Tolumnia Genting Orange variation in blooms

Tolumnia Genting Orange

     I posted some earlier photos of my Tolumnia Genting Orange, but this is a more detailed description of the flowers.  

     The miniature orchid bloomed with a foot-long flower spike, and 26 one-inch flowers. The blooms are very faintly scented.  The flowers open a solid yellow color (with the brown centers) and develop an orange hue around the skirt after about a week.  The flowers also develop brown spots in the back.  I found the flower spike very difficult to photographs because the blooms opened facing every which way.

     It's now been 3 weeks since the first flowers opened, and a few of the oldest blooms have wilted.  Most of the spike is still blooming profusely, though.

Variation in Tolumnia Genting Orange flower color and shape

    One interesting aspect of this blooming, is how different many of the flowers are from each other.  The picture above shows the variation of individual flowers on the spike.  The one on the top middle is clearly deformed (and there were a few blooms which looked like that), while the other flowers all look "normal". 

   

      I expect that the deformed flowers resulted from my recent Superthrive use, since others have reported too-high dosage leading flower aberrations.  I had only been using 1 drop into over a gallon of water, but since both this tolumnia, and my cattlianthe jewel box have recently produce some misformed flowers, I am concluding that even that tiny dosage was too high.  For now, I'm watering my orchids with pure water, and I will be diluting the superthrive much more in the future (most likely, 1 drop into a cup of water, and then a tablespoon of that water into a gallon of the final solution)

     However, even if the Superthrive explains the odd flowers, I think that the rest of the variation may be natural to this hybrid--which is really cool!  The pictures I found online tend to show only one type of flower per spike, but there is a lot of variation among the different photos:

Photo from Orchids by Hausermann (vendor)

Photo from Oak Hill Gardens (vendor)

Photo by 'NYCorchidman' on Orchidboard forum

Photo by 'Pilot' on Orchidboard forum

    Judging by the difference among these pictures, it seems like most of my flowers fall within the common variation for this hybrid.