The sweet fragrance of Coelogyne nitida is filling the greenhouse this morning. This is a cool growing species that we have seen abundantly in Sikkim and in Arunachal Pradesh. In our experience it grows in evergreen and semi-evergreen forest from about 1000m up to 2500m mostly on the trunks and lower branches and often with moss […]

Cattleya purpurata is the national flower of Brazil and a species prized for its diverse colour forms. The first clone to flower with us each year is the variety ‘carnea’ (photographed today) named for the meat red of its lip. Like many selectred forms this is a semi-alba with a coloured lip and the other […]

Last Weekend Jess was working at The Eden Project as part of their Costa Rica Festival. Jess gave four talks about costa rican orchids using images from our extensive collection of species from this amazing country. Topics included diversity (Costs Rica has the world’s highest Orchid Diversity Index), pollinators and habitats. The talks were a […]

This wonderful Brazilian species produces masses of 2cm wide creamy yellow flowers. If you look closely at the flowers you see that they have three long thin sepals, all with slightly hairy edges, two tiny petals with red tips and a tiny yellow lip. We have seen the species flowering in Brazil where we found […]

One of the more subtle species flowering each summer in the Orchid House is this Polystachya galeata. Like most polystachyas this species is African and is found in Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Zaire and Angola. The broad distribution results in a wide range of colour forms. The species is […]