Orchid Plant Quotes

She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable. Tally Youngblood was a weed. And, unlike the orchids, she wasn't even a pretty one.

She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of the other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable.

It is a much wiser policy to plant acre after acre of orchids and lead one's life in solitude encompassed by their sheltering stems, than to surround oneself with the hoi-polloi and so court the same pointless misanthropic disgust as befell Timon of Athens.

It's not really about collecting the thing itself," Laroche went on. "It's about getting immersed in something, and learning about it, and having it become part of your life. It's a kind of direction." He stopped on the word "direction" and chortled. "If anybody had a plant I didn't have, I made sure to get it. It was like a heroin addiction. If I ever had money I would spend it on plants.

It is a much wiser policy to plant acre after acre of orchids and lead one's life in solitude encompassed by their sheltering stems, than to surround oneself with the hoi polloi and so court the same pointless misanthropic disgust as befell Timon of Athens. Society is forever holding forth about fairness and justice. If it really believes these to be of such importance, it might do well to kill off a few dozen petty criminals per day, and use their carcasses to fertilize and give life to countless fields of flowers.

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN. . . .

She left, never to return. I planted a tree and a seed each time I thought of her. I grew a small forest and a large garden and had no one to give the orchids to.

I don't want to collect anything for myself right now. I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something - I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it. " He shook his head and scuffed up some gravel. "You know, I'll see something, just anything, and I can't help but thinking to myself, Well, Jesus Christ, now that's interesting! Jesus, I'll bet you could find a lot of those.

The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants, 350 birds, and 52 varieties of porcelain-smooth, candy-striped tree snails. It had bottlenose dolphins, marsh rabbits, ghost orchids, moray eels, bald eagles, and countless other species that didn't seem to belong on the same continent, much less in the same ecosystem.

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.About the orchids of that place we knew very little. About flies and beetles almost nothing, fungi nothing, most kinds of organisms nothing. Five thousand kinds of bacteria might be found in a pinch of soil, and about them we knew absolutely nothing. This was wilderness in the sixteenth-century sense, as it must have formed in the minds of the Portuguese explorers, its interior still largely unexplored and filled with strange, myth-engendering plants and animals. From such a place the pious naturalist would send long respectful letters to royal patrons about the wonders of the new world as testament to the glory of God. And I thought: there is still time to see this land in such a manner.

May 27, 1941 Sunday we encountered specimens of the rarely appearing yellow lady's slipper. This orchis is fragilely beautiful. One tends to think of it almost as a phenomenon, without any roots or place in the natural world. And yet it, too, has had its tough old ancestors which have eluded fires and drought and freezes to pass on in this lovely form the boon of existence. If a plant so delicately lovely can at the same time be so toughly persistent and resistant to all natural enemies, can we doubt that hopes for a better an more rational world may not also withstand all assaults, be bequeathed from generation to generation, and come ultimately to flower? President Roosevelt says he has not lost faith in democracy; nor have I lost faith in the transcendent potentialities of LIFE itself. One has but to look about him to become almost wildly imbued with something of the massive, surging vitality of the earth.

Orchids are considered the most highly evolved flowering plants on earth. They are unusual in form, uncommonly beautiful in color, often powerfully fragrant, intricate in structure, and different from any other family of plants. The reason for their unusualness has always been puzzled over. One guess is that orchids might have evolved in soil that was naturally irradiated by a meteor or mineral deposit, and that the radiation is what mutated them into thousands of amazing forms... In 1678 the botanist Jakob Breyne wrote: "The manifold shape of these flowers arouses our highest admiration. They take on the form of little birds, of lizards, of insects. They look like a man, like a woman, sometimes like an austere, sinister figure, sometimes like a clown who excites our laughter. They represent the image of a lazy tortoise, a melancholy toad, an agile, ever-chattering monkey." Orchids have always been thought of as beautiful but strange. A wildflower guide published in 1917 called them "our queer freaks.

The vanilla bean is the fruit of a species of orchid native to southeastern Mexico, and it is unusually difficult to cultivate. Like most orchids, it is an epiphyte, meaning that its roots need to be exposed to air, not soil. It climbs the trunks of trees, thriving in limbs a hundred feet aboveground, and unfurls just one flower per day over a two-month period, awaiting pollination by a single species of tiny stingless bee, Melipona beecheii. If the flower is pollinated, a pod develops over the next six to eight months. And although the pods contain thousands of tiny seeds, they are incapable of germinating unless they are in the presence of a particular mycorrhizal fungus.

Nearly all human cultures plant gardens, and the garden itself has ancient religious connections. For a long time, I've been interested in pre-Christian European beliefs, and the pagan devotions to sacred groves of trees and sacred springs. My German translator gave me a fascinating book on the archaeology of Old Europe, and in it I discovered ancient artifacts that showed that the Old European cultures once revered snakes, just as we Pueblo Indian people still do. So I decided to take all these elements - orchids, gladiolus, ancient gardens, Victorian gardens, Native American gardens, Old European figures of Snake-bird Goddesses - and write a novel about two young sisters at the turn of the century.

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN.… Charles BowdenBlood Orchid     

Ordering online was all about ticking boxes. Species. Color. Size. Number. Grade of quality. Degree of openness. But there was something miraculous about seeing the flowers she'd imagined brought to life. Roses from Columbia. Chrysanthemums from Ecuador. Orchids from Thailand. Anemones and agapanthus from Spain. Stargazers and parrot tulips from the vast Dutch flower fields.

He hopes the plant doesn't freeze to death before he can give it to her. He pictures her face when she opens the bag and sees it. A whole load of dark purple flowers stuck onto a tiny bendy stem like a bunch of butterflies about to fly off. Exposed roots like knobbly toes climbing over the rim of the plastic pot as if the whole thing is planning to get out and do a runner first chance it gets. It's a moth orchid.

He hopes the plants doesn't freeze to death before he can give it to her. He pictures her face when she opens the bag and sees it. A whole load of dark purple flowers stuck onto a tiny bendy stem like a bunch of butterflies about to fly off. Exposed roots like knobbly toes climbing over the rim of the plastic pot as if the whole thing is planning to get out and do a runner first chance it gets. It's a moth orchid.

This wild animal must be different. By the way,” he said, turning to Grant, “if they’re all born females, how do they breed? You never explained that bit about the frog DNA.” “It’s not frog DNA,” Grant said. “It’s amphibian DNA. But the phenomenon happens to be particularly well documented in frogs. Especially West African frogs, if I remember.” “What phenomenon is that?” “Gender transition,” Grant said. “Actually, it’s just plain changing sex.” Grant explained that a number of plants and animals were known to have the ability to change their sex during life—orchids, some fish and shrimp, and now frogs. Frogs that had been observed to lay eggs were able to change, over a period of months, into complete males. They first adopted the fighting stance of males, they developed the mating whistle of males, they stimulated the hormones and grew the gonads of males, and eventually they successfully mated with females. “You’re kidding,” Gennaro said. “And what makes it happen?” “Apparently the change is stimulated by an environment in which all the animals are of the same sex. In that situation, some of the amphibians will spontaneously begin to change sex from female to male.” “And you think that’s what happened to the dinosaurs?” “Until we have a better explanation, yes,” Grant said. “I think that’s what happened. Now, shall we find this nest?

Do you like flora and fauna? How about plants and animals? Because we have more of that beautiful crap than we know what to do with. Charmingly domesticated troops of monkeys swing freely throughout our orchid-laden property. You’re probably thinking that a lot of all-inclusive resorts have monkeys. True, but only one resort packs a monkey for each of their guests to take home. You’ll be showing off more than a tan to your friends, you’ll be showing off a gibbon.

If he does it right and is lucky, in nine or 10 months he scoops the tiny half-inch seedlings out of the bottle and plants them in community pots. A year later he transplants them to individual three-inch pots and in another two years to 4 1/2-inch pots, and crosses his fingers. Then, five or six or seven years since the day he put pollen to stigma, he sees an orchid no one ever saw before. It is different from any orchid that has ever bloomed, including those in the Garden of Eden.

Cultivating orchids had been a keen interest and hobby of Helen's ever since her mother had passed away five years ago, leaving a collection of approximately two hundred potted orchids. Since no one else in the family had been inclined to care for them, Helen had taken it upon herself. Orchids were demanding, troublesome plants, each with its own temperament. At first Helen had found no enjoyment in her self-appointed responsibility, but over time, she had become devoted to the orchids. As she had once told Kathleen, sometimes one had to love something before it became lovable.

I looked up at the moon and stars through the glass roof above and gasped at the stunning sight, like a mural painted by a great artist. No wonder Lady Anna had loved this place. I walked to the orchids and plucked a weed from a small terra-cotta pot that held a speckled pink and white flower. "There you are, beautiful," I whispered, releasing a patch of clover roots from the bark near the orchid's stem. "Is that better?" In the quiet of the night, I could almost hear the flower sigh. I walked to the water spigot and filled a green watering can to the brim, then sprinkled the flower and her comrades. I marveled at how the droplets sparkled in the moonlight.

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN.… Charles Bowden Blood Orchid

He liked to compare a horticulturist’s shop to a microcosm in which all the categories of society were represented: the flowers that are poor and coarse, the flowers of the slum, which are not truly at home unless reposing on a garret window sill, their roots jammed into a milk bottle or an old pot, the sunflower for example; the pretentious, conformist, stupid flowers, like the rose, which belong exclusively in porcelain holders painted by young girls; finally the flowers of high lineage such as orchids, delicate and charming and quiveringly sensitive to cold, exotic flowers exiled in Paris to the warmth of glass palaces, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living a segregated life, having no longer anything in common with the plants of the street or the flora of the middle class.

There is a deep stillness in the Fakahatchee, but there is not a moment of physical peace. Something is always brushing against you or lapping at you or snagging at you or tangling in your legs, and the sun is always pummeling your skin, and the wetness in the air makes your hair coil like a phone cord. You never smell plain air in a swamp - you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant’s roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and leaves slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hurry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if someone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving about at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake.

The jungle bristled with life. There were sloths, pumas, snakes, crocodiles; there were basilisk lizards that could run across the surface of water without sinking. In just a few hectares there lived as many woody plant species as in the whole of Europe. The diversity of the forest was reflected in the rich variety of field biologists who came there to study it. Some climbed trees and observed ants. Some set out at dawn every day to follow the monkeys. Some tracked the lightning that struck trees during tropical storms. Some spent their days suspended from a crane measuring ozone concentrations in the forest canopy. Some warmed up the soil using electrical elements to see how bacteria might respond to global heating. Some studied the way beetles navigate using the stars. Bumblebees, orchids, butterflies—there seemed to be no aspect of life in the forest that someone wasn’t observing.

This particular orchid gets all its energy from fungi, sometimes from different kinds of fungi simultaneously. It never even begins to turn to the sun. No photosynthesis here. It relies utterly on its underground friends: the unseen, unsung fungi. Forgive me if this is a romantic vision. Orchids seem to have that effect on people. But since finding out that they are essentially reliant on fungi, I have a new perspective. They are not lone, rising, random gifts, like treasure. They are weak and desperate, and they are gamblers, hoping their luck holds and a good strong friend can be found close by to give them everything they lack. What do the fungi get out of the deal? The relationship of the orchid to the fungus is described as myco-heterotrophic, with the plant sometimes viewed as a sort of parasite, taking the carbon it needs and giving nothing back. Perhaps there’s more we need to learn here, to understand it fully. But, for now, I’ll anthropomorphise and romanticise it further by maintaining that a fungus can make a really good friend, especially if you’re a rare, weak seed with no energy of your own.

We remembered the delicate fig-shaped island,stranded between the American Empire and peaceful Canada, as it had been years ago, with its welcoming red white-and-blue flag-shaped flower bed,splashing fountains, European casino, and horse paths leading through woods where Indians had bent trees into giant bows. Now grass grew inpatches down to the littered beach where children fished with pop topstied to string. Paint flaked from once-bright gazebos. Drinking fountains rose from mud puddles laid with broken brick stepping stones. Along the road the granite face of the Civil War Hero had been spray-painted black. Mrs. Huntington Perry had donated her prize orchids to the Botanical Garden in the time before the riots, when civic money still ran high, but since her death ion the eroding tax base had forced cutbacks that had laid off one skilled gardener a year, so that plants that had survived transplantation from equatorial regions to bloom again in that false paradise now withered, weeds sprang up amid scrupulous identification tags, and fake sunlight flowed for only a few hours per day. The only thing that remained was the steam vapor, beading the sloping greenhouse windows and filling our nostrils with the moisture and aroma of a rotting world

The walls behind the counter had deep floor-to-ceiling shelves for vases and jam jars and scented candles, and there was an old wrought-iron revolving stand for cards. But most of the space in the long, narrow shop was taken up with flowers and plants. Today there were fifty-two kinds of cut blooms, from the tiny cobalt-blue violets that were smaller than Lara's little fingernail to a purple-and-green-frilled brassica that was bigger than her head. The flowers were set out in gleaming metal buckets and containers of every shape and size. They were lined up on the floor three deep and stacked on the tall three-tier stand in the middle of the shop. The plants, huge leafy ferns and tiny fleshy succulents, lemon trees and jasmine bushes and freckled orchids, were displayed on floating shelves that were built at various heights all the way up to the ceiling. Lara had spent weeks getting the lighting right. There were a few soft spotlights above the flower displays, and an antique crystal chandelier hung low above the counter. There were strings of fairy lights and dozens of jewel-colored tea lights and tall, slender lanterns dotted between the buckets. When they were lit, they cast star and crescent moon shapes along the walls and the shop resembled the courtyard of a Moroccan riad- a tiny walled garden right in the middle of the city.

Is that an orchid?" I asked, pointing to a particularly unattractive small brown plant. "Maxillaria tenuifolia," said Sonali. "One of my favorites. This little brown orchid is a species. Not as spectacular as a hybrid, but very satisfying nonetheless. Its charms are quite powerful. Come closer and smell it." I leaned over the ugly brown plant. "Coconut pie! How is that possible?" "Wonderful, isn't it? She doesn't need bright, flashy colors or spectacular sprays of flowers. Her pollinators, the moths, come out at night. She uses her coconut scent to guide and entice the little moth in much the way we use perfume to entice men in nightclubs and cafés." Sonali winked at me. "You can learn much about how an orchid is pollinated by the way it looks. White, pink, and pale-green flowers usually get pollinated at night, since those colors are easily seen under moonlight. The little moth sneaks up on the flower in the middle of the night like a lover. He lands on her, pollinates her, and then leaves. We've all had that experience, yes?" "Yes," I said, thinking of Exley. "Brightly colored orchids, on the other hand, are pollinated by butterflies and birds. Butterflies prefer red and orange. Bees love orange and yellow all the way through to ultraviolet." "Just like certain men like certain color clothing," I said. "Yes, colored petals are the clothing of flowers. The insect must find a way through those petals to get what he wants, like a man brushing his hand through the layers of a woman's skirt.

Large-leafed plants at the edge of the jungle reflected the sun rather than soaking it up, their dark green surfaces sparkling white in the sunlight. Some of the smaller ones had literally low-hanging fruit, like jewels from a fairy tale. Behind them was an extremely inviting path into the jungle with giant white shells for stepping-stones. And rather than the muggy, disease-filled forests of books that seemed to kill so many explorers, here the air was cool and pleasant and not too moist- although Wendy could hear the distant tinkle of water splashing from a height. "Oh! Is that the Tonal Spring? Or Diamond Falls?" Wendy withered breathlessly. "Luna, let's go see!" She made herself not race ahead down the path, but moved at a leisurely, measured pace. Like an adventuress sure of herself but wary of her surroundings. (And yet, as she wouldn't realize until later, she hadn't thought to grab her stockings or shoes. Those got left in her hut without even a simple goodbye.) Everywhere she looked, Wendy found another wonder of Never Land, from the slow camosnails to the gently nodding heads of the fritillary lilies. She smiled, imagining John as he peered over his glasses and the snail faded away into the background in fear- or Michael getting his nose covered in honey-scented lily pollen as he enthusiastically sniffed the pretty flowers. The path continued, winding around a boulder into a delightful little clearing, sandy but padded here and there with tuffets of emerald green grass and clumps of purple orchids. It was like a desert island vacation of a perfect English meadow.

In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.

The range of natural and human life in Yunnan is greater than anywhere else in China. The province covers 4 percent of the nation’s land area, but it is home to more half of the country’s vertebrates, higher plant species, and orchids as well as 72 percent of the country’s endangered animals, many of which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

It was a bright humid night in Chiang Mai. Sangris and I trotted toward the night bazaar, stepping over the basketfuls of fried red chili that the sellers had spread out on the streets like open bowls of flowers. Finding a canal on the fringes of the market, we fed enormous gold carp. They curled through the water like submerged flames beneath the heavy tropical-black sky. Acting innocent, I bought him orange juice and watched his face change when he realized that the sellers had filled it with salt. A trick to prevent dehydration, I explained, and ran off cackling before he could get revenge. I wanted to go into the orchid farms and the butterfly gardens, but they were closed, and I refused his offer to break in (of course Sangris had a way of assuming that rules didn't apply to him, but, I said, they applied to me), so we walked along a half-lit street instead, warm greenness and humming insects all around us, and spent hours trying to catch the guppies that swarmed in innumerable pots by the roadsides. I was better at it: I could lift my hands out of the green-tinted, plant-filled water slowly, without startling the fish, and show him the flashes of yellow and orange and violet and red guppies that flickered through the water cupped in my palms like a strange and magical treasure.

Hesitantly, I follow her up the steps to a metal door. When she opens it, I let out a gasp. A large dome glitters in the sun. Garrance opens up another door, this one glass, and I'm rendered speechless as a plethora of scents and humid air hit me, wrapping me up in Mother Nature's embrace. I'm in the islands. I'm in heaven. And I'm on a roof in Paris. I need a crane to pick up my jaw. "This is my climate-controlled greenhouse, my pride and joy." This slice of Parisian paradise is filled from floor to ceiling with tropical plants like orchids and flowering trees, moths, butterflies, and bees floating from flower to flower---not to mention the exotic birds---cockatoos, parakeets, and a couple of parrots, their plumage in reds, greens, blues, oranges, and whites.

Where have you been all this time? Were you off somewhere singing, putting cats to sleep on the porch, drifting about in the rapids of time, the glow of the morning sun and the rain of a summer afternoon beating down as you pass by, your lips shut tight like a bloodsucking plant? The me that is nowhere to be found now, the me that will turn to ash and vanish, turn to darkness and rot- -that me extends a squalid hand at the final moment of this crash, having entirely deserted and abandoned my life. In truth, I was not me. The me that was born into an animal body and lived as a slave to poverty and insult was nothing but the emptiness that had been momentarily bewitched out of me by an evil spirit. That distant me is precious and beautiful. No matter how decadent and corrupt my body becomes, I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing this frigidness toward life.

Your father has a fondness for orchids." Could she know my father's affinity for orchids is in direct correlation with his affinity for my mother? "Much too finicky for me. I prefer azaleas. When I was a little girl, I used to drink the nectar from the flowers." I brighten a little. "I did that, too." Mom had azalea plants all over our property. She taught me how to pull the blossom from the stem and slurp from the tip of the flower like her mother had shown her. I always thought it was something unique to us, to our family. But maybe it was more. A connection to Japan, an invisible tether. "Is there a variety you prefer? I quite enjoy the omurasaki." I've caught her attention. "It is a lovely bloom," she says.

Kate Atwood tended to the orchids in her greenhouse. She whispered to them in a soothing, absentminded way. She supposed if she were a cat person, she'd chat with her cats – but she was a plant person.

What phenomenon is that?” “Gender transition,” Grant said. “Actually, it’s just plain changing sex.” Grant explained that a number of plants and animals were known to have the ability to change their sex during life—orchids, some fish and shrimp, and now frogs. Frogs that had been observed to lay eggs were able to change, over a period of months, into complete males.

The hallway leading to Botany is lined with cabinets full of dried plants laid out on acid-free paper. Today, I imagine them as a vertical garden, orchids and epiphytes dripping from the sides, a phantom scent of humid forest.

One of the herbals I brought home from the library had a fascinating chapter on herbs and their connection to desire. For Elizabethans, a bundle of rosemary helped arrange an assignation, and an apple suggested libidinous intent. I picture Adlai's reaction to a sprig of rosemary left on his counter, or a juicy Fuji. Better yet, a "Florida butterfly" orchid from the swamp, since the same herbal had an entire page on the sensual properties of the orchid. It called the flower female----"open and inviting"----the root, male----"tuberous and reaching"----and the entire plant "hot and moist in operation.

I don’t know what to make of myself. A lot of the time, despite my deepest hungers and best efforts, I see blackness. But I am planting a young oak tree. I really am. It’ll be here centuries after I’m gone. Assuming I choose to leave.

It was Nicholas' pride to have one example of every tree which could be grown in that locality, and many of these he had imported by schooner from Europe and the Orient straight to the Dragonwyck dock- the Incense Cedar, the Weeping Cypress, the Judas Tree, the Gingko with its fan-shaped leaves, and the delicate bronze Japanese Maple- these were hardly enough to live outside; but the palms and aloes, the oleanders and the orchids, grew in the elaborate greenhouses or in the conservatory off the dinging-room.

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, famous for its collection of more than six thousand living orchids.

Phragmipedium kovachii. It is a stunningly beautiful orchid from the Amazon rain forest in northeast Peru, with a blue-purple flower that can have a horizontal spread of up to nine and a half inches.

enhances the orchid’s reproductive success—but not his own! The best known of these cheats is the bee orchid—the flower looks and feels like a female bee and even has the same pheromones.

Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

Plant Money Marijuana can go for thousands of dollars an ounce. In fact, as of 2006, it was the number-one cash crop in the United States, averaging thirty billion dollars a year. Saffron from Iran is the next-most-expensive plant, as it takes seventy-five thousand flowers to make one pound of the popular spice. Orchids, on the other hand, tend to elude the laws of supply and demand and are priced much more like paintings or sculpture, their value being in the eye of a particular collector.

Tropical Air Plants (epiphytic plants) Air plants include orchids, bromeliads, and all staghorn ferns. They are not planted in soil, and they do not need to be watered. They derive nutrition from decomposing insects and leaves, and nitrogen from lightning strikes. There's not much to add to the story of plants that live off lightning and death. That is drama enough for ten stories.

Herbs and spices come from different parts of a useful plant. Herb refers to the leaves, flowers, or stems. Spice refers to the seed, fruit, root, or bark. Vanilla extract is made from the fruit of the vanilla orchid—its pod, or bean—so we call vanilla a spice.

The necklace we are after is called the Wild Heart," Jack said. "It last sold at auction in November 2015 for $25 million. It features twenty-six oval-shaped flawless pink diamonds and a forty-carat heart-shaped pink diamond. Each diamond is enhanced by a cluster of oval-shaped green marquise emeralds supposedly crafted to resemble the leaves of the phalaenopsis orchid, but which in fact are more like dendrobiums that produce leaves that are opposite one another. The diamonds and emeralds are strategically placed to create a floral effect that makes the necklace resemble Orchidaceae. The gems are set in eighteen-carat white gold and precious platinum." "He likes plants," I explained when I saw a few blank stares. "We met in the hellebore." "It wasn't as romantic as it sounds," Jack said. "She trampled it underfoot like a herd of elephants. I had to go back the next night to repair the damage." "I wasn't trying to make it sound romantic." I heaved a sigh. "I was explaining how I knew that you liked plants." "They probably understood when you said, 'He likes plants.'" Jack's gaze drifted to Cristian. "At least some of them.

Plants are masters of deception. Since they can’t run or hide, many of their survival strategies involve deceiving other plants or animals. Some of the best examples—or worst, if you happen to be a wasp—are certain species of Australian orchids.4 Australia has about 1,400 species of orchids, and around 250 of these have adopted the same strategy of deceiving male wasps to enable pollination.

They’d stopped in front of a pool much larger than the rest. Unlike the others, the surface of this one was not covered in lilies and other water plants, and Emma spied a set of shallow stone steps leading down into it. “Oh! A bathing pool!” she exclaimed in delight. “How wonderful!” “Yes. The heat of the water is extremely effective in relaxing the body. Feel free to make use of it yourself. It is a wonderful feeling, to float about in the steam.

Mankind,’ however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. ‘Mankind’ is a zoological expression, or an empty word. But conjure away the phantom, break the magic circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms the Living with all its immense fullness, depth and movement hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dryasdust scheme, and a set of personal ‘ideals.’ I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle, each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will, and feeling, its own death Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves but there is no ageing ‘Mankind.’ Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another.

Lady’s slipper orchids have a special hinged lip that traps bees and forces them to pass through sticky threads of pollen as they struggle to escape through the back of the plant.

There is something decidedly queer in all of this—the orchids and aspens and strawberries and antplants and ginkgoes—a sense of sensual entanglement that disregards binaries, runs across the species boundary, and almost gleefully defies heteronormative modes of reproduction. This lens might also help us escape the idea that everything in nature is a battle, with a clear winner. Sometimes it may be an improvisation, or a collaboration, or something else entirely. WHEN

Mariyamma's 'garden' is an example of the fine balance between tradition and modernity. Traditional plants like pichi, mulla, chembakam, the four-o-clock plant, hibiscus and pavizhamalli bob their heads right alongside modern varieties like orchid, gerbera, petunia and chrysanthemum. Roses of both kinds traditional and modern - although with the arrival of newcomers in yellow, orange and magenta, the old roses in red and pink have lost their lustre. Still, they hold their heads high, saying, We too are roses.' Kottarathil Veedu had flowering plants even before Mariyamma's arrival. But pichi, mulla, chembakam and hibiscus did not a 'garden' make - they only made a yard with flowers.

Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic; it always reflected function and adaptation at work. Orchids were not just ornamental, to be displayed in a garden or a bouquet; they were wonderful contrivances, examples of nature’s imagination, natural selection, at work. Flowers required no Creator, but were wholly intelligible as products of accident and selection, of tiny incremental changes extending over hundreds of millions of years. This, for Darwin, was the meaning of flowers, the meaning of all adaptations, plant and animal, the meaning of natural selection.

The gardens surrounding the palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha were spectacularly beautiful, full of vibrant colors, the smell of jasmine pervading everything. Harry stopped in front of an exquisite flowering plant with delicate blooms of soft pink and white. "Orchids," he murmured. "They grew in the foliage around Changi, and I've seen them everywhere since I arrived in Bangkok. They are rare in England." "They are like weeds here," said Lidia. "Golly! I wish we had weeds at home like this," Harry said, thinking he must take some back to his mother.

It was as Frank said: the Sparrow Sisters Nursery had quite a reputation. Sally told Henry about the Nursery that was now a landmark in the town. The plants that grew in tidy rows, the orchids that swayed delicately in the beautiful glass greenhouses, and the herbs and vegetables sown in knot gardens around the land were much in demand. Sorrel had planted a dense little Shakespeare garden as a tribute to her reading habits. The lavender, rosemary, roses and honeysuckle, clematis and pansies, creeping thyme and sage were not for sale in that garden, but Sorrel would re-create versions of it for clients whose big houses on the water needed the stamp of culture, even if their owners had little idea what their lovely gardens meant.

Many people who collect orchids designate an orchid heir in their wills, because they know the plants will outlast them.

world. I had vowed that I would acquire not even a single orchid on any of my trips down here, but I thought I might die if I couldn’t have this one. The background of the petals was the beigey yellow of a legal pad, and over the yellow background was a spray of hot-pink pinpoint dots, and the flower was attached to the plant by a stem that was twisted like a stick of licorice. The petals were plump and supple and pleasant to touch. The center of the flower looked like the face of a piglet. I felt as if the plant was looking at me as much as I was looking at it.

One magazine recently reported that a customer of one orchid kennel in San Francisco had so many plants that he was paying two thousand dollars in monthly rent.

It was a dazed, shambling kind of afternoon, a day seen through a scrim, the time gliding by. When I first met a lot of orchid people, they also said that time spent in a greenhouse had a rare, shapeless quality - a day could go by and they wouldn't even notice it had passed if they had spent it among their orchids. That afternoon at Dewey's the light shifted and still we roved around the shadehouse picking up plants, smelling things, rubbing fingers on slick leaves, poking thumbs into dirt, and every couple of minutes Dewey and Laroche would pause and both would light cigarettes and stand in front of some delicate green sprig of something, smoking hard and wordlessly admiring it. I wasn't in any hurry to leave, even though I should have been. Being int he shadehouse was restful in a way that being around people can never be, and it was vivid the way being around lifeless objects can never be, and in the veil of evening air it was as fantastic as a dream.

Forgive me for interrupting your task," Devon said to Helen after they were introduced. A hesitant smile emerged. "Not at all, my lord. I'm merely observing the orchids to make certain there is nothing they lack." "How can you tell what they lack?" Devon asked. "I see the color of their leaves, or the condition of the petals. I look for signs of aphids or thrips, and I try to remember which varieties prefer moist soil and which ones like to be drier." "Will you show them to me?" Devon asked. Helen nodded and led him along the rows, pointing out particular specimens. "This was all my mother's collection. One of her favorites was Peristeria elata." She showed him a plant with marble-white blossom. "The central part of the flower resembles a tiny dove, you see? And this one is Dendrobium aemulum. It's called a feather orchid because of the petals." With a flash of shy mischief, Helen glanced back at Kathleen and remarked, "My sister-in-law isn't fond of orchids." "I despise them," Kathleen said, wrinkling her nose. "Stingy, demanding flowers that take forever to bloom. And some of them smell like old boots or rancid meat." "Those aren't my favorite," Helen admitted. "But I hope to love them someday. Sometimes one must love something before it becomes lovable.

This restaurant had a thing and that thing was plants. Vines cascaded from terra-cotta pots; succulents topped reclaimed wood shelves; miniature white orchids sprouted from handmade ceramic mugs centered on the tables. It was where Pinterest came to vomit, trading in the sort of motif that seemed so effortless and natural that it had to be attainable, only it absolutely was not and Sloane lived for it.

Nothing in science can account for the way people feel about orchids. Orchids seem to drive people crazy. Those who love them love them madly. Orchids arouse passion more than romance. They are the sexiest flowers on earth. The name "orchid" derives from the Latin orchis, which means testicle. This refers not only to the testicle-shaped tubers of the plant but to the fact that it was long believed that orchids sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. The British Herbal Guide of 1653 advised that orchids be used with discretion. "They are hot and moist in operation, under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly." In Victorian England the orchid hobby grew so consuming that it was sometimes called "orchidelirium"; under its influence many seemingly normal people, once smitten with orchids, became less like normal people and more like John Laroche. Even now, there is something delirious in orchid collecting. Every orchid lover I met told me the same story - how one plant in the kitchen had led to a dozen, and then to a backyard greenhouse, and then, in some cases, to multiple greenhouses and collecting trips to Asia and Africa and an ever-expanding orchid budget and a desire for oddities so stingy in their rewards that only a serious collector could appreciate them - orchids like the Stanhopea, which blooms only once a year for at most one day. "The bug hits you," a collector from Guatemala explained to me. "You can join A.A. to quit drinking, but once you get into orchids you can't do anything to kick the habit.

Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation. That has always been part of its charm. Laroche loved orchids, but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as the flowers themselves. The worse a time he had in the swamp the more enthusiastic he would be about the plants he'd come out with. Laroche's perverse pleasure in misery was traditional among orchid hunters. An article published in a 1906 magazine explained: "Most of the romance in connection with the cult of the orchid is in the collecting of specimens from the localities in which they grow, perhaps in a fever swamp or possibly in a country full of hostile natives ready and eager to kill and very likely eat the enterprising collector." In 1901 eight orchid hunters went on an expedition to the Philippines. Within a month one of them had been eaten by a tiger; another had been drenched with oil and burned alive; five had vanished into thin air; and one had managed to stay alive and walk out of the woods carrying forty-seven thousand Phalaenopsis plants. A young man commissioned in 1889 to find cattleyas for the English collector Sir Trevor Lawrence walked of fourteen days through jungle mud and never was seen again. Dozens of hunters were killed by fever or accidents or malaria or foul play. Others became trophies for headhunters or prey for horrible creatures such as flying yellow lizards and diamondback snakes and jaguars and ticks and stinging marabuntas. Some orchid hunters were killed by other orchid hunters. All of them traveled ready for violence. Albert Millican, who went on an expedition in the northern Andes in 1891, wrote in his diary that the most important supplies he was carrying were his knives, cutlasses, revolvers, daggers, rifles, pistols, and a year's worth of tobacco. Being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, when orchid hunting was at its prime, terrible places were really terrible places, and any man advertising himself as a hunter needed to be hardy, sharp, and willing to die far from home.

Your UP might be a $200 digital course that shows customers not only how to care for their orchids, but also how to initially choose a good orchid at a local florist, and then how to properly repot or plant your orchid in a garden.

She was deteriorating out here. I felt like I’d taken an orchid on a road trip and it wasn’t thriving. I was watching it wither, its petals falling off, and there was nothing I could do about it except take it back home and plant it. And now that wasn’t going to be possible.