Is this true about orchids historically ?

[Dr. Dave 4u]

I came across this when looking up the psychopsis orchid.

Historically is this true?

"The butterfly orchid is rumored to have started the European "Orchidmania" of the 19th century".

[Roberta]

I'd be interested to learn the historical context of the statement... Where? Who? I think that it was Cattleyas that got the first attention and started the mania of wealthy people hiring "orchid hunters" to bring them from the jungles of the Americas.

[Dr. Dave 4u]

That was from a Wiki article on Psychopsis...how accurate I do not know

[Dr. Dave 4u]

I just read this in another article, is this accurate?

"Cultivating orchids became somewhat mainstream in 1818 when a man by the name of William Cattleya bloomed the first Cattleya. The odd thing about the event as he unpacked plants he shipped home (not orchids), he noticed these strange plants used as packing material. He potted some of them up, and months later, one of the Cattleyas bloomed. The orchid world has never been the same. It is still feeling the impact of that single plant."

[Roberta]

Actually, his name was William Cattley .. the genus Cattleya was, indeed, named for him. I have heard that story about the packing material... don't know if it is true or apocryphal.

The timing is approximately correct at any rate thought I think that it is a bit late. An interesting note... when these plants first hit the European scene, people thought that they all came from steamy jungles. Greenhouses were kept very hot with stoves (even called "stovehouses") Many orchids that survived the trip (and there were of course many fatalities in transit) met their demise in those stovehouses... because of course many don't come from such hot areas. Eventually, of course, orchid cultivators figured it out. The very early hybrids are also interesting... the only way that people of the time could get the seeds to germinate was to sprinkle them on the substrate of the mother plant. The yield was very low, and orchids were affordable only by the very wealthy. Of course, we now know why... orchid seeds have no endosperm, depend on mycorrhizae to provide the nutrients to germinate. The development of asymbiotic media(propagation in flasks) by Knudson in 1921 laid the foundation of modern orchid growing and hybridizing. The process of mericloning (which makes possible production of many copies of excellent orchids) goes back to about 1959 for orchids (technique developed earlier than that) But it was both of these developments that made orchids affordable for us ordinary folks.

Interesting article (a drink out of a firehose...): History of orchid propagation: A mirror of the history of biotechnology

[Dr. Dave 4u]

Wow..thanks fo the info
Its such an interesting hobby and the orchids so exotic I love it!
Just imagine if that story about William Cattley is actually true, what it must have been to discover this beautiful flower coming out of a mess of making material!!!
So mysterious and exotic!!
My wife is Chinese and her lineage goes back to Confucius so when I read he kept orchids and even wrote about them she was thrilled even more to be living in our tropical orchid condo home!! Just keeping it in the family line!!

[Orchidtinkerer]

Hey Dave,
here's an article you might enjoy. It briefly details how C Rex was first brought into cultivation and the struggles they faced back then doing so.

It was a tragedy that Bungeroth would never recover from.

Read the article to see what happened:
Cattleya Triumphans

[terryros]

They weren't packing material. They were known new flowers and were delivered to two different sites that bloomed Cattleya labiata. The mystery was that it wasn't clear where they had been collected and it took decades to re-learn where Cattleya labiata could be found. See Chadwicks' book on Classic Cattleyas for more details.

[Mr.Fakename]

There's also a lot going on in more "recent" years, and interesting stories to be told.

One I appreciate is how a species came back from the dead.

In 1975, the first population of Phalaenopsis javanica to be seen in decades was found during an expedition.
Rumour spread out, and all the plants were immediately illegally harvested by an Indonesian seller who convinced local people to do the job for him.

Javanica was thought to be extinct from the wild, until new plants were discovered in Sumatra in 2012.

[estación seca]

The terrarium was invented in the 1830s by English dentist Dr. Ward, and soon glass Wardian cases were used to bring to England plants too tender to survive the ocean voyage in a box.