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Tropical hyacinth orchid

Dipodium stenocheilum

Tropical hyacinth orchid
Photo: John Tann from Sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0

Tropical hyacinth orchid is a leafless, tuberous, mycoheterotrophic orchid from northern Australia that spends most of the year dormant underground and flowers in summer. It has never been successfully kept in cultivation, so it is not a plant you can grow at home.

Family
Orchidaceae (Orchid family)
Grows as
Orchid
How easy
Hard
Native range
N. Australia
Climate
seasonally dry tropical

About

Dipodium stenocheilum, commonly known as tropical hyacinth-orchid, is a leafless saprophytic orchid that is endemic to northern Australia. For most of the year the plant is dormant but in summer it produces a tall flowering stem with up to twenty five white flowers with purple spots and a mauve labellum.

How to grow it

No leafless species of Dipodium has been successfully maintained in cultivation due to the inability to replicate the association with mycorrhizal fungi in a horticultural context.

Where it grows

Dipodium stenocheilum occurs in the Northern Territory including Melville Island, on the Cape York Peninsula and the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

Other Dipodium plants

Dipodium ambiguum · Purple hyacinth orchid · Dipodium bicallosum · Dipodium brevilabium · Bell-flower hyacinth orchid · Dipodium conduplicatum · Dipodium elegans · Dipodium elegantulum · Leafy hyacinth orchid · Dipodium fevrellii · Dipodium fragrans · Palau Hyacinth Orchid

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Dipodium stenocheilum by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.

The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.

Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.

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