More Mormodes

Mormodes oberlanderiana ABG# 05-1060 flowering at the Fuqua Orchid Center

A bee's eye view of the twisted column of Mormodes oberlanderiana. The shiny surface of the stigma is visible on the underside of the column.

From behind the flower you can see that the lip is twisted also.  The angle of  the lip and column creates  a characteristic placement of the pollinarium on the bee's thorax. When the bee enters a female flower the pollinia are in the correct position to be placed on the stigma.

The last of our four Mormodes species flowering this week is Mormodes oberlanderiana. I have to admit that I completely missed the subtle but gorgeous coloration of these flowers until I saw them in the morning light through my camera lens. What a beauty. Of the four species this one has, in my opinion, the most captivating fragrance.

Mormodes oberlanderiana is native to Colombia and northwest Venezuela where it grows as an epiphyte.

How to Grow Mormodes

Mormodes aromatica flowering in the Fuqua Orchid Center

Leopard spots on the flowers of Mormodes aromatica.

Mormodes are a blast to grow. It's enormously gratifying to pour on the fertilizer in spring and watch them explode. I love their indescribable fragrances and wacky pollination. Mormodes are rarely popular with the set who covet hybrid Cattleya flowers, or among folks who call small-flowered orchids "botanicals." It's their loss.

Want to grow Mormodes? Here's the key: They have an annual growth cycle that is strongly seasonal.

Mormodes are easy to grow if you pay attention to some obvious signals--yellowing leaves signal the onset of the dry season; new shoots signal the onset of the rainy season. Simple.

Here's how we grow ours:*

• Warm greenhouse (66º night min.) alongside Catasetum & Cycnoches.
• High humidity ~75% RH-- to keep thrips and mites at bay.
• Bright light. Ours grow adjacent to the Laelia bench.
• Plastic net baskets.
• A mixture of coarse fir bark, charcoal, perlite and premium sphagnum.
• Under our conditions they need water about every 3-4 days in summer.
• Twice weekly Cal Mag at 200 ppm supplemented with half-strength Nutricote.
• The dry rest lasts about two to three months, starting with leaf yellowing in October.
• By November & December they are completely leafless and in full dormant mode. During this time it takes about a week to ten days for the mix to achieve bone-dryness. Then we water. The advice to never water them during dormancy "because in nature they never receive rain during the dry season!" is misguided. Potted plant cultivation is not like nature. Two or three months in our greenhouse without supplemental moisture leaves the pseudobulbs badly shriveled.
• New shoots in spring are the signal to increase watering and repot.

*This isn't a recommendation for all Mormodes species grown under all conditions. Growing practices that work well in an Atlanta greenhouse need to be modified for conditions elsewhere.

You can find out about Mormodes buccinator and Mormodes sinuata by following the links.

Mormodes buccinator, The Bugler

Mormodes buccinator ABG #07-1033 flowering at the Fuqua Orchid Center.

The twisted column makes this orchid instantly recognizable as a Mormodes.

The ivory lip of Mormodes buccinator is not the broad landing platform that bees encounter on many flowers. The sides are rolled back and almost meet at their edges, giving the lip a trumpet-like shape--hence the name buccinator (Latin, bugler).

Mormodes buccinator grows as an epiphyte in lowland forests in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil at 450 to 1500 meters (1500 to 5,000 ft.) elevation.

This has been a good week for Mormodes in our warm greenhouse. We have four species in flower simultaneously. The blackened red Mormodes sinuata is featured in Thursday's post.

Mormodes sinuata, The Goblin

Mormodes sinuata. The yellow column is twisted to the side, exposing the anther.

Mormodes sinuata ABG # 07-2342 flowering at the Fuqua Orchid Center

'Like a goblin'--is the fanciful etymology of Mormodes Lindley (from the Greek mormo, meaning 'goblin'; and odes, meaning 'like a') describing this orchid's strange male flower with its twisted column. I can imagine how the features of a goblin's face might twist as it breaks into a grin.

Why would an orchid flower have a twisted column? Because it's part of a unique pollination mechanism. The twisted column places the pollinarium (the pollinia, stipe and sticky viscidium) in the correct position on the pollinator's thorax.

Charles Darwin was the first person to investigate how Mormodes flowers are pollinated when he studied Mormodes ignea (published in The Various Contrivances by Which British Orchids and Foreign Orchids are Fertilized, 1862).

The flower's fragrance attracts a male Euglossine bee (genus Euglossa). As the bee lands on the lip, it strikes the apex of the column, opening the anther cap. The pollinarium, with its sticky disc, swings forward onto the back of the bee. After 30 minutes the pollinia packet dries and uncoils into the correct position for placement onto the female flower.

Reading Contrivances again I have to admire Darwin's patient and painstaking attention to minute detail as he analyzes this whole procedure. "At the close of the twelfth trial I was in despair...," he laments. But he persists. With only twelve flowers at his disposal, Darwin figures out the mechanism using needles of different diameter in place of a pollinator.

Several more species of Mormodes have flowered this week. More pics will follow!