I recently renewed my interest in orchids. Besides repotting the survivors of the plants I lost interest in four or five years ago, I got a few orchids from a niece and nephew who run a small nursery, but do not raise orchids themselves. There were four Dendrobiums. three of them are the fairly boring potted orchids that are almost always some kind of hybrid and will be impossible to identify, and that's OK. One of them is already blooming and the flower looks like it's going to be interesting.

The fourth plant is on what seems to be a piece of tree branch about ten inches or a foot long. This makes me believe it was gathered in the wild, which means there's a chance it could be a pure species, not a hybrid. My niece told me it never flowered for her, and she has a terrific green thumb. It is currently growing a new pseudobulb or cane, which is reddish in color now but surely will change to green as it grows. It has one cane about eighteen inches long that got bent at some time but seems to be surviving. There are eight or nine stubs where somebody cut off old canes. The thing that makes it interesting is the one full-grown cane. It's a full three feet long!

I know this isn't much to go on, but I think I saw a species like this described four or five years ago. I wondered if somebody might be pretty confident of knowing what species it is without a picture of the flower? To summarize: it's probably native to Thailand, probably the Northern part of the country; it's probably a species, not a hybrid; it's almost certainly a Dendrobium; and it has extraordinarily long canes.

If this doesn't ring a bell with anyone it's OK. I know it's almost impossible to identify a plant without a picture of a bloom. That's why I didn't bother uploading a picture yet. If it flowers I'll upload a picture, but except for the length of the cane there's nothing distinctive about it -- it looks just like every other Dendrobium I've raised.