures that are too high or to combustion gases.

So although these are handsome plants I don’t foresee seeing them for sale at Home Depot or Walmart any time soon, they will continue to be the province of hard core orchid growers and of anosmic ones.  I have never grown this plant so I can’t give any first hand advice about its culture but maybe someday I will try it, of course if I can find a place very far from the house to keep it when it is in bloom.

Dendrobium primulinum, also known now as Den. polyanthum

I have had Dendrobium primulinum for about five years and I have found it is among the most beautiful and easy to grow of all Dendrobium. Unfortunately easy to grow doesn't necessarily means it is also easy to bloom. All the plants I have brought have grown well with what I consider standard care for members of the Dendrobium section of the genus Dendrobium. However getting these plants to bloom has been at times a source of frustration and disappointment. It appears that I am growing this species at the very upper limit range of their temperature tolerance for blooming. That means that relatively small variations on the night temperatures at certain critical parts of the year can have profound influence on the quality and quantity of the blooming.


Growers that grow primulinum in the lowland coastal plains of Puerto Rico report that the plants bloom with few flowers or even a single one. Other plants may fail to bloom at all. Irma Selles,a well known local orchidist or renowned skill growing plants showed in an Internet forum a large healthy plant with only a single flower. Dr. Julio David Rios, an accomplished grower of many types of orchids says that his primulinum plant has never bloomed. Don Alfonso a Mayaguez grower that had a large collection of orchids in the seventies and eighties that had a plant of primulinum var. giganteum for many years would complain that his plants bloomed very rarely and often would produce just a single flower. All the plants in the previously cited cases are growing under a climatic regime where night temperatures rarely fall much under 75F at night even at the depth of the tropical winter (which actually is not that cold and could be more properly regarded as the dry season). Where I live, in the mountainous interior of the island, at a height of about a 1,000 feet, temperatures fall to the top sixties at night in winter and may go down to the high fifties for a few nights during the coldest part of the year.
This 10 degree difference between the night temperatures in the coast and the interior makes all the difference in blooming primulinum. But it has to be said that even thought my plants bloom better than the plants in the coast, they could probably bloom even better if the temperatures dropped down consistently into the fifties. I know this because I have seen photos of primulinum growing outdoors in Hong Kong, China and there they produce many more flowers in a single cane than plants in Puerto Rico. In the year 2009 my plant bloomed poorly, with the exception of a single cane that produced two flowers all the other canes failed to bloom. Some of my primulinum, a plant labeled var. Leon, seems to be less sensitive to excessive warmth, however even this plant has, on occasion, failed to bloom.  So if you have cool winters where temperature dips into the fifties and forties, and you also have sunny, warm and wet summers, this plant will probably do well for you.

I have my plants in a place where they get full sun during the morning. Due to the orientation of the shadehouse where they are growing they get more sun as autumn goes into winter, this is similar to what happens in their native habitat where they are exposed to brighter light conditions when the trees where they live lose their leaves.
My plants are watered daily from May to November and then the watering frequency tampers down until they may not get water for two or three weeks at the height of the dry season. I watch the canes and if they get too wrinkled I water the plant lightly.
During their growth phase, in my garden it is from May to November, I fertilize every week. I also put a few pieces of dry cow or horse manure on top of the media, this seems to help produce larger canes. Because the plants are grown outdoors and get a good deal of rain I don’t worry about fertilizer salts build up on the baskets where they are grown.

I grow them on plastic and wire baskets that allow for excellent exposure to air of the roots. The roots die if deprived of oxygen and this can spell doom for a plant. My plants are grown hanging from the bottom of the baskets, this allows for a more natural presentation of the flowers and in my view for easier watering and fertilizing. I don’t grow my plants in plaques of any kind as local conditions means that they dry up very fast necessitating too frequent watering.
They seem to grow well in all the media I have tried bark, cork and coconut. I would guess that these plants will grow well in most orchid planting media as long as watering and fertilizing is done taking in account the properties of the media.
I have three types of primulinum, one has bluish petals and sepals and a white lip, another has al white lip with two yellow eyes and baby pink sepals and petals. The flower of the third type I have has so much yellow in the lip that it resembles a Dendrobium farmeri flower, the petals and sepals of this flower are light pink. I have heard about some plants that have been offered for sale as primulinum alba, but the ones I have seen appear to be white individuals of a similar species Dendrobium cretaceum.
Although primulinum has very beautiful flowers, if care is not taken to groom the plant the flowers can suffer from a poor presentation. This mainly consists of flowers in each side of a cane pointing in opposite directions and flowers from different canes getting all bunched up. I have seen photos of plants exhibited in orchid shows in Asia, in particular in Japan and Taiwan which were groomed with skill that the intrinsic beauty of the flowers was greatly enhanced by the delight artistry of the presentation.

When my plants bloom next year I will try to emulate the high standards set by exhibitors in Asia to make my plants a living work of Art. Wish me luck!

Notice the excellent presentation with all the flowers pointing to the same side

An unusually dark blooming of var. Leon

Note the huge round lip characteristic of this species