Dendrobium sulcatum and fimbriatum var. oculatum
I love big bright yellow flowers, they really cheer me up (I even think dandelions are beautiful ... which is just as well because I have an awful infestation of them in the front garden this year ), so it's no wonder I have almost every single yellow dendrobium species there is under the sun.
The first two pictures are of Dendrobium sulcatum, which is a pendant species with interesting flat pseudobulbs. It belongs to section Callista and is related to species such as Den. chrysotoxum, densiflorum, thyrsiflorum, lindleyi and jenkinsii. The flowers are rather short lived and only last about about a week, but each pseudobulb blooms several times over a number of years, unlike those of nobile-type dendrobiums, which have pseudobulbs that only bloom once.
The third picture shows a spike of Dendrobium fimbriatum var. oculatum. This is quite an imposing species with its huge canes and long racemes of yellow flowers, so it's not for everybody as an adult plant needs a lot of room (the canes can grow to 6 feet or more). My plant is still quite young (I bought it as a seedling) and this is only the second time it's flowered, but it already has 2 flower spikes (old canes continue to produce spikes for many years), so I'm looking forward to even more next year.
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I've lusted after Den. hookerianum for a few years now, but it's difficult to find one and my greenhouse has reached maximum capacity, so I don't have space for another "monster plant" like this one. It grows to the same size if not larger than Den. fimbriatum (6-7 feet = 1.8-2.1 m) but is completely pendulous with thin canes that can't be kept upright. Den. fimbriatum canes are upright until they reach 2 to 3 feet (30-60 cm) and then they also start to lean and hang, but it's easy to keep them upright with a few stakes, so the plant doesn't actually occupy that much room sideways. To allow for the full length of the Den. hookerianum canes I would have to grow it in a basket or mount right in the top of the gable of the greenhouse so it can hang all the way down to the floor. The really interesting thing about Den. hookerianum is that its canes continue to grow for at least 2 seasons (all other dendrobiums that I know of have canes that only grow for a single season) and even more interesting than that is that they can bloom during each of those seasons rather than when they have finally reached full length, which would be the normal thing for a dendrobium.
