Spathulate Vanda

Found in southern India and Sri Lanka in low brush as a large sized, hot to warm growing vine-like, scrambling terrestrial and as such is by itself in the genus. It's leaves have unequal lobes instead of the bitten off praemorse apex typical of the V tesselata group and the petals and sepals lack the clawed bases of typical Vandas and it blooms either in the fall or in the spring with flowers that may or may not have a scent.

This orchid also has successive flowers that take weeks to open in deference to the other Vandas that all open within a few days. In fact this species approaches Papilionanthe in this fact as well as it's viney growth habit in bushes. For that reason Christenson proposed Taprobanea to accomodate this intermediate species between Vanda and Papilionanthe. I have left it as a Vanda until more information becomes available.

At present this species is extremely rare. This was the first Vanda species ever described back in 1703 in the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus as Ponnampou-maravara, then in 1753 Linnaeus named it Epidendrum spathulatum, it did not get it's present name until 1826.

Synonyms Aerides maculata Buch.-Ham. ex Sm. 1818; Cymbidium spathulatum (L.) Moon 1824; *Epidendrum spathulatum L. 1753; Limodorum spathulatum (L.) Willd. 1805; Taprobanea spathulata (L.) Christenson 1992