Friday was Danish day in Orchid Project with twenty teachers visiting from Denmark to find out about Science at Writhlington. Their visit included learning orchid propagation techniques with Zoe Parfitt, Jacob Coles, Misha Harvey and Georgia Hughes. Two laminar flow cabinets were in use to teach both seed sowing and re-plating techniques. The visitors really […]

Winter snows have returned to the West Country and so school is closed for the day – except for the Orchid Project of course.   Come on Jacob we know that Laelia anceps is cool growing but that is ridiculous! It is still snowing hard as I write and so we may be stuck here […]

If you get BBC West in your area don’t miss ‘Inside Out West’ at 7.30 tomorrow which will feature the Writhlington Orchid Project and lots of Writhlington’s orchid growers. If you can’t get BBC west on your TV, or missed it, it’s available on BBC iPlayer.

A traditional Christmas holiday job at Writhlington is finishing repotting the Pleiones. We have found that plants do particularly well when the pots are topped with fresh moss and so to pot them we half bury the bulbs in compost before adding the moss.

Happy Christmas an best wishes for 2013 from all of us here. The greenhouse is full of winter favourites like this lovely Laelia anceps var. veitchiana and packed with flower spikes full of promise for the spring. Not surprisingly our rain water tank is full!