“Orchids have interested me as much as almost anything in my life,” Darwin wrote. In their forms, he saw a vast landscape of the forces of selective evolution, a dance they played with their environment and their pollinators. “My little darlings,” as he sometimes referred to orchids, became his model for further exploring the forces he so broadly described in The Origin of Species. Just three years after the publication of that shattering work, he had produced his tome puzzling over the multitudinous, striking habits of orchids: On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and On the Good Effects of Intercrossing.'

https://nautil.us/why-is-everything-an-orchid-424338/?ref=thebrowser.com