Orchid care for beginners

Orchids are the most popular plants in the UK, but can be surprisingly difficult to care
for. Fake-orchid fan Huma Qureshi learns how to look after the real thing

In pictures: 10 of the best orchids and orchid-inspired buys

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Artificial orchids can look very convincing, like this one

from M&S, but real ones are even better.
Plant lovers, I have a confession to make. My first orchid was a fake.
It still is, in fact: it never died, and it sits, in all its lilac artificialness, on my
bedroom window in my parents' house. It's a realistic fake, though, which I
begged my mum to buy for me when I was 13. It's potted in a clear, square
vase with pebbles around it. Very Zen. Besides, it's lasted 15 years, which
is more than I can say for my real orchids.
When I moved into my new flat last year, I picked up a pale
purplephalaenopsis orchid for about £5 from Ikea, chose a simple white
ceramic pot for it, and placed it on my white glossy sideboard next to a
turquoise vase with a cherry blossom trail on it. Again, very Zen.
It did marvellously and reflowered twice. So I bought another one, in a
deeper, velvety shade of purple.
But it was disastrous: tall, spindly, and slightly menacing. Every night when
I came home from work, I found the floor strewn with decaying flower
heads. The stem slowly turned an unhealthy shade of yellow. It was dead
within a fortnight.
A month ago, I tried again. This time, I chose a very pretty white
phalaenopsis pinned all the way round into an arch. It, too, died. Within a
week the fleshy leaves started to whither and, weirdly, turn a bit mushy.
Time to call in the experts. What was I doing wrong?
"It's very hard to kill an orchid!" said a spokeswoman from the Flowers and
Plants Association, making me out to be some sort of orchid murderer.
But I am not alone. "Orchids have a reputation for being a challenge to look
after," says Simon Richards, a product developer for flowers and plants at
Marks & Spencer, who sympathises greatly with my orchid ordeal. "They
are tropical plants, and it's hard to replicate those conditions at home."
Richards says a good orchid, raised in the right conditions (room
temperature, not less than 16.5C) should last eight weeks with flowers,
after which the blooms will slowly start dropping off (perfectly naturally)
from the bottom up. It will eventually re-flower.
Like most pretty things, they are a little high-maintenance and a bit picky:
they like light, but only north-facing; they hate draughts; and they only like
soft water. Never, ever cut the aerial roots off (the slightly greying roots
curling around the top - apparently some people don't like the look of
them), and never, ever remove them from the original plastic pots they've
been rooted in.
"If you live in a hard water area, use cooled boiled water from the kettle,"
says Richards. "Either water them once a week with an eggcup-sized
amount of soft water, or stand your orchid in a bucket and drench
completely with soft water to replicate a tropical rain shower - let it soak for
a minute in enough water to cover the compost. But don't let any water sit
in the area where the leaves cross over [if it does, dab away with tissue]."
While the flowers are in bloom, keep the stems pinned to the sticks they
are supplied with for support.
Every node (the little triangular etch) on the stem is a potential new bloom.
Once all the flowers fall off, trim the stem all the way down, just above the
very lowest node, and cut diagonally. "This will help to stimulate new
growth, hopefully a new flower stem," says Richards.
It's ideal to put cut-down orchids in a conservatory or greenhouse to
encourage reflowering; failing that, a north-facing windowsill will do. Keep
watering weekly, and you should see a new stem coming through. And
that, says Richards, is that.
"Some people just have a knack for reflowering," he says, although I'm not
sure I really believe him. My Ikea iris is in the process of reflowering yet
again, and I'm sure it isn't down to my "knack" at all. Still, maybe there's
hope for this former faker yet.