The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Epipogium aphyllum
Also called Leafless Epipogium
Ghost orchid (Epipogium aphyllum) is a leafless, chlorophyll-free woodland orchid that lives on decaying organic matter through fungi and is almost never grown in gardens. It is extremely rare and protected, and should be left in the wild rather than dug up or disturbed.
Epipogium aphyllum, the ghost orchid, is a hardy mycoheterotrophic orchid lacking chlorophyll. In much of its range, it is a rare representative of family Orchidaceae.
It is famous for its unpredictable appearance; in many localities it has been seen just once. It is found in beech, oak, pine, and spruce forests of Europe and Asia, on base-rich soils. It is a rare and critically endangered plant in Britain; it was believed to be extinct throughout much of its former range, although in 2009 and in 2024 it was re-confirmed, where the plants were believed to have become extinct.
The plants have an extremely wide range of distribution. The species is widespread across much of the temperate zone in northern and central Europe, Russia and northern Asia from Spain to Kamchatka and south to the Himalayas. There are hotspots of records ranging from the boreal regions of Scandinavia stretching as far south as the Pyrenees, the Vercors Massif, northern Greece, and Crimea. It was reported for the first time on Mount Željin in central Serbia for the first time in 2023; the estimated IUCN conservation status in Serbia is Endangered (EN). In Asia, Epipogium aphyllum is considered vulnerable in Mongolia and endangered in both Japan and China; however in North and South Korea, it is not considered threatened.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Epipogium aphyllum 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.
