I had my orchid phase in Trinidad, amassing a large collection of native species that were donated to the Emperor Valley Zoo before I migrated to the USA. This paragraph from Joan Didion’s (1979) novel, The White Album, expresses how orchid-lovers can view their plants:
“I didn’t know orchids then, now they’re like my children. I wait for the first bloom like you wait for a baby to come. Sometimes you wait four years and it opens and it isn’t what you expected, maybe your heart wants to break, but you love it. You never say, ‘that one was prettier.’ You just love them. My whole life is orchids.”
These days, it is a pleasure finding orchids in the wild but I also spend time inspecting them closely for the cassidine beetles that specialize on them.
Comments are closed.