Whenever I visit Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia, I always head to the amazing little nook that is its orchid house, where the plants are always in bloom in seemingly every color of the rainbow, healthy and beautiful and oh-so-relaxing.
That same aura characterized the orchid room in the Conservatory at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC, where I vacationed more than a month ago. Like Longwood Garden’s, the room exuded the same sense of wonder and excitement.
So, naturally, I pulled out my smartphone and starting taking photos. That’s what these plants do to me: make me want to hold on to them without actually holding them, to take one or two of them home when I know that I cannot. So, the only thing to do is to start snapping photos to remind me of how grand they are.
I’ve tried growing orchids in my home, starting out with what I considered the simplest of them, a Dendrobium, and then graduating to the Phalaenopsis . I believe that I even bought a Cattleya. But they never ever bloomed again after the store petals fell off. They just went into hibernation and eventually died.
I read the orchid books – even bought a few of them – and consulted them in my quest to learn how to coerce the plants into thriving. It didn’t matter whether I bought them at a big-box store or a vendor at the Philadelphia Flower Show, orchids still gave out on me. I couldn’t experiment too much because most are not cheap – not even the less exotic ones.
So, if I was going to try raising them, I wanted to spend $5.99 for a plant, not $19.99 (Too bad I can’t buy them at auction).
My dream is to have a greenhouse full of all varieties of orchids – a time-out space – where I could grow and nurture both them and me.
Although I love orchids, I realized that I knew little about them. So I went searching. One site described Orchidaceae (their scientific name), which have been around for millions of years and grew as the dinosaurs walked, as “arguably the most stunning and elegant family of flowering plant known to man.” There are 35,000 species we know of, and they can be found all over the world except in Antartica.
The American Orchid Society offered advice on how to grow them:
1. Orchids need sufficient light to rebloom. Mine were near a window and still went dormant. Maybe watering them was the problem. I had two beautiful Phalaenopsis once (and got them at a great price) and asked a friend to drop by my house to water them while I was away on vacation. She overwatered them and the poor plants died.
2. They are not hard to grow (tell that to my green thumb).
3. They are not expensive.
I have found that they can be costly. Some of the prices on the web ran into the hundreds of dollars, although you can get them cheaper in a big-box store or your local discount store. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that over the past three decades, orchids have become such a mass-market product that they are affordable – thanks to imports from Taiwan, which primarily grows the Phalaenopsis. The Netherlands is also a top grower, but that country apparently makes more money off its orchids than the Taiwanese.
Orchids outsell any other potted flower in this country, including the poinsettia, according to the newspaper.
It’s been some years since I’ve brought home an orchid but I do photograph them, even when I visit Longwood Gardens. Here are some that I photographed in the Biltmore Estate orchid room:
