A real ‘wow’ in the greenhouse this week is our large specimen of Cattleya mendelii with 24 flowers on eight spikes.

This magnificent Cattleya species is native to Colombia where it grows at around 1000m as a lithophyte on exposed rocks. We find it to be a straight forward species to grow in our Warm America section where we have several clones.

The species flowers reliably in at the end of May for us and in cultivation the species can be recognised by the characteristic flowering season, generally light petals and very dramatic purple pink lip pattern. A good starting point in telling simiar cattleyas species apart is remembering their flowering time as we showed with our ‘Cattleyas throughout the year’ (although Cattleya mendelii didn’t make the list)

The plant here is growing in a free crate from a market acting as a wide shallow basket and we find free crates are a great potting solution – reuse the plastic – suited to the shallow roots of many orchid species – free draining – and of course easy to carry.

This Sobralia is new to 365 days and is a lovely thing. Most sobralias have very large flowers like our Sobralia macrantha (below)

Unlike the large flowered sobralias that are pollinated by bees, Sobralia crocea is humming bird pollinated and so has thin tubular flowers in bright orange. The tube is produced by the flowers not opening very much – which we think is rather cute.

The species is found from Peru to Venezuela as a terrestrial (or rarely an epiphyte) from 1700-2700m in wet forest. We grow the species in Warm Americas in a basket but water it well all year.

The flowers only last a few days but like other sobralias they are produces successively on the top of stems over several weeks. The species is also our smallest sobralia with stems only 50cm tall. An unusual and rewarding species.

The sweet fragrance of Coelogyne nitida is filling the greenhouse this morning.

This is a cool growing species that we have seen abundantly in Sikkim and in Arunachal Pradesh. In our experience it grows in evergreen and semi-evergreen forest from about 1000m up to 2500m mostly on the trunks and lower branches and often with moss and ferns, The photos below show the species flowering in late April near Tawang right in northern Arunachal pradesh.

The Cymbidium growing with the Coelogyne is Cymbidium elegans (an autumn flowering species I am sure we will feature in October)

In cultivation we replicate the species’ cool wet habitat and find it grows best with a minimum of 6C in our Warm Temperate zone and we water well throughout the year.

Cattleya purpurata is the national flower of Brazil and a species prized for its diverse colour forms. The first clone to flower with us each year is the variety ‘carnea’ (photographed today) named for the meat red of its lip. Like many selectred forms this is a semi-alba with a coloured lip and the other petals and sepal pure white. The more common colour is pink with a darker lip (see photo below, although this clone has not yet shown any buds this year and will probably flower in July)

Cattleya purpurata is found as an epiphyte in open forest up to around 1000m where it experiences a warm wet summer and a cool dryer winter. With us it reliably flowers in between May and July and we keep the large plants hanging high in Warm America with a minimum temperature of 15C. High in the greenhouse plants get good light and the baskets of large bark allows lots of air spaces for the thick and abundant roots.

We have also found this a great species to raise from seed as the seedlings are really vigorous and plants usually reach flowering size four years from de-flasking.

Last Weekend Jess was working at The Eden Project as part of their Costa Rica Festival. Jess gave four talks about costa rican orchids using images from our extensive collection of species from this amazing country.

Topics included diversity (Costs Rica has the world’s highest Orchid Diversity Index), pollinators and habitats. The talks were a great success and also helped firm up some of our future plans for new projects with our Eden partners.