Some of you may recall that I once asked about a phal schilleriana that has
only one leaf left and that developed a spike. I was advised by someone here
to try using keiki grow, and I even bought it, but alas the spike is so thin
that I did not know how to go about peeling the node, and so I did not try
the keiki paste.

I let it flower, since I figured that this is probably it's last effort, and
might as well let it go out with a bang. Today the first flower opened, and
it's badly mutated. It looks to me like its lip fused with the two lateral
sepals, so it only has a dorsal sepal, 2 petals, and one lower sepal-lip
thingie. I generally like peloric Phals, but this stress-caused mutation is
a sad sight. I don't really think that it will get better, but I am
reluctant to throw it out while there is that one healthy looking leaf.
Still hoping for a miracle, I guess.

Fortunately I have a lot of healthy Phals and many of them are in flower or
in spike, so in general I am pleased with my collection's performance, but I
still can't help being a bit sad about this one.

It's just a seedling really, I got it as a seedling in October 2003 at the
NCOS show in DC. By March 2005 it had already lost all but one of its
leaves, probably due to cold -- I only later found out that schilleriana is
even more cold sensitive and so are seedlings, so a schilleriana seedling is
likely to fare poorly in temperature where other Phals are still ok. Then
this one-leafed seedling hung on to its life for the last year, and I kept
hoping that it would still pull through somehow, but now I don't have much
hope left for it anymore.

Joanna