It was snowing hard as I arrived at school yesterday morning (it didn’t settle) but inside the greenhouse the mood was much more tropical with the National Flower of Colombia – Cattleya trianae painting a flamboyant picture against the snow speckled glass.

IThis is the standard form of the species with large pink flowers with a deep pink and yellow lip, but we have three clones flowering at the moment.

Cattleya trianae is endemic to that Colombia – so a great choice for National Flower. In our greenhouses it always flowers in February and March where its very large flowers always create a stir.

The other clones in flower this week are our Cattleya trianae ‘albas’ which are yellow and white apart from a slight pink edge to the lip (see below) so we call them albescens rather than alba, and C. trianae coerulea that has blueish lilac colour.

We grow all our Cattleya trianaes in baskets filled with a course bark and no moss. The plants produce masses of roots and we keep them just damp in the winter but much wetter when in summer growth. We hang the baskets up in Warm Americas where they get lots of light (the auto shading is activated at 500 Whatts/ square metre)