Pretty picture: Prosthechea Green Hornet

I spent pretty much the entire day on Monday writing e-mails to people and somehow still managed to get further and further behind as the day progressed. I don't remember having this kind of response in previous years.

Not -- he hastened to add -- that I'm complaining about it. Just saying that this is a bit more intense than I expected. Hooray, I guess.

Meanwhile, an orchid:



Yet another misspelled tag: this one said "Prosthecea," instead of Prosthechea. Not a very exciting error, but it still qualifies.

wrong tag count: 3
missing tag count: 1

But wait! There's more!

Prosthechea Green Hornet is apparently a fairly common orchid in commerce; the internet says it's a hybrid of P. cochleata and P. lancifolia, except that the internet also says P. lancifolia doesn't exist. Because the internet is frequently self-contradictory that way.

Older sources say Prosthechea Green Hornet is actually Encyclia Green Hornet, and that it's a hybrid of Encyclia cochleata and E. lancifolia. Plant List has heard of E. lancifolia, which it says is a synonym for P. cochleata var. cochleata.

Except that there are other opinions. Some people consider it actually Epidendrum; some like Anacheilium, some people aren't aware there's an issue yet and continue to go with Encyclia, and then there's the faction for Prosthechea. Sometimes lancifolia winds up trulla instead. So pretty much whatever name you favor, a majority of orchid taxonomy enthusiasts thinks you're wrong, wrong wrong.

Reading this thread at OrchidBoard.com did absolutely nothing to clarify the situation, but it did bring something else into sharp focus for me, which is that there are very few things I find as tedious and frustrating as reading about orchid taxonomy arguments. Perhaps this is now something you and I have in common. Hooray! Orchids teaching people about themselves! Orchids bringing people together!

Pretty picture: Prosthechea cochleata

This has also been called Encyclia cochleata, which is what the file name on the photo says and what the tag on the plant at the show said. Encyclia still outnumbers Prosthechea by two to one on Google, but it's a new plant to me, and I figure as long as I'm learning a new name, I may as well make it the right one.

One of the common names is "clamshell orchid," from the appearance of the petal at the "top." It's actually sort of the bottom of the flower, though: P. cochleata flowers are upside down, developmentally speaking. Usually, an orchid flower's labellum, or lip, is an enlarged petal which serves as a landing platform for insects, like the "slipper" of a Paphiopedilum. In P. cochleata, the labellum hangs over the rest of the flower like a hood instead, but it's still the labellum. Hence, upside-down.


Whether or not the labellum looks like a clamshell is a matter of opinion, I guess: I'm not impressed with the resemblance myself, and would prefer "octopus orchid." But they still don't consult me before giving plants common names, so clamshell (or sometimes "cockle-shell") it is.

Supposedly the flowers smell like lemon/citrus; I don't remember there being a smell when I took the picture, but I wasn't thinking about that at the time, either.

A version of this plant is native to Southern Florida: it has three anthers, instead of the usual one, and is self-fertile. It's also, unfortunately, endangered, which is what happens when you're an orchid trying to coexist with the five and a half million people in the greater Miami metropolitan region.

¹
The usual one-anthered version is the National Flower of Belize, but is found throughout Central America, Columbia, Venezuela, and the West Indies, and is consequently in much less danger of extinction.

P. cochleata has also been crossed with another orchid to produce the hybrid Prosyclia Green Hornet: different sites give different parentages for Green Hornet, but I'm inclined to go with P. cochleata x Encyclia trulla. Green Hornet is very similar to P. cochleata, but the flowers are bigger.

Supposedly they're fairly easy, as orchids go. I don't know whether that's true, but if I see one for sale and have the money, I may very well buy one to try. There's some sound-seeming advice about their care here.

-

¹ The opening credits for "CSI: Miami" are set to the song "Won't Get Fooled Again," by The Who. The song starts off with a long, drawn-out, overenthusiastic YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! that's fairly over the top all on its own, but comes off as being even more over the top when it follows, as it usually does, a scene involving David Caruso, who is usually trying to be dramatic by putting on his sunglasses and pausing a lot, but they don't give him very interesting lines to end scenes on, so the drama tends to fall flat. Adding a YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! after someone says something relatively uninteresting, or something interesting that falls flat, turned into a minor internet meme.
This explanation really wasn't worth the joke, and in fact the joke probably wasn't even funny: I suspect it only seemed funny because I'm in a strange mood at the moment.