Skip to main content

Orchidmania

Search This Blog

Orchids in action

on January 10, 2013

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

See the future stars of the orchid world at work in this video – not in Kew, but at a Somerset school. Inspiring to see such young people with such focus.

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

A history of the corsage

The term 'corsage' originally referred to the bodice of a woman’s dress. Since a bouquet of flowers was often worn in the centre of the bodice, the flowers took on the ‘corsage’ tag – ‘a bouquet of the bodice’. Although the placement of the flowers might have changed, the name stuck and is still used to refer to any small bouquet of flowers worn on the body. Corsages are made from a small bunch of flowers or a single bloom. Women originally wore a corsage at the waist or the bodice of a dress. Later, it became common to pin flowers to the shoulder or on a handbag. Corsages may even be tied around a wrist, neck, ankle or worn in the hair. Flowers that don’t wilt without water are obviously the best – such as orchids. Gardenias are rather special, in that they still have a beautiful scent as well. The ancient Greeks believed that the fragrances of flowers and herbs warded off evil spirits. Not only the bride but other females at the wedding held flower bouque...

In the dark over moth orchids

I’ve always been intrigued by the name Phalaenopsis, or ‘moth orchid’. I’d always assumed the name was Greek for moth, but ... well, it isn’t! According to a learned discussion ‘phalaina’ means ‘whale’ in English. This is so both in ancient and modern Greek language. An authoritative source of the vocabulary of classical Greek records ‘falaina’ as a whale, while the Latin is ‘balaena’. The discussion continues about the Latin word balaena , used of baleen whale families Balaenidae and Balaenopteridae . It can hardly be a mistake. And one can hardly change the English common name ‘moth orchid’ into ‘baleen whale orchid’, after all, can one? So in 1825, why did Carl Blume name the genus Phalaenopsis? Experts agree that the word ‘Phalaena’ had already been used in 1758 by Linnaeus to indicate one of the divisions of Lepidoptera . Blume must have followed Linnaeus in this respect. If there was a mistake, one writer assumes, then that’s where he...

Hanging gardens of ... Tokyo

An extraordinary garden is delighting visitors to Japan. A few years ago, before I came down with this serious dose of orchidmania, I would not have believed that these were all the same species, given the astonishing variety of form and colour. Now I know better. A suspended, living arrangement of 2,300 flowers rise and fall around viewers as they move through the space at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. ‘Floating Flower Garden: Flowers and I are of the same root, the Garden and I are one’, a project by Japanese artists at teamLab. A computer-controlled system shifts the myriad orchids up and down depending on who is below. Flowers part like curtains, forming a bubble around the viewer. The orchids on display take in water and nutrients through their roots and are soil-free, meaning the garden is actually growing, even though it’s installed upside-down. According to the artists, the scent of each flower is intensified when it’s...

Powered by Blogger