I'm Megan Dietry and this is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian.

Today, we bring you three stories about trickery.

Impositors who misrepresent themselves

take over all to get what they want.

My co-host, Tony Cohen, is going to begin with an unexpected expert in sexual deception,

the orchid. These wily plants are masters of disguise.

These wily plants are masters of disguise,

coming in all kinds of unique sometimes even weird forms a friend of Charles

Darwin's sent him one of these plants that's Tom Miranda an orchid. He's showing us around the greenhouses of the Smithsonian Gardens.

When he took it out of the box, he famously uttered,

Good heavens, what insect could suck it? Because of the long nectar tube with the nectar just down here at the bottom.

Tom knows all about why orchids have these strange devices.

There's almost 30,000 species of them. Some have big beautiful flowers and some actually don't look like flowers at all.

But there's a good reason for that.

It's because orchids have co-evolved to attract a single pollinator.

So each species of orchid uses its own trick, through

scents or color or look to bring in a bug or bird. And Tom has seen plenty of different

adaptations. The Smithsonian is home to some 9,000 orchids, but the best place to see them may actually be in his garage.

That's where Tom keeps his own collection, which has as many as 2,000.

I'm told by my neighbors that... which has as many as 2,000.

I'm told by my neighbors that the police department comes by my house regularly to check and see what might be under those grow

lights that they can see from the street. What they don't realize

...