Mounting cattleya aclandiae

[Nancy]

My husband surprised me by buying me a cattleya aclandiae yesterday. From the help I've already received on this forum, thank you bythe way, I believe it should be mounted. I've never mounted an orchid before and I really don't know how to start. If someone has mounted a cattleya, could you kindly provide me with some instruction?

[WIB]

I think mounting is pretty much the same with any orchid. You find a good subtrate. Purchased cork is light, various relatively hard woods work well also. You kind of pick the support by the size you expect the plant to be and the weight you are able to support. The mount can be vertical, in which case you want some way to hang it. I pushed wire (18 gauge?) into a cork mount for a little Angraecum elephantinum, then I made a hook in the free end of the wire, which allows me to hang the mount vertically. I have a larger cork piece with a Rhyncholaelia digbyana that I've left horizontal, as a raft, to imitate pictures of this plant growing on horizontal branches in the wild. In any case, you can use some long-fiber sphagnum moss to wrap around the roots and then secure the plant to the mount with monofilament (many turnings to hold all the roots in place, but not too tight). After a while, the roots will attach to the mount and you can remove the monofilament, as I recently did with the Angraecum, which is now firmly gripping the cork with new roots. (It's an entertaining little plant. The bud for the new bloom spike forms a year before it blooms. It quietly sits in the axil for a year, then in a matter of weeks produces a single, heart-stopping white bloom. In the evening, when I'm walking home from work, I can pick up the fragrance from several houses down the block.) I spray these plants pretty much daily or twice a day, depending on the weather and dunk them periodically. The Angraecum will never get terribly large, so I'm not worried about having to change its mount. I got the Rhyncholaelia as a fairly small plant, so I assume that one day I'll need to lash the old mount to a new, larger one. - Bill

[Nancy]

Thank you so much for the reply. After thinking it through with advice from the forum, I've decided that this plant will suffer greatly if tampered with. The roots of the little fellow don't branch if they get broken. I've decided instead to slip it, pot and all into a wooded basket with large pieces of bark and tree fern. That shoud create little trauma to the plant.