Quote: >Around 8 km of roadside on vertical rocks, there were purplish Pleione in full >bloom. [...] Any explanation for such drastic increase in population or in >bloom?
An amazing sight. I have seen Coelogyne cristata in similar masses, blooming in synchrony. My guess is that the Maoists have either driven the local people out, or set them tasks, so that they do not harvest grass and branches from the cliffs for their animals. That has given the orchids time to recover. I certainly saw terrestrials like Arundina growing where they were previously absent in Spring this year. The land in question is now untended scrub, but it is near a Tamang village for which they land was previously carefully shared out and intensively cut by the village for forage. The village had three old women and an equally old man left in it, with a couple of goats. ______________________________ Oliver Sparrow +44 (0)20 7736 9716 www.chforum.org _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
