The Writhlington Orchid Project

Well the tropical weather of Durban is a distant memory and the great new friends we made are 6000 miles away. We will never forget the amazing time we had but it’s back to work in the Writhlington Labs. Here we are at Tuesday’s Lab Club, sowing seed of Epidendrum radicans (the pod split in the school greenhouse [...]

We have had an amazing day again in Durban. It started with a trip to the West Park School in Malvern on the outskirts of the city. We started with a school assembley where Simon and Lauren talked to the school. We then had a tour of the impressive permaculture work that the school is [...]

In the workshop Zoe B was teaching people how to replate seedlings. These are the plants that we brought all the way from England. By the end of the day the workshops had made more than a hundred jars of sown seed or replated seedlings, wow. All the jars will stay at the Botanic Garden [...]

Wednesday was workshop day at the Durban Congress. We gave two long workshops on orchid growing from seed. It went amazingly well with groups of 16 and 17 people and they all loved it. Here Zoe P is working with two of the people and showing how to surface sterlise the seed. The people at [...]

This is 6am at the Durban Botanic Gardens with Chris Dalzell the Curator. Chris gave us a fabulous tour of the whole Gardens including the Cycad collection which is where we are in the photo. The Garden also has amazing birds like Pelican and Vervet Monkey. Today we are giving our workshops on orchid propagation [...]

Eulophia speciosa is one of the orchids that Margaret grows from seed in her lab and here it is flowering in the growing house. We like it. The trip around the growing area was realy inspiring and tomorrow we are getting up at 5.30 to have a special tour from Chris the Curator of the [...]