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Out And About (Tall Tales but Very True)

Rare and Beautiful Orchids (Part 3) - Dendrobium tetragonum mylespadei update:

Well, a few weeks ago we spent the day driving to an isolated part of the Great Lakes hinterland with a friend to identify a supposedly new variety of Den. tetragonum (substitute name at the moment) mylespadei. This is after all the heavy rains in the past couple of years, and not knowing whether the roads were still drivable. We made it to the river estuary but we were confronted by a natural disaster of a huge magnitude.

Fig. 1

The river had turned into a flooding torrent taking everything in its path downstream into the lake many kilometres away. It was so huge that 30 metres up the steep sides of the gorge, was completely striped of rainforest and epiphytes, even the bark of the trees were gone leaving bare timber, we estimate thousands of tetragonum and other orchids would have been wash down into the lake, floating around for orchid growing boating enthusiast to find (if there are such people). Even if there were forestry operations going on, they could not have done this amount of damage to our rare orchids.

We looked at each other and said “What next”? Nature is completely unpredictable of late. It will take a hundred years for this to return to its former glory. Further on downstream was even worse as you can see on the left of (fig. 2) where it just uprooted everything and left bare ground (fig. 1 & 2).

Fig 2.

Finding the unique tetragonum in flower was not going to happen.

I went downstream and walked up the side creeks and gullies that flow into the main stream and after about two hours of clambering around over large rocky terrain, we found 6 plants still left there on uprooted

trees with no bark on them hanging only on a few roots. As they would have surely died within a short time, we rescued a few plants for further analysis. The flowers are now being measured and appraised for identification and hopefully returned to the area.

There is a couple of possibilities of what my plant could be, a natural inter-variety between the variety type and melaleucaphilum which has been suggested, or it is a mutant (mutation) of whatever variety, which I feel it could be. So the only way to solve the problem is go to another estuary on the other side of the mountain and see what they are flowering like and get many photo’s. That will be a very long day.

Fig. 3

The plant of tetragonum myalspadei has just opened up this week flowering true to form, but surprisingly a couple of the other plants from the same areas flowered as the variety type. It is a bit of a mystery now on what’s going on! A nice botanical event to solve, but at least we know it exists up there somewhere (Fig 3 & Fig 4).

Fig. 4

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