The Devil's Excrement

Juan Ramon send in this picture of his fantastic Cattleya Schilleriana which bloomed today for the first time. The flowe r is as big as mine below, but note how flat and dark the petals are. The lip may not be spectacular, but we can always cross mine with his, no?

Den. Tangerinum                                              Den. Aulhirum

Cattleya Intermedia                                                      Cattleya Schilleriana

These two Brazilian species flowered this week, both are unusually large flowers for the species. The Schilleriana is 11 cms. across both vertically and horizontally.

Armando Mantellini of Orquideario Cerro Verde is the Venezuelan that has done the most extensive work crossing the best varieties of the Venezuelan Cattleya Lueddemaniana, to me the most spectacular of the Venezuelan Cattleyas. Through the years Armando has gotten better and better flowers through careful and systematic crossing of the best plants available. Today he sent a picture of Cat. Lueddemaniana Giorgio, truly spectacular, solid lip and “flared” petals. Flaring is quite rare in Cat. Lueddemaniana and I don’t think I have seen such strong flaring ever. Enjoy!.

C.lueddemanniana “Veronica’ from Venezuela, very nice color and shape  C. Intermedia Aquinni, very strong flaring.

Very dark form of Cattleya Aclandie from Brazil, first flowering of the plant after many years with me. Right: C. Loddigessi “Tony Boss”

Catasetum Pileatum                               Catasetum Pendare

Catasetum                                                     Catasetum Macrocarpoum

Juli Carbonell kindly sent these wonderful pictures of orchids from the genera Catasetum to attempt to free us from the tension and stress of the political conflict. Thanks!!

Just a nice break from Chavez, dissident military officers and the like. This is a Cirrhopetalum Elizabeth Ann, a hybrid orchid which just flowered for the first time in my house. Weird isn’t it?

Alfredo had to come to my house to figure out what I was doing wrong when I uploaded the pictures. The left picture is a Brazilian species Cattleya Schilleriana and the right is from Asia Cirrhopetalum Makoyanum. Both from my collection. Hope not to bore those that are not orchididiots……

I have been reporting on how Google references the term Phragmipedium Kovachii. Given that the orchid was only discovered recently, it made for a good case to study how Google finds things. Initially, it was strange, after finding 33 references to the term on Aug. 16th., it actually dropped to 22 before climbing back up only to drop again. Then it went back up to 48 to 51 references. Thus, imagine my surprise when today I found 228 references to the term Phragmipedium Kovachii . Thus, there was some form of discontinuos jump. While I know little about how Google works, this suggests that at some point in the month the search engine performs a much more thorough upgrade of the web pages. I will continue keeping tabs on Phragmipedium Kovachii, interestingly enough, I get a lot of people who read my page when they do their own search for the term and end up here. Are you one of them?