Bloom Event - Prosthechea Green Hornet x Epicattleya Miva Etoile 'Noire'

I've got a bit lost in the naming of this one. To all intents and purposes the plant appears to a straighforward Prosthechea hybrid, but there's some Cattleya in there somewhere. Quite what it adds, I can't say. Not a lot by the look of things. The confusion arises because when the species gets renamed, nobody bothers to rename their hybrids. At the time of writing, I'm on a bit of a voyage of discovery myself. I love this orchid but it hadn't occurred to me to challenge the given name. The first part isn't a problem at all, I have Prosthechea Green Hornet in my collection, and its a lovely little hybrid. The second part is more of a challenge, and i've had to do a fair bit of digging and Googling to find out what it should be.

So what is Epicattleya Miva Etoile 'Noire'? Well, first of all it doesn't contain any Epidendrum or any Cattleya. The actual parents of this cross are Prosthechea cochleata (used to be Epidendrum, but has been up to half a dozen different genera since, according to some sources) and Guarianthe bowringiana (previously known as, among other things, Cattleya bowringiana). So according to current taxomomy, its true name should be Guarechea Miva Etoile 'Noire'. Luckily, my plant doesn't seem to be registered in its own right so at least only half its name is wrong. I'm not convinced its worth the bother of altering the label if I'm completely honest.

Without further ado, I guess I'd better show you the flower:

I guess it's a bit of a marmite flower - you either love it or hate it. I'm in the first category (clearly). I'm assuming the colour must come from Guarianthe bowringiana, although how its got from that vibrant plum colour to almost black I don't know. I assume it must have been a particularly dark clone of the species. This is the first flower on the first spike since last year, so the show will improve with time. This is a large plant (at least for something that is 1/2 Prosthechea cochleata and 1/4 Prosthecea lancifolia, so I assume the Guarianthe in the background has increased the overall proportions of the plant as well.

I used to have several plants of this cross that I obtained from a German nursery, but I have sold all but one of them. I also have a few divisions of another plant of the same cross that I got a few years ago that I will offer for exchange or sale once I'm sure they are properly established (they are due to flower soon, so that would seem to me to be a good time).

This particular plant (which I intend to keep in one piece) put out three new growths last year, and is now flowering off the first of those (hopefully the other two won't be too far behind as I would like three spikes out at the same time). I think I probably grow this hybrid warmer than it would really like, although the warmer temperatures do seem to result in fast growth with pseudobulbs hardly resting before sending up new growths. There are two new growths on my plant already, but only one flower spike as yet. This hybrid seems capable of flowering at any time. I suspect that if I take it out of the growroom and subject it to cooler nights for a few weeks, I will probably get another couple of flower spikes. I seem to remember that when I put orchids in my (very well shaded) greenhouse at the start of what we laughingly called a summer last year, this hybrid bloomed within a few weeks.

Looks like a pretty average sized orchid really, until you realize that that isn't the standard 12cm orchid pot, and those aren't medium bark chips its planted in; no, it outgrew that pot ages ago.

Some orchids, and this looks like being one of them, can be manipulated by temperature. I have never been one for showing my plants at society meetings and such like, but a nifty trick to get good blooming on some orchids is to grow it warm so it puts on loads of pseudobulbs but doesn't flower well. Once the temperature is dropped, the plant triggers blooming regardless of whether it is mid growth or not. Quite a lot of Cattleya alliance plants do this, the classic example being Iwanagaara apple blossom. I hadn't realized it at the time of writing the post about it, but those flowers I posted about were the first of quite a few flower spikes. The two spikes it was blooming on are over now, but the plant has since initiated another five spikes, two of which are blooming now. I had been growing this plant in my growroom where it was growing just fine but I was finding it bloom shy. I wouldn't have changed anything if it hadn't been for the terrible attack of scale insect it contracted resulting in me quarantining the plant to stop them spreading elsewhere (I haven't actually treated the plant yet as I don't like to do it while they are blooing), but now I have it in a cooler room, every single unbloomed pseudobulb, no matter how old, has now put out a spike. There are some orchids this won't work on, as not all of them will bloom from old pseudobulbs, but many of them can be manipulated in this way and I wonder if that is how people who know far more than I do manage to get such fabulous bloomings on their plants.