Epidendrum cnemidophorum Lindl. 1853

Plant and Flower Photo courtesy of Weyman Bussey

Common Name The Leg-Armor Epidendrum?

Flower Size 2" [5 cm]

Text by Weyman Bussey

This is an exciting plant! It is the darkest form anybody has ever seen. Bill Goldner now has it and I hope he can self it. The gentleman pictured holding the flower on the plant is Dr. Ernesto Aguirre, one of the foremost Mexican orchid taxonomists in the country. It was taken at an orchid show in Mexico City in 1996.

Found in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in montane cloud forests as a medium sized, cool to warm growing epiphyte with robust, glabrous, green, sheathed below and leafed above stem carrying distichous, alternate, acuminate apically leaves that are articulate below to the conduplicate, clasping leaf sheaths and blooms on a terminal, racemose, few to several [3 to 10] flowered, short inflorescence arising on a mature stem and holding showy flowers occuring in the winter

Synonyms Encyclia affinis (Rchb. f.) Schltr. 1918; Epidendrum affine Rchb. f. 1856; Epidendrum macrobotryum Lindl. ex Rchb.f 1856

References W3 Tropicos [http://mobot.mobot.org/W3T/Search/vast.html] , Kew Monocot list [ http://www.kew.org/wcsp/home.do ], IPNI [ http://www.us.ipni.org/ipni/plantsearch?request_type=search&output_format=query&ret_defaults=on Las Orquedias de El Salvador Vol 3 Hamer 1983; Icones Planetarum Tropicarum plate 1216 Dodson 1985