Once again we are spending the first weekend of our new school year (that hasn’t really started yet) at the Bristol University Botanic Gardens for the annual Bee and Pollination Festival. The team (pictured here) were up at the crack of dawn and had this wonderful display finished by 10am in time for opening. There […]

We were on the Dorset coast on Thursday and the Autumn Lady’s Tresses were the best we have seen there in the last few years. The tiny species gets its name from the attractive spiral of flowers up the spike. This orchid needs really short turf to flourish and the grazing regime around Dancing Ledge […]

Our most exciting mini-miniature at the Bee and Pollination festival is Pleurothallis sonderana and I am sure it will cause a lot of interest. The leaves are 2-3cm long and this mature plant (we have a few) is covered in the 3mm yellow flowers. It is gnat pollinated. The species is endemic to Southern Brazil where […]

  Packing plants for tomorrow’s Pollination Festival at the Bristol University Botanic Gardens it is good to see that we have a diversity of Stelis species to demonstrate the importance of tiny midge and gnat pollinators, and show that it is not all about bees. Stelis is a genus closely related to Masdevallias and Pleurothallis. […]

With the Bristol University Botanic Garden’s Bee and Pollination day just two days away it is lovely to have some really spectacular orchids opening and one of them is this species from Brazil. We have seen this large and dramatic orchid growing in cool Brazilian forests along the Rio del Flores in Rio State. Plants […]