Brachionidium arethusa Luer 1995

Drawing by © Carl Luer and The Epidendra Orchid Website

Common Name or Meaning The Arethusa Brachionidium [Beautiful goddess in Greek mythology]

Flower Size 2.4" [6 cm]

Found in San Martin department in northern Peru in bamboo thickets along a river at elevations around 2800 meters as a mini-miniature sized, cold growing terrestrial with a stout, occasionally branching rhizome enveloped by 3, mucronate, scurfy, tubular sheaths and giving rise to slender, erect ramicauls enveloped by 2, tubular, scurfy sheaths and carrying a single, apical, erect, coriaceous, narrowly ovate, acute, prominent apiculum, cuneate below into the petiolate base leaf that blooms in the spring on a slender, erect, 1.4 to 1.8" [3.5 to 4.5 cm] long, single flowered inflorescence arising from near the apex of the ramicaul, with a loose bract near the middle and another at the base and has an inflated, longer than the pedicel and ovary floral bract and carrying a non-resupinate flower.

"Distinguished by the scury cauline shaths, erect, multiveined, narrowly ovate leafes, large long taile d flowers with a concave synsepal and a transverse, obtuse lip with thick margins reflexed back onto the back surface. Most similar to Brachionidium elegans but differs in the long, sepaline tails." Luer 1995

Synonyms

References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ; * Icones Pleurothallidinarum Vol XII Systematics of Brachionidium Luer 1995 drawing fide; Arnaldoa 12: 56. Beccara 2005 ; AOS Bulletin Vol 76 No 12 2007

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