Location: Santa Clara Railroad Museum
1005 Railroad Avenue
Santa Clara, CA 95050

SETUP STARTS AT 7PM, MEETING AT 7:30PM HOWEVER TALK STARTS AT 7:30 SO COME EARLY/ON TIME!

Speaker

Tim Culbertson (remote presentation)

Speaker bio

Since I was young, one of my passions has always been plants. I began growing orchids in high school, and expanded my collection as an offshoot from working at Longwood Gardens in Philadelphia just after college. From the very beginning it was all about Paphs, particularly awarded and select clones of historic importance, of which my collection numbers in the thousands. While I love finding old, rare stepping stones in paph breeding, I also do a little hybridizing of my own, and growing and flowering my hybrids is very exciting.

I was once the youngest accredited judge with the American Orchid Society, and have been a judge now for 20 years; I have served in various capacities with various orchid societies in California and on the East Coast. Recently, I’ve partnered with Fred Clarke to greatly expand the selection of paphs at Sunset Valley Orchids through the acquisition of significant parts of Sam Tsui’s collection at Orchid Inn. I currently manage the Paphs at SVO, and do hybridizing in a wide range of genera including Cattleya, Catasetinae and Masdevallia. I love meeting other people who like orchids too, and doing so often finds me traveling to shows, vendors, and peoples’ greenhouses to see the latest and greatest in new hybrids and species. I like to be involved in plants as much as possible: in addition to Longwood, I’ve worked at the Smithsonian Institution tending to their orchids, and for years for the United States National Arboretum, collecting rare non-orchid plants and documenting cultivated species and hybrids for their herbarium. In short, I really like plants of all kinds.

For your meeting, I’ll be sharing a presentation on Encyclias of Mexico and Beyond. These spectacular cattleya relatives grow well outside in subtropical climates like Southern California and much of Florida. With their compact habit, great fragrance, and ease of growth, these are delightful plants for every collection. By extending the traditional definition of Encyclias to include recently separated groups like Anacheilum, Panarica, Prosthechea, Euchile, and others that I and many of you grew up calling Encyclia, we end up with a diverse, beautiful, fragrant, exciting group of plants and flowers; if we add those to the wonderful flora of Mexico and Central America, we have a group that every collector should grow. By the end of this presentation, you will have a new appreciation of the range of plant habits, floral forms, and fragrances of Encyclia broadly, as well as an appreciation of their lovely flowers and ease-of-growth.

Plant table

The Leo Kusber donation plants will be utilized for the plant table.