Rare Osa Pulchra Blooms in Kaplan Orchid Conservatory

Stephen Urick, who directs the Kaplan Orchid Conservatory, displays a very rare Osa pulchra plant that was blooming Tuesday, July 15, at the new $2.1 million facility on the ODU campus. The plant, a member of the coffee family, is found in the wild only on the Osa peninsula in Costa Rica, where only eight such plants remain.

The ODU conservatory and several similar facilities are keeping the species in cultivation for horticultural as well as conservation reasons. Timothy Motley, the ODU Robert Stiffler Associate Professor of Botany and Horticulture, does research on plants in the coffee family and received the plant earlier this year as a gift from the curator of the Glasshouse Collections at the New York Botanical Garden.

For more information about the Kaplan Conservatory, visit http://sci.odu.edu/biology/botany/greenhouse/