Orchid Information - Family Orchidaceae Subfamily Epidendroideae Tribe Cymbidieae Subtribe Cymbidiinae

Cymbidiinae Benth., J. Linn. Soc. Bot. 18 (1881) 287. Type genus: Cymbidium Sw.

Synonyms:

Epiphytes, lithophytes or terrestrials, herbaceous, autotrophic or rarely heteromycotrophic. New shoots develop from the lower nodes of the old pseudobulb and persists for 2 or more years. Stem a pseudobulb, ovoid to spindle-shaped, occasionally cylindrical, often inconspicuous and concealed by the leaf bases. Roots with velamen, branching, usually from the base of the new growth, sometimes with erect, pointed, stiff litter-gathering roots on the spreading roots. Scale leaves absent or present, several surrounding the young shoot, often turning scarious and fibrous when older. Leaves coriaceous, plicate or conduplicate, distichous, linear-elliptic or narrowly ligulate to elliptic, acuminate to strongly 2-lobed at the apex; leaf sheaths persistent, broadly sheathing around the pseudobulb; articulate with the leaf blade. Inflorescences racemose, usually laterally from the cataphylls but occasionally from the leaf axils; peduncle erect, arching or pendulous, usually covered by inflated, cymbiform sheaths; floral bracts persistent. Flowers often showy, sometimes fragrant. Sepals and petals free or connate, subsimilar, often spreading, rarely reflexed or with the petals porrect and covering the column. Lip 3-lobed, rarely convex, free or at the base connate to the base of the column; lateral lobes erect and weakly clasping column; midlobe often recurved; usually with 2 parallel ridges and swollen toward the apex, sometimes broken in middle, convergent toward the apices or reduced to a pair of swellings at the base of the midlobe, rarely absent and replaced by a glistening shallow depression or fused into a single wedge-shaped ridge. Column curved, winged or less commonly with 2 lateral elongate arms, semi-terete in cross-section, in front concave; column foot absent; pollinia usually 2, deeply cleft but sometimes 4 in 2 unequal pairs, triangular, quadrangular, ovoid or club-shaped, subsessile and attached by elastic caudides to a usually triangular viscidium which has the lower corners usually drawn out into thread-like appendages. Fruit a capsule, fusiform to ellipsoid or oblong-ellipsoid, narrowing at base into the pedicel and at the apex into a beak formed by the persistent column.
(after Cribb 2009)

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