My Year of Orchids: It is possible to focus

Oh the noise out there! The places to go! The errands. They are endless. Even the many corners of the garden, each with its appeal, tear us from the inner landscape. My inner landscape, the landscape of my focus is each orchid I plant. I watch them in the trees and twigs I feel their leaves thicken. I sense the advance of their roots.

This is a game of patience and it’s played every day. I’m watching for the signals that are sent out hourly. Very small responses to the environment. Very subtle impulses of form and growth. What a surprise to find myself alone in the garden with these mute beasts clinging to twigs and branches, drinking the dappled light and dripping dew.

Focus is on the verge of obsession but I look at it as a creative act, a movement away from the noisy outside shells that surround my jungle garden. A movement away from “me” toward the inner world of the orchids.

The curve of a leaf, its hardening over weeks, the appearance of a bud, the sneaky extending of a root of Cattleya labiata groping its way out of the tree crotch into a new exposed position. The slow push outward, full of risk and promise. The gradual enveloping and increasing agency the plant exerts over its environment.

Did you ever see the way orchid roots make a kind of tent? They enclose a space between the wood and plant and create a chamber where moisture persists. I saw this in Broughtonia domingensis, the first orchid I just stuck in place with no string to attach it. I saw it in Bulbophyllum fascinator, whose roots literally pushed the plant up to form their own little scaffolding beneath. Do you see this magic when you pot your orchids?

When you water with focus you see the roots swell and change as water sticks to them through adhesion and drips so slowly down the surface. Or stands still. Or the root turns green. Or the root gets rubbery. Or the root seems barely to respond at all. Like Angraecum sesquipedale. Until one day you see the leaves are not only longer but twisting and becoming wider. You reach out to touch and they are heavy, leathery to the touch not soft like when they first came out of the wrapping a few months ago. Then you notice a millimeter of root that has attached itself to the wood. After months of supposed inaction. You’ve read the Angraecum roots are slow growing. But something is happening.

Some roots seem to be made of segments. More a series of connected knots and balls than a smooth or supple fiber. This is how my Oncidium phymatochilum seems to grow. Its roots stretching from a miniature mass of popcorn-like growth. This orchid jumped out of its basket one day. I took it to my orchid grotto and stuck it on a twig. Its brownish leathery growth holds promise as it does more than cling. It seems to climb.

Climbing, stretching, twisting, covering. A singular focus toward growth and mastery of the environment. Here orchids excel, supple, expanding, hardening, primed for their bold emergence out of the shadows.

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.