When travel writer Eric Hansen wrote Orchid Fever in 2000, the Columbus Dispatch commented that “The exotic, it turns out, is among us.” As it was in Santa Cruz this weekend. Botany, obsession, and plant-politics converged in Soquel for the Santa Cruz Orchid Society’s Orchid Show. “You can get off alcohol, drugs, women, food, and cars,” says Joe Kunisch, a commercial orchid grower from Rochester, New York, “but once you’re hooked on orchids, you’re finished.”
And so, at the orchid show, the botanically addicted showed off their plants to the more botanically challenged, with local orchids vying for attention and prizes with flowers from Costa Rica and other more exotic locals. There was a lot to be seen, too. There are four times as many types of Orchidaceae as there are species of mammals and twice as many as there are species of birds—and that’s not even counting the hybrids.
Some are as common as vanilla (itself a member of the Orchidaceae). One, the Grammatophyllum speciosum, can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds. Another, the Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis, is infamous for its stench. Like any family, Orchidaceae is as diverse as its most bizarre members. Some of these even showed up at the Santa Cruz Orchid Show.
There were 21 categories of prizes for local orchid growers, but the star of the show was Santa Cruz’s own Ken Bruland, who walked away with the Best in the Show award for his Australian dendrobium.
Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Read More at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
