The Duckitt Nurseries Disa Tour

While Wally Orchard and I were in South Africa, one of the Disa collections that we were both excited about seeing was the collection of the Duckitt brothers, Nicolas and Wilferd.  For those of you who may not be familiar with the Duckitts, they are notorious for being the most accomplished growers of the "Herschelianthe" group of Disas.  In a nutshell, long before the genus Herschelianthe was moved into the genus Disa by Linder, the genus was considered extremely difficult to grow and flower.  The Duckitts have done a better job in this department than any other grower in the world, and have even managed to cross Herschelianthe lugens with Disa longicornu which we saw pictures of in last month's presentation.  Before you run out and try to buy these plants, it's only fair to warn you that their family lives where these plants grow and can study their habitat in the wild.  Even with these advantages, it has taken years to see results. More will be presented about Herschianthes at the bottom of this page.

On the Disa side of things, the Duckitts have a very small fraction of one of their greenhouses partitioned off where they can cool things off a bit and provide the water and conditions necessary for Disas  to thrive.  As with most South African growers, they use a sharp coarse silica sand for their potting medium.  To keep down the growth of algae and moss, they cover the top of their 4" pots with a shredded tree fern fiber.  They  water daily from above with RO water to which is added a weak fertilizer solution during the growing months. They control heat and humidity by using draw fans through cooling pads.  They try to keep their humidity at 55% and have misters for use when the humidity is low.

The Duckitts also sent me some pictures that they thought were especially nice. All the Photos below this point are by the Duckitt brothers.

While we were there, we had to get some information on how to grow the Herschelianthes.  A summery is as follows:

Get a tuber started in flask.  Once the plant has a tuber in flask it is much easier to avoid trouble.  They also only put 5 plants per flask so there isn't as much crowding and the plants can get bigger before they deflask.  Once a tuber is formed, then the tubers can be deflasked into the coarse sand that they use.  The pots are watered only once every week or two until the green top starts to grow.  The green foliage is watered daily until the top starts to dry up. then the watering is reduced to once a week or so until the following fall when growth starts again.

Below are two of their spectacular hybrids.  Both photos by Wilferd Duckitt