The beginning — Jaheri

Not every story of a newly discovered species begins with a revelation. Sometimes it begins with someone looking at an extraordinary plant and reaching the perfectly reasonable conclusion that it is something already familiar. That was what happened in 1897, when Jaheri, a plant collector working for the Buitenzorg Botanical Gardens, took part in Anton Willem Nieuwenhuis’s expedition to Borneo. Officially, he then held the rank of leerling-mantri, or trainee mantri, but the title tells us little about the man himself. Jaheri had already spent years working in the field and knew plants through experience, not merely from botanical descriptions.

Near Lung Karang on the Tjehan River, he found a non-flowering Phalaenopsis with leaves remarkable even for a genus hardly known for modest foliage. There were no flowers, and without them identification was considerably more difficult. Jaheri therefore concluded that he was looking at an exceptionally vigorous Phalaenopsis amabilis. There was nothing foolish about the mistake; quite the opposite, it was entirely reasonable. What he had before him was a plant with leaves so extraordinary that they deserved attention even if everything else about it seemed familiar.

Wigman later wrote that Jaheri collected only a single specimen, and that small detail gives the story much of its charm. He did not suspect that he had discovered a new species, nor was he hunting for a botanical sensation. He simply wanted to show the people at Buitenzorg the extraordinary development of the leaves of what he believed to be Phalaenopsis amabilis. One plant was quite enough to demonstrate a curiosity he thought he already understood.

Botany can be remarkably economical. That single plant was enough for it to become clear, a few years later, that the problem was not that Phalaenopsis amabilis was capable of growing to indecent proportions. It was something much more interesting: it was not Phalaenopsis amabilis at all.

One may be a coincidence. Two complicate the story

At this point the story could have followed a wonderfully convenient path: one extraordinary specimen, the description of a new species, the plant’s subsequent death, and then decades of waiting until it was found again. Except that Wigman recorded something that thoroughly disrupts that tidy sequence. In 1913 another specimen of the same species reached Buitenzorg. This time it came not from Lung Karang but from Gunung Loembis, in another part of Borneo. It had been collected by the mantri Amdja during an expedition led by Captain P. van Genderen Stort.

It is only a brief note in a text written more than a century ago, but brief notes like this have an unfortunate habit of ruining beautifully organised legends. Wigman does not tell us how long Amdja’s specimen survived or exactly what happened to it afterwards. What he does tell us is enough to matter: by 1913, Phalaenopsis gigantea had already been collected from the wild for a second time.

This matters because a later version of the story became firmly established in the literature. According to that account, the original specimen died soon after the species was described in 1909; Phalaenopsis gigantea then disappeared for many years and was not rediscovered until 1937. The difficulty is that the first part of this story does not survive contact with a source from 1914. Jaheri’s original plant was still alive and was flowering for the fifth time. Moreover, another specimen had been brought from Borneo the previous year.

That does not mean that the event associated with 1937 should simply be discarded together with the later narrative. “Rediscovery” may have meant the discovery of another population, a previously unknown locality, or the finding of the species again after a long interval without field observations. At present, we do not have a sufficiently good contemporary source to determine exactly what happened in 1937.

We can, however, say something much more confidently: the history of Phalaenopsis gigantea can no longer be told as though the only known plant died and was followed by several decades of complete silence. The first specimen was still alive in 1914, and a second had been collected in 1913. Somewhere between the contemporary sources and later accounts, the story appears to have changed shape. As so often happens, the legend became tidier than reality.

Where the lowlands end

For many years, Phalaenopsis gigantea seemed to have a remarkably precise address: Borneo, warm and humid lowland forest, usually from sea level to around 400 metres. That range still appears in some modern accounts and, at first glance, seems entirely convincing. The difficulty begins only when we look at more recent taxonomic literature.

When describing Phalaenopsis kapuasensis, Metusala and O’Byrne drew attention to a paradox concerning its much more famous relative. Phalaenopsis gigantea has been well known in cultivation for decades, yet the number of properly documented specimens originating in the wild remains surprisingly small. As a result, its true distribution, habitats and population variation are less well understood than one might expect from a species whose photographs can easily be found in collections on several continents.

The authors report Phalaenopsis gigantea from lowland and hill dipterocarp forests, at elevations reaching approximately 900 metres above sea level. That is considerably higher than the often-repeated 400-metre limit, and it does not necessarily mean that the older sources were simply wrong. There is a more interesting possibility: for a long time, we simply knew too few localities to see the whole picture.

For a plant growing on Borneo, this is hardly surprising. On a map, the island looks like one continuous mass of land. On the ground, it is a mosaic of rivers, ridges, humid forests, limestone hills and places that even today require rather more than goodwill to reach. A habitat boundary once drawn at 400 metres may therefore have told us not where Phalaenopsis gigantea ended, but where the available data did.

Life above the ground

In the wild, Phalaenopsis gigantea is an epiphyte. It does not root in the forest floor but attaches itself to tree trunks and branches, using them as support rather than as a source of food. It is not a parasite and does not extract from its host what it cannot obtain for itself. Instead, it lives in a remarkably dynamic microenvironment, where water, air, dust and organic matter meet on the surface of bark.

Water may come from rainfall, from water running down trunks, from moisture retained by moss and organic debris, and, depending on the locality, from dew or mist. Minerals arrive with rain, dust, water flowing over bark and decomposing organic material. Some roots may remain almost completely exposed, while others grow into cracks in the bark, moss or accumulated plant debris. After heavy rain everything may become thoroughly wet, but that does not mean the roots remain buried for days in a uniform, waterlogged mass.

It is a small distinction in description, but an enormous one in cultivation. “Humid tropical forest” is very easily translated into “constantly wet potting medium”, although the two have much less in common than one might imagine. In the forest, the roots of Phalaenopsis gigantea have access to air even when the surrounding environment is extremely humid. In a pot filled with dense material that stays wet for too long, we may therefore recreate not Borneo, but a swamp. And the giant is not a swamp plant.

A giant in no hurry

The name may suggest a temperament that Phalaenopsis gigantea does not actually possess. The giant does not grow like a pumpkin abandoned on a compost heap simply because it carries the genetic potential to produce enormous leaves. In cultivation it grows slowly, and reaching maturity may take many years.

Cultivation literature offers very different figures for the time required before the first flowering. The problem is that there is little justification for declaring any one of them a biological rule. Growth rate depends on conditions, plant material, method of propagation and probably individual variation as well. It is much safer simply to say that Phalaenopsis gigantea matures more slowly than many other members of the genus and demands a kind of patience that cannot be replaced by an extra dose of fertiliser.

This also has consequences for the appearance of young plants. A specimen that may one day carry spectacular leaves can look distinctly unimpressive during its first few years. Adulthood in this species does not arrive with fanfare. First there is another leaf, then another, slightly larger one, until after years of these modest increments the plant begins to reveal why it deserved its name.

When the giant flowers

When it finally flowers, there is a small surprise waiting. The largest member of the genus in terms of foliage does not produce the largest flowers. They are relatively modest compared with the size of the plant itself: waxy, usually creamy white to yellowish, and densely marked with purple or brownish-red spots. That contrast is one of the species’ greatest charms: monumental foliage and flowers that, rather than competing in size, compensate with pattern, fragrance and number.

A single inflorescence may carry many flowers, and the flower spike does not necessarily end its career after one season. If it remains alive, it may resume growth and flower again in later years. It is therefore worth restraining the hand before automatically reaching for the scissors after flowering with the efficiency of someone clearing up after a party.

The fragrance is often described as citrus-like, although when it comes to orchid scents a certain humility is advisable. The human nose is an exceptionally personal instrument, and one person’s lemon can easily become another person’s orange peel crossed with an unusually ambitious dishwashing liquid.

The giant’s children

A species this distinctive was bound, sooner or later, to attract breeders. Phalaenopsis gigantea has long been used in hybridisation, with attention drawn both to the character of the plant itself and to the pattern, colour and substance of its flowers.

The result, however, does not follow a simple recipe. Crossing a giant with a smaller species does not automatically produce a plant precisely halfway between the two. Genetics recognises no obligation to preserve symmetry, or the breeder’s good taste. Some traits may appear strongly, others almost disappear, while still others emerge in ways that no reasonable person ordered.

That is precisely why the offspring of Phalaenopsis gigantea are so interesting. In successive crosses we can watch ancestral traits being rearranged, sometimes clearly, sometimes as little more than a trace. The giant does not always pass on its size, but it can leave a signature.

A rare orchid you can buy

There is another paradox surrounding Phalaenopsis gigantea. A species regarded as rare in the wild is not, today, inaccessible to an ordinary collector. Seedlings and young plants can be found in cultivation, and occasionally large specimens are offered by specialist growers. Numerous hybrids involving the species also circulate in horticulture.

This does not mean that the condition of wild populations has ceased to matter. A greenhouse-propagated plant may be a genetic descendant of the species, but it cannot replace a population functioning within its natural habitat, interacting with local microorganisms, potential pollinators and the rest of the forest ecosystem. A collection full of Phalaenopsis gigantea may preserve part of the species’ genetic material, but it does not recreate the forest.

Work carried out in Sabah illustrates this well. An ex situ conservation programme used nineteen wild-origin individuals, analysing their genetic diversity in order to select breeding pairs and preserve as broad a gene pool as possible. That is particularly important in plants whose natural populations have been heavily reduced by deforestation and collecting.

A thousand identical copies of one plant are not equivalent to a population composed of many genetically diverse individuals. From a genetic point of view, therefore, it is entirely possible to stand in front of a table covered with Phalaenopsis gigantea and still be looking at a species that is rare in the wild.

One was enough

More than a century later, the story of Phalaenopsis gigantea still refuses to fit neatly into a few convenient sentences. Later accounts of its rediscovery do not fully agree with earlier sources. More recent literature extends the known elevational range of its habitats. Its natural pollinator remains poorly documented, and the number of well-documented wild collections is surprisingly small. At the same time, a plant that entered scientific history through a single specimen is now propagated and cultivated around the world.

Perhaps that is why Phalaenopsis gigantea is such a good reminder of what a species name really is: not the end of knowledge, but the beginning. The name gigantea refers to those enormous leaves that could no longer comfortably be contained beneath the name amabilis. The first name had been tailored too tightly, but even the new one did not tell us everything.

In the forests of Borneo there still exists a plant larger than its name, its herbarium label and a few lines of description. We know its flowers, measure its leaves, record its localities, study its genes and try to protect what remains of its wild populations. And yet there are still places in its history where the most accurate answer is simply: we do not know yet.

So at the end, it is worth returning to the man with whom its documented history begins. Jaheri did not know that he had found a new species. He could not have known that the plant he took for an exceptionally vigorous Phalaenopsis amabilis would bear another name a little more than a decade later, or that more than a century afterwards its history would still need correcting.

He was wrong about its name, but fortunately there was one thing he did not get wrong. He decided it was worth taking with him.

Sources and literature
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Backer, C.A. (1936). Verklarend woordenboek der wetenschappelijke namen van de in Nederland en Nederlandsch-Indië in het wild groeiende en in tuinen en parken gekweekte varens en hoogere planten. Entry “jaherianus”.
View source ↗

Metusala, D., O’Byrne, P. (2017). Phalaenopsis kapuasensis (Orchidaceae), a new species from Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. Pro-Life, 4(3), 386–391.
View publication ↗

Rodrigues, K.F., Kumar, S.V. (2009). Isolation and characterization of microsatellite loci in Phalaenopsis gigantea. Conservation Genetics, 10, 559–562.
DOI / publication ↗

Smith, J.J. (1909). Neue Orchideen des malaiischen Archipels III. Bulletin du Département de l’Agriculture aux Indes Néerlandaises, 22, 1–51; Phalaenopsis gigantea, p. 45.
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Smithsonian Gardens. Phalaenopsis gigantea — The Gigantic Phalaenopsis, Elephant Ears. Plant Explorer.
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Wigman Jr., H.J. (1914). Phalaenopsis gigantea J.J.Sm. Teysmannia, 25, 418–419.
Teysmannia, vol. 25 — PDF ↗

Zotz, G., Hietz, P. (2001). The physiological ecology of vascular epiphytes: current knowledge, open questions. Journal of Experimental Botany, 52(364), 2067–2078.
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