Dendrobium aphyllum supposed to be one plant turned up many - what should I do?

[greenochre]

So, I bought this Dendrobium aphyllum in December, it spent a winter outside on my balcony, then it started growing new leaves and someone started eating them, so I took it inside recently, and it's growing new leaves and roots vigorously. I don't have a good recent photo, only a photo made right after purchase, but you can see the mount.



I decided it's a good time to remount it, because sphagnum was really very old and decomposed + it was fixed with a lot of fishing line and I didn't like it too.
So, I soaked it in water, carefully cut and removed the line and sphagnum... and at this point it just fell apart, apparently it's not one plant, but many. All with some new growth.


I don't know, is it some sort of fraud? Multiple keikis sold as flowering size? Or this Dendr. does it naturally?

Anyway, what should I do know? Two brown parts are obviously dead, and beside them there are six separate plants. Should I just mount them together back? Or should I treat each as a separate plant?

[NatalieS]

I had this exact same thing happen to me with my first den trantuanii. The plant was sold as flowering size, mounted, and when I received it there was a lot of sphagnum moss covering the base of the plant. When I removed the moss, I realised it wasn't one plant, but several canes tied together with hardly any roots at all, and it just fell apart.

I complained to the seller, but they refused to see my point that the individual sections were a long way off of flowering, and therefore not what I paid for, so in the end I chalked it up to a learning experience about buying from that grower and decided to grow each section separately.

I did a combination of potted and mounted, and used it as a bit of an experiment to see what the plants liked best. It took a bit longer, but I ended up with far more plants and blooms, so it wasn't the worst end result.

Some of your sections in the pics are so small however, that I would probably put the smallest ones together, and keep the largest sections separate.