Next week we will be in the forests of Sarawak amongst orchids like this lovely little Bulbophyllum. The bulbs are around 1cm tall with 4cm leaves and the relatively large flowers form a mass just clear of the leaves. This pretty little bulbophyllum has an unlikely name meaning the purple bulbophyllum but this refers to […]

We have been surprised this week by an unusually late flowering from one of our Dendrobium densiflorum plants. Plants usually flower for us between Easter and early June much as it does in its native Himalayan forests. However the flowering of Dendrobium densiflorum in the greenhouse is always a special event. This has to be one […]

It is less than a week to go until we fly to Kuching for our first Sarawak expedition and the Mendip Lab is piled high with boxes of micropipettes, pressure cookers, vortex mixers and everything else you need to build an orchid propagation laboratory. We are pleased to hear that the Laminar Flow Cabinet has […]

One of the most flamboyant of our orchids is this Aerides houlettiana and our seed grown plants are now eleven years old with the largest plant having five long pendulous spikes about to burst and this smaller plant with two. Aerides houlletiana is a medium sized species native to South East Asia where it grows […]

Some of our summer flowering orchids have very short lived flowers but Dendrobium cuthbertsonii starts flowering in June or July and will still be in flower at Christmas. This beautiful miniature species is native to New Guinea where it grows as an epiphyte or lithophyte in mossy high mountain elfin forests. We find that the […]