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.
Thismia neptunis is a tiny, fully mycoheterotrophic plant from Borneo that lives underground and gets its nutrients from fungi rather than photosynthesis. It is a wild species with no known cultivation, so it is not grown as a garden or houseplant.
Thismia neptunis is a species of Thismia endemic to Borneo. It was discovered by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari in 1866, and described in 1878. It was not observed again until 2017, when it was first photographed by a team of biologists from the Czech Republic. It was found in the Gunung Matang massif in western Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo.
T. neptunis lives underground, and is a myco-heterotroph, a plant which obtains nutrients through a parasitic relationship with fungi. It does not bloom every year, and when it does, its flower appears above the soil for only a few weeks.
Thismia abei · Thismia acuminata · Banded Trinity · Fairy lantern · Thismia hongkongensis · Thismia kobensis · Fairy Lantern · Thismia megalongensis · Thismia melanomitra · Fairy lantern · Fairy Lanterns
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Thismia neptunis 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.
