I put down my morning paper for lots of reasons. But the biggest reason is that more exciting things are going on in my garden. It’s the middle of winter here in St. Petersburg, Florida. The dew lies like a heavy blanket on orchids that I have hanging on branches and in baskets. I imagine they are pretty happy ...

The orchids in my garden are about as free range as you can get. Other than providing them with habitat, watering and feeding them, I leave them alone. So many people tell me to trim dead parts off, to keep the leaves clean, to cut off old sheaths. Is this what happens in nature?Yesterday I had a look at ...

Nature tells us. Dying things take their time. Dead things hang on. A yellowing leaf is sending nutrients back into the plant. A dead leaf or stem may channel water to the living plant body. It may be a hiding place for beneficial bugs and microbes. What looks dead may even have a bank of meristem cells waiting to ...

I started a new fertilizer regime and I’m not sure where I’ll be going with it. For the first several months I didn’t even think of fertilizing my orchids. The reclaimed water that I use for of them is supposedly high in trace elements as well as more common substances like nitrogen and calcium.I did finally break down and ...

I don’t know why certain roots behave the way they do. And I don’t know whether the roots that act a certain way are different from other roots on the same plant. If I were still doing botanical research I could set out to find the secrets behind root behavior. But what could be more boring than an academic ...

Have you ever noticed the way there are ants running around all over the garden? They are everywhere. Sometimes I dig something up or water a plant and there are ants teeming all over the place carrying eggs. I think it’s a sign of garden health. There is plenty of organic matter around here that they can use and ...

I ask this question because it’s a cool morning, just below 50, and while it’s not that humid lots of my plants, for example the banana leaves, had dew on them. I felt inside a couple of the orchid baskets and they were damp. So my inclination at least for this morning is to not water.But the orchids that ...

Species and hybrids. Hybrids and species. As a botanist I knew there were tens of thousands of species of orchids. But I never thought about hybrids! My first dozen or so orchids were all species. They stood still and persisted all through the hot summer months as I misted faithfully several times a day. They stood by me when ...

We teach in biology that there’s no such thing as a “life force.” But working day by day in the garden I start to wonder. Seeing these wonderful plants as they bud, branch, twist and thicken. Seeing the dew in their leaves, the curve of a stem or root, the way they seem to climb and cover their woody ...

It’s not just that I’m lazy. It’s late morning and I’m about halfway done with watering but I had pulled out my phone to take some pictures and this reminded me. A friend the other day called Phalaenopsis orchids “boring” and I have to say I disagree. Yes they are supermarket orchids. Yes they are hard to kill. Yes ...

I live in a giant terrarium. Moving to Florida was such a great idea. I hate the cold and I crave the warmth. I wanted to garden all year. It had to be the right place though, with space for plants. No gated community, no lawn, no pool please. As it turned out we found it. Much better than ...

OK. Guilty as charged. I have a PhD in botany from Harvard. I am, or I was an expert in a particular genus of lichens. I do a lot of other things well for example I was great teacher, but I’m not an expert. Lucky thing there are so many other people who are.When I first moved to Florida ...

I grew up in a home where design was a real topic. My parents, though relatively poor, had furniture from Herman Miller. We kids were taken in car rides to see the architectural work of Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology and on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Less so the great parks of Chicago, ...

It rained and poured straight for more than twenty four hours. How could such a prodigious amount of moisture come down in such a plain wrapper as raindrops? There was so much rain and it was so uncomfortably cool we couldn’t take our guests from up north into the garden, let alone look around the neighborhood. And I couldn’t ...

I guess they’re like baby teeth and grown up teeth. But a little different. Here’s my experience so far. When you get an orchid from a grower, it’s been nurtured in a certain environment. The green part of the plant functions primarily to photosynthesize and produce flowers, and to a lesser extent to absorb nutrients. It is also a ...

Janet famously said the other day “things don’t always go the way you expect them to.” It was her usual understatement for a twist of fate in her gardening world. In a word: her raised beds were going from being a giant stack of soil pancakes to a short stack of one or two flapjacks.  Not to mention the ...

I’ve started to look at the orchids differently. Part of it is that they’re part of a larger community of epiphytes in my garden. They share the canopy with bromeliads, air plants, cacti, ferns, and gesneriads (cousins of the African violet). There are even epiphytic milkweed relatives called Hoya in my garden. I guess it’s been a busy few ...

Yes!!!! This means my orchid clumps are little places of life, breathing enough water vapor and oxygen to attract bugs and their predators, the spiders. If you’ve ever seen the way a spider web traps moisture then you can imagine how happy I am. It’s as if another moist biofilm of protection is being established around the orchids. Not ...

Well. What do they get in nature? Sometimes an orchid is situated so mist reaches them at every angle. Sometimes not. An older orchid that has grown into a comfy nest of branches and twigs may do better than a new one straight out of a two inch pot. Bottom line is I try but I can’t reach every ...

Yesterday’s mail brought an order of about twenty orchids. I knew they were in two inch pots but boy were they tiny! Tiny orchids are a beautiful thing. We saw some a couple of months ago at an amazing exhibit at Selby Botanical Garden. They were part of a large glassed in terrarium and the landscape they inhabited was ...