Orchid Borealis

I got this as Conchidium extinctorium from Tropical Exotique in spring 2018.  This is the first bloom. It was transfered to Porpax in 2018 (see below).  It was also in genus Eria at one point.  It is a pretty interesting plant morphologically.  The flower appears from the plant without leaves on a thin shoot, and wiggles around with a bit of wind.  The pseudobulbs are compressed, and disc-like.  The flowers don't look like typical Porpax , but the compressed pseudobulbs do look like them. A phylogenetic trees of Eria and related genera were reconstructed from the nuclear ITS and four plastid regions (Ng et al. 2018).  Conchidium (or Eria section Conchidium , but as shown in this paper, putting them into a section of Eria is not correct) forms a sister clade to Porpax . Actually they had only three species of Conchidium ( C. pusilla , C. muscicola and C. lasiorhiza ), and " Conchidium clade" consists of two of the three species.  The ...

I received this as Rodriguezia pardina from Florália in May 2018.  The flowers aren't as showy as some of the species in this genus, but it is a nice compact species (about 6cm high). But when it flowred first time in 2019, it turned out to be Rodriguezia brachystachys .  I looked for not information about this species, but I didn't have much info.  According to Flora do Brazil ( link ), it occurs in  Minas Gerais and  Federal District . It is also listed in the checklist of orchids from  Federal District , Brazil (Batista & Bianchetti, 2003), but removal from the checklist was suggested because there was no herbarium collection or record (Queiroz 2015, Queiroz et al. 2015).   This site indicates its occurence in Rio de Janeiro , too. Mine is still small, but Mauro Rosim has a photo of his well-grown specimen of this species in his Flickr ( link ).  I've been growing at the cool-end of intermediate, but I'm not sure if it will do better...

Aerangis hildebrandtii was original described by Reichenbach as Angraecum hildebrandtii (The Gardeners' Chronicle: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Horticulture and Allied Subjects. 1878, Vol. 9, p. 725,  link ).  It was transfered to genus  Chamaeangis  in 1972 ( link ), and to Microterangis in 1985.   More recently, it was transfered to Aerangis based on molecular phylogeny data (Cribb & Carlsward 2012).  It is a species found in Comoro Islands . I got this plant from Andy's Orchids a couple years ago.  I'm growing at intermediate-warm temperature.  It seems to be able to grow fairly low light.  I might be giving too much light, and the leaves are a little yellowish. Note that the middle and bottom flowers are missing the anther caps. This species seems to be pretty similar to  Aerangis hariotiana .  Both la Croix (2014, p.153-155) and Oviatt  & Nerison (2016) mentioned that they couldn't di...

Bulbophyllum tripudians from Tropical Exotique Bulbophyllum tripudians  belongs to Bulbophyllum   section Tripudianthes with about 11 species (Seidenfaden, 1979).  This small section is intermediate between section Pleiophyllus and section Cirrhopetalum .  Similar to section Pleiophyllus , the plants have two leaves per pseudobulb.  And the shape of the flower is somewhat similar to section Cirrhopetalum with large lateral sepals.  Most (all?) plants in section  Tripudianthes  are deciduous, and drop the leaves in the winter, and flowers in the winter or spring from the leaf-less pseudobulbs. Several species within this section are so similar that the correct identification is not easy without the details of flowers.  Indeed, I see many misidentified photos on the internet.  Furthermore, much confusion surrounded the naming history of species in this group. I illustrate a part of the confusion at the end of this post.  Se...