The UK’s lockdown came in a few weeks after our first (and only) Open Day on the 6th March last year. Although we couldn’t welcome any visitors after that nor attend any shows during 2020, it has been a very busy year. Jim Durrant has done an amazing job with the plants from Chris Purver and EYOF which arrived in July 2019 and these have been supplemented by a further shipment from EYOF late in 2020. Chris and the EYOF have been great partners and these plants form an extraordinary foundation for our collection. Over the year, we have also added oncidiums from Ecuador and Colombia and we now have a good group of the original species. Furthermore, Sara at Burnham’s kindly provided a number of the key breeding plants that her family have developed over the years. Finally, the Eden Project decided to shut down their orchid collection and their cool-growing plants are now in our glasshouses.

 

As can be imagined, these plants have now filled up our first two greenhouses but we are going to substantially increase our growing area in 2021. We should be fitting out a new glasshouse with stacked LEDs for our seedling program and for the miltoniopsis collection, while moving all of our cymbidiums into a separate greenhouse. This should give us plenty of space for the breeding program as well as expanding the amount of room for the oncidium seedlings that we already have.

 

We would very much like to have welcomed the Orchid Committee to our greenhouses at the end of January but this now seems very difficult given the National Lockdown. If COVID-19 conditions do improve before the end of the flowering season, we will try to arrange another date.