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