The glowing orange wall dripping with pink and crimson blossoms that greeted me in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden on a recent Friday was hardly what I expected. Of course, it is time for the 22nd Annual Orchid Show, and that show’s mission, Joanna L. Groarke, the garden’s vice president for exhibitions and programming, said is to deliver a “shot of color when people really need it.”

But with “The Orchid Show: Mexican Modernism,” they’ve surpassed that simple base line by miles. The show this year was conceived as a tribute to the great midcentury Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-88), and the problem, as Marc Hachadourian, the director of glasshouse horticulture and senior curator of orchids, explained it, was to find a way of reconciling Barragán’s reputation for clean, modernist lines and minimal surfaces with the extreme, showy splendor of one of the world’s most cultivated plants.

Part of their solution, exhibited in three extravagant set pieces that anchor the beginning, middle and end of a steamy stroll through the garden’s hothouses, lies in the particular colors on offer this year. Leaning heavily toward whites and pinks that complement Barragán’s signature palette of creamy rose, orange and purple, they help the pieces strike your eye as unities well before you can take in any detail.

In the Palm Dome, where I started, a rich, rusty orange wall, a smaller white wall, and a protruding, square-bottomed water trough evoke the architect’s 1960s Fuente de los Amantes (Lover’s Fountain) in Mexico City. Emerging from cavities built into each of these walls are hundreds of pink and white Phalaenopsis, dense bursts of color and life almost too rich to number.

The Phalaenopsis, known as the grocery store orchid, is originally from Southeast Asia, but because it’s been the most extensively hybridized, it comes in the greatest variety of colors. Species native to Mexico, like the fragrant but petite Lily-of-the-valley orchids, or Vanilla planifolia, which provides the minuscule black specks in your vanilla Häagen-Dazs, and was first cultivated by the Aztecs, are also displayed throughout.

At the end of the show you discover an even lusher installation modeled on a garden that Barragán famously built around an existing jacaranda tree: Instead of jacarandas, this fabricated steel tree supports an abundance of purple orchids.

The other element serving to marry Barragán’s aesthetic with the orchid’s is the flowers’ placement in the walls. Always well within the edges, they’re framed not only by sharp corners, but by at least a foot or two of flat, brightly painted faux stucco. This works most magically in a hallway broken into sections by three stark walls with cutout doors, one purple, one orange, one fuchsia. As you enter the hall — accompanied by a playlist of Mexican boleros and guitar music — you see a line of plain, if brightly colored, arches. Once you pass through, though, and turn to look back, you see that these walls, too, are teeming with flowers.

Of course, giving winter- and world-weary visitors a shot of color isn’t really the whole agenda. (It’s not that hard, either, since there are now more than 150,000 distinct varieties of orchid, coming in shades from rich, buttery orange to eye-melting violet to astringent greenish-white.) The real aim of capturing people’s interest with a show like this is to get them into one of the world’s great botanical collections and put them face to face with the mind-boggling diversity of life on earth.

So while the Barragán-inspired installations themselves stick to a relatively narrow range of floral styles, the orchids that have been carefully scattered around the rest of the permanently installed vines, palms and cactuses are so various that if, like me, you come to take notes, you’ll walk out lightheaded and bleary.

One feature differentiates the orchid from other flowers — the fusion of female pistil and male stamen into a single structure called a column. Aside from that, it’s easy to find pairs of orchids that could have come from different planets. One distinctively scented Phalaenopsis could fit on the tip of your pinkie while the blossoms of another, pale pink type practically crowd one another off their perches in their drive to take up space. A flat purple variety of a different genus, Miltoniopsis, looks like the Hand of Fatima, while others, of still other genera, could pass for edible red seaweed, or giant insects.

“Mexican Modernism” does an admirable job of balancing simplicity of conception with opulence of execution. Colored windows in one section turn cactuses orange and purple as the sun moves across the sky; potted orchids in the aquatic plants and vines gallery fill the room with fragrance even as they draw your attention to water lilies and water poppies; an adjoining show of stylish photographs by Martirene Alcántara, in the garden’s nearby Ross Gallery, takes you directly into Barragán’s sharp but explosively colorful walls and corners. But I’d recommend making some quick choices before the abundance goes to your head. Take a deep breath, pick a single flower — like a Phalaenopsis Taida Day, whose white sepals are marked with elegant purple veins — and look closely.

The Orchid Show: Mexican Modernism

Through April 27 at the New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Boulevard, Bronx; 718-817-8700, nybg.org.