Little Stars

Brassavola Little Stars (B. nodosa x cordata) continues to amaze me. As I wrote about in February, B. Little Stars has been one of my favorite orchids (if not my most favorite – and I’ve grown a lot of orchids) ever since I first saw and smelled the flowers. The pristine broad white lip and pale green spidery petals are elegant, and the fragrance transports me to heaven. This year, one of my plants is blooming in the summer. It’s very odd, since I’m used to them blooming in the late fall, just in time for Thanksgiving, like clockwork for the last 10 years or so. I started out with a grex from Odom’s called ‘Louise’ (For those uninitiated to orchid nomenclature, a interspecific cross such as this, maintains the genus since the genus is the same in both – Brassavola in this case, and the cross can be named, in this example, Little Stars. Thus, any seedlings resulting from any Brassavola nodosa crossed with Brassavola cordata are called Brassavola Little Stars. If a specific plant of those seedlings is chosen, named and propagated asexually e.g. genetically identical, each plant is a "grex", and is given a name in single quotes - in this case ‘Louise’).

This great plant, to my eye, has slightly smaller flowers than the other B. Little Stars that I’ve seen, with slightly denser flowers and a longer stem. It also has a slightly different fragrance. This is the plant that grew into a huge plant, which I gave to my parents. It had filled a 10-inch pot and had hundreds of flowers. My parents returned it to me several months later with the roots rotted out and mostly dead. I’ve saved one little piece but it hasn’t yet resumed its original vigor some 8 years later.

But it is the one that is blooming right now. In the heat of summer, the fragrance seems richer, denser, carrying much farther throughout the house. It doesn’t wait until dark to start the olfactory show as it does in the winter, but as soon as the brightness of the day starts to fade the fragrance spreads in tantalizing wisps, and like those cartoon smells of pie drawing someone in, this fragrance irresistibly pulls me.

Smelling the fragrance has always brought emotions to the surface, suggesting things only half remembered. I could drown happily in this fragrance. For years, I’ve wondered why this effect occurs and -it is only this summer that I’ve been able to figure out why. I’m noticing that the fragrance varies slightly from day to day, and from hour to hour. It is perhaps this kaleidoscope of fragrances that confuses my limbic system. The other day, I was certain that the fragrance was identical to that of gardenia. But the next day I wondered why I ever thought that. Other times, I smell ginger, cardamom and cloves. Some days it smells identical to Casa Blanca lilies. Lately, it smells almost exactly like Star Jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), another of my favorite floral fragrances, and one that I sadly cannot grow here in the cold winter climate of Albuquerque. On other occasions it could be any combination of those smells. Each of them have emotional connections. All of them together is almost overwhelming.