One of the most popular tasks at Writhlington is pollinating plants to produce seed to use in the orchid laboratory. We produce most of our seed this way which means that we can be absolutely sure that seedlings are the correct species and keep photographs of the parent plants. The job of pollination goes the […]

At Writhlington school we always feel that spring has arrived when our plants of Coelogyne cristata start to flower. Matt isn’t the tallest member of greenhouse club but he still shows the scale of this magnificent plant. Coelogyne cristata featured as one of our favourite orchids in an earlier blog and I am sure you […]

Spring is the best time of year to repot and split orchids and at Writhlington spring starts early. One plant that needed drastic attention was this old plant of Odontoglossum cristatum. A lovely cool growing species from Colombia. It has been growing on the same piece of cork bark for about seven years and it […]

New year is a time we think about all the lovely people we work with around the world. So Happy New Year to our friends in Durban both at the Botanic Garden and at West Park School. Happy New Year as well  to the pupils and staff at the Erica Primary School in Cape Town, […]

One of the real pleasures of having a greenhouse is escaping those cold gloomy winter days into your own little tropical paradise. This morning I escaped to Brazil thanks to Sophronitis cernua. I had the pleasure of seeing this species in the wild on our last school expedition to the Brazilian costal forest (Mata Atlantica) […]