 Green Winged Orchids |  Twayblades, growing slowly |
These two photographs represent two different species, as you can guess, at the same age, which is a bit more difficult to explain. The thing is that the plants on the left are Green Winged orchids, the ones on the right are Common Twayblade. The difference in growth could not be greater. It is quite extraordinary that plants of the same family could be so different. Well, until I considered that Apples, pears, brambles and roses are all in the same family. Then it dawned on me that since plant taxonomy is largely based upon flower structure, all these plants may be related. In their adult form this may even be obvious (in the case of the rose family it is easy to see) but how they get there and what the plant itself looks like may be poles apart. So it is with our Twayblade, it is obviously an orchid when it flowers, but how it gets there is not only quite different to most of our terrestrial species, but much, much slower. It will be a few more years before I can offer Twayblades for sale unless we can devise a much better growth medium for them.
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