More Orchids

In March 2006, I bought two little seedlings, tiny enough to both fit in my palm, at a flower show in Chicago where I was speaking. It was so cold that I put them in my shirt for the ride to the hotel and airport. I didn't know what they'd look like when they bloomed, but I was willing and eager to wait. Hey, I'd be waiting anyway. Might as well have something to look forward to. One is blooming now, and here's what I got.

It's Phalaenopsis "Brother Coral" x "Everspring Pearl." And guess what? It's fragrant!! I do like it! Worth the wait!

With orchid crosses like this, people hand-pollinate the flowers with a brush, and when the dustlike seeds form and ripen in the pod, they scatter them on agar (a seaweed derived nutrient medium gel) in a closed flask. When the seeds germinate, they're almost microscopic. The seedlings are grown on in the flask until they're big enough to transplant. You don't really know for sure what you'll get, since some seedlings will have more properties of one parent than the other. Buying seedlings is a bit of a crapshoot, but I like that kind of gamble.

Iwangara 'Appleblossom" is a hybrid cross of Brassaevola, Cattleya, Diacrium (Caularthron) and Laelia orchids. Yes. A quadrigeneric hybrid. This is part of what is so dang cool about orchids. They are man-made, and yet manage to be so beautiful through it all. Someone decides he (or she) likes the growth habit of one, the fragrance of another, the color of another, the form of another, let's say, and crosses the plants and comes up with something unknown in nature, something virtually unnameable. So then they have to come up with a new genus name for this creation. Hence the bizarre genus Iwangara. It has a terrific growth habit, with nice fat pseudobulbs and springy arching paired leaves. And, like most of my others, it's wildly fragrant. Stinks up the room, it does. Ahhhh. In the picture below, you get a hint of that growth habit. Big plant! Has its own pedestal.

For pure bizarreness, it's hard to beat the Paphiopedalums, or slipper orchids. This is Paph. Emerald "Buint Ruby" x Paph. superbens "King." They're the most fun to photograph, with light coming through their petals.

It's on its second year with me, and it's made incredible growth from the seedling stage. The whole affair is about 2' tall. Love that checkered foliage, too. This flower will last two to three MONTHS on the plant. Most of my orchid flowers last two or more months. That's just another thing to love about them.

Back in February, I wrote about a very special orchid I bought last May--Psychopsis Mendenhall "Hildos." It was just a seedling, with two leaves (sound familiar?). Over the past year, it put out three great big mottled leaves, and in February 2008 I noticed something protruding from beneath them. It was, against all expectations, the plant's first flower spike. I really had no idea what I was in for, but I knew it would be good.

Here's what it looks like now. The spike is 37" tall. Yes. From a plant in a 2" plastic pot. Obviously, a very happy plant. Hildos lives in the east bedroom window, and loves to be bathed in sun for a few hours a day.

At the tip of that yard-tall spike is a very hopeful and bizarre-looking bud. The stem flattened out like a newt's tail and made a little tulip-shaped bud at the end. It has changed even more over the past few days since I took these pictures. And it is driving me crazy, because I think it's going to open while I'm away.

There is a precedent: Phoebe took her first steps the evening I left her with her daddy overnight for the first time. Some things in life just aren't fair. I came back from my overnight trip, and my baby was walking. I fully expected to come home from North Dakota and find this flower open.

Psychopsis Mendenhall "Hildos."

Since I wrote this post, I found that the bud had swelled and enlarged until it looked like an elf's shoe. Yesterday, I photographed it, but I was troubled by its color--a bit yellow. This morning, I looked closely at the bud again, and touched it oh so gently with a fingertip, whereupon it promptly fell off. Well, isn't that special. You wait since February and watch this thing grow to three feet and you know it only has one flower at a time but that one's a lollapalooza, and the very first bud falls off before it opens. However...there is another bud right beneath the stump of the first one, and I choose to interpret this inauspicious event as the plant trying not to bloom while I'm off giving a talk somewhere. Ahem.

Can I get an ARRRGHHH from the choir? It was my personal Belmont Stakes moment.

And looking on the bright side, this spike will live for years, unlike those of the Phalaenopsis orchids, which generally wither when the flowers do. It will throw out one blossom after another. I'm already nervous about repotting this plant, since they are said to resent disturbance. I would too, if I had a 3' flower spike. Oh well. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

So that, my friends, is what's blooming (and dropping much-anticipated buds) right now on Indigo Hill. Inside the house, that is.

What's Blooming Now?

Doritaenopsis "Sogo Gem", on the left, and an unnamed Phalaenopsis on the right. They're lighting up the foyer.

If there were one thing I could change about orchids, it might be their tendency to bloom their fool heads off just as everything else OUTSIDE is doing that. They sit all winter, planning and vegetating, and then go ape in June, just like my roses and columbines, valerian and delphiniums, geraniums and violas...Oh, well. I'm not complaining. Just joy on top of joy, that's all. We can't expect to spread it out through the dreary months.

This is the little private party in one south-facing window in the bedroom right now. Pretty ridiculous, if you ask me. And oh, how I love it.
Years ago, maybe seven? Shila gave me a little keiki (baby) that had grown off her big purple Phalaenopsis. It was about 2" tall, with two tiny leaves. I never got its name. It's a mature plant now, flawless, and it makes more huge intricate flowers every year.

It's important not to turn a phalaenopsis while the buds are forming, or the flowers get confused and turn toward the light, and the ranking gets all messed up. I waited until the buds were all open to turn their faces away from the window and toward the denizens of the house. Ahhh. This is a HUGE plant, and I suspect it has Phalaenopsis gigantea somewhere in its parentage. It's so big and floppy that I had to put it in an enormous metal cachepot to support its heavy leaves. Gad, you'd think I could remove the tag from the cachepot. Having orchids all over your house doesn't necessarily mean you're a class act.

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I bought this little Phalaenopsis "Universal Dream Stephanie" x "Taipei Gold Star" mostly for its fragrance. Yes, some of the Phal's are fragrant, usually the ones with smaller, waxy blooms. That tends to indicate that Phal. violacea is somewhere in their lineage, for it is wildly fragrant. You must wait until they're warm and the sun hits them, and then look out!

Orchids are nothing if not durable. This exquisite little Phal. very nearly died; it caught some kind of fungal disease and all its leaves turned yellow and mushy and fell off, all but one. I sequestered that sorry-looking thing in the downstairs bathroom, doused it with antifungal sulfur powder and waited two years. Now look at it! It's back up in the main collection and blooming its head off. And it's fragrant, too.

It's Phal. leucadia "Red Pepper" x Phal. goldiana "Zuma," and I think it's saying, "Thank you for having faith in me, and believing I'd come back."

Twyford "Lava Glow" is one of my favorite Phalaenopses. It's a gorgeous plant, with shiny dark-green leaves piled one atop the other. This year, it's got 24 blossoms, and I'm told a mature plant can have upwards of 50 at a time. The lip is an indescribably rich magenta-flame color, lost in this photo. The flowers are about the size of a quarter. If you see this plant in a big box store, and you may, pick it up! It's all I can do not to grab Lava Glow plants when I see them languishing at Lowe's. But I've got about fifty orchids now, and they're not getting smaller by the year. I'm out of room, with a bullet.

Best horticultural tip of the year, thanks to my friend Boneman. When you have 50 orchids to keep up with, you're going to have scale and mealybugs eventually. I used to use pyrethrins, and I hated to do it, and it didn't seem very effective, anyway, but I won't use the really poisonous stuff. I now spray my plants with Windex (with ammonia) and the scales just dry up and die. Windex doesn't burn the flowers like pyrethrins do. And I'd much rather have a spritz of Windex on my windows and floating in the air than insecticide, wouldn't you? I spray my orchids, it gets all over the windows, I wipe it off, I get clean windows instead of poisoned, murky ones, and everybody's happy. Thanks, Boneman!

More orchids tomorrow!