Maggie's Farm

The folks who wrote this disquisition may or may not know a lot about 'the science of success,' but they sure don't know much about orchids. I do, since I've raised them for more than twenty years, studied them for even longer, and judged them in hundreds of orchid shows. The authors call them "fragile and fickle but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care." Come, come, ladies and gents. I hope your research on the science of success is more thorough than your research on orchids. The orchid family in all of its branches is huge, the largest botanical family in the world except for the grasses. It contains more than 150,000 species and hybrids. The species are found in every area of the globe, including the Arctic circle, except for Antarctica. And, believe me, these species don't originate in the pampered precincts of greenhouses, unless they are a cross of two superior cultivars of a species. Or a man-made hybrid. You can find them in the chilly cloud forests of the Andes and the steamy jungles of this hemisphere and the other hemisphere.

Sure, you can grow them in greenhouses, as I did until the arthritis got too bad. And they will reward you with brilliant copious blooms if you do it right. But these species all started life in the outdoors. No pampered pets they. Tough little survivors most of them are. And their lifespans can be longer than ours. There are cattleyas in the collection of the Royal Horticultural Society in England that were collected in the early 1800s before any of us here were thought of, and are still alive to tell about it, if we could 'speak orchid.'

I accessed the link briefly, and I couldn't determine who wrote this article. All I know is that he/she didn't do enough research.

Tut-tut.

Marianne

This is the trouble with flinging around figures of speech without researching them.