Nick Plummer asked: "Beautiful plant. It must have been exciting to find them. If you publish a description, will you be permitted to keep the precise locality secret?"
Nick, I can be as vague as I want. My options range from the precision of "xxxx village, yyy subdistrict, zzz Province, Sulawesi, Indonesia" to the vague "Sulawesi" to the totally useless statement "Indonesia". Obviously, the more detail I give, the more useful it is to future workers, and the more likely it is that someone will land a helicopter there and rip all the plants out. There is a compromise to make .... I'll decide later how much I want to disclose. Since this taxon has such evident horticultural value and such a small proven range, I'll err on the side of caution. Finding these plants was hard, frustrating work. I first saw this species some 5-6 years ago; one plant was flowering under a shade-net in an orchid-collection in the garden of a house in a town in the Poso Valley. I took some photos of the plant & chatted to the owner for a while. She was from a different part of the island and had brought the orchids with her to remind her of home, which is a quite common thing for Indonesians to do. I came back to Singapore and, on the basis of the photos, decided that it was probably an undescribed species, so I'd have to go back and follow it up. The civil-war, which was just starting in '99, got much worse and for the next few years it was too dangerous to return to the Poso area. By early 2003 the war had died down, so last August I went back to the Poso Valley. The house was still there, but it had been heavily machine-gunned and was standing empty .... there was no sign of the owner and her family. The shade-house was still there, but no orchids ... someone else was using it to cultivate cocoa seedlings. The neighbours said the family had gone back to their village, and asking around produced the names of the village and it's subdistrict. The village is very remote, and getting there (and back) posed some major problems, so I waited until this year and organised a special trip. Yes, it was worthwhile ... the first one I saw flowering in the wild was a real thrill. Then I saw the next one, and then the next one...... Peter O'Byrne Singapore _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids
