Oncidium altissimum (Jacq.) Sw.

• Title

  Oncidium altissimum (Jacq.) Sw.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Oncidium altissimum (Jacq.) Sw.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Oncidium altissimum Long Yellow Orchid Family Orchidaceae Orchid Family Epidendrum altissimum Jacquin, Enumeratio Systematica Plantarum 30. 1760 Oncidium altissimum Swartz, Vetenskaps Akademiens nya Handlingar 21: 240. 1800. Oncidium Baueri Lindley, in Bauer, Illustrations of Orchids, plate7. 1830. This is one of the most elegant and conspicuous orchids of our Flora, producing greatly elongated clusters of yellow or yellow-brown, rather large flowers much longer than the narrow leaves; these flower-clusters, together with the slender stem (scape) on which they are borne, may attain a length of about 4 meters. The plant is often taken to gardens, and is much less abundant than it was formerly, it grows naturally on trees and rocks at lower and middle elevations in moist parts of Porto Rico, inhabits the Lesser Antilles from Guadeloupe to Grenada, and is widely distributed in continental tropical America; races of it differ from each other in the color, mottling and size of the flowers. Oncidium (Greek, referring to the tubercled lip of the flower), a genus established by Swartz in 1800, includes some 400 species of tropical and subtropical American orchids, mostly epiphytic, some large, many kinds small, their leaves various, their showy, or small flowers loosely clustered. The 3 sepals are nearly alike, and the petals resemble them; the usually 3-lobed lip of the flower is crested, or tubercled; the column is short, and winged; the inclined anther is convex, or subglobose. The fruit is a beaked capsule. Oncidium altissimum (very tall, or long) has oblong, flattened and 2-edged pseudobulbs from 7 to 15 centimeters long, each bearing 1 or 2 narrow, pointed leaves from 25 to 65 centimeters long, and from 2 to 7 centimeters wide. The elongated, round scape is branched above the middle, the branches bearing few or several flowers, with pointed bracts from 5 to 20 millimeters long, the individual yellow or yellow-brown flowers on stalks 10 to 15 millimeters long; the oblong, pointed sepals are from 10 to 18 millimeters long, the somewhat narrower petals about as long; the quadrangular-obovate lip is about 15 millimeters long, its middle lobe much larger than the lateral ones. There are three other Oncidiums in the Porto Rico Flora.