stylistic:style_transfer, structural:expansion, structural:summarization
Cultural symbolism

Orchids have many associations with symbolic values. For example, the orchid is the City Flower of Shaoxing, China. Cattleya mossiae is the national Venezuelan flower, while Cattleya trianae is the national flower of Colombia. Vanda Miss Joaquim is the national flower of Singapore, Guarianthe skinneri is the national flower of Costa Rica and Rhyncholaelia digbyana is the national flower of Honduras. Prosthechea cochleata is the national flower of Belize, where it is known as the black orchid. Lycaste skinneri has a white variety (alba) that is the national flower of Guatemala, commonly known as Monja Blanca (White Nun). Panama 's national flower is the Holy Ghost orchid (Peristeria elata), or 'the flor del Espiritu Santo'. Rhynchostylis retusa is the state flower of the Indian state of Assam where it is known as Kopou Phul.

Orchids native to the Mediterranean are depicted on the Ara Pacis in Rome, until now the only known instance of orchids in ancient art, and the earliest in European art. A French writer and agronomist, Louis Liger, invented a classical myth in his book Le Jardinier Fleuriste et Historiographe published in 1704, attributing it to the ancient Greeks and Romans, in which Orchis the son of a nymph and a satyr rapes a priestess of Bacchus during one of his festivals the Bacchanalia and is then killed and transformed into an orchid flower as punishment by the gods, paralleling the various myths of youths dying and becoming flowers, like Adonis and Narcisuss; this myth however does not appear any earlier than Liger, and is not part of traditional Greek and Roman mythologies.