SSL Organizations as Orchids: Romana/London

[sköldpaddor]

Greetings SSL, it is time for the third installment of my series on organizations as orchids. I continue to struggle to generate engagement when it comes to choosing targets for additional installments of this, but I have lowered my standards to "first person to react to my discord message when prompted" and that means that this week, we are looking at the A.C. Romana/Inter London organization.

When I've been researching for this series (because believe it or not, I do not have orchids for every region of the earth memorized), I've had to do a little digging. But this time...this time the answer came to mind immediately. There are plenty of orchids native to Italy. There are lovely little bee orchids, tongue orchids, even rarer lady's slipper orchids at higher elevations. But perhaps the most iconic of all the Italian orchids is the one that takes its name from the place - Orchis italica. Fittingly for our purposes here, this orchid is also purple! It looks like this.


But wait. There's more. Let's zoom in on that, and learn the common name for this flower.


There he is. Orchis italica is commonly known as the "naked man orchid" because as you may be able to tell with a tiny bit of imagination, each little flower looks like a naked little man in a hat. You can even stretch your imagination a little further and imagine that hat to be one of those cool Praetorian helmets or whatever that is on the Romana logo. I cannot say for certain whether the Romana squad ever plays the game naked. But I am nonetheless pleased with this orchid as a symbol of the majors team in this organization.

This will bring us, then, to the minors team in London. I know literally nothing about this team. I know the logo is blueish. I know there are lions on it. And I know London is in England, but that's about it. England, like most places, has plenty of native orchids (the only places that don't have native orchids are like...a few desert countries, and Antarctica). England's orchids all grow in the ground, unlike the tropical orchids that grow in many other places. I could just pick something blue to match the logo, but most blue orchids you see (like at the grocery store) are just white orchids that have had dye injected into them in order to make their flowers blue, and when you take those orchids home and grow them and they bloom a second time, the next set of blooms will be the natural white. There are a very small handful of orchids that naturally produce blue flowers, but none of them are particularly inspiring to me for this team.

As I sat here and tried to think about whether to choose something blue, or something symbolically English, I kept coming back to the actual imagery of the logo. And then I realized I was overlooking a pretty important English symbol right there - the lion. There are a few orchids that come to mind when I think of lions - some bulbophyllum, at least one cymbidium - but the one I've decided to go with here is Dendrobium leonis. This orchid really is another weird little guy (my favorites, as you might remember) - it has some funky leaves that look more like succulent leaves than other orchid leaves, but the most striking thing is that when you look at the flowers from a certain angle, this is what you see:



Look at it! look at the little lion! isn't it precious! Aren't you astounded! I hope you are, because I have literally no other information to go on, and I am proud of this naked man/lion head combo I've come up with based on nothing but logos and locations.

This concludes the third installment of this series. As always, please, I'm begging you, tell me something about your organization so I don't have to make something random up. One of y'all is going to get assigned an orchid that smells like poop and decomp and you're going to be so mad.