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These orchids were neglected last summer and looked pretty much dead. They are out in the greenhouse at the high school I work in. The belt on the evaporative cooler was off so the temperature got well over 100+ degrees during the days, so you can imagine how the orchids and other plants reacted to that. Needless to say we had to throw a lot of dead plants out. Anyways, these along with a few others survived and have made a nice come back. If anyone knows the names of them please let me know. Nothing was labeled and the guy that was in charge of the greenhouse left and didn't share any info about any of the plants or the greenhouse.

Nice orchids!

Those are absolutely gorgeous! Those pure white ones - wow! I'm not an expert on orchids so can't give you species, ever so sorry... though I do believe the first two are Phalaenopsis.

LOVE the peach. The top two are definitely phalaenopsis, not sure about the others. I have 2 I got at the end of summer on sale for $.25 since they were done blooming that just put out a full set of new flower spikes and blooms!

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mnwatson1 wrote:LOVE the peach

Lol I named them with first color that came to mind.

It amazes me how as soon as orchids stop blooming merchants consider them worthless. I picked up some from Lowes for less than a couple dollars each and Walmart usually marks them down 50%.

jwbates26 wrote:

mnwatson1 wrote:LOVE the peach

Lol I named them with first color that came to mind.

It amazes me how as soon as orchids stop blooming merchants consider them worthless. I picked up some from Lowes for less than a couple dollars each and Walmart usually marks them down 50%.

Exactly! Mine came from Lowe's and I figured it wasn't too big of an investment if I killed them, as I've never even touched orchids before this. My two seem to be pretty happy though!

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Very nice. I have one that looks like that. I've had for years didn't like the house I moved out of last year. It got root rot and lost most of it'd roots. Its a little over a year later And finally has established a good enough root system to start growing again. Before the average leaf was 18" and the flowers were bigger then my hand. Yours is beautiful.

Thank you! I was amazed when it flowered again, I'd always heard they're super finicky. Lol!

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Pretty flowers. I agree that the first two are Phalaenopsis hybrids. I'm pretty sure the "peach" one is too. The other three look like Dendrobiums (look for cashew nut-shapped buds).

Some more pictures of the orchid flowers in the greenhouse The light is washing out the petals quite a bit. The picture in the first post is a better representation of how dark purple these flowers are. I like how it looks like a there's something hidding staring at you in the center of the flower. I don't know why but for some reason I really like the flowers that have purple veins.

Few more from the collection

I've been staring at this flower for the last couple of days thinking to myself, "that's a unique looking flower." Then it hit me that it has six petals and no lip.

Are you growing them in full sun? I can never keep an orchid alive no matter what I do to them. How do you grow them?

I set the greenhouse so that it pulls out the shade cloth from 11am to 3:45pm so it helps keep a lot of the heat out during the most intense sun. During the winter the shade cloth only came out from 7pm to 7am to help keep heat in so the orchids were getting full sun all day long. I've grown orchids in a south/southwest windowsills getting full sun most of the day and they flowered very well. I have most of them in a very coarse mix that has good drainage. I use to soak my pots so the bark would absorb as much water as it could then let the pots dry out before watering again, usually once a week or two. Now I turn the misters on ever day and they get a nice watering and the orchids in the green house continuously send out flower stalks.

I'm going to try again. Your pics are inspirational.