Learn How an Orchid Grows

"When we look at the vegetative growth of the orchid, one of the things we are struck by is that many of them have very, very thick, fleshy leaves. They are very resistant to drying out and they store great amounts of water. The other thing that we have to look at when we look at the orchids is, let me remove one of the so called structures here, because this structure is so similar to a bulb, but it isn't a bulb we call that a pseudo bulb. When we remove the side leaves from it, we see that at the very base is a bud. In botanical terms the bud determines what the leaf is. Actually this whole structure is a leaf. So when we look at this and pull it out, this structure that we call a pseudo bulb because it is not a bulb, is actually the leaf stem and the leaf blade is up above it. If we were to cut through this leaf, the so called pseudo bulb, we would see unlike a bulb it shelves a wide fleshy storage area whereas if we were to cut through an onion we would see what a true bulb looks like."