Million Orchid Project | March Coffee Chat 2026

In our March Coffee Chat, Jason Downing, Director of Research and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden's resident orchid biologist, shares how large-scale reintroduction, public engagement, and innovative seed-sowing strategies are helping restore native orchids to their natural habitats. The Million Orchid Project (MOP) is redefining conservation through community action. As the world’s largest educational outreach initiative dedicated to orchid conservation, the project has already out-planted more than 700,000 native orchids across southern Florida — moving steadily toward its goal of one million.

Thanks to all of you who joined us! The Coffee Chat attendees were a good mix of users with 86% intermediate users, 14% of users identifying as novice.

The map below shows the gardens and arboreta represented by those who registered for the Coffee Chat - home offices not taken into consideration.  

A few slides from Jason's Presentation:

Orchid seeds to scale. A single orchid seed capsule may contain millions of seeds.

1 fruit = starts off as 10 bottles with tens of thousands of germinates. Propagation space becomes an issue. 

105 schools became involved in the first year and were given growing racks and participated in growing tests for each species. 

The orchids are grown in lab space in schools and planted on the school grounds within a few years. The success and survival rate can be tracked in the Fairchild Orchid Tracker app available on Google Play and the Apple App Store.

The Million Orchid Project anticipates reaching 1 million orchids in the next few years.

Q&A

Q: Would you share about the permit process for collecting and propagating Floridian orchids for display and conserve in botanical garden and/or commercial purposes for wild, garden-wild and garden provenance? 

A: Unfortunately, plants that are protected in state parks and national parks are not available to be propagated for commercial use. All the mother plants that we are using were from plants found in cultivation in botanic gardens or from private collections. Orchids have a blanket coverage under CITES. The first thing that we do when we go into a local community, is that we go to the botanic garden to find the seeds in cultivation.

Q: How do the students report the progress of the propagations and success of the orchids that have been planted out in the school yard.

A: We have an app but the no cell phones in schools policies has caused us to switch to using Google Drive. Each school has a Google sheet that they use for reporting.

Q:  How can others replicate the program?

A: Reach out to millionorchidproject@fairchildgarden.org. Jason is very interested in replicating the program and will show others how it was done. Frequently school teachers will reach out but it is the local botanic garden that can provide the lab space and expertise to get a project going. Botanic gardens are pivital to being able to expand this model.

Q: Have you spoken to other organizations or schools that have wanted to start this program for other genera?

A: Yes. Schools are uniquely positioned to be refuges for rare plants and can serve as nurseries. There have been schools that are taking butterfly gardens to the next level by collecting seeds and make those rare plants available.