Orchid Borealis

I got this plant from Andy's Orchids without a name as  Lepanthes sp in November 2017.  It was growing and flowering well, but it declined during our summer vacation in 2018.  I set up automatic misting since we were away for almost 1 month, but somehow, this plant wasn't getting enough water.  It was left with only 2 leaves or so, but it did recover fairly quickly (the photo of the whole plant is taken before this incident, but the plants are getting closer to the original size now).  I have been growing it at the cool-end of intermediate; max/min daily temperature of 29/18C (84/65F) in the summer and 21/13C (70/55F) in the winter.  In the summer time, it is less happy, but this species seems to be able to handle fairly warm condition (for Lepanthes ). There are so many species in this genus, so it is tedious to look for the identification, but I finally decided to spend a bit of time to find the identification of this plant.  I think it is L...

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 purchased this plant as Lepanthes pilosella ( Neooreophilus pilosellum ) from Orquídeas del Valle .  But it turned out to be Lepanthes platysepala, instead.   L. platysepala was originally described by Luer and Escobar in 1994 ( link to the original illustration , Luer 1994). It belongs to subgenus  Brachycladium  which contains about 38 species (Archila and Higgins 2008).  The subgenus is characterized by the pendulous growth habit, short ramicaulis, and petals not lobed.  In the past, this subgenus was proposed to be separated to genus Brachycladium (Luer 2005),  Oreophilus (Archila and Higgins 2008) or Neooreophilus . This species is frequently confused with L. pilosella , and the original description (Luer 1994,  link ) mentioned the differences between the two species: L. pilosella : concave, stripped dorsal sepal, L. platysepala : flatter and more open dorsal sepal with dots.  It is interesting that in some photos of L....