A Rare Beauty From The Philippines

When it comes to beauty in flowers, it isn't only just because its popularly seen on any part of the world or bought from any flower shop across the street. True beauty of a flower comes from its features and its uniqueness in ways that would indicate its rarity as well as its value. Philippines, of all the Asian countries, is known to house one of the rarest species of orchid found across the world, the Waling-Waling flowers philippines.

A Rare Beauty
The Waling-Waling, or academically known as Vanda sanderiana, is a very rare type of epiphytic orchid specifically found in the Philippines, particularly in the Mindanao region. Other than the name Waling-Waling, it was also called as Sander's Euanthe, named after Henry Frederick Conrad Sander, a noted orchidologist. Although its known as Vanda sanderiana, it was later named as Euanthe sanderiana when Rudolf Schlechter separated Euanthe from Vanda in 1914 due to structural differences in the flowers.

Euanthe sanderiana or Waling-Waling is endemic to Mindanao in the provinces of Davao, Cotabato, and Zamboanga where it is found on the trunks of dipterocarp trees at elevations below 500 meters. Over-collected, the plant is considered rare in nature. It is often used in hybridization. It flowers seasonally, and its two-week bloom occurs during the peak months of July until December.

Among the locals, the Waling-Waling flowers philippines are hailed as the "Queen of Philippine Orchids" due to its many stunning colorful hybrids. However, due to this captivating and unique features, the Waling-Waling are now facing extinction because of hunters and orchid collectors from all over the world harvesting the species for their own profit. The decline was stemmed, however, when tissue culture was performed in order to repropagate the orchid.

In 2004, because of the popularity of these specific flowers philippines, there had been a motion in the House of Representatives of the Philippines to declare the "Waling-waling" as the country's national flower, replacing the Sampaguita.