So I was in the Army for a while (I’m the tall handsome one to the right) and it was a great experience for me. I did, however, witness a massive amount of habitat destruction during my travels around the world. Sometimes we would accidentally cause a fire, and then use mortar rockets to put it out.
Like blowing out a massive candle.
I had always held a deep respect for nature and an affinity towards our green friends in the plant world. In Afghanistan is where I had gone through a true transformation though, and when I was exposed to the almost wonderland like flora of the Hindu Kush mountain ranges there was no going back for me.
I left the COP (Combat Out Post) for the first time in mid spring in may 2012, I can’t lie and say I wasn’t filled with anxiety, I think when I had first walked through that gate my heart was going to damn near drum its way through my chest cavity. You see, when I flew in by helicopter I didn’t get a very good view, but inside the base was a barren drab consistency of tan and razor wire. When I left the gate checkpoint though I was immediately taken away by the beauty of the land. I walked along a rocky cliff that was decorated in thick clumps of mosses and intertwined ivy like plants that had little white flowers. In fact, when I came to look beyond the waterfalls and small, shallow, clear, and fast flowing streams moving past my feet I saw millions of flowers everywhere! Flowers of all different kinds, they grew in the fruiting trees and in the shrubbery below, there were farmlands built alongside the ancient man-made rivers that grew poppy and corn side by side. Marijuana grew wild on the cliff side streams that also filtered through villages that had no electricity. Completely isolated from the outside world, the Pashtuns had become completely in sync with the harsh Afghan mountains and I had become completely obsessed with Botany.
This isn’t a blog about the Army though,
Its about plants.
So on that note, let’s get more into this so called “Flower Power”
Flowers are a bigger deal then most people realize, they have only been around for 130 million years, and that means that most of the poor dinosaurs never even saw one. Imagine a world where everything was brown, green, and terrifying and then you died. Yup, that’s pretty much whats the world was like before the emergence of Angiosperms (Flowering plants)
(Google Picture)
The first flower (That we got fossils of) is named Archaefructus, and in just the course of 25 million years they had led to a rapid diversification of the Earths ecosystem. Lets talk about this; Because the Angiosperm could have had an entire lifetime in the course of only a few months in the growing season, as compared to the Coniferous trees that can live for thousands of years, the odds for the flowers to mutate every generation increase and they quickly took the opportunity. Just like an early member of the Orchid family could have mutated to have a deeper Labellum, an insect similar to a butterfly could have mutated to inherit a longer proboscis, thus, the two spread their genes and over time become a completely new species. 
Here we can see the family tree of plants and see that the angiosperm comes last. I could type forever about the different families but lets just stick to flowing plants. Conifers later.
I suck at ferns, Maybe we’ll talk about those waaaay later.
I bought up Orchids briefly earlier and if you’ve been reading the blog for a while you know I’m a FREAK about orchids, In fact check out these cool pics i got from my club competition last Saturday!
Another outstanding ladyslipper, if only I could figure out a way to save mine….
Its my favorite when flowers have brown/black and whit/pink coloration, all four of these along with the yellow tinge on the Dorsal Sepal (That’s the top petal, people. Get on my level) make this Paph a real goldie. The Column, or the bract that holds the Pollinia, wants to pull the top of the flower over to protect it from rain. In cultivation and specifically in competitions, though this is inadvisable. The way it grows naturally makes the flower look wimpy, indisposed and apprehensive. All of Amy’s flowers are top notch, I suspect she angles the light behind the flower as the bud develops in order to make that top pedal move backwards to make it look quite confident.
THIS IS WHY YOU KEEP THE #@&*ING TAG, TOM!
Oh first place, I will get there someday. Holly’s award winner speaks for itself I’d say. A truly unremarkable specimen.
Right! Stay focused Gary
Orchids are the largest family and arguably the oldest of all the flowering plants there are more then 28,000 orchid species and more then 100,000 cultivators. This is why you suck if you lose the tag. They still grow in only two ways though. Monopodia, or where the apex will only grow upwards from a single point, so like our Phalaenopsis moth orchids. Others demonstrate what we call Sympodial growth, or where the new growth will also produce offshoots from the tuberous rhizome that will themselves eventually become adult plants, like Dendrobiums or Catalaya orchids.
Hopefully, this post brightened up your day! I love my orchid club, the Orchid Society of Northern Nevada (OSNN) meets the first Thursday of every month at the Moana nursery clubhouse on Moanna Ln! Feel free to stop by and visit us sometime!
Ol' Gare's Garden 