Bewildering Botanic Beauty

Although the animal kingdom is a wonder to behold, the mysterious bewildering beauty of some flowers is just astonishing!

So today I spent a couple of hours to search for some of the most visually pleasing and outright weird looking and aptly named flowers I could find, and present them to you for your viewing and reading pleasure. Reading, because each of the names is also a handy Wikipedia link for you to discover more about them: beauty isn't just skin-deep in this case!

Behold:

_{Happy Alien flower (Calceolaria uniflora) - source: Wikimedia Commons}

_{Naked Man Orchid (Orchis italica) - photo by Habib Ullah Afridi - source: flickr.com}

_{Ghost Orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii) - photo by NC Orchid - source: flickr.com}

_{Darth Vader flower (Aristolochia salvadorensis) - photo by Kristine Paulus - source: flickr.com}

_{Rothschild's slipper orchid (Paphiopedilum rothschildianum) - source: Wikimedia Commons}

_{Blue Crown Passion flower (Passiflora caerulea) - photo by Gellinger - source: pixabay.com}

_{Hot Lips, Hooker's Lips or Mick Jagger's lips (Psychotria elata) - source: Wikimedia Commons}

_{Kadupul Flower (Calceolaria uniflora) - photo by H P Muditha Sampath - source: flickr.com}

_{Bleeding Heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) - source: Wikimedia Commons}

_{Flame lily (Gloriosa superba) - source: Wikimedia Commons}

_{Chocolate Cosmos (Cosmos atrosanguineus) - source: Wikimedia Commons}

I had to close with chocolate cosmos... My favorite candy ad infinitum; it doesn't get better than that... I hope you were as astonished as I was when I first saw these beauties. If you think this list isn't complete (it sure as hell isn't, not by a long shot!), please feel free to add some of your picks in the comments below!

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