The joint use of two tools applied to plant description, XPER3 and Recolnat Annotate,made it possible to study vegetative architectural patterns (Fig. 1) of the Dendrobium(Orchidaceae) in New Caledonia defined by N. Hallé (1977). This approach is not directlyrelated to taxonomy, but to the definition of sets of species grouped according to a growthpattern. In the course of this work, the characters stated by N. Hallé were analysed and eventuallyamended to produce a data matrix and generate an identification key.