Peter,
I do appreciate you weighing in. Personally, I am happy it has bloomed
again and that the public here in NY can have the opportunity to
actually see this remarkable plant. As a botanic garden, education is a
large part of our mission and we always really do our best to
disseminate factual info, but the problem with any kind of media
coverage of anything is that information can get skewed very easily and
once it is "out there" it then becomes fact. Reporters and media folks
have expertise at reaching out to the public not necessarily about
orchids or any other subject for that matter. With the internet and our
ability to Google anything, right and wrong information gets propagated
easily and widely. The result is that the same articles, stories and
statements get repeated so often, they must be true.
I have seen the great specimen Grammatophyllums at the Singapore Botanic
Garden and Mandai and the amazing efforts of the Parks Board to get this
species back out into the daily landscape. For anyone who has not been
there, Singapore has very successfully brought many of their native
plants back into the focus and access of the community. G. speciosum is
not rare there, but it is not a common greenhouse orchid in temperate
climates-it gets too big. Until the last five years or so it was hard to
find any commercial growers that even offered seedlings or plants for
sale that those of us in the US were able to access. When I bought this
plant ten years ago I was thrilled at the chance. As for the printed
statement, "few people or institutions can afford to grow it", what I
told the reporter is that it is uncommon in cultivation here because few
people or institutions can afford to give it the space that it requires.
In the grand scheme of things it is fun to be able to introduce NY city
dwellers to this amazing orchid species when hybrid Phals are their
reference; as well as the idea that an orchid can compel masses of
people to come out to a botanic garden to see it. For that, I am willing
to put up with a little annoying...inaccuracy.
Cheers,
Dave Horak
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:44:49 +0800
From: "Peter O'Byrne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [OGD] Grammatophyllum story
To: orchids@orchidguide.com
Message-ID:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
The New York Times article that Viateur posted in OGD V10 #277:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/a-200-pound-orchid-blooms-a
gain/?hp
has a couple of errors.
i) It isn't rare in nature. In many places it is really common.
ii) "it grows in the crotches of trees more than 100 feet in the air".
Those trees must be absolutely massive ! Large established plants of
Grammatophyllum speciosum are usually found growing in the crotches of
trees
at the normal height for tree-crotches; anything from head-height up to
20
metres or so. Small plants start growing further out on branches and in
higher forks, but they seldom become very large because they get too
heavy
for the tree to support.
iii) "few people or institutions can afford to grow it"
Oh dear. The reporter developed a bad case of parochialism with this
line.
Fact is, thousands and thousands and thousands of people grow
Grammatophyllum speciosum. It is a common garden-plant. Just not in New
York. Walk around villages in Malaysia and Indonesia and you'll soon see
what I mean. The Singapore Parks Board (an institution) has been busy
for
several years growing G. speciosum from seed and planting them on trees
all
over Singapore in one of the world's more successful attempts to
re-introduce a nearly-extinct native orchid species. When you visit
Singapore in September 2011 for the next World Orchid Conference, keep
an
eye out for them.
Peter O'Byrne
in Singapore
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