Our Changing World: Orchid conservation

Our Changing World joins a group of botanists during their first ever attempt to reintroduce our rarest and most elusive native orchid back to the wild.

New Zealand’s native orchids are much more modest than the showy plants you can buy in the shops. But this one – a potato orchid known as Cooper’s orchid – takes modesty to the extreme.

It lives mostly underground as a tuber – a bit like kūmara or dahlias – and only emerges briefly every few years to push out a leafless stick with small brown flowers.

Like all orchids, it only survives with a lot of help from a fungus, which means that botanists had to use in vitro propagation methods to produce seedlings.