Friday orchid blogging

Paph Charles Sladden (bellatulum 'Red Giant' x glaucophyllum v moquetteanum 'Eureka' AM/AOS

The thing you need to learn with growing orchids is the flowers are the cool thing you get once a year, maybe twice, per plant, and that's only if all goes well. So today you get no flowers, but you do get a flower in formation growing out of one of my paphs. It's been growing for a month now, and might have another month to open, maybe not. You can see there are several buds, which means another flower will probably open as the previous flower dies away, meaning the plant could be in flower for months. Time will tell.

You can see an example of what the flower could look like here. The neat thing about orchids, at least orchids that aren't one pure species but are rather crosses of different species, as in this case, is that you never quite know HOW the flower is going to come out. It's like siblings in a family, they can come out totally different, or at least very different. Thus it's a fun game waiting to see what you're going to get, whether it's even pretty at all, and if it is, whether it's good enough to win an award.

You can see another example of this plant here, scroll down to the 3d photo and description, and here, and here. The differences are slight, but they're there.

Enjoy.