COLOMBO — In the mist-wrapped folds of Sri Lanka’s Knuckles Mountain Range, a UNESCO-recognized world heritage site, where clouds softly wrap the rugged peaks in a soft embrace, a group of scientists recently stumbled upon a ghost from the island’s colonial past, in the form of a forgotten orchid. Nestled among the branches of forest trees near a tributary of the Mahaweli River in Rangala, Kandy district, bloomed Vanda thwaitesii — a delicate orchid unseen in the wild for more than 160 years. The orchid had never been studied alive, even by eminent British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who described it in 1898 based on only two drawings by Haramanis de Alwis, the official draftsman at Sri Lanka’s Royal Botanic Gardens at the time. With no herbarium specimens collected, the plant slipped into obscurity and was widely presumed extinct. “Many assumed it had vanished from the Earth, so we were delighted to find it alive after all this time,” says Bhathiya Gopallawa, a Ph.D. candidate at Sri Lanka’s University of Peradeniya, who co-authored the paper announcing the rediscovery. Vanda thwaitesii is named after George Thwaites, a botanist and administrator who held the post of superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens located in Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, for 30 years and also studied the flower through a 1961 drawing. Image by Bhathiya Gopallawa. A scientific twist The return of V. thwaitesii is also a testament to citizen science, a trait of many recent floral rediscoveries and finding of rare plants. Gopallawa and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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