I wrote orchids off years ago, thinking they were simply too complicated and that I would never be able to keep one alive. WRONG! OK, I didn't even know this was an orchid when I pulled it out of a dumpster near my place up north. A neighbor saw me rescuing it and as it turned out, she was the one who threw it away in the first place, thinking it had gotten too big. After we had a chat during which she told me that it was an orchid, and I told her she could propagate it by division to maintain the wanted size, she ended up taking it back and dividing it, but she gave me a generous handful of the pseudobulbous stem thingees, which I dumped in a bucket filled with a couple inches of water and put in the back of my mini-van for a few weeks. Poor little neglectlings!
Two years later:
When I finally got around to taking them out of the car, I washed them off and covered the roots and part of the rhizomes with water in some see-through containers that were bigger around at the base than the top so that the water would not evaporate so fast. Then I went of on a road trip knowing that when I returned they would either be alive or dead. One or the other!
Two years later, after sporadic topping off with fresh water, they are all still alive, and what a surprise it was for me to see that one of them has a flower.
No, I don't even know what kind of orchid it is, except that due to the fact that it is still alive, growing in water, and flowered, my first thought was that it is probably a lady slipper (subfamily Cypripedioideae with genera Paphiopedilum, Phragmipedium, Cypripedium, Mexipedium and Selenipedium)
I do know that it is terrestrial and sympodial, meaning that it can live on the ground instead of in the air, and it that it stores water in pseudobulbs.