Field of Science

Orchid children? What the ....?

Oh no, another plant analogy gone bad! Orchid children versus dandelion people? Dandelions hardy, orchids delicate and hard to handle! Yikes, how wrong can you be? Dandelions are only easy to grow because you keep disturbing the community by mowing your lawn. Stop it, let some succession take its course, and you’ll find dandelions difficult to grow because as weeds they require the constant disturbance your activities provide. While it’s true most to the habitats people are familiar with are the result of human disturbance, dandelions just won’t grow in most parts of most natural communities. Orchids however often grow in some very challenging environments, and they are hardly delicate. Most are tough as nails, and easy enough to grow if you can duplicate their habitat (and mostly you can’t, and that’s the problem). So the Phactor just hates it when these people who don’t know squat about plants use such labels. Hope this fellow knows more about people than plants. Such plant stereotypes just propagate botanical ignorance.

4 comments:

Gloria Bonde said...

Great insite on "teeth of the lions" love it!

The Phytophactor said...

Gloria, it has been a long time since anyone has brought up the meaning of dandelion, which comes from Middle English dent-de-lioun , which comes from Old French dentdelion , which comes from Medieval Latin dēns leōnis

Flowers said...

Nice blog. Expecting some beautiful picture of Orchids but didn't find any. Still your blog looks beautiful.

The Phytophactor said...

No kidding! Imagine my disappointment in the original article!