Hello Nancy, I can tell you as a grower of said plant & as an AOS judge that you should be thrilled it was pulled for judging! Yes it is a prolific tiny thing but, be assured that counting the flowers is not the reason it didn't get an award. As a student & certified judge I have had to count many flowers & inflorescences for AOS award descriptions & it doesn't matter if the plant was a 6' dendrobium at the New York show, a Epidendrum porpax (Porpax Mountain) on an 18x 32" cork raft or a stenostachia we awarded in Chi a few yrs. ago, we have a trick used on big & small plants. We use string, paper or thread to divide the plant into a grid system. Each of us counts the flowers, buds, & inflorescences in our grid & calls it out to another(so we don't loose our place) who keeps count& writes it down to total up when we have finished with the grid. It has become a kind of betting game at some judgings I've attended around the country to have some one "guess" how many flowers on a plant & have the actual count come up higher or lower. We read tha AOS descriptions of previous awards to the plant & can sometimes from the dimensions of the plant, the # of inflorescences & the # of flowers per inflor. decide whether we would pull it for judging or not. Then we discuss the information and start counting if it seems close. As for the fatality issue your friend mentioned the biggest thing is how you treat the "Special" plant. Pretend it never happened!!! People, myself more than once, have tried to pamper the darn thing to get it to do better next time. AND KILLED IT with the extra attention. Just put it back in the same space you took it from & don't change anything of how youhave been growing it so well to begin with. It will come along in it's own time if it is happy & trying to give it that "extra" fertilizer or water is what usually causes it's demise after being brought into the limelight.
Do you have a 10X magnifier to look at them? They really are the cutest, perky little things... Kathy in MN _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
