Saturday Morning Garden Blogging: Orchidaceae

Rambling a bit while waiting for true Spring.  It’s supposed to snow this weekend!!  Aghhh… So this is a short diary so we can suffer the snow with colour.

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I fell in love with orchids when I was in college where I met someone who introduced me to them.  We would go to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Orchid Show yearly to oooh and ahhh and wish we had the money to buy them all in the garden shop that we would stop at after the show.  Back in the late 70s, owning orchids was a very expensive hobby as propagation methods were limited.  I joined theAmerican Orchid Society and paid my annual dues for about a decade — and finally stopped because I was traveling a lot and most of my money was being saved for that.  I didn’t have any pets at the time, but traveling for long stretches of time meant I needed someone to care for my orchids while I was gone!  And over the years, I slowly lost them, one by one.

Orchids in the wild — Nepal and Thailand

Orchids in their natural state are found all over the world.  I think this is what fascinated me the most about them — that they had evolved to such an extent to adapt to all sorts of growing conditions, whether as terrestrial or on top of trees with the adaptation to absorb water and nutrients from a spongy kind of skin of an aerial root called velamen.  The plant structure varies in many forms as well, and some orchids are used in cuisine or as medicine, but it’s the flower form that is the most fascinating aspect of an orchid. 

If you’re new to orchids, don’t limit yourself to thinking orchids are this:

Cattleya

or this:

Phalaenopsis (very weird form, found being sold at Trader Joe’s)

Because these:

Yellows and greens (cymbidium, cypripedium, papheopedilum)

And these:

Those lips! big and small (Bletilla, Hybrid form Epidendrum Pseudepidendrum, species form Epidendrum Pseudepidendrum, Jewel Orchid)

… are just a sample of what you can grow in your home or outdoors. Growing orchids really isn’t any more difficult than other plants, but you do need to limit yourself to what’s best suited for what you can accommodate since their growing conditions can vary so much. Most orchids are more affordable these days and can be found sold pretty much everywhere (I actually still find it horrifying to see them sold in supermarkets!)  The key to being able to grow them is to first figure out (since most are barely tagged these days) what type of orchid you have, and from there research a bit about what growing conditions they need.

Aliens in the home (Oncidium)

So — Got Orchid?

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. ~ Pablo Neruda   is the coast clear? Has Spring arrived yet?