I was in the greenhouse Friday morning, watering some pots of seedlings. It seemed funny for a second, because outside the greenhouse it was raining. If I hadn’t gone in there with the hose that morning, the seedlings would have died in the desert for lack of water.
(Left, a Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii outside the greenhouse, blooming away in the rain.)
I used to grow and breed phalaenopsis orchids in the greenhouse. It was gonzo amounts of work to keep up with repotting hundreds of plants. And trying to concoct an environment that would fool the orchids into thinking that they were in the lowlands of the Philippines instead of the flats of Southern California wasn’t that easy either. In addition to all the work, the greenhouse was an energy pig, taking as much natural gas to heat as the entire house.
So, end of orchid obsession. End of heating the outdoors and wasting all that energy. (The New York Times has a recent piece on a couple who decided to build themselves a greenhouse. Their heater hasn’t arrived yet, but they’re already way over budget.)
Now that the tropical orchid episode of my life has ended the greenhouse is only heated by the sun via the greenhouse effect. At this time of year it’s handy to have a spot that will help give young plants a head start on spring. That’s pretty much how I use the greenhouse now.
And, um, yes, for a place to store garden clutter. Sort of a garden shed with windows…
Fortunately the windows are an opaque fiberglass, so all the mess inside is obscured. Maybe even a little mysterious and poetic. Here are some potted plants as seen from the outside.
As I was watering the plants in my little artificial outdoor desert I thought back to the 1980s. One the stories from the news that has stuck in my brain all these years was a report on Michèle Bennett, the wife of Haiti’s dictator, Baby Doc Duvalier. The couple was bad news all around, and one of Michèle’s vices was that she’d refrigerate a part of the palace so that she and her friends could strut about in the fur coats that they collected. (Compared to her husband’s brutal ways, it all seems pretty minor, of course.)
Mink and fox and chinchilla coats in Haiti. About as rational as a greenhouse full of warm tropical orchids in San Diego, I thought.
I guess we all want a little of of what doesn’t come easily or naturally. But in an age of a growing awareness of the need to live greener it’s good to stand back and see what we really need.
Orchids can be finicky creatures, especially when you try to grow species that aren’t adapted to your growing conditions. If you’re lucky enough to live in an area with infrequent freezing temperatures (the warm end of zone 9B or in zone 10 or higher), many of the reed-stemmed epidendrums can be as easy to grow as anything in the garden and can be as inexpensive as most other plants. But these also make easy houseplants if you have a nice south-facing window.
If they bear more than a passing resemblance to the flashy florist cattleya orchids it’s no coincidence–They’re closely related members of the Cattleya alliance of orchids.
The parent species for these plants originate in Central America, where they can sometimes be seen growing rampantly. Epidendrum radicans and E. ibaguense are tough and prolific, and will tolerate temperatures down to the high 20s.
To get the species themselves, you’ll have to go to an orchid nursery, but their hybrids can be had in many good garden centers or nurseries. Colors come in everything from the parent species’ orange and red, to pink, salmon, rose, purple, lavender and white. The plants bloom almost the year round and will grow two to five feet tall, depending on light and watering. They all make great starter orchids or good plants to use for landscaping.
Light
Epidendrums are happiest in bright light, from dappled shade to several hours of full sun. They will survive in full sun, but the plants will be short, and the leaves may scorch on the hottest days. They’ll also grow in heavy shade, but the plants will grow tall, and you won’t see any flowers.
This is an example of plant that has been grown in fairly deep shade. The plant grows big, loose and floppy, and it only flowers on the stems that receive some direct sun.
Water
Low to moderate garden water is a good starting point for these epidendrums. They will tolerate quite moist conditions, and they can be surprisingly drought tolerant. But they look best somewhere in between.
Soil
You can grown these in special orchid mixes if you like, but mine have been happy stuck into average-to-sandy garden dirt. Plants grown in orchid mixes will require more watering. Any loose potting mix would work well for plants in pots.
Propagation
Flowering stems, when they reach the end of their flowering life, usually produce new plants near their tips. Orchid growers call these keikis, Hawaiian for “babies.” These little plants will send out long white roots before long. Cut the rooted keikis off when the roots are two to four inches long and stick them where you’d like another plant, being careful not to break the brittle roots. The plants will often start blooming within a year. Additionally, epidendrums can be dug up and divided every few years.
If you get deeper into epidendrum species, you’ll also find species with brown, green and almost-blue flowers, some of them bicolors, some of them with outrageous spotting. If you have the collector gene in your DNA, you’ll find 1500 species to choose from. These specialty epidendrums don’t necessarily have the same lust for life and tolerance for cool temperatures as the common reedstems do, so be sure to do some research before sticking them in a garden bed with your perennials.
Cousin Jenny shared some of the plants on her wish list. I thought I’d share them here myself in case some of you might be looking for some interesting plant gifts for gardeners that aren’t typical garden center offerings. These aren’t generally what you’d call “pretty” flowers, but boy are they fascinating.
Stapelia gigantea with my hand for scale
Earlier I’d posted on my Stapelia gigantea, and she mentioned that she wouldn’t mind having one herself.
She also sent a list of some of the other larger-flowered species in the genus that she was interested in, including S. grandiflora, shown here in an image by Quadell from the Wikimedia Commons [ source ]. And should any of my santas be reading this, I wouldn’t mind having some of them myself. Species in this genus make interesting houseplants or grow well outdoors with dry-average water conditions in places that don’t freeze. Beware of the flowers, however, because they smell like roadkill–but in a good way!
White Bat Flower
And then there was this white bat flower (Tacca integrifolia) that she photographed at the UNC Botanical Gardens last year. This species is probably considered to be the most choice of the genus, but there are several other equally stange, whiskered tacca species. Although I haven’t ever grown them, it appears that taccas are shade plants that don’t ever ever like to freeze or dry out. Once again, they might be good houseplant selections, although not plants that would be easy to bring into bloom. Finding them, even with all the resources of the Internet, is a major challenge.
Much easier to find of the plants on her list is the butterfly amaryllis, Hippeastrum papilio. It’s also easy to grow and flower. Now, Jenny, why ever would you want a plant that’s easy to grow? Where’s the challenge? At least the flowers look more exotic than the single-colored windowsill amaryllises. [ image source ]
To Jenny’s list I’d like to add one of my own wants. I have a long-term interest in orchids that goes back to my early teen years. One of the plants that I’ve never been able to secure in twenty years of looking is an example from the Genus Ophrys. The plants of this genus have intriguing flowers that look like female wasps. In the spring, the male wasps flit about, looking for a little insect-lovin’. When they find the willing ophrys flowers they go to town, apparently satisfying themselves while pollinating the flower. Charles Darwin was also fascinated by the genus, and looked at them in detail in his The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects. (The entire book is available online for free via Google Books.)
Here’s a YouTube video of one of these insects in action. Warning: This is extremely graphic. Children should be sheltered from viewing this clip unless you want to have a long discussion about the birds and the bees and cross-dressing plant species. Like most pornography, the clip does go on a little too long.
Ophrys species generally come from Mediterranean regions of Europe, so I’m thinking many of them would do well outdoors where I am in San Diego. But where to find them? About twenty years ago I was corresponding with a biology grad student in France. He sent me some seeds, but I was never able to germinate them. (Have you ever tried to grow orchids from seed?!)
Even now that Santa has the Internet available to him or her, ophrys tubers are just about impossible to get on this side of the Atlantic unless you deal with import permits and all that paperwork. I just might have to content myself with the YouTube insect porn.
Growing up, Halloween was always my favorite of the holidays. These were the years before everyone cloistered their children into parties surrounded by armed guards, and after the years when the celibrants really meant “trick or treat” when they said it–as in “give me some candy, otherwise I’ll throw eggs on your cars.” Ah. Kindler, gentler times…
I have three little selections to share with you today, ranked from mildy scary to dizzyingly horrifying.
Number one: Scary.
(The image to the left from the Orchids in Our Tropics web store [ source ])
In my orchid-growing days I was fascinated by plants in the Pleurothallis alliance of neotropics orchids, although I was never brave enough to try growing any of them. Of the thirty or so genera in the alliance, one genus had a spectacular name so appropriate for today: Dracula!
And if that’s not wild enough, Carl Luer in 1978 described what is perhaps the most outlandish of the species in the genus. And what do you suppose this mad scientist picked for the species name? Vampira! (A mad scientist with a sense of humor–I like that!) Besides having a terrific name, Dracula vampira is one awesome plant, something this photo attests to. Most of the pleurothallids are small little wonders, but the flowers on this one are eight inches top to bottom.
Scary, but intriguingly beautiful at the same time.
Number two: Scarier.
I know that I’ve shared this one bit of scariness with you before, but it continues to scare me every time I see it.
Ugly house
Every neighborhood probably has one of these, a house with a yard that looks like it’s auditioning for a part in a post-holocaust movie. Like, did the radiation from the bomb blast take out all the plants? To their credit, the homeowners do get points for creating a yard that takes no water whatsoever–a bonus in our current drought. But there are so many better ways to save water and enhance the world you live in. Greg suggested that someone seedbomb this house in a bit of guerrilla gardening, but how do you seedbomb concrete?
I’m not a big fan of the new generation of fake turf that’s going around these days. Although it’s light years beyond Astroturf, it still looks like plastic from less than fifteen feet away, and it does nothing to battle the urban heating phenomenon. At least it would begin to dress up this yard. And currently the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is offering rebates of thirty cents per square foot of lawn that you replace with the plastic stuff. (At a cost of $12 a square foot for the fake turf, the rebate doesn’t go terribly far…)
The water agencies are also offering rebates on water-efficient sprinkler heads, starting at $4.00 per head, which would pay for most of the unit, as well as rebates on weather-based sprinkler timers. Check out the information on the rebate programs. One grouse I have with them is that there’s nothing that would give you a credit for replacing lawn with low-water-use plants that would also help keep the city cool by reducing the amount of reflected solar energy that is converted to urban overheating.
Number three: Scariest.
I was in the back yard looking for the cat the other evening, rounding her up for the evening indoors. She was being extra-coy that night, and I had to go for the flashlight. Returning to the garden, the flashlight beam highlighted this atrocity less than two feet from my face: the dreaded tomato tobacco hornworm! (Edit: Thanks to Jenny for correcting my identification of this little terror.)
Tomato Hornworm
Eek! I felt like Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Psycho, only I was better dressed at the moment.
This is a horror than any gardener can empathize with, I’m sure, particularly when the tomato tobacco hornworm is chomping on the last precious tomato plant of the season. As much as I try to be kind to nature, I marched inside to get the Felco shears and did battle with the beast.
(This photo is actually of another worm I discovered the next day. All summer long there were no hornworms. And then suddenly, bam!, there were several, chomping away on what may be the last tomato in the neighborhood.)
So…you decide. Was the tomato tobacco hornworm the scariest thing? Or was it the vile, murderous gardener who would commit unspeakable acts with a pair of shears?
I was in the greenhouse Friday morning, watering some pots of seedlings. It seemed funny for a second, because outside the greenhouse it was raining. If I hadn’t gone in there with the hose that morning, the seedlings would have died in the desert for lack of water.
And, um, yes, for a place to store garden clutter. Sort of a garden shed with windows…
Fortunately the windows are an opaque fiberglass, so all the mess inside is obscured. Maybe even a little mysterious and poetic. Here are some potted plants as seen from the outside.
She also sent a list of some of the other larger-flowered species in the genus that she was interested in, including S. grandiflora, shown here in an image by Quadell from the Wikimedia Commons [ 
Much easier to find of the plants on her list is the butterfly amaryllis, Hippeastrum papilio. It’s also easy to grow and flower. Now, Jenny, why ever would you want a plant that’s easy to grow? Where’s the challenge? At least the flowers look more exotic than the single-colored windowsill amaryllises. [ 
