My Year of Orchids: There is no message. Only signal.

So many people post pictures of their orchid flowers. They are a study in perfection. Incredible colors, beautiful graceful shapes, a true abundance of luxury. These are orchids ready to be “judged” like purebred dogs. “Best in show.” That’s not where I’m going with my plants.

I celebrate when my orchids bloom. About a dozen of them have so far, not bad considering that some of them were rescues, almost dead when we moved here. But for me, it’s the functioning plant body and not the showy flower that really holds excitement.

Amazing that most orchids get along without soil. The body is a kind of abstract painting, or more accurately an abstract sculpture, which exists in three dimensions and floats along through time, growing, or holding its own, or perhaps shrinking away and dying. Maybe as I gain more experience with my orchids I’ll understand their messages. But I suspect none of us has that great a handle on what an orchid is doing at any particular time. There seem to be no real messages. Rather, there are signals broadcast through color, growth, and some days just a kind of attitude that the plant poses. The tiny advance of a root, the greening of a leaf, or sometimes, a strange twist of a stem or leaf. The appearance of a bud or a swelling or a reddish tinge. These are the kind of signals I’m talking about.

None of them tells us anything specific about the plant. Maybe it’s “happy.” Maybe it’s experiencing stress. My job is to observe these signals and try to interpret them into some kind of usable information for growing a healthy orchid. The range of ecologies and micro habitats these organisms face in their native environments simply rule out any consistent logic for a given genus or even for a particular species. Also, the growing conditions they experienced as babies in a nursery are so much different from what we can give them as mature plants. How can we read their signals?

My Year of Orchids: Thriving in the rain

It’s coming down in sheets today and I couldn’t be happier. Winter is supposed to be “rest” time for a lot of the orchids but when you’re stuck up in a tree with your roots exposed to sun and drought, even in winter, water never hurts. This is a much different situation from people who are potting their orchids, or even orchids that are growing in the controlled environment of greenhouses. Epiphytes in the wild CAN dry up but they don’t love it. They love water. And this isn’t any old water. This is rainwater. The real deal. 

So, why rainwater? I know people who harvest gallons of it for their orchids. Harvard PhD here thought it was because they were cheap. Water is expensive here but lots of people use well water for irrigation and I found the reclaimed water to work just fine. Well. At least it didn’t kill any of the plants. So what is in rainwater that you can’t find anyplace else?

Every drop of water that falls as rain starts its life as water vapor, attracted to a particle of dust in the upper reaches. So every drop of rain that falls has a “nucleus” of dust. In dust are trace elements that the orchids use as nutrients. Strange to think that when it rains the plants are actually receiving a coating of dust, a shower of nutritive molecules. I’ve read that orchid roots take up ions rapidly, and they hold onto them. This makes sense when you consider that rain is continuous, threatening to carry with it the traces of deposited dust. Ultimately the orchid gets its trace nutrients this way.

My babies’ first soaking I wrote to Kathy that some of them were ready to go on a rampage. Well they looked great compared to how they had before the rain, but it would take several months before they showed signs of life. Rain rain don’t go away!

My Year of Orchids: What I started to learn

I started to learn that we can’t replicate the conditions orchids experience in nature. But if they are planted as epiphytes you can’t mist them too often. Most of them evolved in rainforests or cloud forests.

The hand mister that I stole from Janet’s kitchen supplies really gave me a fine lovely mist. It was a romantic scene. Me stretching to reach my new green babies, covering them in gentle moisture as I counted out fifty or a hundred squeezes. Yes I convinced myself. Foolishly. They are experiencing a cloud forest. After less than a week the mister stopped misting. It just refused. It leaked. It lost pressure. And I started switching hands. How could such a light load strain your tendons so much? Count to one hundred times a dozen or so plants and do it three or four times a day. You will learn what I learned.

So I started my trips to Lowe’s, where I was looking for a sprayer I had seen online. “Only online” I was told. I bought a couple more hand sprayers and no surprise, when the first one stopped working I was back at Lowe’s. Learning. Why does it take so long? I bought the one gallon “Round-up” hand pumped sprayer that my friend Yi-Wen suggested. Would you know I got a dud that leaked air? Back to 22nd Avenue North only fifteen minutes away, but which seemed at the time a major schlep. You see, in Cambridge I almost never drove!

Within a week I was back at the Lowe’s return desk. They are nice there. But I was suspicious. So across 22nd to Home Depot where a very interactive person in the garden department promised me the “Round-up” sprayer was best (Reader do you also cringe at this brand?). I looked and I thought and plunged into a new dimension, the two gallon sprayer. Didn’t think I’d want to drag that baby all around the garden but did like that it was more sturdy looking than the one gallon. Took the contraption home, proudly did the minor assembly, and started misting. I knock on wood humbly noting that it has worked perfectly since then. One thing. When things get a little green in there I pour in some water and bleach, use the mix to clean off some of my pavers, then push the sprayer to “continuous” let the whole thing flush out with plain water a couple of times.

What else did I learn? It took months before I released the roots of most of my plants. Poor Dockrillia teretifolia, a native of the Australian rainforest where I once did fieldwork (and named a new genus of lichens) was imprisoned on a high stump with a cave of rocks around its roots, trussed down with string. Is it any wonder it stood still for the whole summer? When I finally came to my senses and released it into the wild, placing it high up in some thin branches next to a trailing pink hibiscus, it pumped out a handsome dangling root system within a couple of weeks.

Dendrobium anosum never got totally free of the huge piece of rotting wood I had attached her to. Partly it’s because she started to root around in the cracks and develop several keikis that were attached to it. But I moved the whole kit and caboodle onto and within the sturdy dappled-sunny branches of a fire bush. There are bees and butterflies every day encouraging Dendrobium anosum to enjoy life.

We enjoy life when we learn. And lucky me, there is still a long way to go.

My Year of Orchids: First glimmer of epiphytes

My first forays into epiphytic plants were at the local nurseries, which were sadly understocked. They were so uninspiring I actually left empty handed. I still hadn’t heard of the amazing Selby Botanical Garden in Sarasota. Nor was I aware of the extensive nurseries just north of there near Bradenton, with their acres and acres of orchids, succulents, and bromeliads. That was a wonderful discovery waiting to happen, and like all wonderful discoveries, all the better to have been postponed. The Lowe’s near my house had a better garden shop then most of the nurseries. And I bought myself a few bromeliads there. I have to admit that it was bromeliads before orchids that caught my attention. There are some houses close by my neighborhood on the Pink Streets that have landscapes with bromeliads of every shape and size. They are unmistakably “tropical,” whereas my native garden, even with its nineteen Sabal Palms, looks more like a jungle than a tropical paradise.

The more I started playing in my jungle garden the more my hunger for epiphytes grew. And this corner of Saint Petersburg being pretty tropical I looked up online where I could buy tropical orchids. Kathy, who I call my “dealer,“ is in Hawaii and my first shipment of orchids came from her. I never looked back after that.

That first box of orchids came beautifully protected and the plants were gorgeous. Succulent, emerald green, full of well developed roots. I unwrapped them and as quick as I could, thinking they needed to get RIght Out into nature, trussed them up in tree crotches or on branches with layers of sphagnum and coir. I hid the roots in the substrate or stuffed them into semi loose boots of my sabal palms, not knowing that orchid roots want to be free! It was my first huge mistake.

It was late July and the heat was on full blast. There was rain most of the afternoons and mornings were hot and humid. Not humid enough for my babies. I had a feeling they were stressed so I got out there every morning, early like just at dawn, and sprayed. Seems like I kept misting them all day. Again at nine, somewhere around noon, and later still in the afternoon. One of them I nearly cooked, Tolumnia sylvestris, still in its pot in the semi shade of the sea grapes, which lost a lot of foliage but bravely and generously sent up three flowering spikes. It’s much happier just stuck in a bush now, regrowing its luscious root system and regaining its strength.

I had mixed luck with Encyclia tampensis, a Florida native, which came to me in bloom. I “mounted” it on a piece of rotting wood and shoved it into a space between a thin tree trunk and a trimmed off branch. The flowers croaked soon after. And I had broken one leaf in my haste (it’s still holding on six months later doing its photosynthetic thing). But it wasn’t until much later that I read 1) orchids don’t like rotting wood. In nature they establish on living wood and 2) E. tampensis is susceptible to rot. Last thing I should have done was pair it up with decomposing wood.

I found that no matter how much you read the orchid knowledge comes by dribs and drabs, incrementally as you experience all the processes in the garden. Once you become satisfied with this slow simmer of knowledge you also satisfy yourself with the slow “progress” of orchids that have landed in your care. Here, patience is truly its own reward.

Back to Encyclia tampensis. When things started to look a little less healthy (pseudobulbs were getting thinner, color had changed from vibrant to not so vibrant) I slipped that wood out of the mount, went on to keep a close eye on the plant, and watched for signs of rot (it starts as a black circle but I’ve found it to be reversible). I kept misting to keep those pseudobulbs full. I let the roots hang down at the sides. But it wasn’t until I started fertilizing, which I had thought I’d never do, that I saw new root growth! I was starting very slowly to learn.

My Year of Orchids: Loving the heat

When I told people I was moving down here in July they looked at me like I was crazy. “you are coming for the worst of the heat,” was their universal quip. But it’s what I came here for. And really at least this first summer, it didn’t seem so bad.

We are on a quarter acre lot. Not huge by Florida standards but not that small either. And two owners ago the person ripped up the lawn and planted native trees and shrubs all around the periphery of our property. So the shady protected jungle extends ten or fifteen feet from the street. We have birds galore, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, titmice, wrens, warblers, thrushes, and the usual players, doves, bluebirds, cardinals, and mockingbirds. Two owls visit the property, a screech owl and a great horned owl, so we must have rodents besides the awful squirrels. There’s a black racer snake who lives on the property. And a teeming beehive back by the compost, packed with honeycombs, where the bees started their own colony in an upside-down plastic flowerpot.

When the previous owner left two years ago a new couple lived here for a very short time. They irrigated the property with St. Petersburg reclaimed water twice a week while they were gone. Well if you know anything about native plants of Florida you know they don’t need watering twice a week. So when we got here things were weedy, overgrown, and just a little bit scary. I had my work cut out for me from the start. There were plenty of sweaty days and weeks spent clearing a path and just getting things within a hundred miles of tidy (not my strong point anyway). There were whole sections of weeds, six foot tall horse mint among them, loaded with flowers and humming with pollinators. Tickseed of every variety and other weeds whose seeds stick right to your skin, especially when you’re sweaty.

On mornings when I’m working outside next to the street, weeding or trimming gigantic sea grape branches, people always stop and we laugh about how the garden will certainly win. But this overgrown jungle did have one great advantage. There were hundreds of spots where I could hang epiphytes.

My Year of Orchids: Exciting things in the garden

I put down my morning paper for lots of reasons. But the biggest reason is that more exciting things are going on in my garden. It’s the middle of winter here in St. Petersburg, Florida. The dew lies like a heavy blanket on orchids that I have hanging on branches and in baskets. I imagine they are pretty happy in their mild, benign winter-rest mode. There’s not too much wind, the day is slated to warm up nicely, and we are in for a few days of mild rain. The world looks good. The plants are fresh and green and perky, and the wetness on their leaves (and on my car) tells me the roots are well hydrated as well.

I moved here in July and pretty much from the first day I wanted to record what was going on in my garden. There was a lot of basic cleaning up the garden that had to happen first, including a full day of two crews trimming palm fronds and some huge branches that had grown over the roof. First things first.

The orchids came along within the first couple of months, so part of my “year of orchids” is already over. But all these are stories waiting to be told. Before I go any further I should tell you this. From the very start I looked at my orchids and as an experiment. Not a torture experiment (I hoped) but one that, with close observation, would allow me to reverse my inevitable mistakes. There were plenty of those to come.

Incidentally or not I was trained as a botanist, specializing in a different group of epiphytes, lichens. So when I started growing orchids, while I didn’t have any idea how they behaved, I did have the innate curiosity of a scientist, somebody who studies things that grow on top of others: epiphytes.

So almost all my orchids are growing as epiphytes in trees or on twigs. A few, including some rescues that looked dead when we moved here, but which have showered me with flowers, reside in baskets. If you’re looking for orchid growing tips, especially indoors, you may be coming to the wrong place. I’m trying to watch these beautiful creatures as they grow in nature. I want to see how they adapt in the rigors of the wild, with birds landing on them and leaving poop on their leaves, where direct sun may burn them, and where, attached to their trees, I cannot bring them in when the weather gets chilly.

But cold is relative. We moved down here from Cambridge, Massachusetts, finally escaping some of the nastiest weather Mother Nature cooks up. I used to cross the BU Bridge every day for work, either by foot or by bicycle on my way to teach at Boston University. The Charles River froze every winter. The bridge, which belonged neither to Cambridge nor Boston, was neglected by both communities and went untreated most of the time. It was slippery at best, sometimes impassible to foot traffic. I used to tell my students, “one of these days the bridge will get extra icy, I’ll slip into the river, and your prayers will be answered.”

It’s about 55° here this morning in St. Petersburg. Back in Boston, while the temps sometimes climb into the 50s even in December, it won’t be until well into May that we can count on temperatures above freezing. So I can start by saying from a subjective standpoint living in St. Petersburg is an utter delight. I love the heat.

Another corner of Sri Lanka. Why talk to a stranger?

Another corner of Batticaloa

I rode to so many small corners in my Sri Lankan village when I was there. Almost always just at dawn. Moments come where I remember those corners almost just the way they were. They composed the atmosphere of a fairly remote spot of a remote spot of Sri Lanka, already a "corner" on its own.

The corner I recalled today was in Kallady village, not far from the main road, somewhere behind the Shanthi Theater where I came to spend time in a darkened hall, sometimes with lots of other bodies and sometimes almost all by myself, watching recent movies from Tamil Nadu, none of them that good but so much fun to catch the energy and the cadence and make out some words in Tamil with the help of subtitles. 

Not that the main road was that much, but it was lively and wide and crowded. People were rushing both ways, north and south, buying and selling, stopping, picking up fish at the fish market below the road or bananas or pineapples from the back of trucks. Buses plied noisily and dangerously fast. Fast eats places on both sides of the road. A coconut juice place, an employment office, a clinic, a well constructed median strip and a new HNB Bank branch. These elements combined to make it seem almost prosperous. 

As if peace were attainable or maybe even there already, having arrived stealthily, miraculously after war and communal violence and threat and loss and disappearance rained down, gritty, miserable, acid, gray, burning and strafing for the past thirty years. But in the back, the pokey back roads, some paved, some unpaved, some with speed bumps in front of schools and others with sharp blind turns behind walls, nothing looked prosperous. It looked very poor and bare. 

This corner was a bare spot. Maybe not the poorest in Sri Lanka. After all the lady kept cows on this muddy, scraped-away lot. And I saw her on her stool, sqatting, milking at the corner on many mornings. I wonder. Did she see me? Her lot was across from a small shop. Maybe her family owned it. Maybe they were rich. They could have been, with a shop and cows and property. Never mind the appearance. And someone, a son or nephew or son in law, seemed always to be close by in the morning in his sarong and bare torso. Pretty fat, at least broad, maybe another sign of prosperity. No vehicles nearby though. Maybe they were still locked inside the gates this time of morning. Because if this was indeed a family, and if they had cows, a shop, property, and more than one mature generation in proximity, then they must have had a vehicle. And not just a scooter. It has to have been a small or large sedan or even, though I doubt it--these were more Western Province vehicles, an SUV. No. SUVs were rare still in the East. Cars too. But not if you were wealthy. 

This place looked so poor. A lady in her 60s or 70s out early in the morning milking her cows. Maybe she'd done it for decades. Maybe it was a real source of wealth. A reliable source. But the scene didn't emit the glow of wealth or comfort. So not bucolic. No trees around. Only mud it seemed, even in the dry season when the unpaved roads turned to dust. And the cows. What could they have been eating? There was no grass to be seen. The lot was lower than the road. Maybe it had been a home. Maybe it had been lost during the war. Maybe it was wiped clean by the tsunami. Was this neighborhood in the zone of devastation? Might have been. Must have been. I think the wave went all the way to the main road. So maybe here like in Thiruchendur, everything you saw, no matter how dirty or worn was new. Built after the tsunami. 

I could pass by the spot once a day. One time each morning (way too hot the rest of the day), but I didn't feel I could stop. The tableau of the village street, the lady and her cow, the man in the sarong. These seemed private. A place I might pass through but not a place to stop. Not a place to gawk, let alone take a picture. A place to pass, silently, slowly, floatingly, straining to look without turning my head. Not making eye contact because it was none of my business. 

Others did it differently. Smiled. Said hello. I tried it sometimes. Not at this corner. But often the looks I got back in return said "this is not your place. This is not your business. This is not for you to separate apart into a domain of your own by saying hello. Why should we say hello to you? You are a stranger and you are strange in your age, your dress, your posture, your facial expression, your eyes. What are your intents? Why are you here in this private place, a foreigner, a European, an interloper. A troublemaker? Another sociologist come to 'study' us? Another interviewer? Go in peace but go. Go through this place and don't take the liberty of assuming it is 'yours' in any way. And don't bother us. We've had decades of bother. Just let us get on with the milking, the driving, brushing our teeth, packing our children off to school, finding time for our meals."

The feeling wasn't hostile. It was just there. It wasn't respectful either. It was just leave us alone. And maybe I wanted to be left alone myself. Left alone to engage or disengage or float or imagine or gain impressions as I wanted them. Maybe it was enough to see and breathe the dust, to smell and breathe the smoke, to take in the sounds as they were offered or as I perceived them. To feel the roughness of the road or see a cow, a large one, unexpected around the corner. To feel the dips in the unpaved road and go into and through them like a joyride or to circumnavigate around the side of them when it rained great huge storms. 

The place was a place of cows. It felt like every place with cows radiated their gentleness, passivity. I don't know if you could call the people passive. Their struggles had been huge, ongoing, stuck into decades like a knife. The struggles came from all sides, politically. There could be no trust. I don't know the suffering of people in Batticaloa. I didn't know them personally enough to understand how they suffered. Do all people suffer alike? Does "accepting" suffering happen differently? Not being allowed into their suffering is part of what I wasn't allowed into. The "mind our own business. What are you doing here anyway?" But suffering is personal even if shared. And the way you suffer, the "approach" to suffering. Who can tell? How is that suffering different or dissipated ten or twenty years out? I more than touched upon this in my writings there. It's a black box, a complete mystery to me. Yet. Suffering was on the agenda. It was on the menu in appetizers, mains, and desserts. There for you to sense but not understand. 

So I couldn't be like my acquaintance,  a graduate student in sociology, who went into people's houses and started her interviews with, "so take me to the worst day of your life, the day of the tsunami." The cheek, ignorance, disbalance and disrespect that question showed explains how this person was so unhappy where we were. How she sought solace in a local, newly built Hari Krishna center. 

What was the mission of a place like that? Who's agenda was it there to serve? Agendas and intrusions, misbehavior of every sort is what we witnessed there in the East. All ages, genders, nationalities. Of course even Sri Lankans were in on it. A great feeding frenzy of misery. And the sufferers of misery, or their children, escaping the vortex of unhappiness and deprivation at dizzying speeds, or maybe more like swimming and slashing their way out of a pool full of sharks. It wasn't a happy place. 

The corner in the morning could provide what you might call a "happy" place. When you are gliding past you are savoring the minute or seconds that it takes. You know you are alive, but in the strangest way because there's no place you have to be at any particular time. You may not be of the people there but you are seeing their lives and passing through, even if just for a moment a day. The lives build a landscape. They are not the backdrop because they are all there is. So the suffering or the sounds of gossip, all of these are there front row center, a drama of each day reckoned in its moments. 

That's the corner for today there are many more to explore.