This tiny little orchid, commonly called a Hardy Chinese Orchid, survived the winter outdoors in a 4" pot in my back yard in E. Vancouver, and on April 29th it's first flower of the year opened up!
I am envious, I had some of these and tried to overwinter in a coldroom and they dried up too much ( now dead ). I presently have Pleione formosan, not flowering but sending out new growth in Ontario. I also have Pleione maculata but am not sure whether it is alive or dead ?
I'm glad you liked my photo. The pleione limprichtii is only cold hardy to 7a, which is what it is here in Vancouver. It is zone 5a where you are? The Pleione maculata is an autumn flowerer, so maybe it starts growing later?
I was in Miami last year and picked up the Pleione book by Ian Butterfield and Phillip Cribb at the Orchid conference< I am determined to succeed with them, if not right now shortly, I enjoy a challenge.
Hardy Chinese Orchid is customarily Bletilla and not Pleione. Maybe this is one of those instances like Voodoo Lily apparently becoming transferred during the course of popular usage from Sauromatum to Dracunculus. A college instructor I once had related during one of his classes that Mrs. Berry used to grow sheets of pleiones outdoors in her Portland, OR vicinity garden (now the Berry Botanical Garden) by putting glass panes over them to keep out winter damp. In the wild it can get pretty cold where these grow but the precipitation falls off during winter.
Nice P. limprictii, I really like the Pleione orchids. I keep my bulbs dormant in the 'fridge as they are not hardy here. I hope to collect or propagate more (bulbs can break double and/or produce bulbils on top of old bulbs) to keep a bulb pan out of season using the fridge and lights. Summers are spent in the garden and greenhouse to plump 'em up for fall. A Canadian vendor FrasersThimble Farms sells Pleione on the west coast and sometimes garden centres have P. formosana in the spring. Beautiful flowers but not very long lasting blooms so its good to have few. Shaun
Wow, so many responses to my post! My pleione produced a couple of bulbils last fall, but they died over the winter. Should I disattach them and winter them indoors? Where pleiones come from in the mountains in China, it is wet in the summer and dry in the winter, the opposite of the conditions in Vancouver. I put my pleione on my windowsill for the winter, where an overhang protects it from getting rained on too much, and it probably also was a little warmer and protected from the wind. I bought it off a woman with a kiosk at the Stone Soup Festival on Commercial Dr. last summer. She has a large patch of them growing (in the ground) under an evergreen tree, so the sunlight is filtered, and they are shielded from the rain (which is good in the winter), so then she must keep them watered during their growing season. What Ron B says about putting glass panes over them, or covering them with a cloche, would be other ways of keeping them dry in the winter. I checked out the website of Fraser's Thimble Farms http://www.thimblefarms.com/ , and wow, they have a big selection! Bletilla, another genus of hardy orchids, I have found is commonly called a Chinese Ground Orchid. Here is a new photo, closer-up, now that the flower has opened all the way up.
In the late fall after a dry period I remove my bulbils and place them in a container of dry peat in the 'fridge. Shaun
Hardy Chinese Orchid (Bletilla striata) is also known as Ground Orchid and Chinese Ground Orchid http://www.ozarksgardens.com/pv/eDMnz/38/26/jsklKU/PTgWMYRvEaquQQT/hardy-chinese-orchid-jpg.html
