"Guelph author Michelle Wan travels... searching for a rare, presumed-lost orchid ... off to find Cypripedium farreri, a rare Chinese orchid now on the IUCN's Red List of threatened species. Few official sightings of C. farreri have been recorded since Reginald Farrer brought it to the attention of westerners 92 years ago.
We were at the end of a three-week trek that had taken us through Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, China, in search of wild orchids... Our tour leader was... Holger Perner, a German orchid scientist and Cypripedium specialist who lives in Chengdu... ... the Perner expedition was hard work. We were up at six most mornings, on our way by 7:30 a.m., negotiating difficult mountain roads, hiking and climbing at altitudes of 10,000 to 13,000 feet... we found, photographed... orchids, including the rare Cypripedium wardii... a flower, pure white with red spots, and almost as hard to come by as farreri. That day we set off, we protected our camera equipment from the violent lurching of our borrowed police van as it bumped over the rough forest road en route to our search site. This was the Wanglang Nature Preserve, deep in the Sichuan highlands... We quickly found orchids, many of them Cypripediums, with their characteristic slipper-like flower. Canada has seven species of Cypripedium, including the well-known Pink Mocassin Flower and the gorgeous Showy Lady's Slipper. China, the heartland of the genus, has 32 varieties (species ?), or 70 per cent of the world's total. In sunny patches we stepped carefully among scattered clusters of purple C. tibeticum... near-black C. calcicolum; and in one place, a... group of tiny yellow C. bardolphianum. There were other kinds of orchids, too, Epipactis, Coeloglossum, and Galearis... Suddenly, we heard our leader's distant shout. A minute later Holger came galloping toward us down a path. "Farreri! I have found it!" Word spread quickly. The forest rang with shouts of "A find! Farreri!", and orchid hunters began emerging from the trees. That's when the hard work began. The way to farreri took us a couple of wet kilometres up into a cleft in the mountains and over moraine with boulders as big as SUVs. Where the cleft ended in a cul-de-sac ringed with high cliffs, we spotted a trio of small, light coloured dots growing inaccessibly midway up the cliff face. Then came the near-vertical assault. Clutching our cameras with one hand, we clung with the other to whatever supports we could find to bring us within focal range of our quarry. C. farreri was worth it. A stunning, creamy yellow flower with strong striping and an unusually dentated, red-tinged lip, it was the fulfilment of an orchid hunter's dream. When I set out on this orchid odyssey I had done so in order to gather field material for the next in my series of "orchid" murder mysteries... Guelph's Michelle Wan is the author of "Deadly Slipper" and "The Orchid Shroud" in the "Death in the Dordogne"series of murder mysteries." URL : http://www.guelphmercury.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=mercury/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1192275960350&call_pageid=1050067726145&col=1024322199505 ************** Photos : [caption : "Cypripedium farreri, above, and Cypripedium wardii, below, are among the rare orchids Guelph author Michelle Wan encountered during a recent trip to China, where she was doing research for the next of her 'orchid-themed' mysteries."] http://www.guelphmercury.com/images/guelph/gue938779_1.jpg http://www.guelphmercury.com/images/guelph/gue938779_2.jpg ************** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
