Bulbophyllum grandiflorum

It’s finally time for a profile of one of my favorite plants of all time, Bulbophyllum grandiflorum.  Why do I like this plant so much? you might be asking.  Well, I don’t really have a good reason.  It’s not the most popular Bulbophyllum among growers, but it’s not exceptionally rare either.  A lot of people think it’s an ugly duckling, so to speak.  I kind of agree with this, yet it is still near and dear to my heart.  Here are some pictures of my plant:

Bulbophyllum grandiflorum

This is the best overall picture I have of it.  You can clearly the flower spike in the center of the picture (next to the previous spike, now brown).  This is an older picture, so it has since flowered and faded.  Hiding on the left are two new growths (only one of which you can really see).  The three oldest pseudobulbs predate the plant’s move to this mount.  You can tell because the two old leaves point down, while the new ones are properly oriented.

The pseudobulbs are 1 to 2 inches tall, the leaves are about 5 or 6 inches, with about 1 inch spacing between pseudobulbs.  The roots tend not to grow very long and are very thin and wiry compared to a genus like Phalaenopsis.  And now for a picture of the flower:

side view

Observant readers will recognize this as the same flower as in the header at the top of the blog.  This plant is indeed a division of that one (from the Vanderbilt greenhouse).  The flower is a little difficult to photograph because it is so three-dimensional.  You can see the hood-like upper sepal on the top and the two twisting, leg-like bottom sepals coming forward.  The two side petals are greatly reduced, becoming little more than bumps next to the column.  The lip is also pretty small and hinged so that it will bob up and down in a breeze.

front view

Here’s a front view giving you a peek at the lip in the center.  You can see how the flower is borne well above the plant (or, rather, further out in this case).  I really like the twisting lower sepals.  Now for a closeup!

the complicated bits

So, here’s the teeny, tiny column, the slightly larger lip hanging over it, and right where the sepals meet is an itsy-bitsy green petal.  Clearly not the impressive part of the plant.  The white blotches on the hood are called “windows” and allow some light through.  Theoretically this tricks insects into thinking that they can fly that direction, which of course they can’t.  Somehow in their bumbling to get out of the flower it gets pollinated.

One of my favorite things about this plant is the smell.  Some people describe it as “foul,” which is an epithet often applicable to Bulbophyllum.  In this particular case, however, I disagree.  Perhaps it is just my particular plant, but I think it smells exactly like pepper.  Yes, the pepper that lives next to the salt on your kitchen table.  The flower is fragrant both day and night.  The interesting thing is that the plant itself smells faintly like pepper even when it’s not in flower.  The smell is most pronounced right after watering.  This is fairly atypical for orchids, and endears this plant to me all the more.

Now, for how I grow it.  Like a lot of Bulbophyllums this species doesn’t really have a rest period, but grows and flowers year-long.  It likes to be fairly wet and have high humidity.  I break one of the cardinal rules of orchid growing with this plant.  I keep it inside a large ziplock bag.  Yes ladies and gentlemen, my plant gets almost no air movement.  This probably isn’t great for it, but it’s really the only way I can keep its feet wet enough and the air humid enough.  It flowered, so I guess it doesn’t mind all that much.

B. grandiflorum is native to Sumatra and New Guinea, so it’s pretty much a warm grower.  Mine is probably nearer to intermediate, but I try to keep it was warm as possible.  As for light, it doesn’t need a lot, but I’ve found it can tolerate intermediate levels.  I keep it about 6 inches from a compact fluorescent bulb.  Although I mist it maybe twice a week, I give it a really good watering once a week, along with the rest of my orchids.  This is when I fertilize, too.  I just use standard Miracle-Gro diluted to about 10 or 20%.  Yes, I follow the axiom that one should fertilize orchids “weakly weekly.”

Let’s see, what else?  I think that might be it.  Hopefully I’m not forgetting anything.  Is anyone else growing this?  How do you do it?  Well, I hope this was interesting and informative.

Never let anyone tell you what smells good and what doesn’t.  Oh, and Happy Growing!

Spring Growth Pt. 2

Here is the promised follow-up to last post.  Yes, I know it’s more than “a few days” late, but I doubt there’s anyone following this blog and actively waiting for updates.  These pictures are a month old, so there has been some more growth since then.  I’ll post updates if anything truly exciting happens.  Anyway, here we go!

unknown aroid

Here is an aroid of some sort that a friend gave to me.  If anyone knows what it might be, let me know!  It’s hardy here in NYC (apparently zone 6b), and must be related to jack-in-the-pulpit.  Unfortunately, the inflorescence was slightly past its peak when I took this picture, as evidenced by the browning on the tip of the spadix and top of the spathe.  That aside, this is an utterly ridiculous flower spike.  It’s almost a parody of a normal aroid inflorescence.

For those of you not familiar with this type of inflorescence, here’s how it breaks down.  The long, pointy thing coming out of the top is the spadix.  The part wrapped around it is the spathe, and it covers and protects the actual flowers on the base of the spadix.  In the picture below I’ve pulled of the spadix to reveal the separate clusters of male and female flowers.

the deconstructed inflorescence

This closeup shows how the spadix is actually fused to the spathe on the back, a fact which surprised me.  The male flowers are on top, and the female ones are below.  Aroids usually prevent self-fertalization by releasing pollen when the female flowers are not receptive to pollination.

And now for a completely different biome!  I grew this puppy from seed:

Adansonia digitata

Yes, this is my very own baobab seedling.  The trees are native to Australia, and develop huge, swollen trunks at maturity.  This gives them the colloquial moniker “bottle tree.”  You can see that the base of this one is already swelling, giving the trunk a nice taper, even at just a few months old.  I find this both surprising and pleasing.  I’m not sure why the leaves are so vertical, but for some reason they have moved to a more horizontal position since this picture was taken.  The species name alludes to the fact that the mature foliage of this plant is palmately compound, which is to say that it looks like a hand.  The young leaves, as seen in the picture, are borne singly.  During the winter this will get a dry dormant period to simulate the alternation of wet and dry seasons in its natural habitat.

And here is a true desert gem:

Welwitschia mirabilis

These three (along with one other in a different pot) are my babies.  Also raised from seed which I got from Silverhill Seeds in Cape Town, South Africa.  This plant is one of the famous limit cases of botany, an adaptive extreme.  They live in the Namibian Desert in Namibia and Angola (and maybe a tiny bit in South Africa).  As the picture shows, each plant has two “leaves.”  The bottom pair, however, are the cotelydons, and will fall off within the year.  The top two leaves, amazingly, are the only ones the plant will ever produce.  Rather than grow new leaves, Welwitschia elongates these two leaves continuously from the bottom.  Eventually the desert wind will split them into ribbons that pile up on top of themselves, giving the impression of multiple leaves.  These are technically gymnosperms, which makes them more closely related to pine trees than to anything that flowers.  It’s well worth doing a search for large older plants.  They hypothesize that some of the desert specimens are upwards of 2,000 years old.

To transition back to the tropics, a few posts ago I mentioned a Brassavola that I won at the Manhattan Orchid Society raffle a few months back.  Here, belatedly, is the picture of it.

Brassavola cordata

You can see a fair amount of dead stuff on here.  Like I said, I am rescuing it from the brink of death.  The short left growth is new since it passed into my care.  The right hand leaf that’s cut off by the bottom of the picture is substantially longer, even with half of it dead and removed.  The little guys hitching a ride on the top are Florida strap ferns (Campyloneurum phyllitidis) that I put there to see if they would grow.  So far they haven’t grown, but they haven’t died either.

I know I promised pictures of an orchid flower last post, but I’m going to renege since I think this post  is long enough for now.  Perhaps the flower will get an entire post of its own.  Additionally, keen eyes will have noticed new plants on my plant list (who am I kidding, no one actually noticed that).  These will get their own writeup with pictures ex post haste.

In the meantime, happy growing!