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Is this Vanda?
Some collectors trudge the trackless wastes to find their plants. Some risk bandits or scale crags. Others buy a scrap of green in a phial at a newsagents at Bangkok airport and, ten years later, find themselves with a gorgeous fragrant flower they can't name.
Orchids are numberless, and the nearest I can come to a name for this is Vanda - not quite like the fish, but memorably close. Vandas are a large tribe, and include the only 'blue orchid', Vanda coerulea. Could this airport-spawned beauty be a coerulea hybrid?
She should be seen from below, for her natural habitat is a tree (and her leaves are depressing). She grew slowly for her first seven or eight years, vegetated with little progress in my very rough compost on a warm propagation bench in, I judge, too much shade. Last year I put her in the sun and this year she surprised me. Her far-carrying scent is sweet and charmingly unexotic; slightly lemony, slightly spicy, slightly vanilla creamy, not remotely fishy.
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