Welcome to Isle of Portland Orchids. We grow species orchids in Dorset. We only sell plants that we have raised ourselves from seed or division, at our nursery,  and sell online and at shows. 

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We are Annie and Simon Pugh-Jones and we care passionately about conservation especially in the biodiverse tropical forests of our wonderful planet.  Simon set up and ran the Writhlington School Orchid Project for 30 years before retiring in 2023. 10% of all our orchid sales are send directly to our conservation partners in Colombis and Sarawak (Read about orchid conservation here)

We are happy to come to shows to sell our plants and put up a small display.  We are also  available to give talks about tropical orchids in cultivation and the wild. Please contact us via isleofportlandorchids@gmail.com 

The orchids we love and propagate at our nursery are native to the World's diverse tropical forests. Over the past 25 years we have worked with conservation partners in Asia, Africa and the Americas and we are committed to supporting local people dedicating their lives to conserving their forests and orchids.

10% of the price of any orchid you buy from us is sent directly to support conservation with 5% going to each of our two partners, one in Colombia and one in Sarawak (Borneo).

You can find our more about orchid conservation and the projects we support here.

We have also written a page about our experience of the threats that wild orchids face and the positive steps being taken to protect them and their natural habitats.

Every week we will focus on one of the 600 or so species in our collection and share information on its cultivation, wild habitat and history. 

Click here to see this weeks orchid 

We also provide information pages for the orchids we grow and sell - find out about our orchids here

We have put together information pages for more than 150 of the 500 orchid species we grow in the nursery. 

Explore our information pages here

We sell plants online and at shows. Follow the link here and subscribe to get updates of new plant listings. With each plant we will send links to cultural information about the species offered.

We send our plants in First Class post and so post on Mondays and Wednesdays giving plants the best chance for spending a minimum time in transit. We will delay posting if the weather is very cold.

We will be selling plants at several shows in 2026. Here are the dates confirmed so far. 

RHS Orchid Show, 13th-15th March 2026, RHS Gardens Wisley, Wisley Ln, Wisley, Woking GU23 6QB

Bristol rare Plants and Orchid Fair, 18th April 2026, Central Church, Tower Lane, Bristol BS2 0ET 

In our orchid culture pages we look in more detail at the habitats our orchids come from and how we replicate those conditions in cultivation.

Read about our observations from our expeditions to the diverse tropical forests of South America, Central America, Africa, The Himalayas and South East Asia, and how we grow the plants native to these habitats.

We have a laboratory to grow orchids from seed. We only use our own seed produced by pollinating palnts in our collection.

We use aseptic technique in clean air to grow our orchids in jars on special growing media. 

Check out how we grow orchids from seed here

Our nursery on Portland looks south towards the sea. We have two greenhouses that we call 'The Cloud Forest Glasshouse' and 'The Himalayan Glasshouse'

The Cloudforest Glasshouse is where we grow our species native to the cool mountain forests of Central and South America. We maintain a minimum temperature of 12C and provide shading in the summer.  We aim to replicate the conditions we have experienced on visits to the mountain rainforests and cloud forests of Brazil and Costa Rica.

The Himalayan Glasshouse is where we grow the iconic orchids if the tropical monsoon forests of the Himalayas.  We maintain a minimum temperature of 7C and aim to replicate the forest habitats we have explored in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh.

We grow warm orchid species in our living room with a minimum of 17C. We use glass cabinets and call this growing area 'The Hot Lowland Cabinets' and aim to replicate the growing conditions we have found in the lowland rainforests we have explored in Borneo, Guatemala, Belize and Assam.

If you would like to hear more about how we grow our orchids, we are available to give lectures and talks to orchid societies and gardening groups. Please contact us via isleofportlandorchids@gmail.com