Aerides Lour.

Abstract

Aerides, the beautiful foxtail orchid, is a popular genus with many species and hybrids in cultivation. When the Portuguese Jesuit Joao de Loureiro saw the orchid growing bare-root in hanging baskets in Indochina in the eighteenth century, he named it Aerides (Greek, resembling air) in his Flora Cochinchinensis (1790), alluding that ‘they possess the power of living almost entirely upon the matters which they absorb from the atmosphere’ (Schultes and Pease 1963). Indeed, Aerides will survive without much care if grown in this manner, but they need regular fertilizing to really thrive and flower, as all plants do. The plant is monopodial and stem erect or pendulous, freely branching, sheathed by the bases of distichous, oblong, coriaceous leaves. Flowering is seasonal, with numerous inflorescences carrying many, often fragrant, pink-coloured flowers that open simultaneously. Sepals and petals are free and widely spread. Lip is trilobed with a spur characteristic of the genus. The 29 species in the genus are distributed from eastern Himalaya to Yunnan and Southeast Asia. They are epiphytic, occurring in deciduous or semi-deciduous, evergreen, lowland to low montane forests, except for one species (Aerides krabiensis) which is saxicolous on limestone (Fig. 6.1).