A walk through the paramo: Aa

A cold, grassy hillside, 13000ft in the Andes is not the environment one would normally conjure-up when thinking about orchids, but then again the orchids you find there don’t exactly scream “ORCHID!” when you see them either. In fact if you don’t know what you are looking for you might not even see them at all, because they lack the flamboyant beauty, which has made the rest of the family famous. Also, like the other plants in the paramo, they have adapted to life in a harsh zone, which has driven them to throw everything they don’t need to

survive overboard. This one is from the genus Aa, which was named this because a botanist named Reichenbach wanted them to be the first name in botanical literature, and since I guess Aa is technically “Latinized,” the name flew.

The leaves of the plant seasonally die back to their tubers in the ground (side note: these little round tubers found on some terrestrial orchids are what brings orchids to have their name, as “orchis” means testicles in Greek). Their leaves lie almost flat to the ground, while their inflorescences (“spikes” to orchid enthusiasts) hole their little white flowers about a foot off the ground. This keeps them well below the grasses and therefore fairly out of sight (-1), but also keeps them out of the wind (+1). The minute flowers are oriented with the lip up (where it is downward on most orchids) and it forms a little cave-like chamber. The mouth of the chamber is lined with hairs, which leads me to hypothesize that an insect enters the cave, inside which are the sexual organs of the flower, and the hairs discourage it from leaving. That being said, no one knows what pollinates them as far as I know.