Читать книгу Orchids For Dummies - The Editors of the National Gardening Association, Steven A. Frowine - Страница 21

Being crazy about orchids isn’t new. In fact, this orchid mania, also known as orchidelirium, seems to have reached its peak in Victorian times. It was similar in its extreme to Dutch Tulip Mania. During these times, some wealthy folks mostly in England spent vast amounts of money to send plant explorers to all parts of the world in search of new species of orchids that were then brought back to auction houses in London to be purchased for vast sums of money. These explorers risked life and limb to find new treasures. They faced tropical diseases, poor or nonexistent roads, steamy insect-infested jungles, and civil unrest in some of the countries they explored. The explorations were extremely competitive and cutthroat.

The explorers kept the locations where they found the orchids as a guarded secret, and they made very few efforts at leaving any plants behind to reestablish themselves in the wild. In fact, some accounts reported that the explorers burned the grounds where the orchids were originally collected so no one else could collect them. Unfortunately, not much information about growing and transporting orchids was known at that time so many if not most of the orchids died in transit or withered in greenhouses that didn’t replicate their native environments. Some species of orchids probably went extinct because of these practices.