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I was among the first to see it growing in its
original location..Only one small seedling left by the time we got there shortly
after it was discovered..I wrote an article about it in the Orchid Digest
magazine around 1980 or so..I also lectured on it for years..One thing for
sure..they grew upwards. The original spot was next to a bit of a
waterfall and you could be sure that their roots were kept damp..as I remember
the elevation was over 3000 ft..There are pictures of the original site in that
first article..and, of course that was in Peru..All the plants that I was to
sell (the first in the West) were all from Ecuador..and all prior to CITES.
Shipped to me by a famous collector from there. I got $500 apiece for the
first plants (in bloom) and sold out in a matter of hours..They were easy to
grow..and I believe easier than the Peruvian var. The main thing you had
to remember about those first plants is that they were runners..You had to
provide a post for them to grow up to do well. With proper breeding that
seemed to have been eliminated to some extent..I grew them fine in Thousand
Oaks, Calif..so coolness did not seem to matter that much..I was told by my
friend Manuel Arias Silva that he discovered a second location in Peru..which he
kept secret so they would not be over collected..Most of the plants he sold
prior to that came from Ecuador..and he had a maid who made monthly trips by
bus, to and fro..to bring shopping bags of them back to his nursery...So the
upshot to this is to say that, no....I never saw a location where they grew on
the flats..and my supplier from Ecuador told me that his plants were extremely
high up some cliffs above an army base where he was an officer..collecting them
was a real adventure..Bill Bergstrom
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