dove plant

dove plant (plural dove plants)

1. An American orchid (Peristeria elata) that produces numerous globose white fragrant flowers. The centre of the flower resembles a dove.

   Synonym: dove orchid

   • 2024, Charles Bland Radcliffe, Proteus, or Unity in Nature:

     The flower of the dove plant (Peristeria elata), the loveliest of all orchidacean flowers, consists of a rose-like crown of white sepals, from the bosom of which a white dove, with outstretched wings, is, as it were, upon the point of taking flight.

2. Any plant of the genus Aquilegia, so called because the flower resembles a ring of five doves.
   • 2017, Henry N. Ellacombe, The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare, page 57:

     Columbine, or the Dove-plant, calls our attention to the "resemblance of its nectaries to the heads of pigeons in a ring around a dish, a favourite device of ancient artists" (Dr. Prior); or to "the figure of a hovering dove with expanded wings, which we obtain by pulling off a single petal with its attached sepals" (Lady Wilkinson);

3. A tropical or subtropical flowering shrub, Melochia tomentosa.
   • 2012, William J. Little, A Sonoran Desert Scrapbook:

     Dove Plant can flower year-round following even the smallest rain.

• “dove plant”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.