Orchid Borealis

Happy Holidays!  The day length around this time of the year is pretty short in Fairbanks, Alaska. Around the winter solstice, we get about 3 hours and 40 minutes.  My 6-year-old son started to attend a kindergarten this fall, and he is learning a lot.  He recently started to correct my English pronunciation, and "solstice" is one of the words which he corrected my pronunciation!  3 hours and 40 minutes sounds pretty dark for people who haven't lived in high latitudes, but actually we get long twilight, so it is a beautiful time of the year.  But many of us get excited that a half of the winter is over, and we will be gaining day light quickly. Ice fog in Fairbanks, around the noon, close to the winter solstice. There are several Japanese traditions to celebrate the winter solstice.  One of them is called Yuzu-yu.  We put oranges, called Yuzu ( Citrus junos ), to the bath.  We can't find this particular orange, so we just put normal oranges.  My son had fun wi

Hymenorchis javanica is endemic to western Java at elevations of 900-1000m (Parsons & Gerritsen 2013, p.518-819).  It is a tiny plant (leaf length is about 2cm), but it gives a disproportionately large display of crystalline flowers.  The flowers are jewel-like especially with a little bit of back light. This plant is originally from Ooi Leng Sun.  But I purchased it from another person in June 2014, and he accidentally shipped the plants via USPS First Class (current USPS Retail Ground) instead of USPS Priority.  USPS Priority takes only 3-4 days for the delivery to Alaska, but USPS First Class can take a long time.  The First Class packages usually (but not always) get shipped to Federal Way, Washington, and then they travel to Alaska via a boat.  So it took 16 days.  Some of the orchids were dead on arrival, but majority of them were highly stressed and I lost many of them subsequently.  I wasn't sure if this one is going to make, but it managed to recover and it finally

Stelis mystax is endemic to a small area of central Panama (around  Santa Fe  in the province of  Veraguas ) from altitude 650-750m, but locally abundant (Luer 2007, p. 97-98). The species epithet, mystax, means a mustache in Latin (originally derived from ancient Greek) because the lateral sepals look like one. Stelis mystax was originally described under genus Pleurothallis by C.A. Luer, but it was moved to a monotypic genus,  Mystacorchis , in 2001.  Molecular phylogeny, based on nuclear ITS and chloroplast matK , shows that  Stelis mystax  is clustered with Dracontia  (= previous Pleurothallis section Dracontia ) species used for the study, which include   Stelis alta ,  S. carnosilabia ,  S. cobanensis ,  S. dracontea ,  S. gigantea ,  S. megachlamys , S. papillifera ,  Dracontia hydra , and  D. lueriana , and two other unique species,  S. carpinterae  and  S. convallaria  (Karremans et al. 2013). Although the support isn't particularly strong, it appears to be clos

Polystachya aconitiflora occurs epiphytically or occasionally lithophytically at elevations of 1650-3000m from Uganda , Rwanda , Zaire , and the Congo (Parsons and Gerritsen, 2013, p.807-808).  It is a easy-growing, compact species with the height of about 12cm (mine is about 10cm tall).  Although the flower is relatively small (about 1cm tall), it seems to flower most of the year. The species name (species epithet) is from the similarity to the flower of monkshood (genus Aconitum ). It was described in 1942 by Summerhayes (p.295-297), and the original description can be found in Biodiversity Heritage Library ( link ).  Podzorski and Cribb (1979) treated it as a variety of another species, Polystachya vulcanica var. aconitiflora . But more recent monograph seems to treat it as a separate species (Mytnik-Ejsmont 2011, Szlachetko and Mytnik-Ejsmont 2015). P. vulcanica is much bigger (both the plant and flower size), and the leaves are beefier (semi-terete) and longer (the plant hi

The original description of the species was based on a plant from Annam.  Cribb (1998) mentioned that Annam is current day Laos.  Averaynov et al (2003) speculated more specific type locality and it is supposedly from  Attapeu Province , located in the south-east corner of Laos.  I wonder where they got this supposition since the original description simply stated Annam ( pdf of the original desciprtion available here ).  According to this wikipedia , Annam is the name used for Vietnam before 1940's (also see this link to Encyclopaedia Britannica ). In 1985, after 80 years of the original description, this species was found in northern Vietnam ( Vĩnh Phúc and Thái Nguyên Provinces; Averyanov 1988), far from the original locality.  Averyanov et al (2003) mentioned an unconfirmed locality from  Lào Cai  and  Lai Châu Provinces, which are in the north-west Vietnam, and disjunct from the other northern Vietnam locality.  Additionally, they speculated that it occurs in the neighbo

I got this plant as Lepanthes sp. aff. manabina from Equaflor-a in spring 2017.  It was in a good condition from the beginning, and it started to recover/grow immediately. I wasn't paying too much attention to this plant, so I'm not sure when it started to flower, but I noticed lots of flowers in early October 2017.  After going through all of >1000 photos of Lepanthes in Internet Orchid Species Photo Encyclopedia (IOSPE) , I picked out a couple similar looking species with drab-colored, greenish, brownish flowers, and studied the illustrations of these candidate species.  I'm pretty sure this plant is L. cincinnata . The species epithet is derived from Latin "cincinnatus", which means "with curly tufts", referring to the curly tips of the 3 sepals.  At the end of this post, I'll try to explain the differences between these 5 species I picked as candidates. According to IOSPE, L. cincinnata is from Valle del Cauca , Colombia in cloud fores

I covered how to convert shop light fixtures to use efficient T8-LED in a previous post .  The efficiency of T8-LED bulbs are widely variable, and the efficiency of commonly available T8-LED bulbs has been slowly improving.  However, the bulbs from Lowes, Home Depot, or Walmart are way behind, and they are still at least 20% less efficient than Sunritek bulbs which are 2 years old.  Now there are T8-LED bulbs with the efficiency higher than Sunritek.  But you do need to source these directly from China, and you probably won't be able to get those locally for a couple more years. I haven't had any failure with Sunritek bulbs (>50 bulbs), and I have been extremely happy with the results.  I have converted all of the shop lights and I needed additional fixtures to use Sunritek T8 LED bulbs.  I decided to use left-over lumbers to make a fixture cheaply.  I made the frame with 1x4 and L-shaped hardwood trim and painted it.  Mine will be used in a grow tent, so it is humid, bu