Friday, April 2, 2010

Pretty picture: Miltoniopsis Keiko Komoda

Another orchid picture from the show in Bettendorf last Saturday. Before sitting down to write this post, I'd thought that Miltoniopsis was a multigeneric hybrid (a hybrid from two or more genera of plant, as opposed to the more typical hybrids from multiple species within a genus) of some kind, maybe Miltonia crossed with Phalaenopsis or something, but it turns out that no, Miltoniopsis is in fact its own genus of six species (wikiposedly), from Central America and the northernmost parts of South America. They're always quite pretty in the pictures (and not bad in real life either, as far as it goes), though one doesn't see them for sale very often.


These are the orchids called "pansy orchids," for their resemblance to pansies (Viola cvv.). It's not a perfect similarity, but I can see where they get the name.


1 comment:

Paul said...

Nice flowers. They used to be classified as Miltonia but later were given their own genus.

Not the easiest of plants to grow for many folks -- they need cooler temps and like fairly high humidity -- not terribly surprising as they are cloud forest dwellers.