Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Waiting for my orchid to bloom is like...

...being a kid again, waiting for Christmas morning to arrive. It takes FOREVER! Finally, it happened. I returned home to Blacksburg to find my Brassavola x 'Little Stars' at full tilt boogie. The past few years, I wasn't giving it enough sunlight, so no blooms. However, I happen to have some sunnier windows in my current apartment and, TADA, three flower stalks this year! It is so exciting! And, the the blooms are night fragrant so in the evening when I get home from work I am greeted by a sweet, sweet smell.



Unfortunately, one of the three flower stalks up and died on me, but hey, I'll take what I can get. After a few years of no blooms, this is great. If anyone knows why this happens, please share!



P.S This is where I got this little guy: http://www.floradise.com/
P.P.S. For all you geeks out there, I believe this is a hybrid of B. nodosa, a Central and South American native and B. cordata, a Jamaican native.

2 comments:

Dabney said...

Thinking back on the bloom history of this plant, I feel it tried to bloom other times but the flower stalks turned brown and shriveled before they had a chance to mature. Perhaps the same thing happened here, just when the stalk was more mature.

Naomi @ WCOE said...

Hi Dabney,

Thanks for your note re. our Orchidelirium blog. I'm definitely not an expert, and I have had a few flower stalks die too. If there is more than one spike developing, perhaps the weakest one died in order to give more strength to the others? Or perhaps it was a temperature shock. I recently had a Phal. bud die due to extreme temperature shock, but the other buds survived.