The Orchids That Died Politely, One Leaf at a Time

Forty Years of Quiet Shelves

I was a school librarian in Pretoria for thirty-four years. If you want to know what kind of person that makes you, it is the kind who likes things labelled, who reads the instructions before opening the box, and who believes most problems can be solved by looking them up properly. When I retired, my husband Gert and I sold our townhouse in Lynnwood and bought a small piece of land outside Hartbeespoort, with a view of the Magaliesberg, a borehole, a slightly tired cottage and a long tin shed that the estate agent called a workshop.

I did not want a workshop. I wanted a greenhouse. For twenty years I had grown orchids on a narrow enclosed balcony in Lynnwood, mostly Phalaenopsis at first, then Cymbidiums, then a few fussy Dendrobiums I was secretly very proud of. I had forty-three pots by the time we moved. I had names for some of them, which I will not share here because Gert already teases me enough.

The Shed Becomes Something Else

Gert, bless him, spent our first winter turning half the tin shed into a growing room. He put in shade cloth, a second-hand misting system and a row of slatted benches made from old pallets. I moved my orchids in during August, one tray at a time, carrying them from the bakkie the way you would carry sleeping babies. I hung a thermometer, a hygrometer and a small whiteboard where I wrote watering days in red marker.

I remember standing in there the first evening, with the light going orange over the mountains, and thinking that I had never been happier in my life.

The First One

The first plant to go was a Cymbidium I had grown from a division my sister gave me in 2009. In October the tips of its leaves started to brown. Not dramatically. Just a neat brown line at the end of each leaf, as if someone had dipped them in tea. I trimmed them and moved it out of the brightest light, which is what my books suggested for leaf burn.

In November a Phalaenopsis dropped two buds before they opened. Then another. By December, three of the Dendrobiums had a white crust forming on the surface of the bark in their pots, and the roots, which should have been silvery green and plump, were turning brown and papery.

They were not dying all at once. They were dying politely, one leaf at a time, the way some old people decline, apologising for the trouble.

The Librarian Does Her Research

I did what I always do. I read. I took out every orchid book I owned and borrowed three more from the Hartbeespoort library. I joined two online groups and posted photographs. I got forty answers, and thirty-eight of them were different.

Too much light. Too little light. Too much water. Not enough. Fungus. Mites. Wrong bark. Wrong fertiliser. The heat in the tin shed. One gentleman in Australia was very confident it was my soul, which I did not find helpful.

I changed one thing at a time, because that is how you find the cause. I moved the benches. I changed the bark. I sprayed for mites although I could find none. I cut the fertiliser in half, then stopped it altogether. Nothing helped. The white crust kept coming back on top of the bark, and I kept scraping it off with an old teaspoon, and I kept losing plants.

By February I had lost eleven. I had started to dread opening the shed door.

Gert's Kettle

It was Gert who noticed the kettle. Or rather, he noticed that the kettle in the cottage had a thick pale crust inside it after only a few weeks, much worse than anything we had in Pretoria. He was cleaning it with vinegar one morning and said, quite casually, "This water is hard as a rock."

I was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dead Dendrobium in my hand, on my way to the compost heap. I looked at the kettle. I looked at the white crust on the bark in the pot. I felt exactly the way I used to feel when a child brought me a book they had been searching for and it had been on the returns trolley all along.

The misting system ran off the borehole. So did the watering can. In Pretoria I had watered with municipal water and, for the fussy ones, collected rainwater. Here I had been giving my orchids borehole water, every day, for six months, without once thinking about what was in it.

Finding Out Properly

A crust in a kettle is a clue, not an answer. I did not want to guess again. I had done enough guessing.

So I looked up how to get a proper water test done, and I was surprised to learn how much it covered. I had pictured something like a swimming pool kit, a few drops and a colour chart. What I found was that there are water laboratories that test for a whole list of things: hardness, dissolved salts, pH, iron, manganese, nitrates and much more. I filled the sample bottle at the tap Gert had fitted in the shed, labelled it in my best library handwriting, and took it in.

While I waited for the results I kept reading, and I discovered I was far from the first orchid grower to be undone by borehole water. Plenty of hobbyists swear by sending samples to water labs before they set up any growing space, which is the kind of advice that is very useful about eight months too late.

The Numbers

When the report came back, I sat at the kitchen table with my reading glasses and a cup of tea and read it the way I used to read a new acquisition. The water was very hard, which explained the kettle. The total dissolved solids were high, much higher than orchids like. There was a reasonable amount of sodium in it as well. None of it was dangerous for us to drink, which was a relief, but for a plant whose roots evolved clinging to tree bark in the rain, it was slowly poisoning them.

The white crust was salt and minerals building up in the pots. The brown leaf tips were the plants struggling with it. Every time I watered generously, as my books told me to, I was giving them more of what was hurting them.

What Changed

Gert and I put in two big rainwater tanks off the cottage roof and the shed roof. For the dry months, when the tanks run low, we set up a small filter specifically for the orchid water, after asking a lot of questions. I repotted every surviving plant in fresh bark and flushed them with rainwater until it ran clean.

The Cymbidium from my sister lived. It lost most of its old leaves, but in September it sent up a new growth, bright green and clean at the tips. I photographed it like a grandchild.

What I Tell the Ladies at the Society

I have joined the local orchid society now. Every so often a new member comes along with a photograph on their phone, a plant with brown tips and a white crust in the pot, and a list of everything they have already tried. I recognise the look on their face. I had it for six months.

I always ask the same question first: "Where does your water come from?" If they say a borehole, I tell them about my eleven orchids and Gert's kettle. Then I tell them to do what I should have done on the first day. Not more reading. Not another product. Just some proper water testing, so you can stop guessing and start knowing. For a librarian, that is the most satisfying sentence in the language.