I was in Asia for business and took the opportunity of spending a week in the remnants of the low-altitude forest in Sumatra. Whilst this was an interesting experience - an Ourang stole my back pack by a river, and had to be spoken to sternly before it was returned, filletted for bananas but happily with camera, money etc intact - I did not see many orchids. The dense forest is never a place for orchids, in truth, and the plants that were to be seen in the canopy 30m above, or on fallen branches, were extremely repetitive: an Eria, two Bulbophyllums; the ubiquitous Dendrobium crumenatum and not much else. As with lowland forest the world over, these live on the uppermost branches of the canopy emergents, and there is essentially nothing to be found lower down. I also saw a single Bromheadia, a couple of Malleolas and an Agrostophyllum by a stream, which made a vertical cut into the forest,
There were more orchids in the gardens of the houses beyond the forest than seemingly, in it. This pattern is broadly repeated in lowland forest wherever I have looked - in South America, for example - and the orchids only really appear at higher altitiudes, in broken forest, where the light gets into old, always shorted and often rather dwarfed trees, scrub and rock. ______________________________ Oliver Sparrow +44 (0)20 7736 9716 www.chforum.org _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
