The Romance of Plant Life / Interesting Descriptions of the Strange and Curious in the Plant World

by G. F. Scott Elliot

PhotoSkeen and Co.

Cinnamon Peeling in Ceylon

Then, after being stripped from the branches, in some out-of-the-way forest-clad range of Burma, Celebes, South America, or Madagascar, these orchids are dried, put up in crates and packed off to London, where they are carefully cultivated in hot-houses and persuaded to flower. They may be worth sixpence or they may be worth £500 each, but no one can tell until they have flowered in London.

But the romance of the orchid-hunter is not exactly what we have to describe here. It is rather the romance of the life of the orchid itself.

It is perched high up on the branches of the tallest trees in the forest, exposed to sun, exposed to wind, and quite unable to gather either salts or rain from the soil. How, then, does it manage to live?

These orchids, it must be remembered, are only found in out-of-the-way and feverish, unhealthy places, where the aboriginal savages still lurk and endure a dreadful existence of hunger and starvation in dense tropical forests.

Now the word "dense" explains the whole story. Those forests are so thick, so full of giant trees and exuberant growth, that civilized man even to-day in 1906 can make nothing of them, and leaves them to the savage. The reason why vegetation is so luxuriant is simply that there are both plentiful moisture and a hot, tropical sun. That makes the life of the orchid possible, and also ensures malaria for the hunter.

It hangs out into the moist air long pendulous roots which act as so many sponges absorbing and soaking in moisture. The tremendous energy of growth covers bark and branches with creeping plants innumerable, with a profusion of moss, liverworts, and ferns such as we cannot imagine from our own experiences in this country. So the roots of our orchid find on the branches rich leaf-mould, and it lives happily and contentedly on the salts and moisture accumulated by the mosses and other plants. Its leaves are fleshy and succulent, rather like those of a desert plant, so that it can store up water against a season of drought.