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Poland trip
Hi fellow RGO'ers,
I just came back from a visit to Poland, my home country. Since the purpose of the visit was to spend as much time with my 94-year-old grandmother (Robert's great-grandmother) as possible, and I was there only for 10 days, I did not do much else while there, but I still managed to get into orchids a little bit while there, so here is the report on that: 1) While in Poland, I encountered a newspaper article on a planned highway extension project through the Rospuda valley near the Polish-Latvian border. There are about 15 (or 19 depending on which source one quotes) of native orchid species that occur in this valley and several of them are quite rare. Here is some info about this that I found in the English language on the Web if any of you are interested: http://www.zb-zeme.lv/eng/xxx/wbg.htm. While this article does not include photos of these orchids, here is a site that shows photos of orchids growing in Poland -- note: the site is in Polish, but the orchid name links on the left are in Latin and the photos don't need translation http://www.polskie.storczyki.org.pl/gatunki.php?lng=lat 2) I had bought my grandma potted orchids on previous visits to Poland, and several of them are still doing very well -- remarkable really considering that my grandma cannot care for them herself, and she gets different caregivers coming in whose primary duty is of course to take care of her, and not plants. One of her Phals was in beautiful flower, too. So since it was my grandma's name's day (which is more important than a birthday in Poland) and it was so hot that cut flowers wilted very quickly, I decided to buy her another orchid. My mother, David and I went to two local stores, one was a fancy florist's and the other a hardware store. The florist's while a bit fancy was pretty much a local florist's in a strip mall in a part of Warsaw called Ursynow where my grandma lives. It had some really impressive Phals, Miltaniopsis, intergeneric ochids, and a few Paphs. I wound up paying $20 for an impressive two spike yellow flowered Phal with several open flowers and several remaining unopened buds plus a new branch off of one of the spikes. This was probably one of the most expensive Phals I could have bought, but I wanted to splurge and get a really nice one for my grandma. I limited myself to Phals since my grandma's caregivers obviously know how to keep those alive already, and it was way too hot for the Miltaniopsis to survive in my grandma's non-airconditioned apartment. The hardware store had exceedingly healthy orchids, including two very healthy flowering Vandas, several neat Paphs, and oodles of Phals that where younger than the ones at the florist's. The prices started as low as $6. Very few of the buds were blasted, unlike at a hardware store in the US, where I often observe pitiful orchids with major bud blast issues. Off topic: 7-months old Robert now crawls like a pro, stands up against any piece of furniture he can find, drinks out of a straw cup, and if held underneath his armpits with feet on the floor he makes strides practicing walking. And most of these skills just emerged in the past two weeks. In other words, he is an amazing menace! Very cute too. And that's it on the Poland trip report. Best, Joanna |
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