Drought and Orchids

We had a drought last summer.  I don't know if the drought has been officially declared over yet, but with the amount of rain we've been getting in the hills so far, and the snow in the mountains, I'm guessing it'll be over this year.  But we'll see what kind of weather we get the rest of winter and this coming spring!

The wetter it is, the more the rivers swell.  I've seen Willamette Falls become almost not even a water fall because of how full the river was.  As in, the river's level was as high as the upper part of the falls, so there was no water falling over a ledge anymore.  This past summer, it was just about the opposite.  In my 3 decades of life, I'd never seen the water fall reduce to such a small trickle.  The rock and man-made structures typically hidden by water were completely exposed.  It was so historically low that I decided to document it.  These photos were taken just up the way from the old paper mill, and across the river from the water treatment plant and the old locks.  Take a look:

As usual I had some orchids blooming at various points during the summer.  Here are a couple of my favorites.

Brassavola Nodosa

Flowers from Last Summer

I probably say this every time I write a blog post, but I'll say it again.  I haven't posted in way too long and I'm trying to catch up on some photo editing!  The ever-growing stash of photos to edit is continually getting bigger instead of getting smaller, which isn't a good thing.  Maybe I'll make a New Year's Resolution to post twice per month.  Or maybe not.  I've never been big on making resolutions like that.  I'm always trying to improve myself and I don't think it's important to time it relative to the start of a calendar year.

Anyway.  Last spring and summer I had a few orchids blooming and was fortunate to have some beautiful evening sun for "posing" my plants.  I also captured a few roses from the bushes in my yard.  I love roses and would live in the Portland International Rose Test Garden if I could.  What a dream that would be!  Minus the crowds, of course.

If you're reading from my home page, be sure to click "read more" for more photos!

Encyclia Radiata -- a non-resupinate flower (the blooms look 'upside down'
but they are truly right-side up; most other orchids are resupinate, where their
buds rotate during growth so the flowers open upside down)

Cattleya Crazy & Crazy Fog

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:

Catt. species unknown

Frilly lip!

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:

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:

Fogggggggggg

Miscellaneous December

It's almost Christmas!  How has the year gone so quickly?  This past year has been such a blur.  Nick and I have fixed up and sold two houses in Indiana, searched for and found new jobs in Oregon, moved across the country, bought a new house, made new friends, reconnected with (my) family, and even done a little bit of traveling.  Major life changes all in a short span of time.

This time of year tends to be hectic, and I'm sure many of you would agree.  I'm writing this post to share a few photos that are sort of from miscellaneous subjects.  It's going to seem like a very disconnected post since the photos aren't really related to one another.

One of my favorite parts of Oregon that I'd missed while I lived in Indiana was the fog.  In the colder months, the clouds sink low and cover the hills in a fuzzy white blanket.  Sometimes it's so thick you can't see more than a few yards in front of you.  Sometimes it's just enough to blur objects a few hundred feet away.  Last Sunday morning, we woke up to a thick blanket of fog.  As it began dissipating, it was still blurry but the sun was able to poke its way through a bit, too.  It made for a cool effect on our giant oak tree:

Creepy Oak

One of my favorite things about Christmas is the cookies.  Every year (with few excptions), my mom and I bake Christmas cookies.  I went to my parents' house and made a few kinds of cookies last weekend.  We're making more tomorrow, so I'll post photos of the cookies later.  But while I was there last weekend, I got to see Mt. Hood in the waning evening light, as the sun set and also after, as the light gradually disappeared.  The snow on Mt. Hood made an eerie glow while everything else was getting quite dark.  Here are my two favorite photos:

Mt. Hood, during sunset

Mt. Hood, post sunset

Earlier in the afternoon, when the sun was low enough to reach far into the house through the window, I took advantage of the bright window light to photograph my mom's blooming Paphiopedilum.  I love bright window light because it highlights whatever object is directly in the light, while everything in the background fades to black as the window light drops off very quickly.  About the Paph, I don't knwo what kind it is, but its blooms are this beautiful lemony yellow with a cute splatter of freckles across the petals.  Purely guessing based on what I remember from last weekend and not using an actual ruler, I think the blooms are about 6-ish inches across. 

My mom's Paph!

Blooms

The first bud on my Doritis pulcherrima opened this week.  The vibrant magenta color always amazes me.  How can something be naturally so bright?  Doritis plants produce flowers that are only about a half inch to 3/4 inch across and have such a dainty structure to them.  Their colors typically range from white, to pink-and-white, to bright solid pink, to a soft lavender.  My plant is the bright solid pink.

As a side note, there is some debate about whether doritis is its own group of orchid, of it they really fall under phalaenopsis. I'm not familiar with the specifics of the arguments, but if you google "doritis pulcherrima" and you get results for "phalaenopsis pulcherrima", it's the same thing.  Since I've known my plant as "doritis" since I bought it, I intend to continue referring to it as such.

This first flower that opened has an odd phenomenon occurring.  It's almost like a siamese twin where there are three extra petals and a duplicate column and anther.  I've seen this doubling of sorts occur on other orchids before, usually at the big-box stores and assumed there was something genetically wrong with the plant.  I've never seen it occur on any of my own plants until now.  This plant has bloomed many times and all looked normal.  So maybe it's a random occurrence and doesn't have a whole lot to do with the genetic health.  Who knows.

Here are a couple of photos of the doritis.

Dor. pulcherrima

Here is another photo of the Phrag, which I took this morning.  This is bloom #2 and I saw another baby bud tucked up in the sheath, so there will hopefully be at least one more flower after this one drops.

Phrag. fischeri x besseae

A Long-Awaited Reward

I bought my first orchid in 2009 after seeing my mom enjoy her modest collection for the couple years prior.  Instantly, I was hooked.  Since then, my collection has ballooned to between 35 and 40 plants, which are all kept on two sofa tables and some empty kitchen counter space.  My collection consists of a variety of types: phalaenopsis, doritis, paphiopedilum, phragmipedium, stanhopia, vanda, dendrobium, epidendrum, cattleya, epicattleya, among others.  It all started with a pure white phalaenopsis with the hybrid name "Funny Virgin".  In the following few months, I purchased a deep purple phal. and a green/white/purple paph., both of which which I kept for a while.  All three of these I'd found at some kind of big-box store, so they weren't anything fancy but I was impressed nonetheless.

Backstory: my husband and I started dating in college.  I graduated a year ahead of him and moved about four hours away.  Once he graduated, he luckily found a job in the same city and moved to a house about 15 minutes away from me.

About a year later, he took me to an orchid grower that he'd found online while doing some research.  He'd wanted to buy me an orchid as a gift but it was a very specific kind that you couldn't find at big-box stores.  When we arrived at the grower 40 minutes west of town, we were greeted by an older white-haired man, so friendly and happy to have customers.  He treated you like you were the only customer that had ever been there, like you were the most important.  I was immediately blown away by the enormous variety of orchids he grew at his greenhouse.  I'd heard of a few "non-standard" kinds because of my mom's collection (I say "non-standard" because you can't typically get them at big-box stores) but there were countless varieties that I had never heard of.  And they all looked so unique!  Large, small, frilly, smooth, leafy, stalky, white, purple, red, yellow, orange, pink, green, brown, spotted, solid.  The comparisons go on and on.

That first visit to the grower (first of many visits!), I think I bought six plants.  One was a phragmipedium fischeri x besseae.  Phragmipediums are a slipper orchid with a bulbous bottom petal while the rest of the petals are generally flat.  It is similar to paphilpedilums, another slipper orchid, except that they originate from different parts of the world (phrags from Latin America, paphs from Asia).  The species besseae is typically a red flower with golden yellow accents, particularly in the throat.  Fischeri is typically a pink or pink-and-white flower.  The flower in this cross I had purchased exhibits more of the coloring of the fischeri species.  It was flowering when I bought it, and in the harsh, dry Midwestern winter air (inside houses, not even considering the cold outside), the flower didn't last much more than a week, maybe two.  I figured "next year, it'll bloom again."  Next year became two years, then three years.  On a few occasions, I considered throwing the plant away.  But since it grew leaves so readily, I had a hard time giving up on it.  Eventually it had to bloom again, right?

When we moved west to our current location last spring, I trucked along all of my orchids in the back seat and trunk of my Honda Civic and drove across the country.  Most of my plants made it unscathed, which was better than I expected.  So I carried on as normal once I got them set up near a well-lit window.  And by that, I mean I proceeded to neglect them as I habitually do (I know, that's probably not the best, but it's better than over-watering!).  I was so lazy I didn't water any of my orchids for an entire month.  Then I started again.

And suddenly, a stem shot up seemingly overnight, and a bud peeked out.  It continued to grow and eventually bloomed.  I shrieked!  I could not believe that after all this time, and trying all kinds of tricks and adjustments to environment to no avail, and finally after neglecting for a month, it decided to bloom.  This is the kind of stuff that makes growing orchids so satisfying.  You put so much effort, care, and hope into the plants that they'll grow and be healthy and produce their beautiful flowers.  And when they finally do...... it's hard to put into words that feeling of triumph.

So here's a photo of my phrag in bloom.  It's a sequential bloomer, meaning it blooms one flower at a time and the existing flower drops before the next bud emerges.  Its second bloom has just opened in the other room, but this photo is of its first flower.

Phragmipedium fischeri x besseae

P.S. I probably don't use exactly correct technical terminology when I talk about orchids.  Please don't be too hard on me for that!  I still have lots to learn and will probably never sound like a plant expert (this is a hobby, not my profession), but I will try to be as clear as possible in my posts.  If you have any orchid questions, please don't hesitate to ask.  I'll do my best to answer.