Orchids Are Coveted AF
While visiting Florida I passed by front yards with orchids attached to the smooth trunks of palm trees. Obviously, this planting was human assisted. Home gardeners fastened the flowers to trees until their roots can grow long enough to support themselves. Some plants, tied with jute, looked at home on the tree. Others were adhered inelegantly with zip-ties (can you hear my disdain). This horticulture hack mimics how these orchids grow naturally in their habitat.
So, how do they survive in the wild without zip-ties? (I've asked that about myself at every wedding installation.) Tiny orchid seeds travel in the wind and get stuck into the rough bark of trees. They put down roots right there and use the tree as the foundation for their home. These orchids are epiphytes, or air plants. They survive on water and nutrients from the atmosphere. The relationship with the tree is called commensal by biologists. The tree is unaffected by the flower.
At home, in Maryland, orchids are mostly grown in pots on sunny windowsills in the winter. These are terrestrial orchids - they grow in soil. A customer of mine, John Goodman, used to bring me a potted orchid every year as a gift. I had to put them up for adoption. They would need to be extraterrestrial to survive under my care. My friend and orchid daddy, Ian Tresselt, sends me a photo whenever they bloom. It's a fond memory of John who we lost a few years ago.
Orchids are a popular and wildly expensive cut flower in the global market. Not many tropicals are grown as commercial cuts in my region. Plantmasters, though, comes through with greenhouse grown, cut orchids in the winter. Leon Carrier, the grower, would delivery a single bucket of cymbidium orchids to my shop in February. I only got about a dozen of these stems each year, but I had a group of rabid orchid customers. I sold them as single stems for $20 each! There is no other flower that I can sell at this price. Orchids are coveted AF.
A rare ghost orchid, native to only Southern Florida and Cuba, was shipped to England for display at the 2023 Chelsea Flower Show. It now lives at Kew Gardens. The ghost orchid is endangered due to habitat destruction and over-collecting (check out The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean). It lives in a glass case like Hannibal Lecter. It needs to stay there.
Showcasing and protecting this rare orchid at Kew is a benefit for everyone who loves flowers. But, there are unintended consequences to introducing a species to a new habitat. The introduced species has the potential to destroy native habitat and threaten the natives. This ghost orchid is safely contained, but do you trust it? It looks ominous to me. Nobody calls it “the friendly ghost orchid.” Remember what happened at Jurassic Park.
