How to grow native orchids
21.08.2023 - 11:48
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
When someone says orchid, what springs to mind? Probably the beautiful and showy hybrid orchids you can buy in the garden centre, or possibly the tropical orchids Kew does such magnificent displays with during its annual orchid festival. The cultivation of tropical orchids became popular in Britain in the seventeenth century. At the time, no one knew how to propagate orchids from seed, and wild plants were dug up and imported en masse, devastating their native habitats. By the nineteenth century, people had realised that the common British wildflowers they had been overlooking were also orchids. They too became popular with collectors, with some species being driven to the brink of extinction by over-collection and the intensification of agriculture.
It wasn’t until the 1890s that French botanist Noel Bernard figured out that orchids have a crucial symbiotic relationship with soil fungi. In 1922, American plant physiologist Lewis Knudson discovered that the fungus breaks down complex sugars and starches into simple sugars that the orchid can use. Orchid seeds are tiny and do not contain any food resources. A germinating seed must form a relationship with its fungal partner, which provides the seedling with food until it unfurls its first leaves and beings photosynthesising.
Knudson was able to develop a growth solution that provided orchid seeds with the nutrition they needed without the need for the fungus, and cultivation from seed became possible. Around the same time, Gavino Rotor developed the micropropagation technique that allowed the commercial production of hybrid orchids.
Before I moved here five years ago, I had never seen any of Britain’s native hardy orchids. I live close to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory,
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