I am including in this message snippets from a few other messages to tie
another current thread in rgo to this one. My question, does this mean that
the skilled taxonomists at Kew are not as skilled after all or were too busy
and made an incredible mistake, or does it mean after all that it is
sometimes really difficult to tell that something is an orchid if it is not
flowering?

Thanks,
Joanna

piece of most recent message in another thread (with subject "Rare orchid
grows under Kew's nose":
Reka" wrote in message
...
"The biggest problem is that orchids can only be identified when they are
flowering - otherwise one green leaf looks pretty much like another," said
Dr David Roberts, Kew's orchid expert and the man who discovered their
oversight.

"When we received the plant as seeds it was incorrectly identified, so it
took us a while to get round to checking whether it was actually what we
were told it was."

pieces of this thread that I am tying this into (the messages below were
posted earlier then the one above):
"J Fortuna" wrote in message
...
I think I read somewhere that orchids
are mainly or only identifiable as orchids because of the flowers, and
so I
am thinking that there could be a plant species out there that would be
an
orchid if only it did flower but it never does.

"Rob Halgren" wrote in message
...
To the other part of the question, if something is derived from an
orchid, but doesn't flower, it is still an orchid. Heck, I have many
plants that don't flower, and may never flower, but they are orchids.
In the jungle, we might not ever notice those plants, so they may not
get described. But chances are good that a skilled taxonomist could
recognise a plant as an orchid by its vegetative characteristics.

"Al" wrote in message
om...
For the masses of us, orchids are 'mainly' identified by specific
flower parts that other flowering plants don't have, i.e. the column
and by the arrangement of petals and sepals and that odd
petal-turned-lip-or-pouch thingy. However, the seed is very different
and probably unique to the family and so is the recently germinated
baby plant; before the embyro develops leaves, roots or stems, it
makes something called a protocorm, (which may be stem tissue for all
I know). If you gave me a sufficiently large bit of pollen from a
plant I would probably be able to tell if it came from an orchid.
It's that unique. Pollen from the slipper group would probably prove
my undoing. Maybe.