The Orchid Society of Great Britain

Cattleyas -
a pictorial guide to identification
Henry Oakeley
Cattleyas have always been the Queen of
Orchids, with their large, colourful, fragrant
flowers, beloved by florists for corsages in
the 1950-60s. Huge nurseries around the
world, particularly in the USA, were set up to
cater for the demand for cut flowers.
Cattleyas are stimulated to flower by
decreasing day length, so by careful
manipulation of screens and opaque shading
it was possible to trigger flowering twice a
year to coincide with Easter, Mother’s Day
and/or Thanksgiving. With good growing
conditions cattleyas make specimen plants
very quickly.
The genus Cattleya was described by John
Lindley, in Collecteana Botanica t.33, in 1824, in
honour of his employer, William Cattley. It had
been collected in Pernambuco, Brazil by the
A specimen plant of Cattleya mossiae – very popular as a cut flower for corsages
230 • OSGBJ 2010 (59), No. 4
naturalist William Swainson. It is to Arthur
Chadwick, whose family have been growing
cattleyas since 1989 that we owe the
information that it was not collected in the
Organ Mountains near Rio de Janeiro, and that
the story that it came as packing material for
other plants being imported is a myth
(http://www.chadwickorchids.com/mythma
ker) invented by Frederick Boyle in his 1893
book, About Orchids – A Chat. Swainson had
sent the plants he had collected to the
Glasgow Botanic Gardens, from whence
some had been sent to Cattley, who
flowered them first.
The flowers last about three weeks. The
plants (to my eye) are rather ungainly things
with their tall canes which flop about if not
carefully staked. When in flower they are