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I have recently gotten interested in growing orchids. It's a minor obsession for which I'm sure my Uncle Dan will happily take the blame. His two-story house is covered, top-to-bottom with these amazing plants. The orchid family comprises some 25,000 individual species, and countless cross-breeds. They range from the tropical rainforests to the tundra of Alaska. I'm not sure that Uncle Dan has samples of all the species in the orchid family, but he certainly appears to have a good cross-section. The greenhouse is divided into thermoclines representing the appropriate growing conditions for each variety. So plants that like warmer weather are situated at the top of the greenhouse, where the heat from the wood stove rises. Did I mention it's Maine and this horticultural paradise is surrounded by snowdrifts for six months of the year? The "cool-growers", then, are arranged closer to the floor, where the occasional draft mitigates the tropical heat. Funny how this arrangement reverses the correlation between altitude and temperature commonly found in the real world; normally it's colder on at higher elevations. At any rate, somehow this infectious hobby has stricken me, all the way out here in California, although the prognosis in my case looks much better; it is still possible to casually walk from one end of my apartment to the other without ducking under hanging boughs and such. I have a modest collection of just three representatives from the diverse family of flowers, and my brown thumb means this is probably all I should be trusted with, lest I be locked up by the SPCTO. I am given to understand that many orchids like to receive their water through misting. All of mine are potted in a very loose soil inside holey pots which can hold water only if it is absorbed into the bark and other chunks in the soil. And since I don't have an elaborate hosing system or a gravel floor in my apartment, I do the misting by hand, with a surprisingly difficult to find plastic spray bottle. Needless to say, frequent watering is more important here in the desert than in cold, wet Maine. So I do my spray routine every other morning. Well it just so happens that there's a little spider, about the size of a match head, living under a picture frame next to my Paphiopedilum Lemforde Surprise (that's actually a flower name - not a Latin blessing for the holey pot). He's probably feeding on the little fleas and critters which ravage my plant population from time to time, so I sort of view him as a high-ranking general in my arthropod control division. I am very fond of General Chow, and it seems he doesn't get quite enough liquid from the dry little plant-sucking beasts that infect my indoor garden. I should also mention at this point that the misting process, while somewhat safer than the garden hose for those with fine wood floors and carpets, is not entirely problem-free. I usually douse pretty much everything within spray bottle range with a good coating of water droplets. So far my roommate has not commented on the books and magazines that have become wrinkled through this process, so I continue. Well every day that I water, I spray the mottled leaves once or twice and General Chow scurries out from under the picture frame, looks up at me, and, I presume, lets the fine water droplets accumulate on himself, or collects them off the table top before marching back under the frame to his post. And that is the definition of symbiosis. |