Or: the first flower of winter.
Today appeared the first fully open flower on my cymbidium orchids, on the plant I named Rogue Yellow last year, when its buds opened fully a month early, in the second week of December:
Rogue Yellow’s first two fully open (slightly greenish) blossoms, in December 2023
So: this year even earlier, in the last week of November, on Thanksgiving Eve Eve. Its flower stalk shot up, two feet in two days, at Halloween, then gathered itself up to burst, today, into floral fireworks heralding winter. (Meanwhile, chilly rains have come.)
The story, from my 12/13/23 posting “The rogue orchid”:
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.
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