Bulbophyllum-phile #1

I've been collecting smaller bulbophyllum species the past six years, slowly getting to know them better. (I had a few many many years ago, all mounted plants, all very very tiny but incredibly cute, mostly from J&L Orchids summer sales tables; they did well in a friend's mist chamber and vanished alas with most of that collection.) Why I like them: really nifty flowers visible without magnifying glass, easy to grow among my paphs, phals and minicatts, and so many to choose from!

I got a plant from Carmela Orchids in 2007, overgrowing a 4" plastic basket. The label said Cirrhopetalum coloriferum. Well, this turns out to be an error. It's really Bulbophyllum corolliferum, syn. Cirrhopetalum curtisii. I already had a C. curtisii (of course that was labelled B. curtisii), but the flowers on this newer plant are different, much bigger and brighter red; my older plant's flowers are streaky pale purple. So I'm not at all concerned with having a dupe.

The flowers are pinky-nail length, rosy red, not terribly stinky even close up. They last about five days (they might last longer with better humidity) and open very quickly once the buds are a certain size; blink and you'll miss them.




The spikes are about half the height of the leaves. Mine's been blooming on and off since December. The plant itself is very robust, growing on my warm middle lights-shelf about a foot beneath 4 fluorescent wide-spectrum tubes. I water it every 2-3 days, as the humidity here in the winter is pitiful.

Something very strange, that I never noticed on the older plant, is that the flowers are covered in a wet, slightly sticky substance. I've noticed this on other web photos of the species. It's visible in mine. I wonder if other bulbos/cirrhos have this characteristic, or if all clones of this species do. (This moisture is not hard-sticky like the "honeydew" commonly found on the backs of sepals of some cattleyas and related genera.)

(Be you lumper or splitter? I'm in favor of lumping species that hybridize readily, splitting those that don't, for an overly simplistic view. In the case of cirrhos vs. bulbos, I'm content to believe that plants that resemble each other from a common ancestor may have diverged sufficiently to be legitimate separate genera. I'm intrigued by taxonomy but can't help feel that, as one recent article put it, the criteria of taxonomists and pollinators are quite different when evaluating related species.)

Here's the IOSPE page for the species: http://www.orchidspecies.com/bulbcorolliferum.htm