Orchid Borealis

Cattleya harrisoniana Cattleya loddigesii and Cattleya harrisoniana are beautiful species; the shape of the flower is well-proportioned and appealing to me.  I'm not completely sure if my plants are correctly identified, but I decided to make a comparison between them since they flowered at the same time since these two species look very similar. The web pages of Miranda Orchids used to contain extensive information about Cattleya .  Unfortunately, these pages were gone after the redesign.  But the previous informative web site can be found in Internet Archive ( link ), and the differences of C. loddigesii and C. harrisoniana are described here .  According to the web page, the geographic distributions of these two species are mostly not overlapping; C. harrisoniana in the east, coastal region and C. loddigesii in the west, interior region of Brazil.  there are some area where two species co-occur.  The flowering season is different; C. loddigesii i...

Cattleya maxima is one of the oldest described species of Cattleya .  Lindley described C. maxima in 1831, after describing the first Cattleya , C. labiata , in 1821.  Four additional bifoliate Cattleya (each pseudobulb usually produces 2 leaves) were described between these two species.  Although it was the second described unifoliate (single-leaf) Cattleya , it was the first species discovered in this genus.  Spanish botanists sent the herbarium specimen of C. maxima in 1777, but nothing was done to the specimen for over 50 years.  Chadwick and Chadwick (2006) contains the details of the history of the discovery, disappearance, and re-discovery of this beautiful species.  You can also read the story in their web site ( link ). Some unifoliate Cattalya are difficult to identify because they look similar.  But C. maxima is relatively easy to recognize due to the unique floral feature, the yellow stripe in the middle of the lip.  This featu...

Brassavola grandiflora is from the Pacific side of central America.  I obtained this plant from Andy's Orchids in 2017.  It is a care-free, easy growing plant, and it is relatively compact (height of 15-20cm).  It usually produces much more flowers, but this time it produced only 2 flowers.  It seems to flower more than once a year, and it seems to be aseasonal.  I keep it at a warm end of intermediate temperature; the max/min daily temperature is 29-27/21-24C (80-85/70-75F) in the summer and 18-21/16-18C (65-70/60-65F) in the winter. It is similar to B. nodosa .  Frequently, people mentions the larger flower size and wider, flatter, less terete leaf than B. nodosa as the difference.  Additonally, Withner (1998) mentioned that the different shape of the column (Fig. 5-2).   Difference in the column shape between Brassavola nodosa and B. grandiflora .  Excerpt from Fig. 5-2 of Withner (1998) Note that the lower side lobes near the ...

From the flood of the negative news on radio and other media, if I put my emotion aside, we are probably living in an interesting time. It makes me re-think about many things; mostly, nature of the human and their societies.  Xenophobia is relatively easy to understand from a biological view, since many people have instinct for familiarity, and that kind of fear may have helped them to survive the early stage of evolution.  But with the accumulated knowledge, I do not see the need to regress that far.  I never felt that history, sociology, economy, and politics to be interesting before 2016.  Things I have a hard time understanding is why the societal class lower than the super rich support the ideas against the redistribution of wealth.  The income tax is one of the methods and I would think that it is one of the mechanism to balance against the capitalism's tendency that money collects more money.  Well, I learned this kind of basic stuff in the junior...

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 orange...