Sunday, February 17, 2019

My Year of Orchids: Jewel orchids

Jewel orchid is the name given to a bunch of different genera of small, soil-growing orchids. They are generally grown more for the beauty of their leaves than their flowers. But if you know me you know it doesn’t matter. I grow all my orchids for the joy of watching them survive and thrive “in the wild,” without pots, shelter, or other accoutrements of civilization. The jewel orchids are a little different for me because they do require soil. They are not epiphytes like the rest of my babies.

So, a bit of a conundrum. How to plant these creatures? Yi Wen gave me some of hers that were growing rife and raucous in a pot. Out of six plants she cut (actually tore out of the pot) none had roots. About half of them survived and are sporting large swelling terminal buds that should flower any day. These plants were pretty big. Bigger than your hand let’s say. Then I got the tiny jewel orchids from my friend Ellen at Olympic Orchids. She’s doing a lot of perfume research these days, based on the orchids, so I wasn’t sure if she was in the live plant business. A few phone calls and emails back and forth and we were in business.

I ordered one jewel orchid from Ellen and she substituted a couple more for a species that was out of stock. Man they were small. Maybe the size of your thumb. I was happy at least to plant them on a damp cool day and thankful for the dewy, foggy mornings we’ve been having. But I did despair slightly at the possibility that these babies might just disappear. They were so small and, well, filmy. As in thin.

Back in my postage stamp sized garden in Cambridge Massachusetts, where squirrels did most of the replanting for me and where, looking down at the soil I could easily expect to see a cigarette butt tossed into what my neighbors considered as my “weed patch,” I developed a strategy for planting the delicate ones. The soil there was sandy like here in Florida and like our sea air, there was a presence of salt, although there it came from the tons slathered on the streets and sidewalks during winter.

I had several goals in my planting method. First, I wanted to increase the available organic matter in the immediate vicinity of the plant without plain thumping it into topsoil, which would attract squirrels. Second, I wanted to keep the ambient moisture around the new plant relatively high without overwatering. Third, I wanted to camouflage the plant from squirrels, not only from an olfactory level (no topsoil) but also visually. The less disturbed my planting site appeared, I reasoned, the less likely it was to arouse rodent curiosity.

Oh yes we have those rodents here too. So for my jewel orchids the goals can be said to be identical. So how do I do my planting? I put the jewels on the shady side of large rocks to keep their moisture up and protect them from the sun, which is getting hotter and more demanding every day. I made sure there were some leaves in the vicinity and a few twigs, as well as spare sprigs of sphagnum, which they came packed in. Just a few sprigs, not a bunch. I made sure to mist every day, maybe twice a day if it’s hot.

So far so good and I’ll let you know if anyone survives!

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