"blooming for the second time ever at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden... this particular Grammatophyllum speciosum is 12 feet in diameter and weighs about 200 pounds. It last bloomed in 2003 and has four... flower spikes...
Known as the tiger or leopard orchid... native to Malaysia, Sumatra and New Guinea, where it grows in the crotches of trees more than 100 feet in the air. Plants can weigh up to two tons. ... rare in nature... in captivity... few people or institutions can afford to grow it. ... Horak [David Horak, curator of the garden's orchid collection] bought the plant 10 years ago... at an auction from the widow of Don Richardson, who was the orchid grower for Greentree, the Whitney estate on Long Island. It now hangs in a 30-inch square basket, 15 feet in the air above a pond in the Robert W. Wilson Aquatic House, part of the Steinhardt Conservatory. ... It is watered every sunny day, and fed two or three times a week. The last time... potted it, it took five people and a rope and pulley to lower it into the current basket. They resent being repotted, and for some time after... repotted it, it kind of sulked. It didn't grow very well for a couple years. In an August 2007 article in Orchids, the bulletin of the American Orchid Society, Erich E. Michel,... operations manager of the Hoosier Orchid... in Indianapolis, describes trying to get a Grammatophyllum to bloom. In the essay, titled "I Need to Grow a Giant Orchid"... he described trying to coax blooms from the plant... The plant's spiny rootlets, which dry and harden until they are thornlike, catch plant and animal litter from above [in Nature] and form "a self-made composter" that helps feed the plant. ... he... describes how, after nine years of waiting, the growers decided to force the plant to bloom, by starving it... He succeeded in 2004, and again in 2007, when the plant produced eight flower spikes. That year, he decided to move it to the Garfield Park Conservatory in Indianapolis, which required four people to hold the pot and three to hold the plant's stems. The Brooklyn orchid's next feat will be to produce a seed capsule... It will have about two million dustlike seeds in it, which may be offered to a commercial firm or other institution that wants to try growing its own. The seeds are considered an aphrodisiac in some circles,.. Michel wrote." URL : http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/a-200-pound-orchid-blooms-again/?hp photo : 1) [caption : "at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden... blooming for the first time since 2003"] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/18/nyregion/botanic190.jpg 2) [caption : "about 12 feet in diameter... weighs about 200 pounds." http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/18/nyregion/redleaves190.jpg ****************** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) orchids@orchidguide.com http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
