Okay, fine, I know schomburgkias as a genus don’t exactly exist anymore1. But I still like how it rolls off my tongue, and besides, I bought the plant as schomburgkia rosea (Seller labelled it as splendida though, so I guess we’ll see when it flowers…).
Anyway.
A month back I received a schomburgkia rosea from a seller, and it was… overgrown. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something as terribly overgrown as this one.
There was fern growing in it, too!
So last Tuesday I set to work, deciding to cut it down to size. I’ve done it once, with a huge brassavola clump (that’s now slowly recovering and veeeery slowly growing), so I figure, why not?
First: remove from basket. Basket.
I didn’t have a cutter so I ended up using pliers. And I had to cut the basket open because the roots are overgrown. You can see some of the fern rhizome at the bottom and to the left of the plant. (Please ignore the messy table. I’m not very neat at plot).
Look at that mess! It’d been potted in I think wood chips, and it’s… a mess. Loads of dead root, and that’s 80% fern root. I really dislike fern-root now, because it a) gets everywhere, and b) actually can cut your fingers if you’re not careful. I’ve got marks on my thumb and index finger where they bit and cut into my skin. Fortunately, it’s mostly superficial.
I admit I was less careful, because a lot of the bottom bits were dead roots. So I pretty much indiscriminately cut away whatever I could, and extracted rhizomes and roots everywhere else. Those rhizomes are hard to get, I bent a pair of tweezers digging one out.
Behold the mess (ft one dried airplant). I removed almost all of the fern roots and the almost non-existent wood chips (the degradation of media was terrible, poor schomburgkia), as well as that incredibly annoying fern rhizome.
I should add that I actually cut it in several places several times, and it kept. on. growing. It’s worse than a hydra, one of the bits even started growing exactly where I cut it off. It’s just as bad as that hairy-creeper vine at the plot that needs to be exterminated.
The resulting divisions were much smaller, and I actually sub-divided one further. .
I repotted three of them into woodchips and a bit of charcoal (and forgot to water them, damnnit), these are the ones with a bit more growth and roots.
The rest of the divisions I brought back, because the largest in the picture (rightmost piece) was further divided into 2. They’ll be given away (two have already been claimed!) while I slowly let these two pots grow. Flowering might be a long way off though but hey, my macradenia just grew a new flower spike!
1: https://www.aos.org/orchids/orchids-a-to-z/letter-s/schomburgkia.aspx
Essentially Epiphytes by Gwen 