Orchid Borealis

Overlook of Allerton house from the bus at Allerton Garden, Koloa, HI Hawaii is a fairly popular vacation spot for Alaskans.  While most people would go there during the winter to escape the cold, we decided to leave the pleasant and beautiful Alaskan summer behind, and visit Kauai, Hawaii.  Well, we were also planning to visit Japan, so it was a nice middle point to break the long trans-pacific flight from Seattle to Japan.  This was the first time visiting Hawaii for all of us, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was fun.   For an Alaska-grown kid, who can't sweat much, it could have been a bit hot, but he had a blast, and eating lots of shaved ice kept him cooler. After the early morning flight to Seattle, we had a half day there before the next flight to Kauai.  So we took Seattle Link Light Rail to Pike Place Market area. Taiga likes to see different kinds of fish sold in the market.  We ate local oysters at Emmett Watson's Oyster Bar, locat...

Densrochilum apoense is endemic to Mindanao , Philippines.  As the name suggests, it was originally found from Mt. Apo , which is the tallest mountain in Philippines.  Mt. Apo is located close to Davao City , the third most populous city in Philippines. Trey Sanders maintains a wonderful web site about Dendrochilum , and here is the link to information about D. apoense . The flowers are small, but each inflorescence produces 19-28 flowers, and many inflorescences are produced.  The yellowish flowers with orange lips are pretty.  It is a compact plant (the height of leaves+pseudobulbs are around 5cm). According to Trey's site, this species is similar to D. eymae and D. ambangense.  I haven't located illustrations or pictures of these two similar species.  Trey's site mentions that D. apoense can be distinguished from these two species by erose margins of the petal and lip.  Entire margins mean smooth edges, and erose margins mean irregul...

Dendrobium suzukii is relatively recently described species.  It belongs to Dendrobium section Formosae .  Although it is likely that this section will be revised in near future (e.g. molecular phylogeny has shown that D. trigonopus and D. jerdonianum do not belong to this section), the section contains about 50 species (Averyanov et al. 2016).  According to Averyanov et al (2016), a lot of wild collected plants entered orchid markets in Dalat city in 1999-2000.  It was then described in 2002 by Yukawa.  The species was supposed to be from two geographically separated regions; Lam Dong and Lai Chau provinces of Vietnam.  Since it hadn't been re-discoverd in nature for a long time after the initial discovery, some people even speculated that it is an artificial hybrid produced by a nursery.  However, in 2014,  Dr. Nong Van Duy and Mr. Nguyen Phi Tam rediscovered it in Southern Vietnam, in a primary forest near the junction of Binh Thuan , ...