Orchidaceae — Earth’s Most Beautiful Orchids
Orchis italica -- naked man orchid
Orchis italica — naked man orchid
Orchis italica, commonly known as the naked man orchid or the Italian orchid, is a species of orchid native to the Mediterranean. It gets its common name from the lobed lip (labellum) of each flower which mimics the general shape of a naked man.
In Italy, it is believed that the consumption of the plant is conducive to virility. It prefers partial shade and low nutrient soil and flowers in April. O. italica grows up to 50 centimeter’s (20 in) in height, with bright pink, densely clustered flowers. They are found commonly and widespread in the Mediterranean in large clusters.
Orchis italica is native to southwestern Europe (Balearic Islands, Portugal, Sardinia, and Spain), southeastern Europe (Albania, Greece, Italy, Crete, Sicily, and countries of the former Yugoslavia), western Asia (Cyprus, the East Aegean Islands, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestinian Territories and Turkey), and northern Africa (Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia).
Orchis is a genus in the orchid family (Orchidaceae), occurring mainly in Europe and Northwest Africa, and ranging as far as Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. The name is from the Ancient Greek orchis, meaning “testicle”, from the appearance of the paired subterranean tuberoids.
These terrestrial orchids have root tubers instead of pseudobulbs. They are extremely diverse in appearance. They produce an erect stem.
The inflorescence is a cylindrical to globular spike, 5–15 cm (2–6 in) long, with yellow, red to purple flowers. They start flowering at the base, slowly progressing upwards, except for the Monkey orchid (Orchis simia), which flowers in reverse order.
The original genus Orchis used to contain more than 1,300 names. Since it was polyphyletic, it has been divided into several new genera: Ponerorchis, Schizodium, Steveniella.
They can be found in tropical Rainforest and semi-desert regions, near the seashore and in the tundra. The majority of neotropical orchid species can be found in southern Central America, northwest South America.
The Orchidaceae are a diverse and widespread family of flowering plants, with blooms that are often colorful and fragrant, commonly known as the orchid family.
Along with the Asteraceae, they are one of the two largest families of flowering plants. The Orchidaceae have about 28,000 currently accepted species, distributed in about 763 genera.
The determination of which family is larger is still under debate, because verified data on the members of such enormous families are continually in flux. Regardless, the number of orchid species is nearly equal to the number of bony fishes, more than twice the number of bird species, and about four times the number of mammal species.
The family encompasses about 6–11% of all seed plants.
The largest genera are Bulbophyllum (2,000 species), Epidendrum (1,500 species), Dendrobium (1,400 species) and Pleurothallis (1,000 species). It also includes Vanilla (the genus of the vanilla plant), the type genus Orchis, and many commonly cultivated plants such as Phalaenopsis and Cattleya.
Moreover, since the introduction of tropical species into cultivation in the 19th century, horticulturists have produced more than 100,000 hybrids and cultivars.
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