Epidendrum blepharistes Barker ex Lindl. 1844

Plant and Flowers ensitu Navarco Quindio, Colombia elevations 1500 meters 5/08 Photos by © Jay Pfahl

Costa Rican Variety Photo courtesy of Daniel Jimenez ©

Another Color Form Photo courtesy of Carlos Hajek and his Peruvian Orchid Page

Plant and Flowers in situ Peru Photo by © Eric Hunt and His Orchid Website

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Common Name The Fringed Epidendrum

Flower Size 2 3/8" [6 cm]

This pseudobulbed species is from Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia in wet montane cloud forests and is found at elevations of 1400-2500 meters on high, steep, exposed, rocky slopes as a medium to giant sized, warm to cold growing terrestrial or epiphyte in wet open montane forests with heavy moss on dead tree crotches with an ant colony. Found with erect, thickly fusiform below pseudobulbs, distichously leafed above, enveloped completely by evanescent, tubular sheaths and carrying 3, coriaceous, oblong, linear-oblong to oblong-elliptic, obtuse to apiculate leaves that blooms at most any time of the year on a terminal , 2' [60 cm] long, erect, few to densely many flowered, subumbellate, racemose inflorescence arising on a mature, wrinkled, fusiform, sulcate psuedobulb that is subtended by several scarious bracts and carrying 4 to 5 alternate, conduplicate towards the base, linear-lanceolate, obtuse leaves.

Synonyms Epidendrum brachycladium Lindl. 1853; Epidendrum brachycladium var. crassipes Lindl. 1853; Epidendrum crassipes (Lindl.) Kraenzl. 1916; Epidendrum crassipes (Lindl.) Schltr. ?; Epidendrum dolabrilobum Ames & C.Schweinf. 1925; Epidendrum funckii Rchb.f. 1849; Epidendrum pachypodum Schltr. 1920

References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ; Flora de Venezuela Foldats Volumen XV Part 3 1970; Icones Orchidacearum Peruviarum Plate 046 Bennett & Christenson 1993; Icones Planetarum Tropicarum plate 378 Dodson 1982; Native Ecuadorian Orchids Vol 2 Dodson 2002; Orchids of Bolivia Vol 2 Laelinae Vasquez and Ibisch 2004 as E funkii

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