Platystele lancilabris (Rchb. f.) Schltr. 1923 SUBGENUS Platysetele Photo by Ecuagenera and their Ecuador Orchid Website

Common Name or Meaning The Spear-Like Lip Platystele

Flower Size .2" [6mm]

Found in Costa Rica on mossy small branches in wet montane forests at elevations around 100 to 1150 meters as a miniature sized, hot to warm growing epiphyte with erect, slender ramicauls enveloped by 2 to 3 thin, imbricating tubular sheaths and carrying a single, apical, erect, coriaceous, narrowly elliptical-obovate, subacute to obtuse, narrowly cuneate below into the indistinct petiolate base leaf that blooms in the spring on anerect, strict, loose, distichous, to 3.2" [to 8 cm] long, simultaneously several flowered, racemose inflorescence with oblique floral bracts.

Many sources cite this species as a synonym of P oxyglosa but I have left them separate at this time. P lancilabris differs from P oxyglossa by being endemic to Costa Rica, larger in size, a strict, nearly simultaneously opening flowering inflorescence instead of flexuous and successively flowered, The sepals and petals are acute and not acuminate and shorter than P oxyglossa as well as the lip is lanceolate, not acuminate and there is a large gelion at the base.

Synonyms Pleurothallis lancilabris (Rchb.f.) Schltr. 1913; *Stelis lancilabris Rchb.f. 1866

References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ; Icones Planetarum Tropicarum Plate 205 Dodson 1980; Icones Planetarum Tropicarum Plate 1078 Hamer 1984; Icones Pleurothallidinarum Vol VII Luer 1990;