Ann's Air Gardens

My Dumpster Orchid Bloomed!

I wrote orchids off years ago, thinking they were simply too complicated and that I would never be able to keep one alive.  WRONG!  OK, I didn't even know this was an orchid when I pulled it out of a dumpster near my place up north.  A neighbor saw me rescuing it and as it turned out, she was the one who threw it away in the first place, thinking it had gotten too big. After we had a chat during which she told me that it was an orchid, and I told her she could propagate it by division to maintain the wanted size, she ended up taking it back and dividing it, but she gave me a generous handful of the pseudobulbous stem thingees, which I dumped in a bucket filled with a couple inches of water and put in the back of my mini-van for a few weeks.  Poor little neglectlings! 

Two years later: 

When I finally got around to taking them out of the car, I washed them off and covered the roots and part of the rhizomes with water in some see-through containers that were bigger around at the base than the top so that the water would not evaporate so fast.  Then I went of on a road trip knowing that when I returned they would either be alive or dead.  One or the other!  

Two years later, after sporadic topping off with fresh water, they are all still alive, and what a surprise it was for me to see that one of them has a flower.

No, I don't even know what kind of orchid it is, except that due to the fact that it is still alive, growing in water, and flowered, my first thought was that it is probably a lady slipper (subfamily Cypripedioideae with genera Paphiopedilum, Phragmipedium, Cypripedium, Mexipedium and Selenipedium)

I do know that it is terrestrial and sympodial, meaning that it can live on the ground instead of in the air, and it that it stores water in pseudobulbs. 

Swell Neighbors

Our new neighbors were going to throw this plant away, but first they asked if we would like to have it.  I said sure, because I have always wanted a ponytail palm, but never got around to getting one. 

 

I didn't know anything about this kind of plant, not even that its other common name is elephant tree.  Looking it up online, I learned that Beaucarnea recurvata, which is it's official name, is a lily plant, unrelated to the palm and not even a tree, although it is said they can grow to be 18' high and more than 6' around at the base, which does look sort of like an elephant's foot.

I hope I don't kill it, as I am not much of a dirt gardener, and also not home all that much, but other reviewers claim that about the only way to hurt this kind of plant is by over watering.  Apparently, that odd swelling at the plant's base is a sac of water, so my unpalm untree will presumably do well all on its own.  I probably should have put it in a giant pot to contain the root system, but although I was able to drag my ponytail palm a few yards from the neighbor's place to mine, I couldn't lift it off the ground as the base is very heavy.