It has been cloudy for the past three days with no sun and very little daylight but inside the greenhouse there is lots of colour with a real diversity of orchids doing their thing in the run up to our Christmas Orchid Festival on Dec 14th (all day from 10 til 4 – don’t miss it)

One plant that doesn’t mind the low light levels is this  large flowered pleurothallis species. The species is found in wet forests from Costa Rica to Ecuador where it is recorded over a wide range of elevation from warm forest at 350m to much cooler forest at 1750m.

We find the species is very happy in our Cool Americas section with other members of the genus and although the reported range suggests it would grow much warmer, we find that our plants react badly to hot weather – losing leaves and dropping flowers if the temperature in the greenhouse gets much above 30C in the summer. It suggests that our plants are from the higher growing populations of the species.

Individual flowers last several weeks and the plant produces a succession of flowers over several months so this plant will be a feature in the greenhouse well until at least Christmas.