Orchid Man in the United Kingdom

  I had a few minutes of selfish brilliance when my 8 months long project slash research slash experiment had brought unexpected and exciting results. Therefore I think it’s fair I called it Rob’s Closed Curtain Cymbidium Growing and Glowering method. Yes, it is a mouthful, and a lot of people are going to rise their brows up or think – What is he going on about this time.   Well if you don’t like cymbidium orchids, or already have a greenhouse or just have your own way of growing them and flowering successfully then congratulations to you – you are welcome to skip this read. For the purpose of my project slash experiment I have divided a super cheap cymbidium NoID hybrid that I never saw in flower and was a rescue from HomeBase. This plant was super neglected and sat in the garden patio for a whole year before – and within that time it didn’t grow a single new leaf. So after dividing them, they went into self-watering pots and into sphagnum moss – now remember you...

Grammatocymbidiums are an exciting novelty that’s only very slowly found its way into Europe, and it’s still hard to find them anywhere unless you know where to look. They are a hybrid between grammatophyllums and cymbidiums. Making them basically heat tolerant cymbidiums that can flower whenever, without the need of dramatic temperature changes, cold nights, and keeping it outside all year round until first frosts just to have that hopeful flower spike. Oh no! These plants can grow comfortably on your windowsill all year round, and will flower with beautiful cymbidium flowers. Most of them are fragrant too! As I said earlier I love cymbidiums, and I could never grow them properly and flower and now with my own plant – I just got it today! Im going to try to help these beautiful hybrids to get a foothold. Just look below!

I love cymbidiums, I truly do. The foliage is fantastic, reminding me of little palm trees – or not so little in some cases where the plant is the size of a small palm tree. The big fat vigorous bulbs and their power to grow fast and survive so many types of environments and lastly the flowers. Cymbidium flowers are among the most bellowed of all orchids to me and I never can get enough of them. But, there is a problem here. I am really bad at growing them. Actually absurdly bad. Actually probably as bad as with growing cattleyas. The common Chinese cymbidiums that are sold in our UK garden centers are unfortunately cold growing plants that require you to either have a greenhouse or a cold porch or keep them outside and then bring in. So I can’t really do that. In fact I can’t do that at all. I have a patio. If I leave orchids outside they will become the lair of slugs, spiders, ants, catepillars and anything that crawls outside. And that’s the big NOPE for me. In fact last...

April has brought us some unusual events, full lockdown, life threating pandemic, and oddly enough on top of that nice sunny weather. Its nature’s tongue-in-the-cheek i think.  In the growth space there is a few interesting things happening, the biggest one is that neofinetias woke up and are growing rots like mad. Because the living room plant stand where they are, doesn’t get sun till after 3PM, I’m having the LED lights on through most of the morning. However, i have completely unplugged the heat mats as they were drying out the sphagnum moss way too fast and I was really worried it may be more damaging to the plants than actually doing any good. Neofinetia, at the end of the day are intermediate to cool growers I don’t want to push my luck. And there is so much to see, the three (now four) no ID neofinetias are growing like mad. One was growing so vigorously it split itself in half as the new roots were pushing the other fans away, which is interesting and I never saw...

Once in a blue moon, in a large supermarket or a commercial garden center you can find real pearls. Orchids that are named hybrids with some unique qualities. One of those is Phalaenopsis Sun Passat. You will undoubtedly lose your heart to the seemingly simple beauty of this Phalaenopsis hybrid. The plant is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for design and decoration thanks for its yellow to white colours with delicate orange stripes in the heart of the flower. And surprisingly this orchid is very fragrant, which is a unusual quality for large phalaenopsis hybrids, furthermore this orchid grows very large very quickly and can put out many, many spikes at the same time and these can carry up to 12 or more large flowers that can reach up to 9 cm across. Like most complex hybrids it’s easy to care for and it can accommodate different media like bark, spaghnum or even growing in semi hydroponics – which I do personally and it’s doing very well. Because the ...

You may say to me I'm obsessed about this type of phalaenopsis and the truth is I am. I fell in love with the colourful waxy hybrids of the Happy Eagle type. I describe them this way because they really remind me of the precursor in the way the bloom. Something a bit like phalaenopsis Bellina, but the colours are different, the fragrance is more fruity and heady. They are also so much more vigorous, happy and resistant to damage, pests and disease. Especially the phalaenopsis Dragon Tree Eagle, actually it was a mistake when I ordered it. I wanted the Happy Eagle and I choose this one. I don’t know why. Probably because there is so much Eagles around it’s hard to get confused. So I did. This one is a hybrid between Phalaenopsis Penang Girl x Phalaenopsis Black Eagle, and it can come in a variety of different colour coordinations. And now it’s in flower and I absolutely love it. The plant so far is quite small meaning it’s young enough but it looks like I...

Sometimes, very rarely you can find a real gem in your standard boring plant nursery or supermarket. One of these gem's is Phalaenopsis Frontera, which is an absolute marvelous plant. Usually when growers manipulate the plant genes the results can be plain boring, or just a massive mish mash of all the colours and patterns you can find, some of them just being plain horrible and I have seen plants that their colours because of the bad cross, looking like a mix of ketchup and mustard - yes, that's a bad colour on a plant. Unfortunatelly for this beautiful it's very hard to find any information on when it was registered and released to public trade. However, the plant has a lot of rare and beautiful qualities. Firstly, it's very vigorous and it blooms with long and flower heavy spikes. The flowers can also carry a sweet honey fragrance it the plant is happy. As a typical complex Phalaenopsis hybrid its very easy to care for taking intermediate home temp...