Green Group discussion

Orchids, because they live on marginal or inaccessible land and have special relationships with insects, are a fascinating study.

Here a British orchid which uses the male mining bee to pollinate the flowers, is endangered due to climate change.
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-chan...

Orchids are unusual also in that they exhale oxygen during the night and inhale it during the day, unlike the majority of plants.

The Orchid Outlaw: On a Mission to Save Britain's Rarest Flowers


This one is well reviewed by Jemima Pett.

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2023/...

"Professor McElwain believes the appearance of the orchids in Trinity are the result of the university's participation in 'No Mow May' - the annual campaign that encourages gardeners to not mow their lawn during the month of May so that plants and pollinators benefit.

"We wanted to implement a positive measure for biodiversity. So, we just simply stopped mowing this lawn in May. And that was difficult to do, because a lot of people really like finely cut lawns. But we stopped mowing, and this wonderful orchid began to emerge.

"And there's not just one - there are three orchids, including another species. So, we actually have an orchid-rich meadow.

"That's a botanist's dream and our only intervention has been to stop mowing the lawns."

Orchids have the smallest seeds of all flowering plants, with a typical seed the size of a speck of dust."


Orchid seeds have no food store so they remain underground for years, co-operating with fungi for nutrients. See The Orchid Outlaw: On a Mission to Save Britain's Rarest Flowers for details.

While this plant does not seem to be an orchid, it's close enough in description.

https://www.rte.ie/news/munster/2024/...

" Conservationists at Killarney National Park have confirmed the discovery of a rare plant, which has not been spotted in over a century.

The Yellow Bird's Nest, or monotropa hypopitys, was last seen in the park in 1896.

It can survive in the shade as it does not need light to thrive.

Conservation Ranger at Killarney National Park, Mary Sheehan, said it took 100 years but the plant has reappeared and is "very, very special"."

The clip embedded in the page, explains that the plant is pale because it does not have chlorophyll, and it is nourished by fungal networks underground which feed off nearby tree roots.

Relevant books:

Here is another plant which is rare, endangered and gets its nutrition from fungi. The term is mycoheterotrophic and here is a botany entry explaining the process.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/...

The new plant was only recently discovered by a hiking guide. To me it looks similar to a brittle fungus, but the article suggests it is pollinated by insects.

https://gizmodo.com/researchers-disco...

"The photographs of Thismia aliasii included in the study showcase a strange plant in various shades of orange or yellow, with a bulbous top from which extend petal- or tentacle-like appendages, which are reminiscent of a skinny starfish (if I do say so myself). The enigmatic plant lives in moist, shady regions of upper hill dipterocarp forests (a type of tropical rainforest), according to the researchers.

However, “it was not easy to obtain specimens for further study as its habitat is on the mountain, and COVID time-delayed search efforts,” Mat Yunoh added. In fact, since 2019, researchers have documented a total of only five specimens of Thismia aliasii, despite the fact that the state of Terengganu is “known to be the richest of the Peninsular Malaysian states in the species diversity of Thismia,” the researchers wrote in the study."

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-fate-bl...

Charles Darwin once remarked, "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that nature tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilization." And yet, Kobe University botanist Suetsugu Kenji knows of a few islands in Japan where orchids reproduce without ever opening their flowers.

He says, "I've long been captivated by Darwin's skepticism about plants that rely entirely on self-pollination. When I found those non-blooming orchids, I felt this was a perfect chance to directly revisit this issue. The apparent defiance of evolutionary common sense made me wonder what precise conditions—both environmental and genetic—would allow a purely self-pollinating lifestyle to emerge, let alone persist."

On the Northern Ryukyu Islands of Kuroshima, Takeshima and Yakushima exist the only wild populations of plants known to reproduce solely by self-pollination.
...
"This is only made worse by another observation Suetsugu made: the cross-pollinating relatives on these islands rely on fruit flies with limited flight ability. The animals thus only pollinate, if they pollinate the plants at all, flowers of the same plant or of those that live very close by, even further reducing the benefit of insect pollination."

More information: Genomic signature and evolutionary history of completely cleistogamous lineages in the non-photosynthetic orchid Gastrodia, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025).
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi … .1098/rspb.2025.0574

Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Provided by Kobe University