AboutOrchids

The Million Orchid Project aims to restore Florida’s endangered native orchids. Scientists and volunteers at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden are tackling this ambitious plan. The famous Ghost Orchid is just one of Florida’s threatened species. Like other native orchids, it has become rare due to habitat destruction and illegal poaching. The Million Orchid Project wants to change that, even hoping to establish plants in urban areas like Miami. So how do scientists grow a million orchids? Fortunately, healthy orchids make lots of minuscule seeds. In the wild, most don’t survive, but in the right lab conditions, they can be grown en masse. After they’re big enough, they are attached to trees to mature naturally. Several hundred young orchids have already been transplanted in the wild. It will take a few years to see if they can reproduce on their own. Fairchild is modeling this ambitious project on the tiny tropical nation of Singapore, which has had great success reintroducing its own native orchids over the past 30 years. Will magical Ghost Orchids someday bloom in downtown Miami? Lots of orchid lovers sure hope so. In the meantime, seeing Ghost Orchids in the wild still requires a trek through a swamp.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2014 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Botanical Gardens, Conservation, In the News.

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