BLOOMING OUT OF SEASON

What’s going on with my orchids? Three of the big ones that normally bloom in winter are blooming now, completely the reverse of what I’ve come to expect. Cattleya aurantiaca has been blooming for weeks now, with two growths each bearing an uncountable number of bright orange flowers, and another growth about ready to pop out another spray of flowers. Unfortunately, this one is just colorful, not fragrant, so I’m only writing about it as a case study in blooming at the wrong time. 

The second one to bloom is Cattleya jenmannii, with one growth in full bloom today with 4 big, delicate-looking flowers worthy of an old-style prom corsage. The plant has two more growths with different stages of developing buds. Cattleya jenmannii flowers are fragrant, so when I found the blooming plant in the greenhouse, I brought it inside.  I’m looking forward to the indolic, fruity-floral scent perfuming the house for the next few weeks. The third plant that’s ready to bloom is Lc Netrasiri, the iconic Red Cattleya of perfume fame, a plant that I’ve had for years and always thought of as a winter solstice bloomer. It’s just rammed out a huge stalk with at least 8 fat flower buds! These flowers will put on quite a display, both visually and fragrance-wise, once they open.

So why are all of these winter bloomers blooming in July? Could it be global climate change doing weird things to the orchids, making them think that they’ve moved from the northern to the southern hemisphere? That doesn’t seem likely, given that day length hasn’t changed, and I would think that would be one strong signal for orchids to bloom. It has been a little sunnier than usual this spring, but lots of sunlight doesn't send the right message to winter bloomers.

Another theory has to do with the fact that all of these plants are getting old and bulky, and consequently I can’t keep up with repotting them. As a result, most of the roots hang out of the pot. I have no idea why exposed roots would make cattleyas bloom out of season, but it’s a theory.

Another theory is that these plants have gotten so big that they can afford to bloom twice a year instead of just once, and will bloom again in winter. This would be the best possible explanation for their odd behavior. I guess I’ll just have to enjoy their summer blooming spree and wait till winter to see if they want to do it again in December. 

THE INCREDIBLE HULK ORCHID (AND ITS MICRO-MINI COUSIN)

For several years now I’ve been harboring an orchidaceous monster in the making. It’s a standard cattleya plant called Lc Betty Ford ‘York’, and it’s presently occupying almost the entire large table in my solarium. It started out as a tiny seedling, grew at a reasonable rate in the solarium for a couple of years, and bloomed once, as modestly as a cattleya can bloom. Last year it put on a huge spurt of vegetative growth, but didn’t bloom. It finally became so large and unwieldy that I had to move it out to the greenhouse, where it thrived even more. This winter it decided that it would bloom off of the last 3 growths that it had added, with 3 or 4 flowers per growth - enormous flowers, each as big as my outstretched hand.

The flowers are so large and heavy that the usual bamboo stakes won’t hold them up, so they’re supported by tall objects on the table that serve as crutches. The colors on the flowers are gorgeous, especially with the sun shining on them, or through them, lighting them up like a magenta neon sign. The lip is the deepest, darkest, most velvety purple-maroon imaginable, set off by a network of gold stripes in the throat.

But it’s the fragrance that is the main attraction. As cattleya fragrances usually do, it started off indolic, skanky and a little camphorous, but over the past week has gone through a candied rose phase that reminded me of L’Artisan Timbuktu, only to end up today as what I consider the quintessential “orchid” fragrance. It’s juicy, fruity, floral, musky, spicy, and the most sensuous, sweet, watery fragrance you ever smelled. It fills the entire house in the morning. If I were a pollinator, I’d dive right in, drink it, and wallow in it until I was completely intoxicated.

Hybrid cattleyas seem to have largely escaped the movement to de-scent flowers, so most of the naturally unwieldy, standard-size ones have a beautiful fragrance. The mini-cattleyas, on the other hand, have been bred for windowsill size plants with relatively large flowers, and are mostly not fragrant.

The big surprise in the greenhouse this week was the blooming of Maxillaria minuta, a micro-mini orchid that I grew from infancy. The whole plant is no larger than the lip of one of the cattleya flowers, and the flowers are smaller than a lentil. They’re pretty, though - nicely shaped and dark red with a shiny, wet-looking lip. I haven’t detected any fragrance yet, but am hoping that one will develop over the next few days.

One of the things that I find so fascinating about orchids is their mind-boggling diversity. It couldn’t be much better illustrated than by the giant cattleya and the miniature maxillaria.

LEMON-SCENTED CATTLEYA

As in perfumes, citrus scents are popular among orchids. Most cattleya fragrances include at least a touch of citrus, with everything from bergamot and lime though lemon, grapefruit, orange, and orange blossom being represented in one form or another.

This week I brought in a hybrid cattleya that was blooming in the greenhouse, Blc Mem Shirley Moore. Its color varies considerably from year to year, sometimes being more on the yellow side, other times more green. The picture is from last year, when the petals and sepals were a bright lime green and the lip a bright purple, suggesting that one of its ancestors was Cattleya bicolor, a species with this color combination. This year both the petals and lip are more on the yellow side, maybe because the winter was colder than usual.

In any case, this cattleya has a powerful fragrance that smells like a traditional US dessert called lemon bars. Lemon bars are basically a flour and butter crust topped by an exceedingly rich combination of lemon juice, eggs, and sugar. The orchid has that same rich, sweet, lemon custard scent, but it adds a little vanilla to the recipe. It’s a real clock-puncher that only puts out its scent for a few hours in the morning, but when it does - wow! It smells good enough to eat.

This one won’t end up as a perfume, just because it’s pretty much a straight gourmand interpretation of lemon. On second thought, has that been done in a perfume? I can’t remember smelling one, since most lemon-themed scents are colognes. Anybody have a favorite lemon gourmand scent?

[Lemon bar photo adapted from Wikimedia]

ORCHIDS OF THE SOLSTICE

Oddly enough, the dead of winter is a time when a lot of orchids bloom. I walked into the greenhouse today to see splashes of color all around - a big blue vanda, one of the giants of the greenhouse, an Isabelia pulchella, a creeping miniature that suddenly broke out into a riot of small bright fuschia flowers, several ladyslippers, and Sophronitis cernua, a tiny plant with clusters of bright neon orange-red flowers. All of these orchids are colorful, but none of them are fragrant.

To compensate, though, there are some fragrant cattleya type orchids in bloom too. Laelia anceps is still in full flower, although the fragrance has changed from fruity-floral to more of a pollen-like scent. Brassavola nodosa, one of the parent species of Little Stars, is just coming into its night-fragrant glory.

An odd one is Lc Luminosa, a primary hybrid between Laelia tenebrosa and Cattleya dowiana. It’s a frustrating plant to grow because the cross seems to have produced flowers that are too heavy for their stems. This year there were two growths with flower stalks. The first one to mature was a complete bust. The buds never fully opened because they dragged the stem down, bending it onto the stiff bud sheath, constricting and finally breaking it at that point. I supported the second flower stalk with a stake, and the flowers opened and were OK at first. Now they’re hanging down again from the point at which each flower joins the stalk. While they were in good shape, the flowers were fragrant, very much like the red cattleya described in another post - sweet, spicy, and fruity.

Another orchid that’s blooming now is the Brassolaeliocattleya (Blc) hybrid with a very long name that became the prototype for my perfume, Golden Cattleya, which I’m still working on tweaking, since I can’t decide what to do about the base. More on that next time. For now I'm just thankful that the days will start getting longer.

[Stonehenge image adapted from Wikimedia]

TWO BIG ORCHID FRAGRANCES: ‘THE’ RED CATTLEYA AND CATTLEYA JENMANNII

The red hybrid cattleya that I used as an inspiration for a perfume and wrote about back in May is blooming again, bigger and better than ever. This year it seemed really anxious to bloom, with the buds bursting open in mid-October. The first year it bloomed, it had one flower, the second two, the third three, the fourth five. Now, in its fifth blooming, it has seven perfect flowers. Saturday morning the red cattleya went with me to Ciscoe Morris’s radio show on gardening, where I was discussing orchid growing. It has been building up its fragrance over the past week, and that morning it was in fine form, first perfuming my car and then the whole studio. It was almost as if it wanted to show off.

When the flowers first opened, they didn’t have much scent for the first couple of days. Then they developed a strong indolic note, and today they have the spicy, fruity, floral, bubble-gum scent that I find characteristic of this plant, although the indole lingers on as an undercurrent. It’s really interesting to see how the scent changes as the flower matures. I think this hybrid, Lc Netrasiri, is my all-time favorite Cattleya.

The other fragrant cattleya that’s blooming this week is the species Cattleya jenmannii. This is the first year it’s bloomed, but it already has three large flowers that are pretty much along the lines of an old-fashioned “corsage orchid” in both shape and color, just a little darker. This plant was not well-behaved, growing out of its own pot and into the pot of its neighbor, where it seems to be inextricably intertwined with a Cattleya intermedia. That’s what I get for not providing enough supervision.

When the jenmannii flowers first opened, they also took a few days to start producing fragrance and had a strong indolic note in the beginning. They have now mellowed out to a spicy, fruity, floral, bubblegum scent that’s similar to the red cattleya, but a little softer and sweeter, with gentle notes of iris and carnation.

For some reason, the red cattleya is extra-spicy this year, since I seem to recall that it’s been more like the jenmannii in past years. I’ve noticed with other orchids that their fragrance can vary a bit from year to year, as can their flower color, depending on growing conditions.