"Our orchids grow in two shade houses, hang from two specially built trellises and are wrapping roots around nearly every tree and palm in the yard. I am their slave.
I serve them meals, fluff their beds... quench their thirst, trim their roots and wipe their little leaves. I shoo away insects and medicate their ills. When winter arrives, we cover their shade houses with plastic curtains that can be rolled up and down. I climb eight feet up onto the sharp metal mesh roof of our ''long house'' to spread plastic on top of the lath, bloodying my knees. Just before cold hits, we carry the sensitive vandas and phalaenopsis inside, along with any orchids in bud or flower. When the cold passes, we carry them back out. Lots of the big ones require two people to lift them. When a hurricane threatens, orchids go on the floor of the shade houses or on the ground beneath the trellises, and we carry those in bud or flower inside. When a hurricane passes, they go back out. My weekends are spent fertilizing them. We never catch up on repotting. Not so long ago, Sandy Schultz and I went to four orchid meetings a month. Now, Sandy is president of the South Florida Orchid Society, which is co-hosting the 19th World Orchid Conference... and we go to fewer meetings. ... There is nothing like walking into the garden in the morning and finding the open flowers of the classic Laeliocattleya Mildred Rives. She is white with a purple lip and golden throat... She is elegant, large, showy... and beautifully perfumed... Cattleya leuddemanniana from Venezuela is a rose lavender with darker, trumpet-shaped lip marked with yellow. C. Hawaiian Wedding Song is white. Slc. Hazel Boyd is apricot. Slc. Jewel Box is red. Blc. Ports of Paradise 'Emerald Isle' is green. ... We have been through any number of collecting phases, favoring vandas one year and bulbophyllums the next, lady slippers for several years and dendrobiums from time to time. The houses have swelled with plants, and still the collecting itch persists. ... When an orchid dies in our collection, I am glad. It opens up space for many plants that have grown large and need air freely flowing around them to stay disease-free. When an orchid loses its tag... it is relegated to the outdoors. Nameless orchids may not win prizes; only known entities win prizes. ... I cannot grow dendrobiums in pots; I put them on trees, where they do fine. From time to time, I mix Epsom salt in a tub of water and soak the vandas or spray them with it; it makes them throw spikes of flowers. I learned the hard way that... laelias do not like Aussie Gold potting mix; they stay too wet in it and die. I add extra magnesium and potassium to my fertilizer. When the roots of the vandas get too stiff from calcium in our well water, I put a dollop of muriatic acid in a pump sprayer of water and hose them off... This appalls most people, but I learned it from my orchid-growing rheumatologist... As a part of this orchid obsession, we also travel to the ends of the Earth to see endangered orchids in the wild. Paphiopedilum Rothschildiana grows only on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo. We were there. Angrecum sesquipedale, pollinated by a moth with a 12-inch probiscus[proboscis], grows in Madagascar. We were there. The red-orange Dendrobium wentianum grows only in Papua New Guinea, and we saw it. ... Our Renanthera Mauricette Brin 'Kiaora' appeared on the cover of Orchids magazine two years ago, and thrilled us. It won an Award of Merit from the American Orchid Society. We continue to goad it, hoping it will produce such gorgeous flowers that it may win a First Class Certificate, the highest prize. So far, no luck. We also were hoping to take her to the WOC, but her flower stem was broken when she was moved during the recent cold snap... The first orchid I bought, in the early 1980s, was a bare root cutting... of LC Irene Finney 'Chicago', a cattleya cross with big mauve flowers. Because it had been divided from a larger plant and had to build its strength, it took a long time to rebloom: seven years. When it did, I was beside myself with its glory. For many years, I kept a log of when my orchids produced buds, when the flowers opened, how many and how big they were, and I even included photographs in the records. That effort has gone by the wayside, because I'd never catch up with the fertilizing and the repotting and all the rest. We have hundreds of orchids. ... The bond between slave and master is very strong. Many people who grow orchids are as besotted as we." URL : http://www.miamiherald.com/living/home/gardening/story/383019.html ************* Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
