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The festive season is approaching, and the flower market is bustling again. The crab claw orchid with a circle of purple-red flowers looks very festive and is one of the popular New Year's Eve flowers, and many people will buy a pot and move home. And those crab claw orchids, which have been kept at home for decades, are blooming enthusiastically under the warm winter sun. Hello everyone, here is to watch the flowers bloom, I am quiet.
Many people have a pot of crab claw orchids at home when they are young, and the old florist always grafts the crab claw orchid on the top of a cactus, and they can slowly grow a dense leaf. Wouldn't everyone be surprised if I said that the crab claw orchid is also a cactus? After all, crab claw orchids are very different from those thorny globular cacti in appearance and growth habits.
The crab's claw orchid's homeland is not an arid desert, but a humid and warm Brazilian rainforest, epiphytes on the bends of large trees and uneven rock faces. These places are piled with moss and rotten fallen leaves, and the roots of crab claw orchids grow here. So its root system is shallow, and the main ways to obtain nutrients are air, rain and animal manure. Crab claw orchids can only catch light cast through tree branches and are never exposed to bright light.
Different environments create different plant forms. The corresponding strategy of crab claw orchid is to flatten the stem and branch as much as possible, so that the light-receiving area of the stem becomes larger. Although it lacks traditional leaves like other cacti, their flat and thick stems grow many branches, which look not only like leaves, but also more like leaves of rainforest plants. At the top of each stem there is a small hole where it grows, from which new stems and buds grow.
Like all cacti, crab claw orchids are evergreen all year round. Because of the slow growth, there seems to be no change during non-flowering period, but the crab claw orchid will silently hibernate. In its native range, when the sunshine time decreases and the temperature drops, crab claw orchids go dormant. However, it is not idle, but is nurturing flower buds.
Friends who have been conserving crab claw orchids for a long time may find that the crab claw orchids around them will have such a stage throughout the year, one is high temperature dormancy in summer, which is promoting flower bud differentiation; One is that after flowering in winter, its leaves become thinner.
The blooming season of crab claw orchid is very appropriate, not only in winter but also filling every festival of New Year's Eve. The buds that are bred do not differentiate into petals, and the bright flowers we see are actually numerous induments. If you look closely, the outer tepal is short and open and curved outward, while the inner tepal is long and stretches forward, and the inner and outer tepals often form the appearance of a "flower within a flower", which is very beautiful.
Such a magical plant also has a long vitality. Some people may have heard that crab claw orchids, which have survived for 100 years, have grown into large shrubs more than ten meters tall. Raising a pot of crab claw orchids can accompany us through a long life.