Cattleya trianae Cattleya trianae Cattleya trianae (Lind. & Rchb. fil), also known as "Flor de Mayo" ("May flower") or "Christmas orchid", is a plant belonging to the Orchidaceae family. It grows as an epiphytic orchid, with succulent leaves, endemic to Colombia where it was nominated as the national flower in November 1936. That year, the National Academy of History of Argentina asked the Latin American countries to participate in an exhibition with the representative flowers of each country. The Colombian government gave the botanist Emilio Robledo the task to designate the most representative flowering plant of the country. The choice of "Cattleya
Flowering plant group of the other flowering plants, and morphological studies suggest that it has features that may have been characteristic of the earliest flowering plants. The orders Amborellales, Nymphaeales, and Austrobaileyales diverged as separate lineages from the remaining angiosperm clade at a very early stage in flowering plant evolution. The great angiosperm radiation, when a great diversity of angiosperms appears in the fossil record, occurred in the mid-Cretaceous (approximately 100 million years ago). However, a study in 2007 estimated that the division of the five most recent (the genus "Ceratophyllum", the family Chloranthaceae, the eudicots, the magnoliids, and the monocots) of