This is one of our smaller Massevallias. The plant is about 5cm across and produces gorgeous 1cm waxy, long lasting flowers in the early spring.

The species is native to cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia and so we grow it cool and moist throughout the year. It seems to be particularly happy mounted on cork where its flowers grow horizontally and look straight at you.

Joe here again with another tiny orchid, Adenoncos parviflora. This little thing comes from South East Asia and Malaysia where it grows in low montane and hill forest and so we grow it in Warm Asia.

The flower is tiny but very attractive as long as you have good eye sight or a macro lens. We guess it must be pollinated by a gnat or a tiny ant as it is close to the stem.

We grow this species on a small piece of cork bark as you can see in the photo. This shows the plant off in a natural way and stops it getting smothered by moss. We spray it with water once a day.

Here is Amber with last week’s winning orchid – Pleurothallis truncata which will go forward to ‘Orchid of the Month’  – Thanks again to all of you who voted. 44% of the vote went to the winner and Dracula bella was second with 22%. There are some great orchids heading your way this week – voting again opens on Saturday.

This fragrant orchid is found in Columbia usually at around 1000m and the most consistent sent identification we have had is adhesive tape. This genus has a pendulous flower spike that hangs down which means we have to hang them up when the flower spike appears. There is very little research and information on this orchid probably because the genus Gongora is amongst the hardest to identify by looks. This is due to the fact that their pollinator, a euglossine or perfume bee, finds and identifies it by smell.

Hi I’m Issy and I’m in year 8 at Writhlington school and I’m in the orchid project. This is me in cool Americas with todays orchid. I particularly like Pleurothallis restrepiodes because it is purple, it looks great from underneath, and really surprisingly it smells of wet cat.

This species comes from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru where it grows in cool wet forest. I have heard that one time we had ice on this plant and it didn’t kill it so it is obviously very tough. It also propagates really easily from keikis that grow in the top of older leaves.