Orchids: cut stems, pot plants, meaning and care

A potted phalaenopsis costs about 15 euro in an Irish supermarket and flowers for two to four months. A delivered bouquet costs 40 to 70 euro and is finished inside a fortnight. If the gift is meant to last, that comparison is the most useful thing on this page, and it is not one a flower shop is going to put in front of you.

Cut orchids are a different product with a different job: sprays of cymbidium or dendrobium in arrangements and bridal work, at a price per stem that reflects how long they take to grow.

What orchids mean

In western florist usage the orchid stands for refinement, rare beauty and luxury, a meaning that dates from the Victorian collecting mania when a single new species could be worth a house. The Victorian language of flowers listed the orchid as beauty and a refined kind of love.

The older and more specific tradition is Chinese, where the orchid is one of the four gentlemen alongside plum, bamboo and chrysanthemum, standing for integrity and quiet nobility, and where it carries an association with fertility and children.

Colour meanings here are modern florist convention rather than tradition: white for elegance, pink for affection, purple for admiration. Nobody receiving an orchid decodes it. What an orchid says in Ireland is that the sender spent money and expected the gift to sit in a room for a long time.

Season in Ireland

There is no Irish season, and no meaningful Irish production. Cut orchids arrive from Thailand and Singapore by air or from Dutch glasshouses by lorry, in the same volumes every week of the year. Potted phalaenopsis come from large Dutch and German nurseries.

Ireland does have wild orchids, and they are worth knowing about even though they have nothing to do with the shop. Bee orchids, marsh orchids and pyramidal orchids grow in dune systems and on limestone grassland including the Burren, flowering from May to July. Every one of them is protected in the sense that picking or lifting them destroys a slow-growing plant. Photograph them and leave them.

When to send them, and when not to

Orchids suit a milestone: a retirement, a significant birthday, a new house, a thank you that needs to be substantial. A potted plant is the better version of that gift in nearly every case.

They suit Mother's Day for the same reason, with one practical advantage: Irish Mother's Day falls in March, and a pot bought that week is still flowering at the start of summer.

Cut orchids are worth the money in bridal work, where a few stems do the work of many. As a general rule for a wedding budget, a small number of orchid stems in the bridal bouquet with cheaper flowers elsewhere is a more efficient spend than orchids on every table.

Do not send them for sympathy in Ireland. The flower is too showy for a funeral home and the family will have nowhere to put a pot plant. Do not send a pot to someone who travels constantly, since three weeks with no water in a warm flat will finish it.

Care

For cut stems: cut 2cm off on a slant, use shallow clean water with the sachet, and keep them away from draughts, radiators and open windows. Orchid flowers are thin-textured and dry out at the edges before the stem gives up. Change the water every third day.

For a pot: the two things that kill them are cold and standing water. Take the clear inner pot to the sink once a week, run tepid water through the bark for a minute, let it drain fully, then put it back in the outer pot with nothing in the bottom. Bright indirect light, no direct sun on the leaves, and a room that does not drop below 15C.

When flowering stops, cut the spike back to just above a node and keep going. A phalaenopsis that gets a weekly soak and a bright windowsill out of the midday sun will flower again, and again after that.