OrchidSafari ARCHIVES*

Fleur asked me in the last chat to send her information about equitant and mule ear Oncidiums since the terms are not used in her area. I'll get to that and all can share, but let me tell you of the search.

I went back through thirty years of oncidium literature and the terms "equitant" and "mule ear" appeared regularly. Authors like Rebecca Northen, Carl Withner and W. W. G. Moir used them freely, though Goodale preferred "Variegata Oncidiums" for the group and wrote a distinguished monograph with wife May on the subject.

Problem: no one defined the term "equitant" as it is used with these plants. Knowing what you don't know is half the battle, so I called "Lady Equitant", Anita Aldrich, disguised my voice and told her I was a student judge doing my homework. She asked, "what is it, Ed?" so the ploy didn't save my embarrassment. Her answer did. When I asked what really is an equitant, she told me she had never really thought about it. We all just KNOW what an equitant oncidium is and we can all recognize one as far as we can see it. But try to describe it over the telephone (Wright's acid test for things taxonomic) and you hit a stump. Anita and I finally agreed it is a descriptive term relating to the fan shaped growth habit and the arrangement of the leaves, rather than any characteristic of the flowers. Classically, equitant refers to a "folded in the middle look" in which the halves of an item mirror each other. Many flowers do this but very few plants do it. Even fewer plant groups have the characteristic, so it is an adequate ready description of the type. Back to square one, it is essentially a slang term that is widely understood among aficionados but as remote in definition as most slang terms such as "cool", "groovy", "hip" and all the other gibberish intelligible only to the young.

There is a lesson here, and a great credit due to Fleur: if you would truly learn, ask the basic question. You may come pretty close to stumping the experts and you will surely teach us all, novice and elder, the value of understanding each step of the way. Thank you, Fleur, for a lot of people who have had to go back and study something everybody knows!

Re mule ears, I don't want to talk about it. Years ago, I was judging a show with a group that included perhaps the world's leading authority on Mexican and Central American species. We came upon Oncidium morenoi, which was a relatively new introduction at the time. A clerk or student asked what it was and I said it was the juvenile form of Oncidium carthagenense and if you fed it raw hamburger meat it would grow up to be that robust species. There was stunned silence for about thirty seconds and then I believe I learned more differences between morenoi and carthagenense than Kew Gardens will ever catalog.

Regardless of how you learn, the mule ears are a great group because they grow easily and put out an abundance of flowers. The group is characterized by long, rather narrow foliage shaped very much like a mule's ear. There may be a small pseudobulb at the base of the leaf as in O. splendidum, but this is the exception. Size ranges from O. pumilum with its hoard of tiny yellow flowers to O. Mem. Pepita de Restrepo with leaves over a meter in length and spikes up to 3 meters in length. Until the popularity of equitants, O. Dr. Schragen (splendidum X lanceanum), a mule ear, was the most awarded oncidium.

Guess that comes down to equitant and mule ear are imprecise terms describing foliage characteristics in some of our most popular oncidiums. Thank you Fleur, I enjoyed looking into this and I learned something new along the way.