by | April 1, 2026
Finding the Wild Cigar Orchid
Inside the cigar orchid’s rebound in southern swamps.
Tucked away in Miami’s Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, there’s a group of plants that aren’t supposed to be there. No record shows any gardener planted them, but among the curated blooms and leaves of the sanctuary, this rare plant has naturally claimed its rightful home—and it stands out. When the cigar orchids bloom every year, there’s no question that their masses of yellow and maroon flowers are right where they belong.
“It can send out hundreds of flowers at once,” says Hong Liu, a professor at Florida International University, who has spent her career studying cigar orchids, a plant named for its swollen stems and paperlike skin resembling cigars. “Just imagine what that’s like. That’s spectacular.”
Cigar orchids are giants of South Florida’s swamps—their native habitat—where they grow on the trunks of cypress and buttonwoods scattered throughout the Everglades, Big Cypress National Preserve and the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. The species, which can measure up to 5 feet wide, is rarely seen in Florida outside of Collier and Dade counties, where its roots revel in the humidity of the protected wildlands.
You’ve been looking for so long, and you know all the effort is worthwhile at that moment … It’s just like you found treasure.
–Hong Liu
In early spring, during its blooming season, the species can produce upward of 500 flowers. Also known as the bee-swarm orchid, the plant emits a perfume from the chambers of its flowers, attracting two local pollinator species. In Collier County, carpenter bees flock to the petals. In Dade County, a highly specialized oil-collecting bee—limited in range to the state’s southernmost regions—buzzes toward the flower, hoping to find a prize inside. But the cigar orchid has other plans.
“They’re cheaters,” Liu says. It’s a scheme millennia in the making: The cigar orchid has evolved to produce flowers that look like one of the bees’ favorite plants. But by the time the bees arrive and find nothing inside, the orchid has completed its mission of getting pollen onto its unsuspecting hosts, a cunning strategy that saves the orchid from having to produce nectar or oil for the bees. It’s no risk, all reward for the flowers.
The fraudulent flowers are prevalent from the Caribbean to South America, but only a few hundred cigar orchids are known to remain in Florida, where plant poachers stole them by the truckload in the early 1900s.
Efforts from research centers like Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden are helping to increase numbers in the wild, but as climate change pushes sea levels higher into the orchid’s habitat, they could drown or their host trees could suffer.
“I want to say that we’re okay for the next decade. For how many decades, I really don’t know,” Liu says.
Liu is lucky if she spots one cigar orchid per day when her research team is searching in the wild. But no matter how much swamp they have to wade through, seeing a cigar orchid is worth it. “(When we see one,) we just yell ‘Touchdown!’” she says. “You’ve been looking for so long, and you know all the effort is worthwhile at that moment … It’s just like you found treasure.”
For more Conservation content, click here.
About the Author
Helen has an aptitude for finding alligators and a passion for covering the weird and wonderful of Florida. The Tallahassee native graduated with her bachelor's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. At Flamingo, she helps organize advertising and write stories (usually about Florida's fantastic fauna).
