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A Little Secret
7 July 2026
Somehow we've found ourselves continually dealing with orchids. Apparently they are ideal hospital gifts. And we've tended a lot of hospitalized people lately so we end up bringing home a lot of orchids.
It never occurs to the visitors that the patient is in no condition to care for the orchids. And they themselves don't return regularly enough to even water them.
Anyway, being stuck with them, we researched them, starting with the care instructions.
Go light on the watering. Once a week, just a bit. Or, better, let one ice cube melt in there once a month. They really don't want much water.
The flowers last a long time so it's disconcerting to see them start to dry out and fall off. You are tempted to water more. But no. Don't.
It's natural. They bloom, they die.
But then what?
Well, you prune. And sometimes you get a second bloom. But they you have to cut the stalk all the way down to the base. And wait for the next stalk to grow. Once a year.
So the flowers on our white and magenta orchids, which we've photographed before, have all dried out and fallen off. The little magenta ones first. And just recently the last of the big white ones.
We trimmed the magenta flower stalks back a bit and saw a little new growth but we completely missed seeing a new stalk of the white ones. The stalk the flowers had bloomed on turned yellow, though, so we pruned it back to that new growth.
All of which sounds like a dance to no music, but thanks to discovering that little secret about pruning, we're about to enjoy the second flowering of the white orchid.
So we took a picture.
Then the thought occurred to us that you really shouldn't listen photographers who just talk about photography. Cameras, lenses, software, paper, printers, all that stuff.
Because that's not what photography is about.
It's about orchids.
By which we mean, it's about what we experience as we live our lives. It's life that matters. It's what we experience.
Or we'd never be tempted to take a picture.