Friday Fabulous Flower - Winter Orchids

People always are surprised that orchids are relatively easy house plants to grow.  A certain few rules to follow and the results are quite fun.  The flowers of cultivated orchids tend to be large and showy and often a bit exotic as is today's FFF, and while they look fragile that might last several weeks before wilting, unless you pollinate them, and then they wilt overnight.
All to TPP's orchids are in the process of flowering, which they do each year after summering outside. This particular orchid is a Zygopetalum hybrid, but don't know which. Orchid hybrids are common because they hybridize easily, and there is a biologicial reason for this.  TPP doesn't like hybrids like this grown for the exotic flowers they produce because such a flower is a hopeful monster; an orchid species can be just as "exotic" looking, but it's flower is the product of natural selection, evolution, an interaction between animal behavior and plant genetic variability, but the hybrids are not such a product, their features do not correspond to anything biologically meaningful, and for someone who studies flowers, a waste.  But this orchid was a gift, and it grows well, flowers easily, and the waxy flowers last, so it remains a pet. And this time of year FFFs are hard to come by.

Price per flower for peonies

OK, TPP is not quite done with peonies yet! Here's two peonies, both 3.5 foot diameter mounds of foliage and flowers, really big flowers!  These are Itoh peonies, hybrids between tree peonies and herbaceous peonies. They generally die down each year like herbaceous peonies, although they may have short, woody stems persist. The stems are quite stout and avoid the droopiness of herbaceous peonies, and they have the large colorful flowers of tree peonies. These are not cheap plants, generally costing between $55-$65 so many people hesitate to invest so much, but what would you pay for a great big flower?  How about $1? Well, each of these plants will produce 40-50 flowers each year, so the pay back is not too bad. These make quite a colorful presence in just 2-3 years from planting. Also, as you will note, the yellow-flowered genotype of tree peonies does show up in several of these Itoh hybrid varieties.

Orchids are fun

Orchids, more precisely, orchid flowers are fun.  Who can argue?  First a couple of caveats.  Most orchids have pretty small flowers; only a few have big, really gaudy flowers, and people are more familiar with these for the obvious reason that they are the ones most commonly cultivated and pinned on prom dresses.  Second, a lot of cultivated orchids are hybrids, artificial things, and therefore no matter how fantastic looking the flower, it's a flower that only exists as a curiosity; it doesn't function in nature.  What could be duller to a floral biologist?  People's fascination with the unnatural contrivances has always puzzled the Phactor because real species have some truly fantastic floral forms, and these are shaped by natural selection to be functional, to interact with their pollinator is sometimes a very specific manner.  This is one of the reasons why making hybrids is so unchallenging; pollinator specificity and pollinator behaviors are the isolating mechanisms that keep even closely related species from swapping genes, so without other isolating mechanisms it's easy for humans to hand pollinate them and generate hybrids sometimes with fantastic floral forms, but forms not adapted to do anything.  The photography displayed here is enough to make you envious, but you don't expect less form National Geographic.  (Prosthechea fragrans is shown here.)