Greenhouse and gardening…

I have raised flowers for many years, in greenhouses, light-boxes indoors, and in my gardens. (To see pictures of my various greenhouses and gardens, continue here; to jump to photo gallery and text about orchids, please click here.)

The picture on the left shows the interior of my greenhouse, when I lived in Washington in the mid ‘80s. When I moved to Long Island in 1987, I took it apart piece by piece and re-assembled it there.

This is a small corner garden from the front yard of my house in Washington in the mid ‘80’s. Here it’s early Fall, and not much is happening, but the picture gives a sense (I hope) of the series of small gardens scattered around the yard, which were surprisingly peaceful even when so close to a busy street.

Urban gardening… This is a pocket garden I made in front of my lab at the University of Chicago, about 1990. Some years I grew mixed wildflowers, and used it as a cutting garden. Other years it was a little more organized, with low beds of pansies and petunias in the front, and gladiolas in the back. Also had a nice backyard garden at home. There was an alley behind the shrubbery, and the fellow in the building across it enjoyed practicing his accordion a great deal…

My first love has always been orchids. Historically they were one of the earliest flowering plants, coming from the prototypes of the lily and amaryllis families. There are some 35,000 species. Characteristically they have 3 real petals, and 3 petal-like sepals, one of which is usually very specialized and has become the lip (labellum).

Part of the fascination with orchids comes from their intriguing histories. In the early 1500’s, Cortes arrived in what is now Mexico, and found that the Aztecs ground up the seed capsules of the vanilla plant (a kind of orchid), mixing it with the brown seeds of the cacao plant to produce chocolate. Thus vanilla became one of the first plants traveling from the New World to Europe. Orchids also played a role in Darwin’s original observations that led to the theory of evolution. He observed that the comet orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) had a long spur at the back of its flower. Since the nectar at the tip of the spur was some distance from the rest of the flower, he speculated that it was pollinated by a creature with a long tongue of the same length. Some time later, it was discovered that the comet orchid is indeed pollinated by the long-tongued night-flying hawk moth, just as he predicted.

Here is my greenhouse in Galveston, shortly after it was built in the spring of 2005.

Here is the interior.

Below are some of my favorite orchids…

These three are cattleyas, or corsage orchids. There are about 65 species of cattleyas, which are native to the tropical Americas. They are epiphytes, meaning that they live on the bark of trees, but they are not parasites—they live on nutrients from the air. Usually they are found in the tops of tall trees in moist to wet forests. Cattleyas are “sympodial”, that is, having long horizontal stems from which new

vertical growths appear, and they have large cylindrical pseudobulbs, swollen areas of the stem for water storage.

This is my spring 2008 collection of cattleyas…

This is an Odontoglossum, of which there are 175 species. They live in the mountains of South America in wet cloud forests, and can be either terrestrials (living on the ground), or epiphytes.

These next three are Paphiopedulum, of which there are about 60 species of this genus, which live in the Asian tropics. The large pouch-like lip has led to their informal name, the lady-slipper orchids. They are epiphytes, and because they have no pseudobulbs to store water, require a moist bark-like medium. Often the lady-slippers have a waxy-looking surface, and some have little hairs (look

at the edge of the petals on the bottom one).

Cymbidiums, of which there are 44 species, come from tropics in the Old World. They may be epiphytic or terrestrial. Their features include prominent pseudobulbs and numerous linear leaves as well as fleshy white roots. The flowers have three-lobed lips and a ridged callus. A friend of mine from South Africa, on seeing mine painstakingly grown under lights, told me once that he remembers them growing wild in his back yard at home.

This is a Dendrobium, a genus which always seems to find its way to the tabletops in Thai restaurants. There are 1200 species, primarily in Asia, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. Their name comes from ‘dendron’ (tree) and bios (life). They store water in upright pseudobulbs, or canes.

These are examples of Phalaenopsis. They come from Southeast Asia and Australia, and there is even an Orchid Island (near Taiwan) named after them. They are sometimes called ‘moth orchids’, as a fanciful view of a long flower-covered stem may suggest a flight of the little creatures. They tend to like warmer temperatures, relatively low light, and humid conditions.

In nature, Vandas (below) live on the branches of trees, and can grow up to three or feet tall. They come from China, the Himalayas, Indonesia and Australia. Vandas like warm temperatures, bright sunlight, and high humidity.

Most of these photos are of orchids I’ve grown. The remainder come from the Garfield Park greenhouse in Chicago (just a little bigger than mine)…

I also take photos of other kinds of flowers. To see them, click here.

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To contact me, please write to: Drmendelson@wmendelson.com