What do rainforest flowers look like?

Many first time visitors to the rainforest expect to see many large and colourful rainforest flowers. This misconception is provided and sustained by the collections of colourful flowers that are usually presented in tropical botanical and urban gardens.

However, many of the native plants in the tropical rainforest have very small flowers. This is because they are attracting small pollinators, such as insects.

Many other flowers are dull in colour. And this is because they are attracting animals through smell rather than colour. (Such animals include night active creatures such as moths and bats)

And of the large colourful flowers that do exist, they have evolved to be polinated by birds, and so they are often high up in the top of the canopy where birds can see and get to them, and are out of the range of humans walking along the forest floor.

However, despite the apparant scarcity of rainforest flowers,this doesn’t take away from their subtle beauty or diversity...

There are at least a quarter of a million species of flowering plants. They continue to be discovered; during much of the 1980’s and 90’s several thousand new species were still being described every year. They are the major form of plant type all over the world; indeed they appear as the dominant of any life form in most terrestrial ecosystems.

And nowhere is this dominance more obvious than in the tropical rainforest, with the Australian tropical rainforests no exception.

The diversity of rainforest plants in the region is reflected in a complex taxonomy, with a confusing array of different species and different ways of representing them.

The latest order used is based on the most recent in genetic based techniques (which can be different from previous systems); the continuing data produced by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG).

These tropical rainforests are significant in an evolutionary sense. The tropical rainforest of the south-western Pacific region, and the Australian ‘Wet Tropics’ in particular, are thought by many scientists to have more representatives of the most primitive flowering plants than anywhere else in the world.

for more on the latest technical classification of rainforest flowers click here