The Bursting Bud-Emergence

First bloom of a young orchid, or any orchid, is not a speedy process. What fun would instant gratification be, anyway? Orchid fanciers learn to enjoy the journey. It helps to have a lot of orchids so that when one's journey slows down or stalls altogether (hear that, Donna?) you can switch your fickle affections to one that's doin' its thing for you.

Another ten days down the road. The scales on the bud hint at multiple flowers to come. Squeeee! Now I'm wondering if it's going to bloom precisely when it would were it living in Guatemala. How cool would that be? Clearly, I have weeks to wait before finding out--this photo was taken in the last week of January. Slowly I turn, step by step (you have to say that in a Daffy Duck voice).

February 3, 2010: I'm having such fun with this post, photographing the plant as it changes. I've no idea when to expect flowers. I've been watching this bud for so long I can hardly imagine the day when its flowers will open and start emanating that heavenly scent in my very own bedroom.

March 1, 2010: It's really cooking now. I fantasize that each little kink and scale on the spike will resolve into a bud and then a flower. I'm misting it several times a day and at night before I go to bed. It's kind of like boiling water when someone is in labor. It's something I can do that seems helpful.

The spike elongates and miraculously differentiates into separate buds. Here it is on April 20, 2010.


By April 28, it's starting to open.
agggghhh
boinnng
pop pop pop

The color deepens and even more flowers open
and along about 10 AM that heavenly muguet/carnation/paradise perfume, barely remembered from a roadside in highland Guatemala, begins to emanate

and it fills up the room until about 1 when the sun is no longer warming the flowers

but even after that you can catch a whiff until nightfall when it rests and girds itself for the next day of beauty and fragrance.

It surely favors its mother.

Not to be outdone, the little Encyclia cordigera alba plant I bought to tide me over decides to open on exactly the same day as its big purple cousin.
Just to show me, it pumps out a perfume that's even spicier than the purple one's.

I fall in love with it, too, and apologize to it for ever thinking it wouldn't be just as lovely and fragrant as its cousin from far away.

My orchids aren't really so much plants as members of the family, friends who bring me joy. My bedroom looks like a sale table at an orchid show. I bring practically everyone who enters the house in to see them; they're just too wonderful not to share.
We all have days when nothing seems to be as it should.

It's good to have a place to go where everyone is happy and thriving, where abundance and beauty are the order of the day. To to receive affirmation in the sight and scent of well-grown plants; know that this, at least, is something you've done right.