I thought this was an oxypetalum, but after looking at the pics on this forum, I'm not so sure. It has large (@ 5 inch) blooms, some fragrance, and blooms open at night and are gone with the sunrise.
This year the "mother" plant has gone crazy and has so far had almost a dozen blooms and currently has another 15 or so buds coming on. The cuttings from it are all two to four years old and one of them, the oldest, has had two blooms this year.
Thanks,
ginni
Hi TGIF. The bloom looks like a lot of other species. If that is a pic of the foliage on the right, then your plant might not even be an jungle epiphyte. If that is rope on the right, then is that the foliage on the left? If you could post a pic of the foliage, that might help a lot.
Edited to add: the petals look awfully skinny and pointy to be E. oxypetalum
This message was edited Sep 6, 2006 10:08 AM
The 'spike' at about the 10 o'clock position is a bud (it opened the next night) and all the other green is foliage.
This pic is part of the foliage and two buds. I will follow with another pic of a better view of a plant.
It will take me a few minutes to get the next picture. The camera battery is low so I'm charging as I go!
This is not the one that's blooming, but a cutting taken a year or so later. The Mother plant is too large to get a good picture of. She now measures somewhere in the neighborhood of 12' (yes, that is 12 feet!) from tip to tip of her two longest branches.
ginni
Classic E. oxypetalum growth. If any of the stems are triangular, it is presumed to be a hybrid or another genus other than Epiphyllum (round and flat are the choices there.) Classic size too. The 12' height is one reason the hybrids are so popular even though few of them have any scent: hybrids don't get near as big. The scent is strongest on mine about an hour or 2 after they have opened.
Thanks Penn.
Now the next qusetion is how do I get "mother" into a 16x10' greenhouse along with 6 other epis, about 30 orchids, 11 broms, 6 ferns, and 3 dozen potted plants for the winter?! Last winter one of the branches grew about 4 feet over the winter! I have avoided cutting the mother back so I could have lots of blooms each year. Hopefully some of the later cuttings will start blooming next year, but I've gotten sort of "mother hen" protective of this "chick" (not to mention curious about how big she will actually get to be). Meanwhile I have gotten a Staghorn fern which will eventually take up a *lot* of space, but I should have a few years before that becomes a problem.
Any suggestions other than a larger greenhouse? I already tried that out and DH was not pleased. We just enlarged to the current size last year!
Thanks again for the info - want a cutting? I have several curtesy of my cat chasing a snake under the plants.!
ginni
How about Epi strictum aka Epi hookery?
edited to say - we overlapped.
This message was edited Sep 6, 2006 1:09 PM
I wondered about that. In fact that is why I opened this thread. There was a picture of an oxy that didn't look like mine, and a picture of a hookeri that seemed more like this one. That was when I decided to do some more checking. It is always nice to be able to tell some one that I give a plant to just what it is they are being given.
Let it be known henceforth - I don't really care what it is - I love it! I have never been real avid about names for any of my plants. I'm very much an "I like it" type person. I can't even name most of my orchids. I just enjoy having them blooming in my life. And I don't have a clue about any of the bromiliads names and they don't seem to mind their new names - George, Jeri, Ophilia or whatever! They all just want to be watered, fed and loved! With that done, they bloom for me.
Penn - no triangular stems noted, although in the past I have noticed a few that started out triangular then became round.
Thanks for the input. Hope you have as good a day as I'm having!
ginni
This message was edited Sep 6, 2006 3:26 PM
Hey RUK, tgif. The reason I too thought E. hookeri/strictum was the flower, hence my thought that maybe the flower was a bit acute for oxy. But, a 12 ft hookeri would
Well, RUK, you are quite knowledgeable in these things so you made me walk out and look at mine. I happen to have a pot with both species side by side (don't ask) and I looked at the suspiciously crenelated foliage on the 2nd pic tgif posted. I agree, it must be hookeri that is flowering. But I have not heard of them getting so tall. tgif, do you have 2 species there? The large plant, does it have some stems that have almost no zig-zags on the edges, and maybe some of the edges sort of furl in? It seems that the plant pictured is almost certainly E. hookeri. The triangular beginnings of the stems also indicates hookeri. Can you do a pic of some of the stems of the tallest parts of the big plant, the flat stems?
Pete,
The flower sure looks like hookeri. And - oxypetalum pads never seems to grow that straight upwards? They always sort of drape a bit away from the long canes.
I suspect Ginni feeds this monster Beer or something....
I'll get some more pics. It has gotten a little to dark now, but lets see what I can do.
The longest stem is round for a little over a third of the length, then it sort of goes triangular for a bit and starts to flare out into a three flat lobes, and finally into a single flat stem which has a lot of buds started. The last three or four inches of the stem is curling up.
Now we will see if I can get the pics in order. This one shows the base of the stem where it is round. Just before it wanders off the page it turns into a more triangular shape but I couldn't get it to show up.
more on the way - g
Excuse me! I have never been guilty of contributing to the delinquency a minor! She's only about 10 years old ya know! lol!
Now, where was I - oh yes - this sort of shows where the stem starts to flatten, but it goes into a three sided set of 'leaves' (I know, I said it wasn't tri in an earlier post, but this happens out in the middle and I hadn't noticed it before!)
(one more coming up)
The last 2 1/2 feet or so are flat until the last few inches where it has started to curl up. This section has a *bunch* of buds on it.
All of my plants are from the same original cutting, so I can't see it being two different type. If you insist that it has the characteristics of more than one type I shall wonder about who is feeding BEER to whom! Around here beer only goes into the human mouth.
All of the other plants are very well behaved and are perfectly normal except that only one of them has bloomed. I have read that it takes 2 to 3 years for cutting to bloom. Well, the one that did bloom this year is 4 years old and the others are 3 to 4 years old.
My epis get fish emulsion (when my sinuses are acting up and I can't smell it), Peters Orchid Food or Miracle Grow Bloom Buster. It is just a matter of which is already mixed or is the closest to hand.
Now, have I made all of this clear as mud? And if so will you kindly send some of that mud this way as we have had about 1 inch of rain in the last 11 weeks and right now mud is better than no moisture at all!
ginni
ps - I noticed that no one has addressed my question about how to get this "EPI FROM H*** into my little greenhouse for the winter!
Now I'm just showing off!
Thanks for the info - I'm going with the hookeri/strictum based on the bloom.
ginni
