Orchids, brilliant and delicately fragrant, form a beautiful scenic line

In the world of flowers in all their myriad forms, it is hard to find a flower like the Chinese orchid, whose flower shape and flower color are infinitely varied and unpredictable. The diversity and variability of flower shape and color in Chinese orchids is most notable in butterfly flowers and rare flowers.

What is a butterfly flower? In orchids, when the petals or sepals are partly or wholly transformed into a lip or lip-like form, opening into a shape and color like a fluttering butterfly, it is therefore called a butterfly flower. What is a rare flower? In orchids, when individual flowers open with more or fewer, or unusual, petal numbers or column (nose) compared with conventional orchid flowers, and some flower types or petals also show obvious changes, such flowers, being extremely rare among orchids and of ornamental value, are called orchid rare flowers.

Butterfly flowers and rare flowers can be said to be a brilliant and delicately fragrant scenic line of orchids, and are much noticed by orchid enthusiasts.

In the appreciation of flower shape and color in Chinese orchids, the appreciation of butterfly flowers and rare flowers is generally later than that of colored flowers, plain-heart flowers and general petal-type flowers, and also later than the Japanese appreciation of orchid leaf variegation. According to orchid historical records, the earlier high-grade butterfly flower to appear was Cymbidium goeringii Sixi Die (appearing around the 1920s in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, see "A Brief History of Orchids"), and the multi-petal rare flower was Cymbidium goeringii Lvyun (said to have been collected and cultivated around 1869, during the Tongzhi reign of the Qing Dynasty, by the Chen family of Liuxia Town, Hangzhou, from nearby Wuyun Mountain). (The Qing Dynasty "First Fragrance Notes" and "Four Discourses on Cultivating Orchids" have accounts of forms resembling bees and butterflies, but no flower names.) At the same time and afterward, Cymbidium goeringii butterfly flowers also included Yangshi Sudie, Ruidie, Yuhudie, Wudie, Zhendie, Xiaohudie, Yingchundie and so on, establishing the ornamental status of butterfly flowers among orchids. The large emergence of rare flowers such as multi-petal, multi-lip and multi-column types came later. It can be said that the appreciation of orchid butterfly flowers and rare flowers originated with Jiangsu and Zhejiang Cymbidium goeringii, and by the latter half of the 20th century, when orchid cultivation flourished greatly in Taiwan, China, it spread to Cymbidium sinense and Cymbidium ensifolium (these orchids are produced in relatively large quantities in Taiwan, China and Fujian), and there appeared Cymbidium sinense (Baosui Lan) butterfly flowers Wenshan Qidie, Qiankun Die, Huaguang Die, Wenhan Qidie, and rare flowers Datun Qilin, Yu Shizi, Guoxiang Mudan, Fucui and so on, and subsequently Cymbidium ensifolium butterfly flowers Baodao Xiannv, Fuxing Qidie and so on. After the reform and opening up of mainland China, with the large-scale development of various orchid resources, a great many Cymbidium sinense, Cymbidium ensifolium, Cymbidium goeringii, Cymbidium faberi, Cymbidium kanran, Cymbidium tortisepalum, Douban Lan, Chunjian, Songchun and so on also produced large numbers of ornamental butterfly flowers and rare flowers. At this point, butterfly flowers and rare flowers became a great wonder in the orchid world, and their ornamental value and trade price also led the field because of their butterfly and rare qualities, often selling for over a thousand to over ten thousand per plant. The field of orchid appreciation also expanded greatly. The cultivated varieties of orchid butterfly flowers and rare flowers are also ever more butterfly-like and ever more rare, and are frequently fine specimens pursued and admired by fellow orchid enthusiasts.

As for the reason for the appearance of so many orchid butterfly flowers and rare flowers, from the ecology of the orchid plant there are three factors: First, orchids are insect-pollinated flowers and rely on insects for pollination; to effectively lure insects to pollinate, in the course of their evolution the inner three petals, the lowest petal, evolved into a lip (labellum), and there appeared colored spots and stripes resembling an insect's body or wings, causing insects to mistake it for their own kind and fly toward it; in the process of collecting nectar, orchid pollination is also completed, or the orchid's pollinia are carried to other orchids, causing cross-pollination. This phenomenon was already described in the work of the great biologist Darwin, "The Fertilisation of Orchids". In recent years British botanists have also discovered that the shape and color of the lip of some orchids have evolved into the appearance of a certain female insect, in order to lure male insects of the same kind to come and mate, and pollination is achieved during their mistaken mating activity. Some botanists have also observed that the lip of orchids often grows flat and extended forward or into a pouch shape like a platform for a helicopter to land on, allowing insects to land flatly, or to remain in the pouch, better to collect nectar and pollinate. From this we can reason that, in order to strengthen their lure to insects, orchids in the course of evolution further caused their sepals or petals also to become lip-like, so that insects could be attracted from even farther away, and thus butterfly flowers appeared. Second, precisely because orchids are insect-pollinated flowers, and the flowering periods of various orchids often cross or overlap. Various insects fly among the clumps of various orchids, so opportunities for cross-pollination are apt to occur, and under natural ecological hybridization, diverse butterfly flowers and rare flowers are also apt to appear. Third, the phenomenon of atavism. According to Mr. Yang Diqing, a botanist from Zhejiang, because orchids are insect-pollinated flowers, insect pollination raises their reproduction rate, and in the course of evolution the number of flowers can be reduced to save the plant body's own materials and energy; therefore, the evolution of orchid flowers can be seen overall as: the inflorescence from a panicle to a raceme to a solitary flower; the flowers from many to a single one; the flower type from sepals and the like being the same shape as the petals to petals evolving into a petal shape different from the sepals to the lowest petal further evolving into a specially shaped lip (labellum). Some orchid butterfly flowers and rare flowers that we see today, such as tree-type flowers, clustered flowers, multi-petal butterfly transformation, multi-petal wheel shapes and so on, are mostly phenomena of certain atavisms in orchids. Nature is just this wondrous, producing so many species variations. Orchids are just this marvelous, able to produce so many flowers of every kind for us to admire.

Butterfly flowers can roughly be divided into outer butterflies (sepal-to-lip transformation, including skirt butterflies - the lower sepal transformed into a lip and elongated downward like a skirt train), inner butterflies (petal-to-lip transformation, including three-heart butterflies - column butterflies, four-heart butterflies, five-heart butterflies, and cat-ear butterflies, rabbit-ear butterflies and tiger-ear butterflies with upright petals), complete inner-and-outer butterflies, plain butterflies, odd-petal butterflies, petal-type butterflies and so on. Rare flowers can roughly be divided into general multi-petal, multi-lip, multi-column rare flowers, peony-, chrysanthemum- and waterlily-petal multi-petal rare flowers, mother-and-child flowers, tree-type flowers (branched flowers), odd-petal flowers, plain rare flowers, few-petal flowers and so on. In short, those that are both ornamental as butterflies and worth viewing as rare are fine specimens; those that are neither ornamental nor worth viewing are inferior. Generally speaking, those that bloom fairly regularly each year, that is, with a fixed pattern, or whose many variations still reveal a pattern of variation, are mostly good flowers. Those that appear only occasionally and are unstable are inferior. Butterfly flowers and rare flowers combined with leaf variegation are fine specimens with multiple virtues of flower and leaf. The above can serve as a reference for selecting butterfly flower and rare flower varieties.