Today our students have been enjoying our wonderful Ansellia africana. This wonderful plant is a star of BBC’s Green Planet episode one – so do pop over to BBC iPlayer and watch last year’s flowers dance as they open (it is at the end of minute 4). Seeing this orchid flowering reminds me of our […]

Our Year 7 team this year in the greenhouse are fantastic and to them every orchid that opens is a new experience. Today’s orchid is more of an experience that most with its foul smelling flowers the colour of blood. Whenever Bulbophyllum nymphopolitanum flowers it gets passed around greenhouse club so everyone gets to experience […]

  A spectacular highlight every February is this wonderful orchid from the Philippines. Dendrochilum javierense has masses of closely packed brick red flowers on arching spikes that on a specimen like this plant make for a wonderful display. Dendrochilum javierense is a small growing dendrochilum with narrow stiff leaves, about 25cm long, and more upright […]

To start the week we have this lovely dendrobium species. Dendrobium adae is native to the northeastern Australia Cape York Peninsula,  northeastern Australia, where it grows in cool misty forest from 700m to 1200m as an epiphyte or lithophyte. The flowers are large for Australian dendrobiums, very fragrant during the day, and of a wonderful […]

The morning has woken wet and windy in Somerset – far removed from the tropical warmth of South America. In the greenhouse it is another story and the sparkling flowers of Cattleya trianae ‘alba’ transporting us to the warm mountains of Colombia. This orchid is a very reliable spring flowering species which thrives in our […]