What is "epiphytic"

Usage examples of "epiphytic".

Ancient trunks and knotted vines, giant ferns and stippled foliage, the languid monotone of botanical patterning interrupted, at precisely the proper moment, by a sudden caesura in the greenery, bright orchids dazzling as summer clouds, flavored cups of epiphytic ice protruding from their beds of root growth thick as pubic hair up in the crotches of the stilted mangrove trees, or the swoop of incandescent plumage as a blue-throated flycatcher sailed out into the open river space and vanished, the eye barely registering its passage.

I believe that this is the case, because the bladders of some epiphytic and marsh species of Utricularia which live embedded either in entangled vegetation or in mud, have no bristles round the entrance, and these under such conditions would be of no service as a guide.