Friday Fabulous Flower - rare? orchid edition

While taking a small group of friends on a wild flower walk, this little beauty was found just a couple of feet from the foot path along with a dozen or more plants.  This is often called the purple twayblade orchid, Liparis liliifolia.  And then a friend asked, "Is it rare?  I've never seen one before." that is a fairly interesting question.  This is a small plant usually just a few inches across the pair of leaves and maybe standing 5-6 inches tall in a much taller meadow-type habitat, and the flowers certainly are not gaudy or bright enough to attract much attention.  The fact is that TPP doesn't know how common or uncommon this orchid may be, but one suspects it is more common than you might guess because it is insignificant and easy to miss.  In an old field meadow, a vegetational analysis found one of 3 species of small orchid (Flora of Comlara Park has pictures) at the rate of at least one for every 5 square meters examined.  But even then just walking through the meadow would not result in seeing anything without being very careful.  These little plants were in plain site but TPP had walked by earlier and missed them.  And if deer are plentiful (they are) and bunnies are common (even with foxes around they are), these orchid are subject to being browsed making them less common, but TPP has seen several others this spring, so maybe a good year?  

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.

Friday Fabulous Flower - teeny orchid

Friday again?  Were did the week go? Here's a great fabulous flower that TPP just happened to notice in the greenhouse the other day. But it's easy to miss even though it is one of the few really orange flowers in our collection. This is an orchid, and contrary to what most people think, most orchid flowers are fairly small, if not tiny, although the smallest orchid flower is a ridiculous 2 mm tall. In comparison this orchid, Pleurothallis guanacastensis, is a whopping three times bigger at 6-7 mm tall. When you see flowers like this, obviously providing a visual display, you do wonder what type of little critter is attracted to them and pollinates them? Whatever it is you can see the little space they fit into between the labellum (lower center petal) and the column above housing the stigma and pollinia, a space which is all of 1-1.5 mm. In the tropics such little puzzles abound, organisms about which we know next to nothing. It's been named, it lives in lowland tropical forests as an epiphyte in Costa Rica. And that's about it. 
And congratulations to my Tico friends for their big "football" win over the USA. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - green, fringed orchid

Just recently TPP posted the image of a rather small and inconspicuous orchid, the purple twayblade,  and here's another orchid in the same category and the same place, the green, fringed orchid (Platanthera (formerly Habenaria) lacera).  Jones' Flora of Illinois said this species was rare and limited to the northern-most counties, but our vegetational surveys in central Illinois have found this species surprisingly common such that you begin to think that such comments just mean people weren't looking enough or very hard or very closely. This plant was almost 0.5 m tall, but even then it was buried in meter tall vegetation such that if you weren't moving the taller plants aside for a look, you never ever would see it. This probably explains why so few specimens exist in our herbarium collection.

Orchid pollination facilitated by rain

This is a really nifty study of something completely new, an orchid that gets self-pollinated by rain.  Orchids have a funny arrangement where two waxy masses of pollen are spacially separated from the stigma in such a way that it usually takes a pollinator to move pollinia to the stigma.  During the rainy season, pollinators may be rare, especially if an insect, so having a mechanism for self-fertilization is an important fail-safe.  It wasn't clear in the summary, but TPP guesses that the flower has a period, probably several days, during which it waits patiently to be pollinated, and then as it nears the end of its functional life, it changes so that, as this paper reports, the force of a rain drop hitting the cover over the pollinia releases them, and they spring out and rebound on an elastic strand to land on the stigma.  This is very unique.  There are quite a few plants that disperse propagules (seeds, plantlets, spore packets) using the force from falling rain drops.  But this is the first instance of this for pollination.  In several of these cases the fruit wall or a cuplike structure causes the falling drops to forceably rebound.  It will be interesting to see if the flower has any such structure.  How very cool.  HT to AoB Blog. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Vanilla

The Phactor would be quite remiss to not post a FFF for the 2nd week in a row and it was kind of readers not to mention this.  This is a pretty attractive flower, but this is the best photo that could be acquired with any ease at all since the silly plant has climbed a tall Madagascan succulent and now hangs down from way above.  This is a species of Vanilla, an orchid, V. aphylla to be exact.  Aphylla means without leaves, and indeed the leaves of this species are reduced to a vestigial size and the vine, which climbs by means of contractile, grasping adventitious roots, conducts its photosynthesis in its green stem.  Clearly this species is adapted to drier habitats, one of which is probably rather exposed tree trunks.   No one is certain if this plant is still in contact with soil anywhere; it seems to get all the water it needs from the humidity or a spray of water every few days.  It's a native of SE Asia and came from Thailand a long time ago.  From this angle you can just see the hairy purple nature of the throat in contrast to the greenish yellow of the other perianth parts, which are about 5-6 cm across. 

Nocturnal orchid

Nocturnal flowering is rather uncommon even in the tropics. Quite a few flowers open in the evening, for example, nutmegs, but the flowers remain open through the next day at least. And of course there are several bat and moth pollinated flowers. Several palms flower at night attracting hordes of beetles. But a completely nocturnal orchid is news because of all the crazy things orchids do, nocturnal flowering was not one of them. Since this orchid (Bulbophyllum nocturnum) flowered in captivity no one is certain about the pollinators, but some type of small insect certainly, perhaps a small dipteran. The dangly little filamentous appendages are strange, and they may either mimic some sort of insect or help disperse a particular floral odor, or both. In general the flowers of orchids in this genus are pretty small, ca. 1 cm diameter. Unfortunately and particularly with the fadish approach to science funding in the USA, even the small amounts of support needed to fund tropical field work are difficult to find, which makes such discoveries really difficult.

Friday Fabulous Flower - a Queensland orchid

What with the international date line crossings, the Phactor is a bit unclear about the day of the week, even more than usual. However, my trusty international Casio watch, which has a better understanding of such things, tells me it's a Friday, so time to blog about a flower, as if this never happens otherwise. This particular orchid (Dendrobium linguiforme) is a wonderful plant that can (or could be) found in a wide variety of habitats, most often as a stem epiphyte of trees. As you will note the tough sclerophytic leaves and short stocky rhizome form a substrate hugging mat that allows it to survive in some pretty harsh places. Unfortunately it's easy to grow and the flowering is quite lovely, if brief, and the flowers are fragrant, all of which leads frequently to poaching from the wild.