(Sm.) D.Don
Description
Pleione humilis is a dwarf orchid of the Himalaya and adjoining mountains, native to Nepal, India, Bhutan, Myanmar and Thailand, with around 136 georeferenced occurrences across this eastern arc. It grows chiefly as an epiphyte on mossy tree trunks and branches, and occasionally as a lithophyte on shaded, humus-covered rocks, in cool, humid temperate forest. The illustrated plant from Nundhaki in Nepal, at about 1500 m and flowering in March, exemplifies the species' habit of blooming in late winter to early spring, characteristically before or as the new leaves expand at relatively low montane elevations.
The plant grows from small, flask- to top-shaped, often warty pseudobulbs, each producing a single (occasionally paired) plicate, deciduous leaf. The flowers, usually borne singly on a short scape from the base of the pseudobulb, are large for the plant's size and showy, with spreading, narrow, white to pale pink sepals and petals. The conspicuous trumpet-shaped labellum is broadly funnel-form and frilled at the margin, white marked within by yellow to brown and red blotches and bearing several toothed or fringed keels (lamellae) along the disc. The slender, winged column lies enclosed within the lip, and the fruit is a ribbed dehiscent capsule shedding dust-like seeds.
Pleione is a small genus of about two dozen Sino-Himalayan and Southeast Asian orchids, much admired and cultivated, of which P. humilis is one of the winter-flowering, single-leaved species. As with all orchids it is protected under CITES Appendix II, and wild populations are threatened by collection for horticulture and by clearance of the moist forest on which the epiphytic plants depend; conservation therefore hinges on protecting both the species and its montane forest habitat.
Author: (Sm.) D.Don · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Bhutan (Orchidaceae), Flora of China (Orchidaceae), Cribb & Butterfield: The Genus Pleione (monograph)