Winter Houseplants: Orchids Part I

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
December 2nd, 2008
Filed in Indoor Plants
Tags: container plants, flower, flowers, orchids

The merest mention of the word “Orchid” is enough to send some people running for the exit at the garden center. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way!  Tissue culture techniques and hybridizing have made lots of easy-care varieties available.  But first, a little bit of the mystery and magic behind orchid fever. . .

The Orchid Thief

Susan Orlean, a writer for the New Yorker, wrote the book The Orchid Thief after spending two years following orchid enthusiast (and, unfortunately poacher) John Laroche through the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in southern Florida.  She attended the Miami Orchid Show (the end-all, be-all of the orchid shows), and generally hung out with some very intense creatures.  She lived to tell the tale and thus peeled back the curtain on one of the strangest “secret societies” that is not really secret:  Orchid Lovers.

When I lived in Sarasota, Florida and worked at the Marie Selby Botanical Garden, a word-renowned orchid, bromeliad and epiphyte research center,  I got to go to the Miami Orchid Show, as well.  For several months, I lived and breathed the craze that all orchid and bromeliad lovers live by.  I attended all of the plant society meetings.  The orchid fanatics were just as fanatical about orchids as the fern fanatics were about ferns.  (Now that I live in the South, I attend the Camellia Society meetings.)  I have this to say about plant fanatics:  regardless of their chosen plant, each group is just as fanatical as the other re: their plant.

The popularity of the book The Orchid Thief, ridiculous upside-down picture of Phalaenopsis orchid notwithstanding, caused a surge in popularity of orchids as houseplants.  Orchids were suddently available for purchase at high-end chain garden centers like Smith and Hawken and at Home Depot (for a fraction of the price-though the varieties were not as interesting).  Where do you go when you don’t know a Dendrobium from a Paphiopedilum?

The Hoosier Orchid Company

Indianapolis Monthly always does a feature about the “Best of Indy.”  One year, they featured The Hoosier Orchid Company, an orchid breeding, research and boarding facility.  Yes, you read that correctly–a boarding facility.  Much as people board their pets when they go on vacation, you could board your orchids at the Hoosier Orchid Company while they were out of bloom.  The HOC would tend to them, re-pot them, and coax them back into bloom.  While I traveled to Seattle, Washington, I boarded my orchids there and they came back to me in tip top shape.  The owners were always so nice to everyone, and let people wander through their jungle of greenhouses, overtaken by gigantic vanilla vines, and impatiens growing under the benches.  It was there that my interest in orchids ignited.

I read, with sadness, while researching this blog post, that the Hoosier Orchid Company closed in the summer of 2008.  They could no longer sustain the business with falling prices and rising shipping costs.  The owners bred and researched a wide variety of species orchids, cultivating them from seed in their tissue culture labs and growing them on to maturity for orchid collectors.  From the Hoosier Orchid Company, I bought my first cucumber orchid.  The leaves looked like mini-gherkins.  Heaven.  An orchid that looks like a pickle.  Two of my favorite things, combined.

Next up: So you want to grow an orchid?  We’ll show you how!