Plant Story -- Scentbottle Orchid, Platanthera dilatata

This post is about a native orchid, the scentbottle, Plantanthera dilatata (orchid family, Orchidaceae).

scentbottle orchid, Plantanthera dilatata

Plant Wonders--10 Tropical Plants Not to Miss

Looking into the Costa Rican rainforest

Ew! The tropics! Deadly snakes and poisonous plants! I tip-toed through the vegetation as if every leaf would bite!

I first encountered the tropics in 1973, when I took an Organization for Tropical Studies course, Tropical Ecology, which introduced U.S. graduate students to the tropics, in Costa Rica. At the beginning of the course, they gave us a safety orientation: these snakes are poisonous, these ants have a sting that will incapacitate you, these leaves cause welts...

Suitably intimidated--having experienced only the northern United States--I stayed in the middle of the path and tried not to get close to the leaves.

Plant Story: Not Always Just Plain Vanilla

     Good vanilla is one of my favorite flavors, and the idea of "plain vanilla," vanilla as the no-flavor flavor, has always been somehow annoying.  And it wasn't always the case.

The vanilla orchid is the plant in the middle,
hanging down over the tree branch. (In the
Conservatory at the Smithsonian in
Washington D.C.)

   Vanilla is native to the Americas and although probably in use for millennia there, it only reached Europe after 1492. At that time it was a rare and highly desirable flavor.


   Vanilla comes from “beans,” long thin bean-like pods, but vanilla is not at all a bean (legume, plant family Fabaceae), but an orchid (plant family Orchidaceae). In fact, it is the only orchid used as a food, or used by commerce in any other way than as ornamentals (flowers) even though there are more species of orchids than species in any other plant family, legumes and grasses included.  

   Vanilla is a climbing vine with fleshy leaves longer than my hand, but 2-3 fingers wide. We grew a vanilla orchid in the greenhouse at the University of Nebraska. It climbed up to the ceiling. Then its stem connecting it to the pot broke, so the plant was hanging from the wall and ceiling without being rooted in soil at all. It lived like that for years. And that was fine until we wanted to move it...which is of course one function of flowerpots, mobility.

      The flowers of the vanilla orchid are cream-colored recognizable orchid flowers ( vanilla flowers on Google).  The fruit develops as long dark pods.