Bloom Event - Coelogyne speciosa 'Burnham'

As even a casual reader of this blog will realise, I love growing Coelogyne, especially Coelogyne speciosa in all its lovely colour forms. I picked up this particular plant on one of my fairly frequent visits to Burnham Nurseries (my Orchid Nirvana). It was in with all the other (presumably regular form) Coelogyne speciosa, but as it happened, this plant had a flower which was obviously different so I couldn't help but purchase it.

There is a lot of taxanomic confusion (surprise) around this colour form of C. speciosa, with many authorities calling it C. speciosa var. salmonicolor. From what I was told at Burnham Nurseries at the time, it can't be called var. salmonicolor because there is already a species of Coelogyne called salmonicolor, so they put the name 'Burnham' to it to differentiate it from the straight colour form of C. speciosa. In fact, modern taxonomy doesn't allow for different varieties of a species at all, so we are essentially free to call the various colour forms what we like. This will clearly lead to confusion and I have already seen several arguments over this on various online forums. Quite why one persons labelling of plants should be so offensive to someone else I can't really fathom. As far as I'm concerned, as long as the plant is well grown, I couldn't care less if their label reads differently to mine and the nomenclature changes so regularly that both labels are likely to be correct at some point in the future. Just chill out, OK?

As you can see, its very pale, even for the 'Burnham' form. This could be due to light levels or some other variation in growing conditions as compared to other people's plants of this variety, but it is rather lovely. While I spend some time looking at, comparing and appreciating the subtle nuances of these flowers, my better half probably sums it up best with "Not another brown flower, surely!?" Philistine.

In the above photo I have tried to show a bit more of the lip detail to illustrate how pale this flower is. The nodding nature of this species makes it rather difficult to get a natural looking photo of the inside of the flower but since it is intended more for scientific curiosity than for aesthetic value it serves its purpose well enough. Note that there are no brown markings at all inside the flower. The 'regular' form of the species has decided brown marks on the keels (those slightly furry looking ridges on the lip), and quite often on the rest of the lip too and in some forms the markings or the entire lip are almost black.

The plant was in desperate need of re-potting when I got it, with more roots above the potting medium than in it, so I didn't even wait for the flower to go over before de-potting it and replacing the potting medium. It seems to have grown away just fine (Coelogyne generally do) and is now re-flowering in its new potting medium.

As you can see, the plant is still relatively young but is growing nicely and is almost at the size where it will begin to produce multiple growths both from the lead and from backbulbs so I'm hoping for a nice clump with multiple flower spikes before too long. As a point of interest, my original Coelogyne speciosa plant began to produce multiple growths a while back, but I ended up having to divide it because the flowers at the back of the plant were of a different colour form to the flowers at the front of the plant, with the flowers at the back resembling the plant in this article with the front of the plant being the 'regular' colour form. Now I have divided it up so I should have plants of two colour forms. Why did this happen? I originally assumed that there were just two plants in the pot. This proved not to be the case as I had to cut rhizome to separate the two. I can only assume that I have a 'sport' on my hands. I will have to wait for it to bloom again before I can be sure what it actually is but at least now I have some decent photos of both colour forms to compare it against when it does bloom.