Thursday 7 April 2016

If You Like Orchids,

and I do,


 there is a great show coming up for you, it is in the New York Botanical Gardens

 titled “The Orchid Show: Orchidelirium” it is on display now through April 17 in New York, it is being held in the botanical garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a sprawling glass greenhouse built around the same time that orchidelirium escalated and made its way to the United States, all told, the display includes an estimated 6,000 orchids, says Marc Hachadourian, curator of the garden’s orchid collection and manager of the Nolen Greenhouses, visitors can also see a 19th-century propagation display and an example of a Wardian Case, a portable greenhouse invented by a London doctor named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward that became a flower fad in its own right,

visitors can glimpse a variety of orchids, from the speckled Lady’s Slipper to the bright yellow Dancing Ladies and the star-shaped Darwin orchid from Madagascar, the famous naturalist Charles Darwin, after whom the flower was named, was an orchid fanatic in his own right who once said, “I never was more interested in any subject in my life than this of orchids.” He was so infatuated with the flowers that he even published a book on them and studied the relationship between the flowers and their pollinators, in 1862, he predicted that the only way a tube-shaped Madagascar orchid could be pollinated was for an insect to have a feeding tube long enough to reach the flower’s base, forty years later, scientists confirmed this notion and discovered a moth with a tube that reached about one foot in length, 

so for a fascinating, interesting and colourful day out the NYBG is the place to visit, as an aside if you want to look at a $100,000 orchid have a look here.


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