My Year of Orchids: Is there a “right side up?”

Is there a right side up with orchids? I asked the question for a couple of reasons. First when I moved to this house there were some Phalaenopsis clinging to their baskets. The leaves are hanging down to one side and the roots were tightly packed in the baskets kind of like a ponytail. Also, when I put my babies in the trees any of them upside down themselves almost immediately. Comes to mind Dendrobium anosum Who threw her long fronds straight downward, roots up in the air. It’s not just Dendrobium that does it. I had the same experience with my epidendrums, Vandas, and an oncidium. So I wonder. Is there a fixed up or down for orchids?

There seem to be a few things at stake here. For one, we like to assume that or kids, as epiphytes, have invented all sorts of water saving anatomies. For example doesn’t it make sense that the structure of leaves and stems would have evolved to accommodate sending water down to the roots? Doesn’t it make sense that the routes covered up being lower than the rest of the plant would be more likely to get the dribs and drabs of water after a rainfall?

We know that regular land plants have a quality called polarity. We sure this feature with our plant cousins. Polarity simply means we have a top and a bottom. We have one and that things go into another and that things go out have. We spent most of our time with our head about our feet. And plants also keep their roots in the ground and grow their shifts upward toward the sun. We can discern apical dominance in pretty much any plant that we observe carefully. So shouldn’t polarity work for orchids? Or, assuming that polarity is in force in orchids, doesn’t it make sense that there should be an up and down?

I gotta say the jury is still out on this one. So many of my orchids seem to creep along on a branch or spread themselves or her grow roots that are going in every direction.For sure there is a Mira stomatic area that is centered at the base of pseudobulbs. But as in all monocots this meristematic area is not apical. It’s somewhere in the middle of the plants, at the place where the vegetative shoot separates from the absorptive roots.

So maybe we can jump philosophically and say that our kids are built to fill space opportunistically. That is to say maybe they don’t have a well-defined “up“ or “down“. Maybe they grow in the best way they can in a given environment. Like if an orchid falls out of a tree onto a cliff in nature and manages to take a toehold. Maybe it’s beneficial that there is no strict up or down.

I have noted that a lot of my orchids “right themselves,” forming new shoots above the meristematic juncture. So maybe they are exerting some sort of conventional polarity. But a lot of others seem perfectly happy to just hang around, or spread themselves sideways, or kind of just move laterally through space. I guess it would help to see some real orchids in real nature. But until then it’s all guesswork.