CONSERVING ONTARIO ORCHIDS

WHAT ARE ORCHIDS ?

Orchids are very special plants with very special flowers. The flowers come in a rainbow of colours and in many interesting shapes and patterns. One of an orchid’s petals always has an unusual shape. It is called the lip. Usually it is very showy. People often notice the lip of an orchid before anything else. Orchids are the only plants that have these very special petals. Can you spot the lip in the drawing below?

HOW MANY ORCHIDS ARE THERE?

The answer may surprise you. Orchids for the biggest group of flowering plants. There are at least 25,000 different kinds of orchids! Some people who study these plants think there may even be many thousands more. Only about 61 of these very special plants grow in Ontario and 75 in all of Canada. Fortunately, many of our Canadian orchids have truly gorgeous flowers. – show pictures of interesting varieties for kids…

WHERE DO ORCHIDS GROW?

Orchids are amazing! Different orchids live from the Equator north to the Arctic Circle and south to the southern tip of South America, and from sea level to 5000 m. high on mountains. Some of these orchids live in trees. Others live on rocks or in the ground. Canadian orchids often live in places like bogs, swamps, forests, and meadows. The soil in these places is almost always wet. This makes the soil acid, or sour. Most plants can not get the nutrients they need from acid soils, and so they can not live on them. Canadian orchids can and do. How does this make them even more special?

THE LIFE OF A CANADIAN ORCHID – THE SHOWY LADY’S SLIPPER ( Cypripedium reginae )

Only the roots of the magnificent Showy Lady’s Slipper orchid survive winter, under a blanket of snow. As spring arrives, warm sunshine and longer days help the orchid plant to make leaves. These leaves are green because they contain chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is a chemical that lets green plants make their own food. They do this with water, minerals, and energy from sunlight. This process is called photosynthesis.

When the Showy Lady’s Slipper orchid is about 5 years old, it produces a big, beautiful flower in late June with a pink, slipper-shaped lip. Its colour and fragrance invite bees to come inside looking for food. Most flowers make nectar, a honey-like substance, for visiting bees. Instead this orchid makes yummy hair-like growths that bees can eat. When the bee leaves the flower, it brushes past a sticky sac filled with yellow pollen. The sac sticks to the bee’s back. When the bee visits another Showy Lady’s Slipper flower, the sticky sac comes off the bee and attaches itself to part of the flower called its stigma. This process, called pollenation, is how flowering plants start making seeds.

Orchids make very tiny seeds in a seed capsule. The capsule grows behind the flower as it fades. One capsule can contain may thousands of seeds. The seeds will ripen by the end of the summer. As they do, the capsule splits open and the seeds are blown away by the wind. Only a few usually fall to the ground where orchids like to grow. These may germinate, or begin growing when spring arrives the following year

As the new Showy lady’s Slipper plants grow, they spread their roots into the surrounding ground. These roots can also make new growths that develop into new orchid plants.