This is about the cymbidiums in my little patio container garden. They’re winter-blooming flowers in the local climate — normally, they send up their first shoots around Thanksgiving, as the weather grows cool and the rainy season approaches. This year, most of them behaved normally: around (American) Thanksgiving weekend, at the end of November, at least 7 shoots appeared, suddenly (it’s often hard to discern them among the foliage, so there might be more), and growing to a foot or more in length in a few days. The buds then open very slowly, about a month later (after New Year’s), but then the blossoms will last for months, the last finally succumbing when real heat returns, usually early in June.
Always the first to bloom is a very pretty yellow cultivar (I have several clones of it).
This year the autumn weather was deranged, with heat waves alternating with record cold snaps. My patio plants went berserk. The hydrangea decided it was spring, and produced several flower-heads in October. One, but only one, of the yellow cymbidiums decided it was winter, and sent up a stalk around Halloween, a whole month early. This rogue orchid is now splendidly blooming, a kind of Advent surprise — very cheering when many days are gloomy, foggy, or frost-flirting.
On Monday (12/11) Erick Barros took a ton of photos of Rogue Yellow, at various angles, orientations, and degrees of closeness, from which I have chosen two to show to you. (Winnowing the competitors down to two took a good bit of my time yesterday.)
First, a long shot of the whole stalk of buds, showing the scar where the top bud (of 7) was devoured by one of the marauding animals that visit my patio, in twilight or the dark of night, when I don’t see them (my little garden is afflicted at the moment by squirrels burying the acorns of the local live oak trees, but the squirrels have been known to inflict other sorts of plant damage, as have the neighborhood roof rats and skunks):
(#1) The Magnificent Seven, minus their fallen leader
Then in close-up, Rogue Yellow’s two fully-opened blossoms:
(#2) Welcome, dark winter, we shine out with cheer
December 13, 2023 at 11:22 am |
I find myself adding more and more yellow to my life, in search of sunshine.