I received this plant as Octomeria lobulosa. For my untrained eyes, it looks pretty similar to O. grandiflora. I appreciate opinions and information with regard to these two species! If you know a good literature of this group, please let me know.
Update: My friend, Alfonso Doucette, provided me a link to a Ph. D thesis, where the author proposed that O. lobulosa to be synonymous to O. grandiflora (see the bottom of this post for the link).
I looked around information for O. lobulosa, but there is almost no information about O. lobulosa. The only thing I found is from Orchidaceae Brasilienses Book 1 by Pabst & Dungs (1975). So here is an excerpt from the book:
The book has only illustrations of the flowers (see the figure), and there is no descriptions. So I'm not so clear about the differences.
From looking at the book, the width of the petals and sepals seems to be different. The sepals and petals of the O. grandiflora are more pointy and their widths seems to be narrower. From this aspect, my plant seems to be closer to O. lobulosa, but it could be just a variability within O. grandiflora. The petal and the lateral sepal on the right side is showing the backside of the flower. In all of the photos below, the ruler is in cm.
The top image of the photo below is showing the shape of the side lobe of the lip. This does look like O. grandiflora. The middle phot is the natural shape of the lip looking down from above. When I was dissecting the flower, I squashed the tip of the lip, so the right side of the lip looks misshaped. But from the middle photo, you can see two ridges between the two side lobes (reddish structure). These two ridge does look similar to O. lobulosa. But once I flattened the lip (the bottom image, ignore the top half of the lip which was squashed by me), the shape of the lip looks a bit closer to O. grandiflora. Because of the lip shape, I tempted to think this plant is actually O. grandiflora, but I'd like to hear any opinions.
Here is the entire plant. I didn't pay too much attention to keep the plant up-right when I was potting. Oops... I have another plant which was labelled as O. grandiflora, purchased from the same vendor at the same time. The leaf shape seems to be slightly different, but it hasn't flowered yet. So I don't know the difference between the two individuals I have.
Update 1:
Here, I obtained the original description of O. lobulosa from:
Rechenbach, Heinrich Gustav, 1858. Hamburger Garten- und Blumenzeitung 14: p. 215
24. Octomeria lobulosa.
Aff. Octomeriae grandiflorae Lindl. folio angustiori, labello ima basi cordato, trilobo, lobis lateralibus semiligulatis, lobo medio producto duplo longiori flabellato, antice quadrilobo, carinis geminis a basi lobi medii in discum posticum.
Flos flaveolus basi labelli atropurpureus.
Eine kleine Blüthe von strohgelber Farbe mit braunrothem Lippengrund.Translation of the last two sentences (the ones in German) from the help of my German friend:
Aus dem Garten des Herrn Consul Schiller von unserm Freund Stange gesendet.
A small flower of straw yellow color with reddish brown lip base.
Sent from the garden of our friend, Mister Consul Schiller.
Update 2:
My friend, Alfonso Doucette, pointed me to a Ph. D thesis by Dr. Forster with additional information about O. lobulosa.
Forster, W. 2007. Estudo taxonômico das espécies com folhas planas a conduplicadas do gênero Octomeria R.Br. (Orchidaceae). Doctoral Thesis, Instituto de Biociências, University of São Paulo, São Paulo.It can be downloaded from this link. At the very bottom of the web page, there are 2 links to PDF, the top one with a larger file size is the full version. Unfortunately, I can't read it since it is in Portuguese, but there are lots of illustrations including distribution maps. So it would be of interests to people who are interested in Octomeria.
According to this thesis, O. lobulosa is considered to be synonymous to O. grandiflora var. grandiflora.
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