It is November 5th and today’s Mendip Studio School’s R&D session featured fireworks in the greenhouse. This is Oncidium excavatum, native to cool rainforests in the mountains of Peru and Ecuador, producing explosions of yellow flowers on long flower spikes. The R&D orchid team are keen to produce seed from this rare species, to cultivate in the Mendip Studio School propagation laboratory, and so are busy in the photo pollinating flowers.