Dipodium variegatum

Happy New Year! I know that it has been a while since I've last updated, so I'll try to get back in the habit. Almost one year ago I was boarding a flight to Australia (by way of New York and Shanghai) to see my research organism for the first time. I had a blast touring around for six weeks hunting orchids, reuniting with old friends, and meeting new ones. But best of all, I found plenty of orchids to photograph and sample -- more on that later.

I will be sharing more photos from my trip and research soon, but for now enjoy this Dipodium variegatum, the slender hyacinth orchid, that I found north of Batemans Bay, New South Wales.

Here's wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2015!

Deliciously named orchid cultivar

Another orchid on the kitchen table is blooming; this time it's the deliciously named cultivar Cycnoches cooperi 'Dark Chocolate' × 'Dark Fudge'. Thanks to these lovely little flowers, I'll now be able to voucher this specimen and include it in my phylogenetic work.

The interesting thing about this genus and its allied genera is that the flowers are unisexual and display sexual dimorphism where the characteristics of the male and female flowers are noticeably different. These here are the male flowers. You can tell by the narrow labellum at the top of the flower and the very long column below the labellum. It was that extraordinary column that gave the genus its common name swan orchids - there's a quite clever illustration at the bottom of the second to last page in this article that might help you visualize why the name is appropriate.

It has been suggested that plant vigor, amount of sunlight, or other environmental factors may lead to whether the plant invests its resources in presenting female flowers. A plant must be capable of supporting seed production if it is going to give up on the possibility of producing male flowers with relatively cheap pollen instead. Luckily for the swan orchids, the molecular "choices" that decide whether a flower is male or female do not decide the fate of all flowers for that year or season. Different inflorescences flowering at the same time can have opposite sex flowers as seen in figure 6 in this article (the photo by Katherine B. Gregg). Gregg's work in the 1970s is the last that I know of in Cycnoches to try and identify what combination of environmental patterns might be generating the plant's phenotypic plasticity. This kind of work has hit a new stride lately in population ecology (here's just one example in alligator weed). Might be an interesting project for someone to work on. And the study organisms aren't half bad to look at!

Oeceoclades gracillima: won't you crawl inside?

Don't you just want to crawl inside?

Oeceoclades gracillima (Schltr.) Garay & P.Taylor is an orchid native to Madagascar that has stunning maroon and black mottled foliage which is hard to capture properly on film, but you can see one of the better images here. (In case you were wondering, you pronounce the genus name ee-see-o-CLA-deez.)

I picked this one up from Michel Orchid Nursery when they were at the orchid show and sale at Longwood Gardens in March 2012. I'm so happy it finally flowered as this means I'm able to dry and press a specimen for a voucher and begin working on isolating and sequencing DNA from the leaves and flowers on the other inflorescence. It's not the prettiest flowering orchid around - the flowers are mostly small and drab - but it's got character elsewhere in the leaves.

For those of you with a sharp eye who follow the blog because of my interest in carnivorous plants, you'll notice that this species had originally been named Eulophia gracillima by the German orchid specialist Friedrich Richard Rudolf Schlechter in 1913. That name was supplanted in 1976, however, by the new combination when Leslie Andrew Garay and none other than the Utricularia expert Peter Taylor!

Taylor was also the co-author of another combination, Oeceoclades roseo-variegata, which according to the Kew World Checklist is now a synonym of O. gracillima. The former is still in use, however, and was how my plant came labeled from the nursery.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, and this little flower has a wonderful little nectar spur. Overall, a great, compact orchid that was really easy to cultivate.

Thecostele alata wants to give you a hug

I received this cute little orchid from Gines Orchids last week for my research on genera allied to Dipodium and Cymbidium. Like most species in this group of orchids, Thecostele alata (above) is native to Southeast Asia. Those two slender upper petals sort of look like they're reaching out to give you a hug, don't they? And is it just me or does the column resemble the head of a floppy-eared dog (at least from this angle)? Perhaps I've been staring at this for too long.

The orchid that smells like Chanel No 5

Dipodium roseum, a parasitic Australian relative. Photo by Ian Sutton.

The orchid genus Dipodium, collectively known as the hyacinth orchids, includes somewhere between 20 to 30 species native to Southeast Asia and Australia. Interestingly, the majority of the species are leafy epiphytes - well, terrestrials that climb and then become epiphytes - dispersed throughout Southeast Asia. A small group of these plants, however, have lost the leaves entirely and live as terrestrial parasites at the base of Eucalyptus trees in Australia.

This, of course, is interesting on its own, but what caught my attention today was the description of a new species in 2006 by Peter O'Byrne and Jaap Vermeulen. They found Dipodium fragrans growing in eastern Johor state of Peninsular Malaysia, inhabiting the lowland swamp-forests common to the area. Dipodium fragrans, as you can deduce from the species epithet, is heavily perfumed, so much so that it led to this humorous description, hidden away among the often stuffy and sometimes inaccessible language of academic botany:

D. fragrans is noteworthy in two other respects: the inflorescence is often branched, and the flowers are strongly fragrant, hence the specific name. Vermeulen describes the scent as "being like Chanel No 5", while O'Byrne (a poor schoolteacher) is ignorant about luxury fragrances and likens the scent to frangipani's.

Science, including the scientific descriptions of  new species, could learn a lesson from O'Byrne and Vermeulen. A little humor, properly placed, makes for a more engaging read. It certainly stuck with me more than if that comment had been omitted!

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Reference:

O'Byrne, Peter, and Jaap Vermeulen (2006). Two Cheirostylis species and a new Dipodium. Malayan Orchid Review, 40, 91-94