Pretty picture: Odontocidium (?) Margaret(e?) Holm 'Alpine'

I'm not ordinarily a big fan of Oncidiums and their relatives -- objectively, I can be impressed by how many blooms, or an unusual color, or something, but I think my preferences run more toward single (or few) very large and elaborate blooms, instead of lots of smaller, simpler ones. When I come across an exception to that general rule, though, it tends to be a doozy.

I think the main thing I like about this is that the blooms are so large, relative to what I usually see, but the pattern is also great, and I like the colors, too. This one just pleases me in all the ways. (Except possibly for being fragrant, which I don't think it is but even if it were it wouldn't matter because I wouldn't be able to smell it at the show or remember it after the show.)

The ID on this one is confusing and uncertain. Of course. In 2008, I posted a photo of an orchid we were selling at the ex-job, which was tagged as Odontoglossum 'Margarete Holm,' but it didn't look anything like this -- different color, different pattern, smaller blooms. And, obviously, Odontoglossum, instead of Odontocidium.

The orchid registry where I usually get my ancestry information gives two results for "MargaretE Holm," but neither one is listed as an Odontocidium, so I don't know which one is the plant in the photo, or whether either of them is. one is an Oncostele (syn. Odontoglossum), registered in 1983, and the other is an Oncostele (syn. Odontioda), registered in 1988. The site doesn't have photos to go with the listings, which is understandable (it would be a lot more work, and it's hard to confirm the identity of a plant in a photo unless it's very distinctive or common), but that also leaves me without a way to choose one or the other.

An online image search leads me to think that it's probably the 1983 cultivar, making this actually an Odontoglossum instead of an Odontocidium as tagged, though that preference is based on a single Pinterest post. Ideally, one would like to have something a little more solid to base the guess on. I also found a Garden Web thread about a plant that sort of looks like this but with blooms that lean more to the pink/purple side than the dark red in my pictures. That one was sold as Margarete Holm 'Alpine.' A Garden Webber comes down on the Odontoglossum/1983 side, but . . . Garden Web is only barely more trustworthy than Pinterest, and only one commenter weighed in, so I wouldn't, like, want to bet someone's life on that being true.

And none of this explains the photo I took in 2008, which pretty clearly seems to be a different plant than this.

In any case, I like these photos -- if anything, the photos make it look better than it did in person -- and this was one of my favorite orchids at the 2015 show.

Next up, another Anthurium, this time no. 0255 "Steph N. Wolfe." Hopefully it will be less confusing than this.

Pretty pictures: Odontocidium Sunlight 'Pacific Sunset'

Odontocidium Sunlight 'Pacific Sunset' = Oncidium Mexico × Odontocidium Crowborough, though the orchid registry online doesn't know of the cross, so it's not clear how official this is.

Pretty picture: Miltassia Charles M. Fitch x Odontocidium Black Beauty

The tag just said "C. M. Fitch," but the internet says the C is for Charles.

I'm not sure why, exactly, but I kind of like this even though it's plainer than the orchids I normally go for. Perhaps it's just that the color is unusual.

Pretty picture: Odontocidium Tiger Crow 'Golden Girl'

This whole week's posts, with the possible exceptions of Friday's and Saturday's, are all being written last Saturday, on 23 July, because I am hopeful that if I have a whole week to work on it without being sidelined by other blog posts, I might actually get the Ficus elastica post done by Friday. (UPDATE: I didn't. But it's up now.) (I still haven't figured out how to juggle the blog, profile-writing, and watering in a satisfactory manner.) I promise nothing, but that is my hope.


Meanwhile, are these not the most sickeningly cheerful orchid flowers you've ever seen?


I don't mean to disparage. I could use something sickeningly cheerful about now -- the heat wave for most of last week, the whole shooting/bombing thing in Norway on Friday, Amy Winehouse's death Sunday, plus whatever fresh new nightmares have happened in the world between Saturday and today. Feels like a good moment to go play with Sheba.

Pretty picture: Odontocidium Tiger Crow

I'm realizing that a really insane percentage of the non-Phalaenopsis orchids we sold at work are¹ from the Oncidium alliance.² This is kind of surprising to me. I mean, it's not that they're not nice flowers, and I understand Oncidium itself, at least, is supposed to be easy to grow, so it makes sense. It's more just, I think, that the forms and colors are so varied, it's strange to realize that the flowers we had were only ever a narrow fraction of the diversity in the family.

As far as this particular photo goes, the flowers are more interesting in the close-up view where you can see all the detail. But I don't think the picture itself (or any of the other photos, for that matter) came out that well -- the colors seem a bit dark and dull, given the subject. So I guess it was a wash. I do like this flower, though, better than a lot of the other orchids I've seen recently.

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¹ "Were?" They still sell the same types of orchids, but I'm not one of the people doing it anymore. So is it present tense, because they're selling them now, or is it past tense, because I used to be selling them?
² Although orchids from one genus will interbreed considerably with other genera, not all of the possible combinations will produce viable offspring. Instead, genera cluster in different groups, called "alliances." Orchids within the same alliance can interbreed freely, but they may or may not cross with orchids from other alliances. The Oncidium alliance is one of these groups, and includes the genera Brassia, Miltonia, Odontoglossum, Oncidium, and Cochlioda, which can be crossed and recrossed to make several multigeneric hybrids we've seen here, including Beallara (my personal favorite, I think), Wilsonara, Colmanara, Degarmoara, and Goodaleara.
Phalaenopsis, the orchid most familiar to people in the U.S. (maybe elsewhere too -- I don't know), is part of the Vanda alliance.
Not all orchid genera are necessarily in an alliance.