Four wild orchids

Jenkins’ dendrobium (Dendrobium jenkinsii) hugged the shady side of a tree trunk, but stood out bright in the hot sun of the early afternoon. It was just a few days past holi, and as always, the hot season had us in its grip. Our open jeeps left us dusty, hot, and terribly uncomfortable. It was high summer in Manas NP; the rains were expected in two or three weeks. I was a little puzzled by this wild orchid of Assam. If this was not D. jenkinsii, it must be D. lindleyii, and both are said to grow at higher altitudes, not at the 50 to 100 meters that we were cruising. The leaves, the details of the flower, the tree-hugging habit were all correct though. If you have a solution to the puzzle, let me know.

On the next tree was another set of blooms: a similar cluster of yellow flowers growing on the shadier side of the tree. But when I looked again, they were different. The leaves were longer, and the flowers were clearly different in form. Also, these were hanging from trees, not hugging them. The leaves were not intermixed with the flowers, but they seemed to grow on opposite sides of the main stem. A search through an index told me that these are Dendrobium chrysanthum (golden-flowered dendrobium). Strangely enough, they are said to grow at an altitude of above 300 meters. I can’t believe that I was on ground that no botanist has ever visited. After all, these were the hunting grounds of the Victorian British plant hunters who transformed the gardens of the western world by almost destroying the natural vegetation of the Himalayas. We live in a world where the destroyers of the environment do not take responsibility for nursing the earth back to health.

A few tens of meters further along the road, hooded orchids (Dendrobium aphyllum) hung in long streamers from a tree, ending a few meters above ground. Fortunately, a tree behind it had not shed all its leaves, and I could get a partially dark background against which I could photograph the blooms. The pale yellow funnel of the labella, with the purple streaks of “runways” leading to the nectar made the identification fairly unambiguous. And fortunately there was no confusion this time; the orchid is said to grow at these heights.

Elsewhere I’d glimpsed a jumble of stems growing out of a tree a few meters above ground, and not realized that I was looking at an orchid. The Family noticed two flowers and realized that they were orchids. It is likely to be the shoe-lip dendrobium (Dendrobium crepidatum), which is again said to grow at an altitude of above 600 meters. Finding these higher altitude orchids at near sea level presents a neat puzzle. The Manas NP of Assam is a continuation of the Royal Manas NP of Bhutan, which starts at a height of 2700 meters above sea level. In our days the extensive old forests of the Himalayas are fragmented into these biosphere reserves. Perhaps plants which would normally have spread laterally at a fixed altitude now are forced to try to spread vertically, and at these lower elevations we see the outliers of a few hardier species which are not strongly restricted by climate. After all, the four orchids that I saw here have been domesticated and are widely available across the world to orchid enthusiasts. We don’t know how many species are completely lost with the loss of forests.