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Gastrodia spatulata is a small, leafless, underground orchid that lives on fungi rather than sunlight, surfacing only briefly to flower. It is a wild species of Borneo and Java and is not grown as a garden or houseplant, so the key point is that it cannot be cultivated like typical plants.
Gastrodia spatulata is a species of Gastrodia native to Indonesia and Malaysia. It is known from Borneo and Java.
Because, aside from a short flowering time, the species of Gastrodia remain underground throughout their lives, they are extremely cryptic plants and easily overlooked. In 2011 Wood et al. believed the species to be endemic to Mount Kinabalu. The species was first discovered to grow in Indonesia in 2018, when Kenji Suetsugu and colleagues were checking the dried voucher specimens of Gastrodia in the Herbarium Bogoriense, and discovered that one of the specimens of G. javanica which had been collected in western Java was misidentified, and in fact belonged to this species.
Gastrodia africana · Gastrodia agnicellus · Gastrodia amamiana · Cooper's black potato orchid · Dense potato orchid · Potato orchid · Tall Gastrodia · Brindabella potato orchid · Gastrodia gunatillekeorum · Gastrodia javanica · Gastrodia kuroshimensis · Western Potato Orchid
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Gastrodia spatulata 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.
