Orchids are plants that belong to the family Orchidaceae a diverse and widespread group of flowering plants with blooms that are often colourful and fragrant. Orchids are cosmopolitan plants that are found in almost every habitat on Earth except glaciers. The world's richest diversity of orchid genera and species is found in the tropics.
Orchidaceae is one of the two largest families of flowering plants, along with the Asteraceae. It contains about 28,000 currently accepted species distributed across 763 genera. The total number of orchid species is nearly equal to the number of bony fishes, more than twice the number of bird species, and about four times the number of mammal species. Botanists continue to discover new orchid species around the world.