Miltonidium "Issaku Nagata"

What is not to love??!?!  Tall stunning sprays of abundant and fragrant flowers adorn this mid sized orchid. And the blooms are long lasting to boot!

I call it my orchid "Christmas tree" as the branching arrangement of the flowers resembles a shimmering pyramidal shaped evergreen fir.  But of course, one could let the spike gracefully arch to one side too.

Meet the Gorgeous Vuylstekeara orchid!

This gorgeous and unusual hybrid is still thriving and reliably flowering almost every year since I first purchased at White Rose many years ago.

Vuylstekeara is an intergeneric hybrid between three orchid genera, Cochlioda, Miltonia and Odontoglossum.  It is very hardy and produces nice long sprays of star-shaped speckled blooms.

The photograph below depicts a newly opened bloom where the petals and sepals have not begun to recurve like the flowers shown in the photo above.

Odontocidium hybrid

flower spike about 2ft tall

Label: (Odo. Durham Supreme x Odo. Crispen)novelty X Onc. Maculatum sp. "Green Selves".

Another of my beloved favorites, this rare (unnamed) cultivar I found by pure chance. I purchased as a seedling and so had no idea of the flowers until it bloomed. What a delightful surprise when this baby put out a spray of exotic looking blooms! Individial waxy flowers measure about 3 inches tall and are star shaped. It closely resembles Vuylstekeara which is an intergeneric hybrid resulting from a cross with Milt Ron’s Rippling Delight ‘Pacific Parfait’ x (Vuyl Mem Mary Kavanaugh x Oda John Hainsworth).