Monsoon Orchids

Flowers of different sizes and shapes!

During the tropical summer of the Western Ghats mountains, water becomes scarce on the hilltops. The mosses, lichens, and the orchids sheltered in the tree barks go dry and sometimes leafless. A touch of summer rains starts the life in them. Some orchids start to grow flower buds, while others start to grow new leaves. During the monsoon, they get into their full glory of life.

During the past few years, I managed to collect a few orchids from the wild—some fallen during rainstorms, some from cut trees. I mounted them on the trees near my house for close observation. In this photo-article, we will explore some orchids and their flowers!

These three orchids have similar form. But their flower structure and density are different.

Malaxis flowers with bug-like flowers. These are terrestrial orchids, meaning that they grow on the forest floor where a lot of organic matter is present.

Few Dendrobium flowers

A Dendrobium orchid. These are characterized by many long stems, with roots creeping over tree bark.

Small flowers of Cleisostoma tenuifolium

New growth of a Nervilia orchid. These orchids grow on the forest floor and disappear in the summer. The laterite soil hosting these particular orchids becomes brick-hard during the summer. Since they flower before putting up leaves, it is hard to identify their flowers.

The orchids hosting these flowers feature a "pseudobulb", a storage organ to put up during dry summers. Some of them lose leaves as well. During monsoon, new leaves appear, followed by flowers and pseudobulbs.

The humid conditions during monsoon also favour orchid sprouting in the wild. Growing them artificially requires lab conditions!

Dendrobium orchids germinating on a fallen tree trunk.

The Western Ghats hosts a variety of orchids across its diverse ecosystems. Some orchids are found in windy shola mountaintops as well. The orchids below are from ~1700m mountain in Kuduremukha National Park.

Orchids from a ~1700m mountain from Kuduremukha National Park. The first orchid is a Oberonia.

Orchids face threats in the form of their ecosystems being destroyed for various human activities. Individuals can take action and spread awareness about them by actively helping to conserve them — like the efforts in Kerala supported by Kew Gardens and Gurukula Trust.

Next time you find an orchid fallen from a roadside tree, bring it to your house and mount it on a tree where there is neither bright sunshine nor damp shade. By the next monsoon, it will put out new roots, and hopefully flowers, and become stabilized. A small act can go a long way in conservation!