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Author Topic: Orchids
Ken Hume
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Posts: 640
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Post Orchids
on: June 29, 2016, 16:34
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An orchid plant has arrived in the roadside verge mix of nettles, grass and bramble.

This is the purple pyramid orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis)

Image

Botany expert Sandra Parkinson advises :-

"It is not unusual to find this orchid on a roadside verge. It is a perennial and will live for years, even if it occasionally gets mown. The seed can be harvested when the flower head has gone brown and papery and then the the spores can be scatterred (the seeds are minute - orchid seeds are found in the sky at jet plane heights). Orchid spores are only a few cells big, and when they germinate need to immediately find a fungus (sometimes a specific one) with which it develops a symbiotic relationship in order to grow any further. The spores like very poor soil (with the necessary fungus) rather than road verges, which are often either too fertile from adjacent arable field run-off, or from traffic pollution. From germination, Pyramidals take about 3 years to flower the first time".

Ken Hume OWG

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