Department: Glass
This week I am working with Petra, she showed me the watering requirements for her area of Tropical Display - everything gets misted all over including Tillandsia usneoides, plants clinging onto plants and the aerial roots of a Ficus benjamina (except for tree ferns, where only the base is watered and not the leaves or the crown) and the floors damped down. Things in her area that needs special attention are newly planted Licuala palms inherited from the George of the Jungle film set, the banana trees, and the other Ficus tend to get quite thirsty. I also fed the Licuala, this I did separate to the main watering as if the feed touches the leaves of plants it can make them scorch. It is a 3:1:5 feed which is high in potassium for flowers and palms. They will be doing a 2nd clear up spray of Pyrethrum 5EC.
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| Photo 1: Licuala palms |
Then I helped pot up some
Calanthe orchids pseudo-bulbs which flower around Christmas and are deciduous. A lot of the tropical orchids are epiphytes, so the soil generally used for them is a finer orchid bark mixed with a fibrous mix called Bromeliad mix with perlite so that it creates a more open medium with more air. We used a 50:50 mix of these. We sat the pseudo bulbs on top of the soil in a pot. They were beginning to re-shoot. These new shoots will in turn become pseudo bulbs. These will have a light watering at the beginning and not watered again until their shoots really get going. This is to encourage the roots to not stay in the surface and to seek it within the pot and this in turn will stabilise the plant more. Orchids are not prone to aphids but these are - the deciduous leaf ones often have softer leaves. A lot of orchids has a virus and feeding them helps suppress this.
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| Photo 2: Calanthe pseudo bulbs being potted up, as new shoots are going to turn into pseudo bulbs, it was good when placing them in the pot to ensure that there is room for the new bulb. |
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| Photo 3: New shoots of Calanthe |
Dave and Petra are involved in the orchid show in London. I helped them with the mock up of their display. The main idea was to show and get the point across about AGM plants. It's easy to put in all the plants that one may like, but it is good to think of the whole picture of how something looks, otherwise the interesting features of a plant that you particularly find interesting will get lost and it won't do any of the plants justice, just a whole mish mash of everything.
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| Photo 4: Beginning of mock-up of orchid display |
