Phalaenopsis: an ending, a beginning
Tonight I acquired a beautiful Phalaenopsis orchid from someone who currently lives across the street from me in Chicago, but is moving to Yale to start a post-doc position and can’t take his beloved plant along, for some reason. We’ve been trying to coordinate an exchange time for a couple of days, and tonight he brought the orchid over and we knelt on the front steps for ten minutes or so while he schooled me on its care. Even now, when it’s not in bloom, it’s an incredibly beautiful plant; it has a forest of green aerial roots draping themselves languidly over one side of the pot like locks of hair, and reaching out of the pot in the other direction are two dried bloom spikes from this year’s blossoms, spiky and thin like the long horns of a Chinese dragon. It has large, deep green leaves that grow in layers like a fan, and is altogether a remarkable thing to hold and touch and look at. I have all kinds of information about how to keep it beautiful from its previous owner, who when he dropped it off kept putting out an affectionate hand to show me what he was talking about, and sent me an email minutes after leaving my apartment with more instructions on watering and exposure. His love for this orchid both moved me and intimidated me; it was hard to close the door on him with the plant in my arms like a pet he had to leave behind.
Here is a photograph he sent me of the orchid in bloom this past year.
It won’t be hard to get through the winter now, knowing that this will be waiting for me on the other side.
October 20th, 2007 at 4:42 am
Your orchid is probably the moon orchid (amabilis) according to Wikipedia since i know nothing about them.
They remind me of home for I am sure I have seen this flower before. But anything that makes it less hard to get thru winter in Chicago must be welcome.
from Wikipedia:
The generic name means “Phalaen[a]-like” and is probably a reference to the genus Phalaena, the name given by Carolus Linnaeus to a group of large moths; the flowers of some species supposedly resemble moths in flight. For this reason, the species are sometimes called Moth orchids.
They are native throughout southeast Asia from the Himalayan mountains to the islands of Polillo and Palawan of the Philippines and northern Australia. Orchid Island off Taiwan is named after this orchid. Little is known about
their habitat and their ecology in nature since little field research has been done in the last decades.
See you soon in this land of orchids where the Vanda Miss Joachim, like the Lee family, reigns as a national symbol.
with love
October 27th, 2007 at 6:14 am
I miss you so.