Articles - Obsession  

Hello. My name is Becca W., and I am an orchid addict. My problem started a little over four years ago when I adopted an overgrown Dendrobium NOID from my mother-in-law when she moved from south FL to colder climes. I hung it out in my tree here in southeast Florida and paid little or no attention to it...... at first.

Then my husband bought me a Phalaenopsis from Home Depot for Valentines Day.... I set it outside under the tree where the Dendrobium hung, and life progressed. We attended the Palm Beach Tropical Flower show that spring and bought a Vanda hybrid in bloom - one of those big purple dinner plate things. One of my husband's patients happened to mention a local nursery west of town, Laurel's Orchids. We paid a visit one weekend and came home with a few things. By this time I'd actually started a little 'orchid growing' area in the stand of Areca palms on our back patio. It was a lovely little area to hang a few orchids - the dappled shade provided by the palm branches was perfect, and a nice flowering hedge and garden bench that I still had room for back when I still called my addiction "an interest in Orchids" provided a beautiful place to sit and reflect.

Soon I joined the AOS, ‘just to get the magazine’ and found a nice little group of folks chatting about their orchids on the AOS Web Forum (Ed: www.orchidweb.org). I had no idea that this friendly group of people would soon help me move to the next step: "orchid hobbyist". Photos, suggestions on vendors, show schedules,.... OH NEED I GO ON!? By that summer my little growing area was slowly expanding. It’s amazing how many orchid pots you can hang in a large stand of Areca palms, especially if you tie old pantyhose around the tree trunks to hang mounts from. A trip to the Fall Redlands show in south Miami soon followed and a drab winter was brightened by visiting local vendors, eBay auctions, mail order catalogs and such. My growing area soon expanded to include a small specialized "Vanda Area" that had a manually operated hose nozzle attached to some PVC laundry racks purchased from Wal-Mart. A patio table with sun umbrella was pressed into service. My Palm Pilot contained the telephone numbers and directions to JEM, JB Orchids, Laurels, Odoms, and many more south Florida vendors. I ordered my fertilizer from a guy in California and knew what alifor was.

As time progressed, I had too many pots for the Areca palm stand and decided that a little shelving unit under the eve of my house might relieve me of the burden of moving the hanging pots around when the palm branches shed..... to say nothing of the additional room! I was still comfortable with the label 'orchid hobbyist', although I had now actually met in person folks I’d met online at the Forum and had attended my first May Redlands Show in 2001. I had orchid friends from different states and different countries - Puerto Rico, France, Chicago, New York - MY WORLD WAS EXPANDING.....as was my orchid collection.

2002 came and in May another trip to Redlands. This time I made hotel reservations, invited my husband to join me and made an entire weekend of it! I met more orchid friends and orchid vendors and somehow found myself not only buying orchids but a founding member of a new specialty orchid society dedicated to Encyclias. The next thing I knew, I found myself volunteering to develop and manage The Encyclia Enthusiasts Web Site (www.encyclias.org) and publish their quarterly newsletter.

By the fall of 2002 the growing area had started to take over the patio. Gone were the bench and hedge; the shelving unit had grown, and the Vanda Area now contained a large iron trellis with automatic sprinkler that occupied the entire space under that humble stand of Areca palms. I had added words like resupinate and rupestres to my vocabulary, knew how and why to ‘pre-order’ and spent hours pouring over websites located in Central and South America. The word 'addiction' started to creep into the back of my mind, but I was still in control.

Today, exactly one month before Spring Redlands 2003 I surveyed my growing area to see how much room I have for additional plants and - lo and behold - this is what I found: the patio now contains a total of 4 separate growing areas, a potting bench and a ‘storage chest’ for orchid supplies. Growing area 1 contains 4 units of 4 shelves each. The Vanda Arch has been moved from under the areca palm stand to make room for the wrought iron garden screen that holds the mounted encyclias and the back patio fence holds a small but growing ‘Fry Me Crispy’ area for schomburkias and the like. In addition, a few of the potted patio plants have orchids mounted directly on and hanging directly off them and some of the orchids have now grown to require their own mounting area, table, specialty pot or are directly mounted on the trees. My collection now includes many Cattleya, Laelia, Encyclia and Dendrobium species and I'm looking for a new growing space for my anticipated Redlands acquisitions...... It is a blessing that my homeowners association won’t permit the construction of a greenhouse….Or is it?

My name is Becca W. – I own 250 orchids, 20 orchid books including Carl Withner’s 6 part series on Cattleyas and an autographed copy of Martin Motes ‘Vandas’, I own an orchid database program, belong to 3 orchid societies, subscribe to several orchid magazines and weblists, made my hotel reservations for Redlands 2003 months ago …. and I am an unrepentant orchid addict.

Photos of Becca’s growing areas and orchids can be viewed at:

http://community.webshots.com/user/rlwolfefl

She can be reached via email at:

rwolfe@encyclias.org