Exotic blooms

Usage examples of orchids.

This refers not only to the testicle-shaped pseudobulbs of the plant but also to the fact that it was long believed that orchids sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals.

The smallest orchids are nearly microscopic, and the biggest ones have masses of flowers as large as footballs.

A young Chinese collector, Hsu She-hua, who was not long ago described in newspaper reports as a fanatic, said that even though he had been hauled into court seven times for possessing illegal wild orchids he considered it worthwhile.

Some Victorian orchid collectors went to the tropics themselves, but most stayed home and paid professional hunters to travel around the world and collect orchids for them.

Having tropical orchids therefore indicated that you were rich enough to hire a man to do a task that might kill him.

No one in England was very good at cultivating or breeding tropical orchids, so hunters were the only way to get nursery stock, and the big nurseries employed whole crews of them.

These were known as lost orchids, and every orchid fancier and every ambitious commercial grower and every prideful hunter was determined to find one of them.

IN 1975, global traffic in wild orchids was outlawed by the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which is known as CITES.

Labate said he lost an eight-foot-tall palm tree, a six-foot white bird of paradise, a fern, six orchids, and two bonsai plants.

Ghost orchids are found in the United States only in the Fakahatchee, and they are now classified as endangered.

THE orchid community in South Florida, which grows most of the commercial orchids for sale in the United States, is a tight, tangled world.

Since then, the woods west of Boynton Beach have disappeared, and Savilla has grown up, married twice, moved several times, had three children, and retired from her job as a lab technician, but the orchids she collected when she was young are still growing in her back yard.

The man was especially curious about her ghost orchids, so she showed him a cluster of them on her mango tree.

A few days later, a deputy sheriff, Perry, and Bob Fuchs and his business partner drove to Krull-Smith Orchids in the middle of the night.

The male beetles enjoy several weeks of orgiastic ecstasy among the orchids, and when eventually the females emerge from the ground, we can imagine a great deal of wounded pride and righteous indignation.