Coelogyne stipitibulbum Holttum 1947 SECTION Longifoliae
Photos By Peter O'Byrne ©.
EARLY 
Common Name The Stake-Shaped Coelogyne [refers to the pseudobulbs]
Flower Size 2" [5 cm]
Found in penninsular Malaysia in the Cameron Highlands at elevations around 1500 meters in mossy montane forests as a small sized, cool growing epiphyte with a creeping rhizome with .8 to 1.2" between each stalk-like base, swollen upper part, 4 angled in youth and longitudinally rugose with age, dark green pseudobulbs carrying 2, elliptic, crisped margins, gradually narrowing into the petiolate base leaves that blooms in the fall and early winter on a flat, erect, 16" [40 cm] long, elongating, successively single flowered inflorescence and carrying flowers that redden with age.
Text by Peter O'Byrne Pers. comm.
" C. radicosa and C. stipitibulbum are different species, and are easy to distinguish from fresh material. Seidenfaden & Wood (Orchids of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore) followed Holttum in maintaining them as separate species, but made an error that resulted in more recent authors mis-interpreting these species. In "The Genus Coelogyne: A Synopsis", Clayton mistakenly reduced C. stipitibulbum to synonomy with C. radicosa. Kew's database also states that C. stipitibulbum is a synonym of C. radicosa; they are probably following Clayton. The most likely causes of this error are: 1) It is likely that Clayton never saw any living material of either of these plants. The photo in his book of C. radicosa (Plate 11c) was taken by Phil Cribb. His drawing of the C. radicosa lip (Fig 13b) was copied from Seidenfaden & Wood. (It should be noted that two of the illustrations on Clayton's Fig13b have been transposed; Number 15 is C. radicosa and #17 is C. prasina). 2) There is very little decent-quality herbarium material of C. radicosa in existence. The artist who prepared the illustrations of C. radicosa for Seidenfaden & Wood (Fig 85 e-g) relied heavily on intuition to draw the overall lip-shape from damaged herbarium specimens. Unfortunately, the shape is wrong. In reality, the hypochile is much shorter and broader, and the sidelobes are much broader. 3) There is hardly any herbarium material of C. stipitibulbum present, and it is in such poor condition that Seidenfaden couldn't draw the flower. Clayton's decision was thus based on a misleading drawing and a parsimonious description of a nearly-unknown species. The two species actually differ in their midlobes, keels and colours." Peter O'Byrne
Synonyms
References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ; Gard. Bull. Singapore 11:278 Holttum 1947; Flora of Malaya Vol 1 Orchids Holttum 1957; The Orchids of Penninsular Malaysia and Singapore, Seidenfaden & Wood 1992; The Genus Coelogyne A Synopsis, D A Clayton 2002 as syn of C radicosa; Wild Orchids of the Cameron Highlands REACH 2009 photo fide; Wild Orchids of Penninsular Malaysia Ong, O'Byrne, Yong & Saw 2011 photo fide; Les Coelogynes E & J George 2011 photo fide
-------------------------------------------------------
