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...

Porroglossum dalstroemii is endemic to mossy cloud forest of southern Ecuador (Province of Morona-Santiago ), altitude around 1800m (Luer 1987).  It is a cute minituare species with its leaf about 4-5cm long.  The flowers are small and not showy, but the sepals are all fused together and the shape is interesting.  I received my plant in December 2014 from Andy's Orchids, and it seems to be almost always in bloom.  It is an easy grower under my condition.  I'm 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.  It seems to be ok in a fairly shady condition (PPFD of 55  µ mol m -2  s -1 ).. The flowers are upside-down compared to a typical orchid species, and the lip is located at the top side and the dorsal sepal is at the bottom.  This is called non-resupinate flowers ( link to Wikipedia about resupination). It is interesting that you can see that the...

I purchased this plant as Pleurothallis crocodiliceps from Equaflor-a a couple years ago.  But it turned out to be P. vorator .  This species is endemic to Province of Nor Yungas , northern Bolivia (Luer 1989) and Zamora-Chinchipe Province , Ecuador (Jørgensen, P. M. and S. León-Yánez, 1999). The elevation range is 1000-3000m (Jørgensen et al. 2014) while Luer (1989) mentioned 2800m.  It seem to grow well 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. The flowers are fairly small relative the moderate size of the plant (about 6-8" height), but it is continuously in flower.  And when you look at the details of the flower, it is a delightful species. The taller leaves are a little reddish because they happened to be too close to the light. Luer and Vásquez described P. vorator in 1980 ( link to the original description).  The scary sounding species epithet, "vorator...

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 ...

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...