Exploring Nature: Orchids

I have quite a few plants around my house and probably my favorite is an orchid in a pot in the living room front window. It has some lovely violet-purple blooms and was given to me as a gift about eleven years ago.

Although I’ve always considered orchids a tropical plant, they are amazingly adept at thriving almost everywhere except Antarctica. And that includes Texas.

Among the 50 varieties that grow wild in our state are grass pink, Chapman’s, snowy, water spider, cranefly, rose pogonia, whorled pogonia and — my favorite name — the spring ladies’ tresses. The moist woods of East Texas are especially suited to wild orchids.

Orchids are the largest family of flowers in the world. The rarest color for an orchid is blue. Most expensive commercially grown orchid is the gold of Kinabalu, a species priced at $1,000 per stem. (I’m told it has a lovely scent.) A single plant of one rare species, the Shenzhen Nongke orchid, sold for $200,000. Wow.

Some 200 species of orchids grow in the continental United States and about half of this total are grown in Florida. In fact, some 50 species grow exclusively in Florida.

In the wild, orchids live for about 20 years. Potted orchids, such as mine, are usually good for 10-15 years. (I guess mine has a few years left.)

The orchid capital of the world is Hawaii. On the islands, folks grow orchids in their yards, taking them quite for granted as part of the landscape. And of course, the orchid lei is often placed around tourists’ necks to welcome them to Hawaii.

I water my orchid once a week, always in moderation and never over-watering. I’m told some folks place ice cubes on the orchid soil and believe this helps keep them healthy.

To each his own. But if you don’t have an orchid, I invite you to join the fun.

When an explorer brought the first orchids back to England from Brazil, the flowers caused quite a sensation. British papers called the resulting frenzy an “orchiddelirium.”

Two centuries later, people are still going bonkers over orchids.