You may remember this orchid from back at the end of January. I had it in a “Wordless Wednesday” post (which are never really “wordless” for me) and showed a close-up of one of the flowers.
At the time, I talked about all the flowers to come. Here’s that photo.
The only way to get a fairly decent shot of all the flowers on this plant was from above. There are more than 20 at the current time, blooming on 5 separate spikes. Three of these spikes are offshoots of prior blooming spikes and 2 are brand new spikes. (For those of you less familiar with orchid terminology, “spike” is just the fancy term used for the blooming stalk).
Why I wanted to post about this again is a comment I read recently from a nationally renowned orchid grower. He said that with “modern Phalaenopsis” (like the orchid above) the old thinking was to leave the finished spike on in case it rebloomed. But The new blooms would be so much smaller and punier it was better just to cut the spikes off and let the orchid put its energy into making new flower spikes.
Looking at this plant, I totally disagree. But then again, I disagree with just about all the orchid advice out there anyway.
Gardendaze 