HUMMINGBIRDS IN SIBERIA

For the past week we have been having bitterly cold weather. Everything is frozen solid outside, and all of the plants with green leaves have that sad, beat-up, leathery look that they get when it’s freezing. In fact, they’re a good gauge of temperature because as soon as it warms up they start looking normal again. The air is perfectly still, the sky is perfectly clear and blue, The Olympics are perfectly white, and the sun is doing its best to peek over the southern horizon and shine horizontally on everything for a few hours a day.

The winter solstice is only two weeks away, so it’s not surprising that the days are short. What is surprising is all of the dry, cold weather we're having. Normally it’s cool, cloudy, and wet this time of year, but not freezing! Global climate change seems to have turned the Pacific Northwest into Siberia.

The saddest thing of all was seeing a little female hummingbird early this morning trying to drink at the feeder outside my window and realizing that the sugar-juice was frozen solid. I hope she managed to go up the street and find nectar in some of the winter-blooming flowers in the neighbors’ yards, but I’m afraid they were frozen, too. I brought the feeder in, thawed the liquid, topped it off, and put it outside again hoping the hummingbirds would find it before it freezes again. From now on, until it warms up, I’m going to bring it inside at night.

I hadn’t been in the greenhouse for a week, but did venture in there today to check the temperature and see what, if anything had frozen. Amazingly, a lot of my pleurothallids and other small-flowered orchids have burst into bloom! They must be enjoying the cold a lot more than I am. 

[Photos of Fairbanks, Alaska at noon on the winter solstice and a hummingbird at a red plastic feeder just like mine are both adapted from Wikimedia. Trisitella hoeijeri photo is mine.] 

MIDWINTER ORCHIDS: TWO FRAGRANT MINI DENDROBIUMS

A good many dendrobiums are winter bloomers, keeping the greenhouse interesting through the months when it’s dark, cold, and rainy outside, and dark, cool and dry in my indoor dendrobium area. Most dendrobiums don’t have the “wow” factor that a big, bright-colored cattleya does, but they’re loveable just the same, and some of them bloom a lot more frequently. Dendrobium hercoglossum is covered with flowers, and has been blooming virtually non-stop for over a year.

A couple of days ago I found that my little Dendrobium tetragonum was blooming again. I say ‘again” because it seems like it just bloomed. It’s an Australian species, so its ancestors were probably subjected to drought and other natural forms of abuse, making it tough and perfectly suited to growing under my conditions. The plant itself is only about 4 inches tall. Instead of its canes being round like those of most other dendrobiums, they are square, hence the name. The flowers are large for the size of the plant, spidery in shape, and cream colored with rust brown borders. They put out a strong gourmand fragrance during the day, mostly vanilla with caramel and butterscotch, along with some sweet woody notes and just the slightest hint of mint. I don’t know what pollinates this species in nature, but it has good taste.

The other mini-orchid that’s blooming right now is Dendrobium kingianum. What a surprise to walk into the greenhouse the other day and see a community pot of about a dozen baby dendrobiums, the offspring of two of my adult plants, blooming away. There’s nothing more satisfying than to see my orchids’ kids grow up and bloom, especially when the flowers are as nice as these are. The flowers are all some shade of pink with delicate magenta markings on the lips. Dendrobium kingianum is not my favorite orchid fragrance, but it’s one of the most powerful. A single blooming plant can scent the whole house during the day. To me it smells like sweet clover amped up several orders of magnitude, with some cloying honey and pollen notes added. I wouldn’t want to wear it as a perfume, but it’s certainly a sillage monster.