It's as if all it wants to do is delight me.
I was dying to see how it opened, so I took a series of photos of Blossoms #3 and 4 as they went from closed bud to crane head to flamenco-dancing lobster dude.
At this point the bud looks like the skull of a crazy bird, maybe an ibis or flamingo.It doesn't take more than overnight for it to go to this folded miracle:
You can see the next bud cued up. How considerate of the orchid, to have another bud forming in the wings when this flower finally withers and falls with a plop in the middle of the night.
Ta-DAA! I am OUT!
And I am the kabuki lobster dude, mixing genres, phyla and metaphors, doing my manly flamenco for your viewing pleasure for the next week and a half.
Psychopsis mendenhall is native to Trinidad, where its brilliant blossoms dance singly on long stems in the forest gloom. Imagine such a thing, encountered in the wild.
And now, given sun, rainwater and orchid food, it opens five-inch wide blossoms on my windowsill. Life is good.
9 comments:
Cool Dude!
It even looks like he's wearing shades! Must be pretty bright on that windowsill!
beautiful!
"Kabuki lobster dudes" in rural Ohio... who knew!! Sayonara...
Life is good, indeed!
I just bought one of these yesterday at an orchid show in Lakeland, FL. Found your blog while Googling how to take care of my new beauty & am so glad I did. You have expressed my enthusiasm about this flower perfectly.
Love that lobster!
J...go look at the spider we found at the new RAPTOR barn yesterday.
Scary!
With all the things you need to check on every day, I admire you for remembering the lobster growing on your windowsill that unfolds just for YOU.
It's always freaky how they look like they have little faces! Glad it has bloomed and bloomed for you Julie. :c)
Here's an interesting postscript. I just returned from a weekend working a festival in Berkeley Springs, WV, to find that my pride and joy dropped its last flower before it opened. Did a little searching around online and found that one cause of this bizarre and tragic event could be ethylene gas from ripe fruit. When we walked in, the whole house stank of overripe pawpaws from a bowl on the kitchen table. Yeah, maybe just a bit of ethylene gas here.
The pawpaws are outside awaiting processing. They can go stink out there. And there's a hard little bud on the Psychopsis. There's always hope.
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