Cynorkis lilacina?

Happy New Year to All!

I made and ate Udon (from scratch) for New Year's Eve, which is somewhat traditional food for the new year's eve in my home town (Kagawa, Japan). For New year's day, I ate home-made Anko Mochi (rice cake with red-bean paste), which is traditional food to eat for the new year's day in the western Japan. Even though the source to get foreign food is limited in Alaska, we manage to eat somewhat traditional food from the commonly available ingredients. If interested, I wrote up a step-by-step recipe to make Udon a couple years ago.

Going back to orchids, this one is imported as Cynorkis lilacina from Malala via Botanica Ltd. in July 2015. There aren't much information I can find about Cynorkis in general, and I'm not sure if it is the correct identification or not. I appreciate if anyone has an opinion about the ID.

Because of the change from Southern to Northern hemisphere, I guess that it flowered in out-of-season. Link to my blog post with more photos.


Cynorkis lilacina? on Flickr


Cynorkis lilacina? inflorescence on Flickr


Cynorkis lilacina? plant on Flickr

I love udon, especially with ebi tempura on top! Thank you for the link to your recipe. Very detailed and informative! I think I'll try it myself some day. Is Anko Mochi the same as Daifuku? It sounds very similar.

I can't hep you on the orchid ID. I've never heard of this genus before. But it's very pretty and delicate.

lovely pastel colour with an almost crystalline overlay.

Sweet, great photo. I'll look around, maybe with a Chinese vendor, to see if there is any info. Thanks for sharing.

great flower and pics! i've heard of cynorchis but that's about it

Very pretty little flower.

That is cute. Thanks for the how to on the udon

Hamlet said:

I love udon, especially with ebi tempura on top! Thank you for the link to your recipe. Very detailed and informative! I think I'll try it myself some day. Is Anko Mochi the same as Daifuku? It sounds very similar.

I can't hep you on the orchid ID. I've never heard of this genus before. But it's very pretty and delicate.

Click to expand...

I thought Daifuku is slightly different, but I didn't know the difference, so I had to google. Daifuku(-mochi) seems to be a kind of Anko-mochi (same ingredients, but slightly different methods of preparation?), but I'm still not completely clear about the difference. In my experience, the outside part (rice cake) is much softer with Daifuku, and Daifuku is sweeter because the proportion of bean paste is large compared to Anko-mochi. In my impression, Daifuku is a little more "elegant", and anko-mochi is more "country/rural".

Marni Turkel has an excellent article about Cynorkis in the first volume of Orchid Journal International (the 1st volume is available for free). And my plant is definitely miss-ID'd and not C. lilacina.

Johan Hermans is pretty sure this is Cynorkis baronii (Johan has helped me before, and he is always extremely helpful, thank you!). I was going to change the title of this post and edit, but it seems that I can't edit it any more. I did edit the blog post, and added a bit of update.

The autonomously self-fertilized fruits got matured after 1 month (extremely fast), and the leaves died back in the spring. In Sept 2016, leaves started to emerge. I repotted in Oct 4, 2016 and here is how it looks like:


One additional tuber, and 1 new mystery seedling (right). The new seedling started to grow much earlier (sometime in the summer). I was thinking that it would be connected to the original plant, but it appears to be a new seedling grown from a seed! The fruits dehisced a little before my collection of the fruits in Feb. In retrospect, I think I removed a couple of those from neighboring pots because I thought they were weeds! Big bummer. But it is amazing that how quickly it grew to this size(only 8 months after the fruit dehiscence)!

I noticed the link to the blog post was screwed up in the original post. Here is the correct link.

Cool.. Good luck, keep us posted.

The offspring from self-fertilization of the original plant flowered this fall! So the generation time (flower to flower) is only 1 year and 9 month. Very rapid for orchids. The seeds seem to germinate and grow without flasking, I'll try cardboard propagation (if I don't forget harvesting the seeds). If anyone is interested in trying, please let me know. I'll try to share the extra seeds (for free or trade with some other seeds). The original parent is going to flower soon, so we'll have seeds from 2 plants. I can't promise 100% because I might forget to harvest like the last time.

Can a moderator (Dot?) possibly change the title of this thread to "Cynorkis baronii"?


Cynorkis baronii on Flickr


Cynorkis baronii by Naoki Takebayashi, on Flickr


Cynorkis baronii (inflorescence) on Flickr


Cynorkis baronii (leaves) on Flickr

So stunningly beautiful photographs.
Is this Cynorkis a proto-carnivorous plant?

Haha, well, I don't know the function of the glandular trichomes. Orchids have achieved fungi-vory (well, myco-heterotrophic) but haven't reached to carnivory yet!

Pretty little flower congrats