Living in a country that is very well known for its flower markets and exporting of both cut flowers, bulbs and complete plants, I often dont realize that for people living in the USA , getting flowers is not all that normal.
When I send my Missourian friend a bouquet of peach roses when she became 18 she said it where the first flowers she ever got.
What a lovely story elise, and what a GREAT way of your teacher to get the children in contact with orchids and to give them a sense of pride and resposibility to get the taking care of one of her orchids for a day.
Iam sure you did what you wrote and "googled" the Banana Orchid. I did the same and came up with this picture and a little description.Turns out to be the National Flower of The Cayman Islands. It's an orchid I never saw or read about, but with around 30,000 wild species that isn't a big surprise! Looking at the location of The Cayman Islands and reading the desciption, looking at the picture, Iam thinking strongly towards an orchid from the Genus(part of the Orchid Family...will explain in another Topic) Cattleya or Laelia.
Banana Orchid description:
Probably the best known of Cayman's 26 species of orchids is the wild banana orchid, of which there are two varieties:
Schomburgkia thomsoniana var. thomsoniana, which originated on Grand Cayman, and
Schomburgkia thomsoniana var. minor, which came from Cayman Brac and Little Cayman.
Both varieties have scented flowers with purple lips, although the petals are predominantly white on the Grand Cayman variety, while the Sister Islands' has slightly smaller flowers, with pale yellow petals. The flowers appear at the top of a long curved spike at the bottom of which cluster banana-like pseudo-bulbs that give this orchid its name.
