Hybrid Name: CTL Vio Sapphire
Parents: Phalaenopsis Tzu Chiang Sapphire x Phalaenopsis violacea
Care Group: See Phalaenopsis Orchid Care
Phalaenopsis CTL Vio Sapphire Care
Potting & Watering
I grow my CTL Vio Sapphire in a moss-heavy mix because it has about 50% violacea in the parent linage; my understanding is that summer-blooming, fragrant phals such as violacea, mariae, gigatea, and so on, all prefer to have their roots constantly moist (but not wet). The medium is 50% sphagnum moss, 25% bark, 12.5% perlite, 12.5% charcoal. I water once or twice a week as the internal media approaches dryness. When watering, I follow my standard method of watering phals, which is a heavy drench with tap water. You can read more about how I water and care for my phals in this post: Phalaenopsis: Care, Culture and Tips to Keep Your Orchid Reblooming.
Light
Medium light with high intensity during the morning-early day. My Phalaenopsis CTL Vio Sapphire grows by an east-facing window on the left side of the window (see photo). That is important to note, because it is the area by that window that gets the most light in that section, for the longest period of time. In the summer the leaves did start to suffer from very slight leaf scorch, so I now run a fan in the room to move air across the leaves during the hottest days of summer. The plant gets direct sun exposure from about 7am-12:00pm, the rest of the day it gets reflected ambient light from whatever comes through the window.
General Growth & Plant Notes
My plant has taken on much of the body structure and look of the Phal. pulcherrima lineage but with the flower colour of violacea; it is growing very tall and leggy compared to other phals, and the spikes are also quite long. It appears to be an ever-blooming sequential plant which it likely also inherited from the Phal violacea lineage. Flowering in 2017 stalled shortly after I got it. I got the plant in June and it flowered freely until July where it paused for a bit and then resumed producing new flowers in September. My other violacea/bellina phals (Phalaenopsis bellina var alba, Phalaenopsis Tying Shin Fly Eagle) also did this stall during the month of July only to resume flower production nearly exactly opening at the start of September.
The Phalaenopsis CTL Vio Sapphire flowers are extremely vibrant (unlike any colour I’ve seen before); photos don’t do it justice and I think that the camera lens does not capture the upper limits of the color within the flower, so that may be why images always appear slightly less impressive than the flower actually is. It is very fragrant and oddly (but pleasantly) smells a lot like sunscreen.
Phal CTL Vio Sapphire Photos

