Dendrobium bowmanii
A pencil-leaved orchid from eastern Australia and New Caledonia, also treated as Dockrillia bowmanii. It has thin, wiry, straggly stems up to 60 cm long and fleshy cylindrical leaves. It grows on trees, and sometimes rocks, in dry rainforest and coastal scrub rather than wet rainforest. Mount it, give it bright light and strong air movement, and let it dry quickly with a drier, cooler winter.
Where it grows wild
It grows as an epiphyte, sometimes on rocks, in dry rainforest, vine thicket and coastal scrub at lower elevations. Its stems spread or hang and root only at the base. The terete, water-storing leaves show it is adapted to fairly exposed perches that dry out between rains. It sometimes hybridises with Dendrobium cucumerinum where the two overlap.
Recorded elevations run from 0 to 1020 m, with a median of 400 m (80 records). NSW PlantNET describes it as a plant of lower-elevation dry rainforest.
🔒 Growing it like that
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More Dendrobium
Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, used under its CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, unmodified.