About
The mangrove tartan orchid is a lowland epiphyte or lithophyte of New Guinea, the Moluccas and Vanuatu. Crowded cane-like stems with two rows of fleshy leaves bear short-lived, strongly scented yellow flowers marked red.
Field notes
Morphology
Crowded, flattened, sometimes arching canes up to 1 m long carry many fleshy dark green leaves 4–7 cm long in two ranks, smaller or absent near the tips. Flowers 2.5–3.5 cm across, yellow with red or orange markings and strongly fragrant, appear in groups of two or three.
Distribution & habitat
Lowland rainforest in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia, New Guinea and Vanuatu, with one record from Saibai Island in the Torres Strait.
Ecology
Flowers are short-lived.
History & etymology
First described by Carl Ludwig Blume in 1856; Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach moved it to Dendrobium in 1859.
Habitat
- Altitude
- Not recorded
- Altitude class
- —
- Native to
- Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Australia
Cultivation
- Difficulty
- Not recorded
Text adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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