Pretty picture: Epidendrum Hokulea

Another Epidendrum of the type I don't like. Though at least the ID is fairly solid this time, unlike the last one.

Epidendrum Hokulea = Epidendrum Joseph Lii x Epidendrum cinnabarinum (Ref.)

Pretty picture: Epidendrum Petticoat Pink

. . . or maybe it's Epi. Sun Valley 'Pink Petticoats.' I couldn't find a "Petticoat Pink" in the International Orchid Registry. I did find a Sun Valley 'Pink Petticoats' on the internet, but the color isn't a close enough match for me to be confident about the ID. So I don't know what this is for sure.

And I mostly don't care, either. Not only am I not that into this kind of Epidendrum (though I like the ones with the orange/green/magenta combination, like Epi. pseudoepidendrum, the hybrids tend to be shaped more like this one, e.g. Rose Valley 'Caribbean Dream' or Neon Valley. I appreciate the distinct shape and arrangement of the hybrids, I guess, but they're just not my thing.

Pretty picture: Epidendrum pseudepidendrum

Wikiposedly, this species can reach five feet (1.5 m) tall. That's a pretty serious orchid.

There have been a lot of Epidendrums in previous shows, but very few have had this green/purple/orange coloring, which I love every time I see it. Of the two similar previous plants, both from the 2012 show, both were heavy on E. pseudepidendrum genes:

Epicattleya René Marqués x Epidendrum pseudoepidendrum
Epicattleya René Marqués 'Tyler'

Epicattleya René Marqués is E. pseudepidendrum x Cattleya x claesiana (Ref.); Cattleya x claesiana is Cattleya intermedia x Cattleya loddigesii.¹

The thin petals make it tough for an autofocus camera like mine to get a good shot of it, but I think these turned out okay. Or at least the above photo worked out okay. Less happy with the whole-plant shot:

My second-favorite thing about Epidendrum pseudepidendrum, after the color, is the botanical name, which is delightfully self-negating.²

-

¹ Cattleya x claesiana is a cross of two pink/lavender catts; intermedia has multiple color varieties, though most have a a dark lip in common, and loddigesii is typically a uniform light pink or lavender across the whole flower, though sometimes the lip is lighter.
² Pseudo- means false, so the name translates as "the Epidendrum that is a false Epidendrum."

Pretty picture: Epidendrum stamfordianum

Didn't mean to just stop posting like that, but I've been busy, and the plants aren't doing anything especially noteworthy anyway. There have been new Anthurium blooms, and lots of new Anthurium buds which will eventually become blooms, but they've all fallen into the same red/yellow, red/white, and pink/pink categories I've shown you several times before, and it's hard to feel any urgency about making a blog post to show them off. I have a few ideas for longer posts still, but never seem to find any time to work on them, so . . . probably not going to be posting a lot in the near future either.

But we'll always have the orchid-show orchids. This particular one photographed badly -- for every shot I took, the camera made a different guess about where to focus, all of them wrong -- and it might not have been that interesting even if it had photographed better. Epidendrums seem to concentrate more on quantity of flowers, rather than quality. But the colors at least coordinate well with the color scheme on the blog at the moment, and the photo looks a little better at full-size. (Which possibly means that I should have cropped it differently.)

Pretty picture: Epidendrum Fany Lady

I couldn't find any record of an Epidendrum Fany Lady. At first I thought maybe it was a misspelled Funny Lady, but that doesn't appear to exist either. So I don't know anything about this particular orchid except that apparently it's an Epidendrum.

Alas, this is another case where I was a bit too far away to get a good photo.
I've spotted a couple Epidendrums in regular, everyday retail lately -- the ex-job had an orange one last Wednesday, and they'd had a few others earlier this year. Not sure what, if anything, this signifies, but it's interesting to me because this is the first time I remember seeing them outside of orchid shows. When I've mentioned them on the blog previously, readers have told me that they're not inordinately difficult to grow, so maybe this means I'll be encountering them more often.

Pretty pictures: Epidendrum stamfordianum

Tag: Epi stamfordianum

Pretty pictures: Epidendrum Rose Valley 'Caribbean Dream'

Couldn't get to sleep on Friday night until very late, which kind of screwed up my whole Saturday. So limited commentary today.




A pink flower with the same name was posted in April. Searches for the name bring up flowers of both colors, so I'm not sure which color is "correct," or whether both are.

I also couldn't find the ancestry for this one.

Pretty picture: Epidendrum embreei

[shrug]

It's okay, I guess. Anybody have strong feelings about it one way or the other?

Pretty pictures: Epidendrum Rose Valley 'Caribbean Dream'

The orchid show had two different-looking plants that were both identified as Epidendrum Rose Valley 'Caribbean Dream,' which was confusing. One is the one shown here:


And the other [EDIT: NOT SHOWN IN THIS POST] was the same shape and size, but the flowers were orange-red instead of pink.


Both colors show up in a Google search, so it could be that there's a pink form and a red form of the same flower. Which would be strange, but it's hardly the strangest thing I've ever heard of from the orchid world.

(The orange-red version gets its own post, but that's scheduled for December.)

Pretty picture: Epidendrum Neon Valley

I don't think I like Epidendrums, when it comes right down to it. I mean, I try, and sometimes I think, oh, that's a nice color combination or whatever, but they just don't do it for me. Give me a few large flowers (Paphiopedilum, Cattleya) instead of a huge cloud of tiny flowers (Oncidium, Epidendrum) any day.

Not saying you have to agree. Just personal preference. I'd make an exception for fragrant flowers, but I haven't run into any straight Epidendrums that were fragrant either. At least not fragrant enough that I noticed.

Pretty picture: Epidendrum Kauai Super White

Late Wednesday night, my computer went crazy: I'd somehow been infected with some malware. (The specific one that got me was "MS Removal Tool," a fake security program that not only pops up to tell you your computer is simultaneously infected with 38 really scary things, but also automatically closes most programs you're running and won't let you open new ones. So you can't run your antivirus program, you can't do any actual work in another program, and you can't even open the Task Manager to see what the hell it is that's running on your computer.)

Because we have more than one computer here, I was able to use an uninfected one to search the net for removal instructions, and although it took me five hours to do, I think it worked and everything is okay. I mean, I won't completely trust my computer for a while, but it seems to be working normally again.

[TWO HOURS LATER:] Actually, no, check that, it's still not working normally, and actually the spare one started acting goofy in a similar but McAfee-specific way, too. So there will be no more posting (e-mail is probably out for a while as well) until I can figure out what's going on and how to fix it. This may suck for you, but however bad it is for you, I assure you it's way, way worse for me, since my entire life is on my computer.

Pretty picture: Epidendrum Moon Valley

Not sure I'm entirely pleased with how these pictures turned out, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps I'm feeling the lack of a wide, whole-plant shot. (Nothing I can do about that now, alas; I have to work with the photos I took in March, and if memory serves, I was feeling a bit rushed that day, because I was worried that the batteries would die on me.)


I have zero direct experience with Epidendrum; we never had them at work. In fact, I think the orchid show at Wallace's that these pictures come from is the only time I've ever seen them in person at all. It's possible that I may have seen hybrids with some Epidendrum ancestry at work; wikiposedly they hybridize with other genera in the Cattleya Alliance.


I'm also nearly positive that I've seen pictures of Epidendrums being grown outdoors, on some blog or another, but I couldn't find it. A few of them are sufficiently cold-tolerant to be grown in the warmer areas of the U.S.

Pretty picture: Epidendrum Max Valley

Yet another photo from the Illowa Orchid Society's show at Wallace's Garden Center at the end of March. (The reader should expect that these posts are going to happen every week or two; I have them planned through January.)

Unlike with some of the others, I don't have any fun trivia or strong personal feelings about this one. I think the picture is the problem, as far as strong personal feelings: the green-blue cloth and blue ribbon in the back make the colors all seem strange. I couldn't move it somewhere else to take the picture, though, unfortunately.