Orchid Hobbyists Invite You to Monthly Meeting

This month’s speaker worked as the orchid collection specialist at the Smithsonian. – Courtesy photo / Facebook, @sgvoh

The San Gabriel Valley Orchid Hobbyists invites all fans of orchids to their Jan. 17 monthly meeting at the LA County Arboretum, located at 301 N. Baldwin Ave. in Arcadia. The meeting will take place in the Palm Room. Judging will begin at 7 p.m. followed by the meeting at 7:30 p.m. Refreshments will be provided.

The speaker for this meeting will be Thomas Mirenda from Hawaii who will discuss growing orchids on the big island of Hawaii.  Mirenda has been cultivating plants since his early childhood and lives to create beauty with plants in botanic garden settings, which he has done for more than half of his adult life. Originally trained as a marine biologist, Mirenda moved to Hawaii to pursue a career and worked on the tropic relationships of denizens of coral reefs in the northwest Hawaiian Islands. During his work he realized he was better suited for horticulture than marine biology and went on to take positions at the New York Botanical Garden, Brooklyn Botanical Garden and at the Incredible Greentree Estate in Long Island where he cared for a first class Orchid collection.