Moon orchid

About the plant

Walk into any supermarket and the moth orchids by the till descend, almost all of them, from this plant. Phalaenopsis amabilis grows on tree trunks and branches in the humid lowlands of Indonesia, the Philippines and New Guinea, its roots splayed over bark and its broad leaves hanging flat. In season it sends out an arching spray of pure white flowers, each with a lip touched with yellow and red, that can last for months. Carl Blume named the genus in 1825 from the Latin phalaena, a moth, after seeing a colony of them at dusk and taking them for insects on the wing.

The species was among the first of its kind to flower in Britain: plants sent from Manila in the late 1830s by the collector Hugh Cuming bloomed in the stove houses of the great nurseries, and Victorian growers coddled them in the warmest, steamiest corners they had. This plate of 1847 is by Walter Hood Fitch, who had taken over the Magazine's drawing thirteen years earlier at the age of seventeen and would make more than 2,700 plates for it.

In Indonesia it is anggrek bulan, the moon orchid, and one of the country's national flowers.