A massive well done to our brilliant display team who put together this year’s RHS Orchid Show Display at Wisley.  The team of four Mendip Studio School Students, Zoe and Jacob worked from 6am until 5pm, not getting home until 8.30pm – a long but productive day.

The show opens to the public tomorrow morning at 10am.

It is Dendrobium nobile time in our Cool Asia section starting with our alba or ‘virginale’ clone – just in time for tomorrow’s show.

The more common pink clones (below) will be following later in the month and during April.

We have several clones of this Himalayan species that represent the wonderful diversity we have seen in the species in the wild during our visits to Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh.

Dendrobium nobile is one of our favourite species. Its large and striking flowers are as arresting in the greenhouse as they are in the forests of Sikkim (see plant in situ below) where it is the state flower.

The plant here flowering near Gangtok, in Sikkim, shows the natural growth habit. The plant grows long upright pseudobulbs during the warm wet summer months. In their second year these bulbs become less upright and produce heavy flowering in April. In their third year the bulbs are pendulous and produce a few extra flowers and by this time they have lost all their leaves.

The wild plants in Sikkim show a wide range of colour forms and one tree in particular demonstrated the variability of the species with dark forms, light forms, rounded flowers and more pointed flowers. (see below) The tree also shows the habitat clearly with plants growing in dappled shade from tall trees and a little moss on the trunk showing that the dry season is far from bone dry here. In fact we found that it rains every few days in the dry season at this altitude 1200m. In cultivation we grow the species in Cool Asia with a minimum of 10C in winter and vents open above 17C. We keep the plants wet in summer and damp in winter, never allowing bulbs to shrivel.

Dendrobium nobile in Sikkim – this is one of my favourite epiphyte trees of all time and was on the side of the road. Do visit Sikkim if you get the chance.

It is a delight to have diverse clones in flower in the greenhouse too.

Tomorrow morning we are off to Wisley for the RHS Orchid show. The team here have just finished preparing the sale plants and we have a delighted to have 120 species to bring with us from seedlings in-vitro, to plants in 6cm pots and a few monster plants in 30cm pots. We hope to see you at the show.

Along with the large dramatic orchids like yeaterday’s Dendrobium aphyllum, we have lots of more subtle, smaller orchids in flower for this weekend’s show. Stelis superbiens is the largest flowered of our many Stelis species and the soft pinky-brown flowers give a subtle but beautiful display.

The species is found from Mexico right through Central and South America to Peru. It grows a little lower than many of our very cool growing stelis from 1000-2000m altitude in damp forest. Despite being a little warmer growing than most of the genus, we treat this species the same as our other Stelis – growing it in a small basket and keeping in well watered and shady throughout the year.