maxillaria cucullata

[u bada]

Well, picked this up from Andy's last weekevnd, it was literally the last minute grab... was on the table and on sale!

Has several flowers on it, a bunch of pbs and new growths and potted ...and reportedly relatively easy... I'm hoping. it's quite large for me being an apt grower, but i've heard it handles shade? Any tips are appreciated. I'm also hoping it can handle low humidity...

There were a lot of color variation, but I fell in love with this one's colors, the gradation of the of colors perhaps... supposedly fragrant but hadn't tried.

[MattWoelfsen]

You will need to raise relative humidity in order for it to flourish. This plant comes from low mountain areas of Central America--very humid.

[No-Pro-mwa]

Good luck with it and I like the colors.

[fishmom]

I have one of these which grows on a south-east facing windowsill in winter, outside under shade cloth with morning sun in summer. I live near the water so we have high humidity at night, as a rule. It's not as hot and dry as L.A.. I lost some blooms last year during an early hot spell when the plant got dry for a while.

[u bada]

Ah well... guess we'll just see how it goes. I'll be growing it on north facing balcony that gets some direct morning and afternoon sun... not sure where it'll go in there... but the cool growers I end up sticking in the shadier corners in the summer and just water well... some make it others don't. I really try to focus on temperature tolerant and other extreme conditions tolerant orchids for that area... maybe just too much of the last minute purchase... at least it wasn't the most expensive!

I emailed Andy's and see what they say... what's great about going to growers is you can see where they grow them and the conditions in that spot... since this was on the table I couldn't see where they were growing them and forgot to ask...

[Kevinator]

So you went to Andy's open house too? Nice! If I remember correctly, I saw some grown outside in the potted section. The area houses several other maxillarias such as ubatubana and picta, so I'm thinking you could base its care off of those two. I know that ubatubana doesn't give a crap about humidity but does perform better under high light.

[u bada]

Thanks kevinator! I guess I need to get ubatubana asap! If I could get a list of plants that don't give a crap of humidity I'd grow them all!!! But alas all the entries on orchidspecies say everything grows in high humidity so... ok, I'm being facetious...

Yes I actually got there a bit late on sunday so I had to run through and take pictures first, then ran around with Katrin for my takes... so thats how I guess I missed the maxes... do you recall what else were near the maxes? epis? laelias? paphs? or maybe they were near the cyms?

[Kevinator]

I actually went on Sunday too! I left at around 2 though. If I remember correctly, the maxies were in the area around most of Andy's large epidendrums and cyrtochillums. A few of the larger cymbidiums like insigne were growing there too. Most of the orchids were intermediate to cool growers but the conditions provided for them seem to be almost identical to the rest of Andy's outdoor growing areas so temperatures shouldn't be much of a problem as long as it ranges between 90-45 degrees F.

Humidity shouldn't really be a problem for most maxillarias as many of them are rather sturdy, especially the picta types or the ones related to variablis or schukenea

[u bada]

Thanks again... yeah I agree all the various outdoor areas should probably have pretty much the same temp and humidity except perhaps the ones a bit more covered or densely with plants... I think I know the potted area you're talking about and it was fairly dense, so even with a more open shade cloth over, the plants were shading each other and it was fairly secluded, I think...

Andy got back to me the other day and said, simply, "that one does very well outdoors"...

[Tindomul]

Nice. Thanks for sharing.