Category Archives: Tropical gardening

Orchids in the Orchid Tree – Cattleyas and Bauhinia

Cattleya Orchids in Hong Kong Orchid Tree

Cattleya Orchids in Hong Kong Orchid Tree

This is the current scene above my neighbor’s mailbox. A flowering Cattleya Orchid she installed in the crotch of a Hong Kong Orchid tree. A delightful welcome to the driveway or mailbox.

I would say the Cattleyas are probably 3 feet in circumference and nestled in the center of a semi multi trunked Hong Kong Orchid Tree. The flowers are pink and white, fabulous and slightly fragrant; it should be noted that there are some really fragrant Cattleyas that can be used in this way. The Hong Kong Orchid tree is looking as good as possible for a Bauhinia so the Cattleyas are the star of the show.

The iambic pentameter or whatever hadn’t occurred to me when I started this post – Orchids in the Orchid Tree. Where’s an English teacher when you need one?…maybe it is alliteration? In my experience, English teachers were generally offended by my writing so somewhere, somebody is feeling unhappy about comma faults – my specialty. I was nearly kicked out of the University of Georgia for my comma faults; my solution to stay in college – semi-colons! And it worked! I have a college degree and am still here offending innocent people with my punctuation. I can only wonder how many good, interesting writers were sidelined by English teachers. Carl Sagan comes to mind:Billions and billions. Ms. Ford, if you are still out there, I am published and somebody paid me!!

I digress, my neighbor offered a start of these Cattleyas to me and I enthusiastically accepted. I have a good sized Banyan Tree asking for some Orchid company. Research (and my neighbor) tells me that you need a rough barked area, then apply some sphagnum moss, add the orchid and tie it to the tree with string. Water until established and …Voila.

Orchids in the Orchid Tree…

Cattleyas

Cattleyas

Yellow Butterfly Ginger – Hedychium flavum

Yellow Butterfly Ginger

 

This is the Yellow Butterfly Ginger as opposed to Ginger Lilies or White Butterfly Ginger. I can’t recall exactly where this came from. I had some Ginger Lilies a very old lady gave me in Atlanta, but I was afraid of importing those to South Florida for fear of being overrun. So, I left the Ginger Lilies in my garden in Atlanta, I think the new owner built a pizza oven over top of them. This particular lady who gifted me the Ginger Lilies identified the plant by the fact that the root looked like an old shoe.

Back to Florida, this very fragrant plant started to bloom last week and to me it smells like a really intense Honeysuckle. Very pleasant. I had to search a bit to figure out what Ginger this is exactly. I finally decided it was Hedychium flavum based on the identifying feature of hairy leaves and yellow flowers. The flowers start out white with yellow centers, then the whole flower turns creamy yellow by the end of the day. I hadn’t realized the leaves were hairy until now.

The plant is about 4-5 feet tall and lives in the shade of a good sized Banyan Tree. Almost everything I have read about these says they require a moist site. I live on a gigantic sand dune so there is no really moist area here, this is the closest thing we have to moist and it is working fine so far. The Ginger has been in the garden for about a year and has probably doubled in size and was evergreen through the winter. The foliage is kind of grassy and makes a nice backdrop for Bromeliads or Ferns. The roots look like reddish culinary ginger, but I have not had the occasion to eat any – they do not remind me of old shoes at all.

Culinary Ginger is a Zingiber as opposed to a Hedychium. This can be grown from roots bought from the grocery store.  I have tried this and ended up with a plant about 18″ tall and enough ginger for my husband to use in a Pumpkin Pie. While I am a devoted herb grower, I find buying ginger at the grocery store is best.