Two of my cattleyas are blooming right now. One is a large red/magenta one I bought a few years ago and practically tried to kill it (kept knocking it over, the shock killing the roots). Thankfully I managed to nurse it back to health and it has bloomed for me the past couple of years consistently. This time it has two blooms out at once! Here you go:
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| Catt. species unknown |
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| Frilly lip! |
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| Frilly lip! |
This is my favorite cattleya, and I'm sure you can understand why. These blooms are 4.5-ish inches across at the widest part. Their color is so incredibly vibrant. And I know you don't know this through your computer screen, but they smell amazing! Wouldn't scratch-n-sniff computer screens be awesome? During certain times of the day, the smell is much more potent than others, and it's this lovely sweet/spicy scent. My one regret is that I lost the tag so I don't know the exact species/hybrid of this particular plant.
My other cattleya that is blooming is a mini that came from dividing my mom's plant when it overfilled its pot. This is a cute little one that is a vigorous grower and often puts out multiple canes of new growth at once, producing several blooms. I currently have 7 (SEVEN!!) blooms blooming on this little guy! I've never had a cattleya that produced so many flowers in one go! These flowers are about an inch to 1.5 inch across, and I haven't noticed any smell from them. Anyway, here's a peek:
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| Catt. species unknown |
I love the bright yellow with the red lip. So cheery! Thanks, Mom! Have I mentioned that we enable each others' orchid addictions?
Changing gears here, we have been experiencing intense fog lately. The past few days not so much, but there were a couple weeks off and on where on the way to and from work, it would be so densely foggy that visibility was reduced to about a tenth of a mile, sometimes even less. There were a couple evenings coming home from work where I couldn't tell how far down the road I had gone, whether I'd passed my street or not. Crazy! There's a street light and a tree across the street from my house and it produced some creepy shadows and light rays that I wanted to capture. It didn't work out quite as I'd hoped (the light rays through the tree branches are a lot easier to see in person than in the photo) so I'm going to try again the next time we get some pea-soup-fog, but I'll share a photo that I took anyway:
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| Fogggggggggg |
