"the lady's slipper orchid is Britain's rarest, and most heavily guarded, flower..
In 1917, the lady's slipper orchid was officially declared extinct... But..., in 1930,... in Yorkshire, a... botanist stumbled upon... a... specimen... Since then, the lady's slipper orchid has held the... distinction of being Britain's rarest flower. For four decades the fact of this last plant's very existence was known to just a few botanists; the plant - which may, ... survive until it is 100 years old [why not less / why not more ?] is now guarded round the clock when in flower. The fear, even today, is that obsessive orchidophiles [or orchid hunters ?] might dig the thing up. Or if not, that some innocent might trample it. Behind the scenes... efforts have been under way in recent years to breed the orchid, and to reintroduce new plants into the wild... the location of the last wild lady's slipper orchid... the Yorkshire Dales... wardens feel it necessary to bivouac close to the plant in spring and summer, as they have done most years since 1970; working in shifts, they use tripwires to signal the arrival of intruders. ... the site is... on private land not included in recent right-to-roam legislation. However, it is viewable from a distance, and wardens have sometimes found themselves being watched through telescopes... this is not an area known for bird-watching. ... Cypripedium calceolus... was dug up for collections and gardens as early as the 17th century, and became... earner for country folk in Victorian times, when it was sold from market stalls at Skipton, Settle and Ingleton in North Yorkshire. The botanist who rediscovered the plant in 1930 let fellow botanists in on the secret... the botanists formed a committee to establish guards on the plant every year. Today, the committee is run by Natural England, the government's outdoors agency. Its dozen members include the handful of botanists who are currently trusted with knowledge of the location, as well as representatives of various bodies involved in the project. The Cypripedium Committee, as it is known, is so concerned about disturbing the fragile ground where the wild plant grows that it has allowed itself just one visit in 20 years. Instead, it spends most of its time monitoring the reintroduction programme that's now under way... The... reintroduction project began in the mid-1990s, when seeds taken from the last wild plant were propagated in flasks at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.... At Kew, part of the ... learning curve on the lady's slipper project was the discovery that the seeds had to be unripe, otherwise they wouldn't germinate. Seedlings, once they had finally been grown, were... returned to Yorkshire and reared until they were thought strong enough to be placed outdoors. In the first year of the programme... 71 plants were readied for reintroduction, but the vast majority failed or were found to contain genes of a plant from continental Europe... Today, 550 cultivated lady's slipper plants are being grown in cold frames... at a number of locations in England... locations are being kept top secret for fear of attracting the attention of obsessive orchid hunters... almost 100 plants have been... reintroduced to the wild,... placed in suitable growing habitats across the flower's known haunts of a century ago, including spots in County Durham, Cumbria, Lancashire and Derbyshire. Some are growing... beside one of the busiest footpaths in northern England, having so far failed to flower... the lady's slipper reintroduction project... still learning to spot the precise habitats where success is likely... It's in Yorkshire that most of the lady's slipper reintroductions have taken place, but many of them have failed to flower. In fact, of the 100 or so lady's slippers planted out in the wild over the past few years as part of this project, only four have so far produced any flowers, and there have been no orchid babies... produced. ... optimism that... more will be flowering on English hillsides in the next few years, and that they may soon start reproducing naturally. ... several of the reintroduced seedlings have been discovered growing wild in Yorkshire and stolen... Some years they don't flower, and when they do it happens only in the first or second week of June... ... the programme's hugely ambitious aim is to make the lady's slipper so numerous and widespread... that its survival won't be endangered by orchidophiles [or orchid hunters ?] The Victorians had a name for orchid obsession - Orchidelirium - and they sailed uncharted seas to bring home new species. The Duke of Devonshire once bankrolled an expedition to the far east that produced more than 80 new species for his collection at Chatsworth... Another trip to the Canadian Rockies ended with two of the Duke's gardeners drowning when their boat capsized on the Columbia river. Once, a group of Victorian orchid hunters travelled thousands of miles to find one of the world's rarest species, but after several weeks gave up the search and broke camp - only to find that the flower they sought had been destroyed beneath the waterproof groundsheet of their tent. ... In the 1990s... a US horticulturist... John Laroche stole rare ghost orchids from the Fakahatchee Swamp, Florida, and set out to clone them. (The story was used as the basis of the 2002 film Adaptation.) In 2000, two Britons on a collecting expedition in Colombia were kidnapped by suspected Farc fighters. Paul Winder, a merchant banker, and Tom Hart Dyke... were held captive for nine months before being released." URL : http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2107622,00.html *********** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
