"orchid... popping up in Miami-Dade County in disturbed and abandoned lots as well as in manicured and mulched garden beds... not a native...
Its one-inch flowers are mostly green, although the lip is white and pink. The leaves occasionally appear after the flower stalk. It grows in the ground, and when small, it has a roundish bulb... said Suzanne Koptur, an ecologist at Florida International University. ``It's a very tough, strong... seems to pop up from ... seeds that find what they need in that cypress mulch.'' ... The monk orchid might displace... ''... things like... native orchid, Eulophia alta ,'' Koptur said... The new Eulophia orchid was first noticed last year by one of Koptur's neighbors, Harvey Bernstein, who found it growing in the mulch beds around his succulent collection. Bernstein is a plant curator at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden... When he didn't recognize the plant, he took it to Koptur, but she didn't recognize it, either. It worked its way through several orchid growers until, finally, Bob Pemberton, a research associate with Fairchild, solved the... mystery. The little orchid is Eulophia graminea... from Southeast Asia, Burma and subtropical islands of the Pacific. It has become naturalized in northern Australia, and now... it is in the Redland, Miami Dade College's North Campus, Little River, South Miami and even in a parking lot on Virginia Key. ... young plants are slight enough to remain overlooked... In Miami's Palm Grove neighborhood, just west of Belle Meade... Don Wallstedt found many eulophias growing in rocky soil in two empty lots. ''I saw these little flowers and knew it was an orchid but didn't know what kind,'' he said. ``I looked in Wild Orchids of Florida, which has every orchid that's ever been seen in Florida, and knew I had something unique.'' ... How did it get here? ... Pemberton found several of the plants for sale on eBay, as well as a Thai source offering the bulbs and even a source in Scotland offering plants... Its dust-like seeds may have been carried on the wind. ... it seems to like only cypress mulch, Koptur said. Her native landscape is mulched with local wood chips... It is setting seed in Miami-Dade... meaning something may be pollinating it... Wallstedt believes it may be a tiny blue butterfly, which appeared in a photo published with his account in The Biscayne Times. Pemberton disagrees. To serve as a pollinator, the butterfly would have to carry the orchid's... pollinia, on its body from one flower to the next. Pemberton went to Wallstedt's site, counted 25 of the little butterflies and caught 20, then did a body search on them for signs of pollen... Koptur, who spent hours watching the flowers in a neighbor's yard to see if anything showed up to pollinate them, suggests ants. Pemberton disagrees. ''Ant pollination of orchids is very rare,'' he said. ``Most ants groom themselves with secretions from glands on the sides of their thorax. Those secretions contain an antifungal material that kills pollen.'' Pemberton proposes that the pollinator may be a bee. The lip of the flower not only has colored stripes that usually are landing guides for bees, but it also has mini structures that stick up like the tiniest of fingers, which are attractive to bees." URL : http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/594330.html ************* Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
