“Gastrodia agnicellus,” labeled the “ugliest orchid in the world,” is one of the plants and fungi recently described this year, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) have announced.
The orchid, located in Madagascar, it has no leaves, grows from a woolly tuberous stem, and spends most of its life underground, emerging only to flower or bear fruit.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Johan Hermans, the orchid researcher behind the find, told CNN on Thursday.
Still, he said, “It’s not very attractive. I have to say, it looks fleshy, red on the inside and brown on the outside.”
“We first saw it in the seed bag. A couple of years later we went back and looked in the same area, trying to find a brown flower on the branch of brown leaves, and we finally found it.” said Hermans, an associate honorary researcher at RBG Kew, explained.
“It was hidden at the base of the tree and the leaves had to be removed to find where the plant was,” he added.
The researchers thought that the strange-looking plant might smell of rotten flesh, as is usual in some orchids pollinated by flies, but instead, the orchid surprised them with a “pleasant aroma, citrus and rose. ”Said Hermans.
“This orchid has an incredible life cycle: it has a woolly tuber on the ground, without leaves, and the flower appears slightly below the leaf litter.
“It opens little, fertilizes and gets a kind of fruit and rises on a rather long stork about 20 inches high, and opens and distributes the seed.”
RBG Kew and its partners officially found and named about 156 plants and fungi worldwide in 2020, including a scaly-leafed shrub from southern Namibia, a relative of blueberry found in New Guinea, and a new variety of hibiscus in Australia.
But several of these plants are already threatened with extinction due to threats to their habitats, RBG Kew warned Thursday.