What Happens When a Plant Is Copied for Centuries

I have been spending the past few weeks buried in my research notes, and I keep circling back to the same thought. It amazes me how the orchid, a plant that began its story in the shadow of dinosaurs, managed to slip so gracefully into the hands of medieval scribes. Every time I trace its path from Rome into the early Middle Ages, I feel as though I am watching a fragile thread of memory being carried across a darkened landscape. Somehow it never breaks.

Satyrion (orchid) from Pseudo‑Apuleius Herbarium,
British Library Harley MS 1585, folio 39r. Early 11th century.

When the orchid finally reached Rome, it was already carrying centuries of meaning. Its story did not stop there. As the empire began to fall apart, the orchid slipped into a quieter world. Not the noise of markets or the press of crowds, but stone rooms, low lamplight, and the soft rhythm of a quill moving across a page.

The more I sit with this part of its journey, the more amazed I am that the orchid survived it at all. After the Western Empire collapsed in the fifth century, the great medical libraries that once supported scholars began to thin out. Cities grew smaller. Trade routes weakened. The physicians who once read Dioscorides in busy port towns now lived in places where books were rare and often worn from travel or age. Yet the orchid did not disappear.

From Cretaceous Forests to Classical Medicine - The Early Story of the Orchid

To understand how the orchid appeared to the physicians of Rome, we must first travel back through the immense silence of deep time, to an age long before any human hand reached for a root or attempted to name a flower. The orchid had already witnessed entire worlds rise and fall, surviving eras dominated by creatures far more formidable than anything alive today. Its history is one of extraordinary resilience, carrying it from a planet ruled by scales and feathers into the earliest chapters of human civilization. When we look at an orchid now, we are looking at a survivor whose journey began in the shadow of giants, a plant that endured ecological catastrophes that erased species far more dominant than itself.

An illustration showing what the Late Cretaceous
landscape may have looked like in regions where early orchids could survive.

Orchids, Honey, and the North Carolina Mountains: A Weekend at the Arboretum

They say timing is everything, but in my world it’s usually a toss‑up between plants and history. Last year, I fully intended to make it to the Asheville orchid show, and then the SCA called. A friend was receiving a major award, and honestly, that’s one of the few things that can pull me away from a room full of blooms.

Fast forward to a few weekends ago, and the stars finally aligned. Lorelei and I loaded up for our very first road trip together, heading west to meet up with Carol.

For someone who spends so much time hovering over my Milsbo and Rudsta cabinets, tweaking humidity levels for my “indoor jungle,” it’s funny that I had never been to the North Carolina

Rooted in Community: My New Role Supporting the Triad Orchid Society

They say that once you buy your first orchid, you don’t just gain a plant; you gain a lifelong obsession. For me, that obsession led me straight to the Triad Orchid Society. What started as a simple quest to keep a few garden center rescues alive has blossomed into a collection of over 50 specimens and a deep dive into the science of orchid care.

If you’ve spent any time in my grow room, you know that I don’t just "water and hope." I love a good system. My home is a laboratory where horticulture meets high-tech; I manage my collection within specialized IKEA Milsbo and Rudsta cabinets, outfitted with environmental sensors to monitor every degree of temperature and percentage of humidity. I’ve even written custom scripts to track my collection's health and blooming cycles, always looking for ways to help things grow more efficiently.

Alchemy at the Kitchen Sink: Mixing the Perfect Orchid Tonic

If you walked into my kitchen this afternoon, you would have found me in a very specific, very 21st‑century state of mind: standing over a bucket with a 16‑in‑1 test strip in one hand and a bag of MSU fertilizer in the other. There’s something almost clinical about it, waiting for those tiny squares to bloom into color so I can calculate exactly what I’m feeding my orchids and houseplants.

But as the “hardness” pad turned its deep, stubborn purple, my mind drifted away from the chemistry in front of me and back toward the medieval herbals I’ve been studying. It struck me that while I’m obsessing over modern reagents, a 12th‑century gardener was doing the same essential work; they just called it searching for the “soul” of the water. For them, the watering can wasn’t a tool of measurement, it was a tool of alchemy.

A Tale of Two Faucets: My Journey to the Perfect Orchid Water

Ever since I started my vast collection of orchids, and maintaining my collection of houseplants, I have just been using the water that comes from our tap with fertilizer occasionally mixed in, to water all of my plants.  After attending some Orchid Society meetings and talking with others, I decided to see how our water rated as far as PH, Hardness and minerals go.

As plant enthusiasts, we talk a lot about light, humidity and the perfect potting medium, but we rarely seem to think about the quality of our water and how it can affect our plants.  We all think water is just water, right?  That's what I thought for the longest time.

To give you a little background on my setup: when our house was originally built, it relied entirely on well water. Eventually, the municipal lines moved into our area, and we switched over to city water for our everyday use. However, we decided to keep the well active as a supplement. For a long time, the well was just "there," but as my collection grew, I started wondering if I was sitting on a hidden resource... or a hidden problem. This led me to my kitchen counter with a water testing kit and a mission to see which faucet my orchids actually preferred.

I went on Amazon and got a 16-1 testing kit: Varify 17in1 Complete Drinking Water Test Kit - 100 Strips + 2 Bacteria Tester Kits and decided to run a couple of tests on our water to see what the results would be.

I started the test with our tap water.

(As a side note: The colors on the test strips don't always convey accurately in the photos, but they were very distinct in person!)

Bite-Sized Botany: Visualizing the Orchid Management System

If you’ve spent any time on the Orchid Collection page of the main site lately, you’ve likely seen the Greenhouse Dashboards I've built. While it might look like just another registry, it’s actually the heartbeat of my collection. It serves as a custom-built digital twin of my greenhouse, bridging the gap between raw data and the actual daily care of my plants.

https://www.thepottedhistorian.com/home

New Name, Same Roots: Welcome to The Potted Historian

If you’ve noticed a bit of "dust" on the digital shelves lately, it’s because I’ve been busy digging.

For a long time, this blog served as a digital greenhouse journal, a quiet space to record the slow unfurling of a new bloom or the steep learning curves that come with managing a collection of over 50 specimens. It was about the moss, the humidity levels, and the tactile joy of watching a new root tip push through the medium.

But as my research into the history of orchids grew, I realized that I’m not just growing plants; I am living alongside a history that stretches back centuries, to the first-century woodcuts of Dioscorides and the Materia Medica.

Why "The Potted Historian"?

The Root of the Matter: Why We Call Them Orchids

Walk through a greenhouse today and you’re hit with a wall of blooms so delicate they feel almost impossible. Like most growers, I’ve spent years obsessing over the symmetry of my plants and those architectural petals that seem to just drift on the air. But lately, my research into pre-16th-century herbals has changed how I look at them. I've realized that for a Renaissance scholar, the "beauty" of the flower was really just a side note. To them, the real story was happening down in the dirt.

The title page of Andrés de Laguna’s 1555 edition of Dioscorides. A stunning example of the leather-bound book that defined botanical history and the anatomical origins of the word orchid.

Phragmipedium x roethianum

 

Phragmipedium × roethianum has one of those quiet, interesting histories that makes you appreciate it even more once you know the backstory. It’s a natural hybrid that showed up in the wild long before anyone officially put a name to it, popping up in the parts of Ecuador where longifolium and hirtzii overlap and apparently decided to mingle. Growers and field botanists had been spotting these

Orchid Documentation Automation: Because Copy/Paste Wasn’t Cutting It

Lately, I’ve been diving into scripting at work.  Real, hands-on automation that makes you think about structure, edge cases, and keeping things maintainable over time. And being the nerd that I am with a hobby I love, my first thought was: I can totally use this for my orchids!

What started as a simple spreadsheet to track my plants has evolved into a fully automated, modular, and surprisingly elegant system for managing both my Orchid Inventory Workbook and my Keiki Inventory Workbook. It’s become a sandbox for everything I’ve been learning... cleaner logic, better data handling, helper functions, and workflows are smooth as butter.  Learning JavaScript has been a bit daunting at times but having a background with HTML

A Long Overdue Update: A Goodbye I Wasn’t Ready For

My Galeopetalum Starburst Parkside has bloomed!

Hello, my dear readers!

I am a bit late in posting because life has gotten in the way, but I'm happy to report that my Galeopetalum Starburst Parkside has bloomed. The first bud opened up on February 10th and since then, the remaining seven have completely opened up. Every morning when I open my office door, it smells so good because of the scent that the flowers provide.

One of my First Scented Orchids is About to Bloom Again!

When I was down in Florida last April visiting with friends and family, I made a stop by an orchid shop in Orlando called City Oasis (P.S. if you are ever in the area, go check them out!)  On that trip, I purchased two orchids, both very new to me and very fragrant.  I purchased a Galeopetalum Starburst Parkside and a Coconut Orchid (Maxillaria tenufolia).  I was super excited to add these two unique orchids to my collection.  

The Galeopetalum, we'll just call it Starburst for the duration of this post, has bloomed a total of two times since I brought it home back in April.  It has been thriving in the environment I have set up for it and it's so happy, it's about to bloom again for a third time!  When in bloom, it has bright spotted green and purple blooms.  To describe the smell of these blooms, to me, it's a bit sweet and spicy; it's definitely unique in its fragrance.

an image sourced online of the blooms

Thinking Outside.... the Pot?

When I was in Norfolk the other weekend visiting the orchid grower's greenhouse, we got into a discussion about Keikis.  (Keikis are the baby orchid plant that grows from a mature orchid's flower stem or pseudobulb - I have a couple of posts under the topic of Keiki) I happily showed him photos of my Keikis and how some of them either were in full bloom or would be blooming soon.  One of the things he suggested to me was to take a small pot with orchid bark mix in it and set it on a shelf with the keiki roots in it, above the mother plant so that when it came time to cut the keiki from the mother, the keiki wouldn't go through "shock" as bad, since the keiki plant would already be used to the environment of its roots being nestled down in orchid bark.

What is... An Epiphyte

The Encyclopedia Brittanica describes an epiphyte (pronounced: "ep-uh-fight") as a type of plant that lives on another plant or object just for support.  Some common types of epiphytes are orchids, air plants, mosses such as Spanish moss, ferns like Staghorn and Birds Nest ferns, bromeliads, hoyas and others.   For this post, we'll focus on orchids.

an example of an epiphyte orchid attached to a tree in its natural habitat

Goes to an SCA Event, Makes a Side Quest for Orchids

This past weekend there was an event called Twelfth Night, for my medieval reenactor group, in Newport News Virginia.  Last week while I was planning my route to get there, I was looking at Google maps and seeing what all was along my route, like covered bridges or orchid suppliers.  Needless to say, there weren't any covered bridges, but I found an orchid supplier in Norfolk Virginia.  The supplier was a vendor at the Triangle Orchid Show this past September in Raleigh; I had bought two orchids from him while I was at the show.  I reached out to them via email after looking at their website and falling in love with one of their unique orchids.  We coordinated plans for me to visit their greenhouse, pending weather.

Um, hello gorgeous!

Phalaenopsis Joy Fairy Tale

New Series Coming: What is __________?

 Good morning and Happy New Years!

I hope everyone made it through the holidays with their hearts filled with joy and love :-)

The progress on my Ikea cabinets for my plants is progressing, although I'm getting close to being complete.  It's been a learning experience for sure, but I'm glad that I can finally put my plants on display and enjoy them.

new buds on another one of my Phals

A quick update on the book I got from an Inter-Library Loan: 

Getting Through the Holiday, Blooms and New Projects

It is now the final Friday of the year and I have some exciting news to share!

When I went to open my office door on Christmas morning, I checked on my orchid that had the keiki that had the blooms on it.  On December 18th, I had predicted that that orchid would bloom in about two weeks.  Much to my surprise, one of the buds was slowly opening up on Christmas morning.  Since I couldn't remember what color the blooms were on this particular orchid, it was exciting to see such a lovely surprise.  By the next day, the flower had fully openend.  The other buds on the orchid are progressively getting bigger, so I will have more blooms over the coming weeks.

Looking for Books and Other Related Musings

 I haven't compiled enough research yet to make another solid post on my findings, but I've been searching around for books, articles and other types of media regarding the history of orchids and their uses.  The other night, I happened across a "sample" of a book online that looked interesting but it didn't give me enough information to make an informed opinion on whether it could be used or not for my endeavors.

I used WorldCat which is a global catalog of library materials online to search for the book I found the sample on.  In North Carolina, there was only one place listed that had this book on its shelves and that was NC State.  Even though this book was on a topic I'm interested in, I didn't want to purchase the book only for it to not have the information I am looking for, for my research project.  The book itself, is a moderate expense and while I do love my books (glances over at my bookshelves), I have become a bit selective on what books I purchase.