Prosthechea prismatocarpa
Back in 2003 I spend a day exploring Costa Rican forest remnants with the wonderful botanists Franco Pupulin and Bob Dressler, based at the Lankester Botanic Gardens, Cartago. The main target of for the day was to identify potential new orchid species.
Prosthechea prismatocarpa was one of the well known orchid species we came across, with plants flowering high in remnant forest trees on a misty ridge at around 1500m altitude.
This is a magnificent orchid with long spikes of dramatic flowers pollinated by large butterfies that grip onto the pink lip and force their proboscises up under the collumn to the nectar.
As indicated by the natural habitat I found the species in in Costa Rica, Prosthechea prismatocarpa is cool growing and very at home in a basket in our cloud forests greenhouse (min 12C). Plants grow very large with time but flower a relatively small plants.Â