Although I do have a tree nearby to offer additional shade, my outdoor plants are on a simple wooden stand built around a 2x4 foot piece of plastic egg crating. I then cover that with some screen door screening that can be gotten from Walmart for $5-$6 per roll. Seemed to work OK last summer.

Roggie

A structure which uses shade cloth is ideal. I have a small orchid house outside which I assembled from the manufacturer. For catt's about 50% shade is about right.

How to shade outdoor plants in summer has been a continuing problem for me.

Shade cloth is great and if you can build a permanent structure for it (a shade house), that's the perfect solution. Giving the sunlovers good sun from the east, but shading them from the hot midday sun overhead and from the west in the early afternoon is what you need. You also need a way to keep the thing from blowing down in a storm.

If you are handy, you can build quite a nice structure, and for a smaller number of orchids, a smallish one will do, or one of those lattice walls you can get from Lowe's will do.

Not being handy, I haven't been able to get a shadehouse, and have too many for one lattice to protect. So each year I try some new jerry-built thing, based on the previous years problems. But I haven't found anything else really good.

This year I am trying one of the big crank umbrellas supported by the heavy stand. (The ones they use on outdoor tables. The tables are expensive, but the umbrella is much less so)

I think that if I can position it right, it will shade the plants from the hottest sun without putting them into permanent deep shade. But I won't know how it worked til September.