Everything about Rhizanthella Gardneri totally explained
Rhizanthella gardneri, also known as
Western Underground Orchid, was discovered in the spring of
1928 in the
wheatbelt of
Western Australia.
Jack Trott had bent to investigate an odd crack that had appeared in his garden's soil, and had noticed a sweet smell that arose from the ground. Scraping away the soil, he soon uncovered a tiny white flower, about half an inch across, growing underground. What he'd found was an entirely new type of
orchid.
The white leafless plant is made up of a tube which produces a flowerhead. Unlike any other orchid in Australia, the Western Australian underground orchid remains completely underground for its whole life. Not being able to obtain the sun's energy, it instead feeds on the
broom honey myrtle, a shrub. It is linked to it by a
fungus named
Thanatephorus gardneri.
This particular orchid is a
myco-heterotroph as it relies completely on the
Melaleuca uncinata and a
mycorrhiza fungus for its nutrients and carbon dioxide. Having received this from the fungus the plant is than able to convert the water, nutrients and carbon dioxide into the energy needed for growth and maintenance.
The plant blooms in May and June and measures 2.5–3 cm. The flower head contains 8 to 90 small dark maroon flowers.
Rhizanthella gardneri reproduces vegetatively by which it can produce three daughter plants, as well as sexually. In the latter case the pollinated flower will then take six months to mature - pollination is thought to be effected by some animal species attracted by the fragrance. The seed is thought to be dispersed by
Marsupialia, who eat the fruit, but substantial findings are hard to come by as only 19 mature specimens of the orchid are known to currently exist in the wild and only 300 specimens have been collected to date.
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