Too wet, too dark is my take on your description of conditions. Jewel orchids like even watering but they are not a bog plant either. And plants that don't have enough light don't use up the available water.

Give it another try. It's a nice orchid.

Agree with Richard. Mine is in a glasshouse. In a small pot. Watered several times a week in summer. Once a week in winter. Never misted.

Needs bright diffused light so it is in the shadiest corner but it is still getting sunlight broken down by by the shade-cloth hail-guard, the dirty glass and the distance to the plant which is just above bench height so that it can get very gentle air movement.

Likes to have a moist but not sopping wet potting mixture.

I got some from Blackjungle back in the late 90s. I put it in a 29 gallon terrarium that was rarely if ever watered and remained fairly well closed all the time. The plant eventually rambled all over the tank. At some point I pulled out a few pieces and stuck them in a pot. That pot survived being largely neglected. Somehow, that pot has ended up beneath one of my wire shelves, on the lowest shelf, literally within the big plastic box i use to catch drips. Point being...it can survive almost total neglect and practically no water either! While they do love being in a nice terrarium (if you don't overwater them and underlight them), they can easily survive outside of one. My little pot even blooms from time to time. I only know that because i'll sometimes find a spike growing up through the wire shelves behind other things. They are very sturdy orchids.

Hi tropichris;

A nice orchid grower gave me a broken off piece of a Ludesia discolor. It was the 4-5 inch tip of a larger plant. It had an endbud and 3-4 leaves, but no roots. I laid it in a saucer, with the leafy end elevated at the saucer's edge, and with the stemmy end on a thin pad of damp sphagnum moss (NZ)--not covered. I placed the dish in bright, indirect light--right by the sliding glass doors.

When the sphagnum was almost dry, I misted ONLY the stem area until the sphag was evenly damp (not swimming). Depending on the weather, this sometimes meant misting it twice a day (it was about this time last year).

Little Ludie didn't wilt, but nothing happened fast. Eventually, when I lifted the stem to peek at the node areas underneath, I saw that some nobby looking root beginnings had formed.

At this point (and tired of spritzing the sphag so often) I lightly covered half the stem area with a sphag layer equaling that underneath. This I dampened as often as necessary to keep it from drying completely. I never misted the leafy part.

Slowly, more root nubs and three leaf buds appeared at the stem nodes, so I soaked a well sorted medium of small fir bark, charcoal, and pearlite (probably 3:1:1) and potted Ludie in terracotta.

All three sprouts made their ways to the edge of the pot. I live in an area of low humidity, but Ludie doesn't seem to care. I keep it damper than a Phal (keeping a skewer well down in the medium to check for dampness) watering it about once in five or six days (here). It's growing fine, but so dang S-L-O-W-L-Y that I wonder if I'm missing something. No spikes, yet, but it has only been established for 8-10 months.

Sweetcicely