2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
Arachnis (lat. Arachnis) - a genus of herbaceous epiphytic perennial plants of the Orchid family (Latin Orchidaceae). Several plant species of this genus, as well as numerous man-made hybrids of these species, are popular participants in botanical gardens, flower greenhouses and indoor window sills. In the wild, they grow in tropical areas of the Asian continent, in island Indonesia, as well as on numerous islands of the Great Pacific Ocean.
What's in your name
The Latin name of the genus of plants "Arachnis" is just one letter different from the name of the genus "Arachis", which belongs to the legume family, one of the plants of which is known to all people on Earth, thanks to its fruits.
This plant is an underground peanut (lat. Arachis hypogaea) or Groundnut. Its fruits are delicious nutritious beans, which people tend to call "nuts." The surface of the fragile shell of the fruit is covered with a mesh pattern that resembles the patterned webs of a spider.
Plants of the genus "Arachnis" do not have such fruits. But their graceful flowers are located in the inflorescence in such a way that they create a picture of an invisible spider web on which numerous snake spiders sit. That is, we again come across spiders.
The riddle is easily solved if you turn to the Greek language for help, which often helps in deciphering the meaning of the names of many representatives of the plant world. And we find that the Greek word "Arachne", consonant with our names, means nothing more than the word "spider". It's that simple.
In the literature on indoor and industrial floriculture, a not too long genus name is usually abbreviated to 5 letters -"
Arach ».
Description
Plants of the genus Arachnis belong to plants with a "monopodial" type of stem or shoot structure, that is, they have a shoot that retains an apical bud throughout the entire existence of a given shoot in nature.
The whitish aerial roots, which do not require soil to provide food and moisture for the growth of leaves, flowers and seed development, hang down in the form of a not too thick, but long, beard. After all, orchids of this genus prefer to live at a height of up to 12 meters from the surface of the earth, located on the branches of tropical trees.
At the beginning of life, the thin and herbaceous stem of plants of the genus Arachnis can reach a length of 4 (four) meters, gradually turning from herbaceous to woody.
Rigid belt-like long leaves of plants are arranged in two dense rows along the length of the stem, forming a rather decorative dark green picture. If the sun's rays manage to break through the foliage of the trees on which the plants are located, the leaves can turn from dark green to yellow.
Lateral inflorescences are formed by numerous flowers of an amusing shape, similar to living juicy spiders, crawling along a spider web invisible to the viewer. The narrow tepals spread out in different directions are akin to the tentacle legs of skillful spiders.
The quantitative composition of the genus Arachnis
The genus Arachnis has in its ranks more than 20 species of plants that live in the natural conditions of the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, India, China, as well as the islands of the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
Although, the number of species in any plant community is a variable number, depending on the vigilant eye of botanists. The use of scientific achievements in other branches of knowledge by botanists, for example, in the science of "genetics", makes it possible to more accurately position one or another plant on the classification botanical "shelf" that most closely matches its genetic data.
