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the question of spotty leaves

19/1/2017

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Picture
Early Purple Orchid seedling in sterile culture at 15 months old.
This picture is interesting for many reasons. The first is that the photograph shows a considerable amount of spherical aberration. This is a physical phenomenon associated with lenses which have flaws resulting in different focus points. This is different to depth of field and has more in common with chromatic aberration, where the different point of focus varies with the wavelength of light.

In this case it is not some strange home made lens that has caused this affect, it is photographing through the side of a glass jar which has caused this odd result. The plant is really very small, 2cm from base to tip and some distance from the side of the jar. This is not the most interesting thing, however. It is the spotting. This has developed after one year in sterile culture, starting as surface sterilised seed, with one sub-culturing event. This development of spotting in Early Purple Orchids, Orchis mascula, is quite common which makes me think that it is most likely not viral in origin. Well, not unless it is a viral infection present in the seed. There are ways to test for virus activity which are easy to carry out as confirmation, which we may do later in the year just as a matter of curiosity.

What is really rather more interesting a question is what controls the expression of spotting. Individual plants will always maintain the same amount of spotting, a very spotty plant will always be very spotty and a relatively lightly spotted plant will always be lightly spotted. What differs is the distribution of spots.

There is another aspect of spotting which has a certain intrigue and that is the disappearance of spots later in the season.

All these questions, all of which can be answered given a little ingenuity and a supply of plants. So far we have only started to look at pattern development in Common Spotted Orchids, Dactylorhiza fuchsii. These are very tolerant plants that are easy to grow and since they live for a long time we get several years of measurements from each plant.

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Time to think about your garden orchids

3/1/2017

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Picture
One of our Pyramidal Orchids siting out the Winter
As you can see in the picture, the New Year has brought with it frost. This is no problem for our native species, which live their long lives in our constantly changing temperatures. This particular plant, Anacamptis pyramidalis, is one of the winter green species. These are a group of plants which produce leaves in the autumn and sit through the hrsh weather ready to spring into life when the weather warms up and the days get longer. Most of our native species prefer to stay below ground with a small shoot just poking out to register the changing day length.

This individual plant has already flowered once and is now several years old. It is quite difficult to know how long many of our native orchids will live, but for some we already have some definitive data, simply because we have been growing them for so long. Of course, not all plants will have the same life span. They may succumb to pests and disease along the way, but we expect our Dactylorhiza species, the marsh and spotted orchids, to live for about 20 years. This is not so much of a surprise considering that even with the prolific rate of seed production by these species, the rate of germination and seedling survival in the wild is small. It therefore makes sense that the only way a plant can guarantee species survival is to produce seed for as many years as possible.

The story is complicated, as it so often is with these lovely flowers, by thevariable time it takes for the plant to move from seed to flower. Some are quite quick by orchid standards, if not in comparison with ordinary garden plants, taking only three years. This is in the ideal conditions of our laboratory and nursery, in the wild it will be much longer.

This is one of the delights of the way in which we grow our plants, you can have them flowering in your garden meadow this year if you get them in early. We are a nursery with an agenda, to help these plants survive and repopulate the wild areas of the UK. So if you are, or know someone who is, setting up a wild flower garden, make sure they have some orchids in there.

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    Author

    Dr Wilson Wall, grower of orchids. A scientist by inclination and training.

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