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Orchids: the success of beautiful cheats

Orchids: the success of beautiful cheats

One in seven flowering plants on Earth is an orchid. The Orchidaceae, one of the oldest, as well as the most extensive, families of flowering plants, comprises 749 genera and around 26,000 species. Some have evolved to survive in the most inhospitable of environments, pushing their sweet blooms through the sands of arid deserts or the icy soils of Arctic tundra. All this I learned from The Book of Orchids, a luscious coffee-table tome from Ivy Press (and the University of Chicago Press in the United States), coauthored by Tom Mirenda, Mark Chase and Maarten Christenhusz.  Read more