Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A plant, such as a tropical orchid or a staghorn fern, that grows on another plant upon which it depends for mechanical support but not for nutrients.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In botany, a plant which grows upon another plant, but which does not, like a parasite, derive its nourishment from it.
- noun In zoology, a fungus parasitic on the skin and its appendages or on mucous surfaces of man and other animals, causing disease; a dermatophyte.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Bot.) An air plant which grows on other plants, but does not derive its nourishment from them. See
air plant . - noun (Med.) A vegetable parasite growing on the surface of the body.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun botany A
plant that grows on another, using it as a physical support but neither obtainingnutrients from it nor causing it any damage if also offering no benefit; anair plant .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun plant that derives moisture and nutrients from the air and rain; usually grows on another plant but not parasitic on it
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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'epiphyte' (_i. e._, a plant growing on other plants,) "forms dense festoons among the branches of the trees, vegetating among the black mould that collects upon the bark of trees in hot damp countries; other species are inhabitants of deep and gloomy forests, and others form, with their spring leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas of Brazil."
Proserpina, Volume 1 Studies Of Wayside Flowers John Ruskin 1859
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Tillandsia is an epiphyte, a plant that derives its nutrients not from where it is planted but from the air.
The Memory Palace Mira Bartók 2011
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Tillandsia is an epiphyte, a plant that derives its nutrients not from where it is planted but from the air.
The Memory Palace Mira Bartók 2011
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A botanist scaled a tree trunk to a height of three meters, and scraped from the trunk a sample of the tiny epiphyte for genetic sequencing.
365 tomorrows » 2009 » October : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day 2009
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He uses terms like commensalism and epiphyte, and primary and secondary forest, and crepuscular; and our brains scramble to keep up.
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He uses terms like commensalism and epiphyte, and primary and secondary forest, and crepuscular; and our brains scramble to keep up.
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This ecoregion is characterized by a lush, tall tropical evergreen forest of huge, buttressed canopy trees reaching 40 m in height and an extremely rich epiphyte flora.
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Around 3,200 m sub-tropical give way to temperate species but humidity and epiphyte growth remain high.
Jiuzhaigou Valley Scenic and Historic Interest Area, China 2009
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A striking example of epiphyte accumulation at lower elevations is the Spanish "moss" that festoons the Evangeline oak, baldcypress, and other trees of the eastern Gulf coast.
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It does seem that it is a ground orchid rather than an epiphyte, that will affect the potting medium.
Back To Regular Programming-Mishmash Style* « Fairegarden 2009
chained_bear commented on the word epiphyte
"...they had spent what waking hours they could spare from the Juan Fernandez ferns and epiphytes to combing the countryside in search of a nest..."
--Patrick O'Brian, The Far Side of the World, 231
February 23, 2008