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- This website is committed to bring you the best picture of orchids flowers and

comprehensive information about orchid. You will find beautiful orchid picture from wild orchid and orchid species plus hybrids. All the popular orchids like dendrobium orchid, phalaenopsis orchid, oncidium orchid, cattleya orchid and vanda orchid among other are covered.

There are some tips how to grow orchids and hybrids in particular. You will find a “sea of orchid colors” in the pictures from a Thai orchid nursery, actually it’s a virtual orchid show.

We also cover the most popular orchid colors; this is white, yellow, blue and purple. There are also other colors, like beautiful red cattleya, blue vanda, pink dendrobium and other orchids with mixed colors.

There are beautiful orchid bouquets and other flower arrangements. Orchid wholesale offers seeds and seedlings of cattleya, cymbidium, dendrobium, oncidium, paphiopedilum, phal, phalaenopsis, vanda in flasks.

The orchid family--Orchidaceae--has a greater variety  of species than any other plant family on Earth: naturally occurring species number over 

30,000, and artificially created hybrids in the tens of thousands. Most of the flowers are epiphytes, growing with their roots not  in soil but instead hanging down tree branches in the rain forest. A few orchids are parasites; lacking chlorophyll, they extract the necessary nutrients from the organism on which they grow. One Australian orchid even spends its entire life underground. Orchids come in every color except black, and though few have any fragrance, the ones that do run the gamut from the scent of chocolate to that of carrion, they have a complex lifestyle. Orchids are so unlike other flowering plants, in fact, they seem to live in a kind of isolation from other organisms. Darwin wrote a book on them--On the various contrivances whereby they are fertilized by insects, and effects of crossing.
Orchids Nursery

Darwins book served as a kind of sequel to his Origin of Species, and was intended to clarify certain points crucial to the theory of natural selection.

But only quite recently--and only because of the advent of powerful molecular techniques such as genetic sequencing--have plant biologists been able to reconstruct the history of the orchid family to which these alluring flowers belong.

Darwin argued that natural selection cannot take place unless organisms cross with other individuals. The reason he gave is that the survival of individuals best adapted to prevailing ecological conditions--often called "survival of the fittest"--depends on the existence of a broad

Sexual reproduction of plants, with its radical reshuffling of genes in each new generation, gives rise to that variety of plants.

- Most plants--particularly the angiosperms,

thing. To germinate at all, the seed must first be invaded by a fungus. Once the embryo makes a cellular connection with a fungus, the immature seedling begins to siphon off essential nutrients from its fungal host. In other words, the orchid seedling becomes a parasite on the fungus. The plant may carry on with this living arrangement until it develops leaves capable of photosynthesis, making it able to manufacture food on its own. Alternatively, the flower may continue to feed off its host for the rest of its life, without ever producing green chlorophyll. This strategy is called myco-heterotrophism, and orchids are its most common practitioners.

Clearly, orchids are an exceptional family of plants. Classifying them within the standard system of taxonomy, and thereby indicating their closest relatives, has been a matter of considerable controversy among botanists.

Some have focused on the seed as the basis for classification, placing Orchidaceae alongside other mycoheterotrophs. Others have focused on the flower, and considered the family closely related to the lilies. Still others have placed them in their own unique order, Orchidales, which just sweeps the controversy under the rug.

Recently, however, cutting-edge techniques of molecular biology have offered an entirely new basis for classification. The most important of those techniques is DNA sequencing--the process of determining the exact order of the nucleic acids that collectively constitute the genes comprising the genome of the plant.

Biologists have already sequenced the complete genomes of more than a dozen multicellular organisms, including mice, rice, and human beings. But the sequence of even a small portion of an organism's genome can help reveal fundamental aspects of its natural history--the path the organism took to get to where it is today.

- The genetic approach,

then, is amplifying the practice of classification, rooting it in history. Systematics--the broad investigation into the discovery, naming, and cataloging of biodiversity--has become not just a collector's passion, but a fundamental pursuit in biology'.

For the plant systematist, DNA sequences yield crucial information about the ancestors and closest living relatives of orchids, when and where they evolved, and why they came to have such a complex lifestyle.

Genetic analysis shows that Orchidaceae is a member of the order Asparagales, to which the agave, asparagus, hyacinth, iris, and onion families also belong.

The plant family, moreover, was the first of those groups to branch off on its own. But because orchids have left almost nothing in the fossil record, determining a date for their origin has not been straightforward.

Some biologists, therefore, have turned to an investigative tool known as a "molecular clock," whose ticking is based on the assumption that DNA mutates at a fairly constant rate. The clock is usually calibrated by comparing its (admittedly speculative) readings with the independently agreed upon dates of some widely recognized fossils from various plant or animal families.

Molecular clocks are not without their critics, but one such clock has enabled botanists to calculate that orchids may have branched of prior to 100 million years ago, around the end of the early Cretaceous epoch--much earlier than traditionally thought.

One reason that the age estimate seems surprisingly ancient to many botanists is that most major orchid groups occur in either the Old World or the New World, but rarely in both. A plant group native to the continents in one of those regions, but absent from those in the other, might be expected to have established itself more recently than 100 million years ago--that is, after South America and Africa (which were

once part of the super continent Gondwana) had fully separated, thereby preventing further exchanges of organisms between the two landmasses.

Two other reasons for thinking orchids are of relatively recent origin are that most are epiphytes (and thus presumably arose after the emergence of forests full of flowering plants), and most sustain complex relationships with certain insect groups (bees, for instance, didn't become pollinators until the advent of flowering plants).

And sure enough, most hybrid popular orchids evolved not so very long ago. Yet DNA data from several small groups--particularly the one to which the genus Vanilla (source of the much-loved flavoring) belongs--support the idea that orchids in general are of ancient origin.

Vanilloid orchids, which encompass some fifteen genera that form the subfamily Vanilloideae, have always posed an enigma to orchidologists. They incorporate certain advanced features--some are climbing vines, some have winged seeds, most have highly elaborate flowers--as well as features that usually occur in more primitive orchids: they are terrestrial, their pollen grains are not lumped together on a pollinarium, and the fusion of their stamens and pistil is less complete than in most other orchids. DNA sequencing, in fact, shows that Vanilla and its close relatives diverged from other orchids lineages early on. Furthermore, vanilloid orchids today are distributed across the tropical belt of the Southern Hemisphere: Africa, eastern Australia, the Pacific island of New Caledonia, South America, and Southeast Asia (especially Papua New Guinea, but also Indonesia and Malaysia), all of which were once

Vanda White

Vanda Orange Color full Plant

Dendrobium White

Vanda Violet full Plant

Vanda Violet

Dendrobium White and Violet

Vanda Orange Color

Orchid Dark Yellow

part of Gondwana. Although significant rifting began in Gondwana about 165 million years ago.It was not until about 100 million years ago that Africa and South America became distinct continents; Antarctica, Australia, and New Caledonia, however, re-roamed in contact until as recently as 85 to 90 million years ago.

If the orchid family evolved on Gondwana prior to 100 million years ago, the ancestors of the vanilla orchids would have had plenty of time to spread across the super continent before it broke apart, and their family tree should reflect that historical pattern of continental breakup.

Indeed, that's precisely what the DNA data show. Orchids have been around for a long time, but the same holds true for many other families of flowering plants.

What then, has enabled orchids to become so diverse? Extreme specialization together with specific insect pollinators is usually cited as the primary driving force. And that is almost certainly an important factor. But the DNA data suggest an alternative, though complementary, explanation.

Yet the DNA data seem to indicate that orchids--whose flowers readily change color, form, shape, and size as a result of the selective pressure of specific pollinators--disobey that "rule." Flowers can be misleading. The mode of growth--whether terrestrial or epiphytic--and the structure of the leaves and stems turn out to be the better indicators of malaxids' (as well as some other orchids') evolutionary history.

Biologists generally maintain that hierarchical classification systems should be "natural"--that is, based on evolutionary relations rather than on some shared attribute such as flower color, leaf shape, or geography. To some extent, a plant's name and its placement in the hierarchy should enable one to infer part of its evolutionary history. And as hypotheses about evolutionary relationships change, so must the names.

Most of the DNA data support traditional classifications, but some--the data on the malaxids, for instance--do not. From where I stand, the present century is an exciting time to be in the business of botanical sleuthing. Soon botanists will know a lot more about the plant kingdom's most glamorous angiosperms--the flowers, as Darwin put it, "universally acknowledged to rank amongst the most singular and most modified forms in the vegetable kingdom."
Author Kenneth M. Cameron COPYRIGHT  Natural History Magazine, Inc. & Gale Group 

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