Paphiopedilum rothschildianum
 

Single-growth, first-time bloomer that has only been in my possession a few months.

Nice!

That's beautiful. How many pairs of leaves?

3 plus a singleton emerging.

I really like the color, so this one's a keeper.

Very nice King of Paphs.

Bill

It is indeed a keeper.

So what about the care is different from others? I think I have figured out "most phrags." But the only Paph that is truly happy with me is a Drurii cross I have, and that one likes to get treated like phrags. So now I am separating paphs into "treat like phrags" (long green only leaves), and "weird hard to understand" (mottled leaf paphs).

Mottled leaved Paphs tend to grow in limestone cliffs and may do better with some marble mixed into the potting media or with some extra CalMag incorporated into the fertilizer regime.

We have really hard water here lots of calcium, but I will try the cal-mag in RO. Thanks.

For Paphs, the world-class Paph collection at the Huntington Botanical Garden in southern California gets well water with TDS ranging from 200-800 ppm, heavy on calcium carbonate. They found that these do much better with the "liquid rocks" than they did with RO. There may be exceptions, I don't know about the multi-florals. But this is what most of the Paphs want.(They may look a lot like Phrags but their habitats, and therefore their needs, are very different) So if water is higher in TDS than that, maybe dilute it with RO. But I'd suggest saving your RO for plants that really want and need it (like the Phrags and the various cloud forest groups). Cyms and Catts also don't seem to care.