- December 3, 2024
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The annual orchid show is one of the signature events at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, a place which also happens to be known for having the world’s largest scientifically documented collection of living epiphytes.
Even the impacts of Hurricane Milton didn’t prevent the show from reopening on Oct. 17 at Selby Gardens' Downtown Sarasota Campus.
“We're growing plants for them to be the best they can be for research to utilize, so we have a lot of redundancy in our operating systems,” said Angel Lara, greenhouse manager at Selby Gardens.
The Orchid Show 2024: PURPLE!, which is presented through the gardens' longtime partner Better-Gro, will allow the public to discover a unique concept: the prevalence and significance of purple in the plant world.
It features a display of live orchids in its Tropical Conservatory, as well as a series of other materials including rare historical book artwork in its Museum of Botany & the Arts.
The enjoyment of purple in orchids, Lara said, dates back to the Victorian era’s Orchidelirium.
During this time of fever for collecting and discovering orchids around the world, Queen Victoria constantly sought purple Cattleya orchids.
However, the color is also useful to plants in numerous ways.
“It's really a very important botanical color in our world,” he said.
At first, Selby Gardens' team had been considering the theme of color in general, said David Berry, who is Selby Gardens' vice president for visitor engagement and chief museum curator.
However, it ultimately tabled the idea in favor of purple, feeling that there was enough that could be done with the one color alone and that a color-themed show would require planning further in advance.
“We just started rattling off purple hues that are botanical in name, and there are a surprising number of designated purple hues, because purple really isn't just a single color. It's a category of color,” Berry said.
In fact, looking in the Museum of Botany & the Arts, you'll even find a prominently-displayed list of purples specifically named after plants, from Violet to Eggplant.
The display in the Tropical Conservatory has been carefully curated, Lara said, through a process that goes beyond the plants and even involved steps like acquiring boxes to precisely match the colors of the orchids.
“We like to call it theatrical horticulture, because it's sort of like making like a set piece out of plants,” he said.
What most of the plants have in common is that in some way they sport a purple hue, whether that be on their flowers, on the undersides of their leaves, or somewhere else.
The show requires three hours of maintenance every morning by four staff members and two or three volunteers a week. Every three weeks, all plants must be switched out to keep a fresh appearance.
Despite some broken glass panels due to Hurricane Milton, the structure of the greenhouses themselves are still intact, with Selby's plant collections unharmed.
“We took it pretty well, given the circumstances,” Lara said. “We tend to lose power, but we have generators, so we always have a backup system.”
Many parts of Selby Gardens' two campuses saw damage as a result of the storm, with the Downtown Sarasota Campus reopening in phases.
Damage at the Historic Spanish Point campus in Osprey was significant enough to result in the cancellation of the annual "Lights at Spooky Point," leaving the orchid show standing as the major event of October.
Rominiecki said hurricanes Helene and Milton have underscored Selby Gardens’ urgent need to move ahead with Phase 2 of its Master Site Plan.
She said with the garden having safeguarded its preserved plant collections in Phase 1 through the Steinwachs Family Plant Research Center, it will now focus on safeguarding its living collections.
The current greenhouses, which date to the 1970s, will be updated with newer ones that include Hurricane-resistant glass.
“Resiliency is the core of our master plan effort, and so we know we have to safeguard and shore up the rest of our infrastructure,” she said.
Purple serves a few different purposes in the plant kingdom, Lara said.
“For plants, it's just a really practical method of either attracting pollinators or having predators stay away, and a way to deal with light and stress," he said.
Also, he notes, if plants are located low in the understory of a forest, purple pigmentation on the underside of a plant's leaves can help reflect the little light the plant receives, back into its leaves.
Many flowers utilize purple striation, guiding the pollinator towards the pollen.
The color purple can also deter predators by appearing like rotting meat in nature.
One example of this phenomenon is the corpse flower (Titan arum), which is pollinated by beetles and flies which it attracts through its appearance and its strong scent, which resembles rotting flesh.
Lara’s favorite orchids in the collection are its lady slipper orchids, a genera known for its pouch-shaped flowers.
The pouches use a series of hairs, which are pointed in a singular direction, to trap curious insects, forcing them to move through the pouch and climb past the staminode, behind which they collect or deposit pollen.
Even though the plants are not carnivorous and don't survive off the nutrients of animals, not all animals that find their way inside make an escape.
“They add a pouch, they add water in it, and then there's only one way out, and the way out is how you pollinate the plant. The other way is how you drown and die,” Lara said.
Pointing to one of the lady slipper orchids, he also notes its use of purple.
“Variegation like this, or spotting, also sort of looks like lichen or something very old that you don't want to eat,” he says.
The orchid show isn’t limited to the greenhouse display, but also includes exhibits at Museum of Botany & the Arts.
These include a photography exhibit and materials from Selby Gardens’ Research Library.
Among those materials are hand-colored copper engravings from "The Orchid Album," which was produced in part by Bejamin Williams, a successful commercial orchid grower in England in the 19th century.
It also features chromolithographs (color prints) from a publication which Berry calls “the apex of orchid books of the 19th century," Frederick Sander's “Reichenbachia: Orchids Illustrated and Described."
Sander ran the foremost commercial orchid growing business in England at the end of the 19th century, becoming a supplier to most of the crown heads of Europe, and was known as the “Orchid King.”
Rominiecki hopes that the experience be an escape from the disaster seen in the community after Hurricane Milton.
“Honestly, Selby Gardens' team is so dedicated and tireless, between our staff, our volunteers and the vendors that we partner with,” she said. “Everyone's working so hard. I think our recovery is going incredibly well under these conditions, and we're just so grateful that we could reopen the orchid show so quickly and make that accessible to our visitors and our members, because I think right now, having a place of refuge and beauty amidst everything our community has gone through, is so wonderful.”
