Orchid care for beginners

Plant lovers, I have a confession to make. My first orchid was a fake.

It still is, in fact: it never died, and it sits, in all its lilac artificialness, on my bedroom window in my parents' house. It's a realistic fake, though, which I begged my mum to buy for me when I was 13. It's potted in a clear, square vase with pebbles around it. Very Zen. Besides, it's lasted 15 years, which is more than I can say for my real orchids.

When I moved into my new flat last year, I picked up a pale purple phalaenopsis orchid for about £5 from Ikea, chose a simple white ceramic pot for it, and placed it on my white glossy sideboard next to a turquoise vase with a cherry blossom trail on it. Again, very Zen.

It did marvellously and reflowered twice. So I bought another one, in a deeper, velvety shade of purple.

But it was disastrous: tall, spindly, and slightly menacing. Every night when I came home from work, I found the floor strewn with decaying flower heads. The stem slowly turned an unhealthy shade of yellow. It was dead within a fortnight.

A month ago, I tried again. This time, I chose a very pretty white phalaenopsis pinned all the way round into an arch. It, too, died. Within a week the fleshy leaves started to whither and, weirdly, turn a bit mushy.

Time to call in the experts. What was I doing wrong?

"It's very hard to kill an orchid!" said a spokeswoman from the Flowers and Plants Association, making me out to be some sort of orchid murderer.

But I am not alone. "Orchids have a reputation for being a challenge to look after," says Simon Richards, a product developer for flowers and plants at Marks & Spencer, who sympathises greatly with my orchid ordeal. "They are tropical plants, and it's hard to replicate those conditions at home."

Richards says a good orchid, raised in the right conditions (room temperature, not less than 16.5C) should last eight weeks with flowers, after which the blooms will slowly start dropping off (perfectly naturally) from the bottom up. It will eventually re-flower.

Like most pretty things, they are a little high-maintenance and a bit picky: they like light, but only north-facing; they hate draughts; and they only like soft water. Never, ever cut the aerial roots off (the slightly greying roots curling around the top - apparently some people don't like the look of them), and never, ever remove them from the original plastic pots they've been rooted in.

"If you live in a hard water area, use cooled boiled water from the kettle," says Richards. "Either water them once a week with an eggcup-sized amount of soft water, or stand your orchid in a bucket and drench completely with soft water to replicate a tropical rain shower - let it soak for a minute in enough water to cover the compost. But don't let any water sit in the area where the leaves cross over [if it does, dab away with tissue]."

While the flowers are in bloom, keep the stems pinned to the sticks they are supplied with for support.

Every node (the little triangular etch) on the stem is a potential new bloom. Once all the flowers fall off, trim the stem all the way down, just above the very lowest node, and cut diagonally. "This will help to stimulate new growth, hopefully a new flower stem," says Richards.

It's ideal to put cut-down orchids in a conservatory or greenhouse to encourage reflowering; failing that, a north-facing windowsill will do. Keep watering weekly, and you should see a new stem coming through. And that, says Richards, is that.

"Some people just have a knack for reflowering," he says, although I'm not sure I really believe him. My Ikea iris is in the process of reflowering yet again, and I'm sure it isn't down to my "knack" at all. Still, maybe there's hope for this former faker yet.