Garden Alphabet: Orchid from the Southern California Spring Garden Show 2013

Garden Alphabet: Orchid from the Southern California Spring Garden Show 2013

Today’s photo comes from our visit to the Southern California Spring Garden Show 2013 in Costa Mesa, CA. The show runs through Sunday, so you still have a chance to make it to the show. As usual, there were tons of plants on display including large collections of orchids of all shapes and sizes. The shocking contrast of this purply-pink, white and black grabbed my eye as I walked past. Orchids, in general, are amazing plants, looking more like an alien species than something to be found here on Earth.

I’ll have a lot more photos from the Garden Show up soon and I will be highlighting them here on A Gardener’s Notebook in the coming days and weeks.

Orchidaceae

The Orchidaceae are a diverse and widespread family of flowering plants with colorful and fragrant blooms, commonly known as the orchid family. Along with the Asteraceae, they are one of the two largest families of flowering plants, with between 21,950 and 26,049 currently accepted species, found in 880 genera.[1][2]

Selecting which of the two families is larger is still under debate, as concrete numbers on such enormous families are constantly in flux. Regardless, the number of orchid species equals more than twice the number of bird species, and about four times the number of mammal species. The family also encompasses about 6–11% of all seed plants.[3] The largest genera are Bulbophyllum (2,000 species), Epidendrum (1,500 species), Dendrobium (1,400 species) and Pleurothallis (1,000 species).

The family also includes Vanilla (the genus of the vanilla plant), Orchis (type genus), and many commonly cultivated plants such as Phalaenopsis and Cattleya. Moreover, since the introduction of tropical species in the 19th century, horticulturists have produced more than 100,000 hybrids and cultivars.– Wikipedia.org

Previously in Garden Alphabet: