************************************************************ Jungle Collecting Orchids The Easier Way Laura & Duane Duman *************************** We have already told you about the joys of sloshing through the jungle dripping with sweat and surrounded by swarms of bugs while we scanned the trees for orchids and snakes. It is too bad that most of the really good jungles are so far away. The magnitude of planet earth seriously limits our collecting. In this article we will suggest alternative collecting for people with patience, understanding, and a sense of wonder about the natural world and its delightfully different people. We find catalogs or plant lists from orchid nurseries in very remote places. The ones which charge for their catalogs are too up-scale. We use our own library to see if we can recognize anything on them, and then go over to Matthaei and use their library. Mostly we order the species with the cute names. Then we wait. Back to reality. To order plants from outside the country, you must have an import permit. Every foreign catalog will ask for your import permit number. To get ours we wrote to US Dept. of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Federal Center Building, Hyattsville, MD 20782. They sent us a form; we filled it out and returned it. They sent us a permit good for about five years. Ours expires next year end. That is all it takes to be an legal importer. We have heard that this office has moved. Next the country from which you are ordering must issue a CITES(Committee for the International Transportation of Endangered Species) permit. I have seen vendors ask up to $40.00 for a CITES and one vendor assumed that cost itself. The usual cost is about $20.00. This permit says that the sending country and the official endangered lists have no problem with your order. The box of orchids will be put on a flight which lands at an international airport with a plant inspection station. The USDA checks the plants against the CITES, inspects for bugs and molds etc., treats if necessary, reseals the package, and puts it onto whichever delivery service has been prepaid by the sender. If you are lucky the box is on your front porch the next day. Our delivery charges are usually in the realm of $40.00. If the sending nursery can affix a Phytosanitary Certificate it gets through agriculture more quickly. The payment method is usually more interesting. Each plant list will state the acceptable methods of payment. We never use a credit card number or any instrument which has our bank account numbers on it. Money orders often work. Bank to bank transfers work if you have their account number. The cost of the transfers usually runs around $20.00. Our bank will not issue a money order to Indonesia. You must fill out a long form which gets sent to someone in St. Louis. They convert the $$ from US to Indonesian and transfer the money. That would not work because the vendor would not accept anything but American Dollars. Other times money orders are quicker and cheaper. We still owe this Indonesian $13.61, and the transfer cost is about $20.00. The lesson you should learn >from above is that small orders are very expensive, and large ones increase the fixed costs very little. Orders rarely come in less than six weeks, and we have waited for as much as two and one half months. This is important because you would like to establish the plants before winter sets in. When they come late you must keep them alive without roots until the following summer. Even if the plant list says that everything is nursery stock, when it comes you can often see where they cut it off the nursery. It takes a year or two to get the plants established. The chance of getting award quality flowers is about zero. On the other hand, if you order from the Philippines you can get a Vanda luzonica or a Trichoglottis philippinensis. Guess where we got our Eria javanica. Some of our plants are named after people. Our Dendrobium victoria-reginae is from the Philippines. When it came it was five very small divisions and it looked like it had been ripped off of a tree, and was as dead as a deciduous dendrobium can look. After a year four of them stayed dead, but one has four one inch growths near the top of one pseudobulb. No growths or roots from the base yet. Our Grammatophyllum measuresianum is from Thailand. (Anyone remember Capt. Measures of Her Majesty's finest?) It had two large pseudobulbs and a nice new growth. The growth rotted in two weeks. I have repotted it four times looking for the right combination. After a year and one half, I have two strong leads beginning to spread leaves but still no roots. The successful potting directions were found in 'ORCHIDS'. Then there was the Rhynchostylis coelestis from Thailand. It put up two strong spikes as soon as we got it. It was a beautiful flowering, and we have a mounted photograph in our living room. One of Laura's friends wants a copy made up for her office. Now, we all know that I should have removed those spikes as soon as they formed. Flowers and no roots does not work. The plant died as fast as the flowers, and that really good one got away. These small nurseries sometimes have no idea what they are selling. I ordered a Diplobium from Irian Jaya because I had no idea what is was. I got a plant labeled Coelogyne diplobium. It is a runner with slender half inch pseudobulbs and fat heavy three inch leaves. The only thing I am sure of is that it is not a Coelogyne. Out of a list of orchids I ordered a Lycopodium from Sumatra. We ordered one because we had never heard of that genus of orchid. The CITES permit said 18 orchids. The plant turned out to be a new unnamed species of the fern-like Lycopodium which is not allowed to be shipped across international boundaries. We have donated the plant to the Matthaei Gardens. We are not recommending any particular vendors. We are just looking for really strange stuff, so we use vendors who do not charge for their lists. I think the plants from the more expensive catalogs would be more likely to duplicate what we can get here. Our plants are not likely to get any awards or even to be show quality. But they are rather inexpensive, and a very interesting challenge. ************************************************************