Lankesteriana International Journal on Orchidology ISSN: 1409-3871 [email protected] Universidad De Costa Rica Costa Rica
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Lankesteriana International Journal on Orchidology ISSN: 1409-3871 [email protected] Universidad de Costa Rica Costa Rica Cribb, Phillip FOREWORD Lankesteriana International Journal on Orchidology, vol. 10, núm. 2-3, diciembre, 2010, pp. 1-215 Universidad de Costa Rica Cartago, Costa Rica Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=44340990001 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative LANKESTERIANA 10(2-3): i. 2010. FOREWORD Paradise for an orchid collector is a trail that runs through rich orchid habitat. Preferably the trail should decrease in elevation from 3000 to 500 meters over a protracted distance, it should be in a high annual rainfall area with the rain distributed evenly throughout the year, it also should be in a region of extremely high biodiversity and very pronounced local endemism. The adjoining forests, cliffs and embankments would be festooned with the natural epiphytes and terrestrials of the zone. In the Western Hemisphere, prior to the development of roads and highways, such trails from the lowlands to the Andean highlands existed from northwestern Colombia to southern Ecuador and northern Peru and provided the means of communication for people traveling by foot or mule back. Each of those trails might have had more than 1,000 orchid species distributed along their length. Curiously, each trail may have had a very different species composition from the next closest trail. The mountains of this region were clothed in mature montane wet forest that appeared to provide very similar conditions from one locality to the next. Yet, careful analysis and comparison of the composition of the orchid ora of several parallel trails reveals a very low commonality of the species. Recent reports suggest that the highest orchid diversity on earth may be in this region. Many collectors visited the zone from the time of Humboldt and Bonpland, C. Mutis, Ruiz & Pavón and Juan Tafalla at the turn of the 18th century. A wave of horticultural collectors were sent out from Europe by the major plant nurseries up through the turn of the 19th century. Most of those collectors were Europe-based and did not remain in the rich regions for prolonged periods of time. Very few actually lived in the orchid-rich regions, partly because those areas were inhospitable climate-wise. By establishing his home near Popayan in southern Colombia, Friederich Carl Lehmann (1850-1903) lived in the midst of those orchid populations, but in quite agreeable climate. He married a local girl, Doña Maria Josefa Mosquera and established a family. He arrived in Colombia about 1876 and collected for about 28 years. That period coincided with the fashion of maintaining large orchid collections by the wealthy of Europe. Lehmann communicated with Professor H.G. Reichenbach f., the leading orchid taxonomist of the time, and after Reichenbach died in 1884, worked with Dr. F. Kraenzlin describing new species of orchids from Colombia and Ecuador. He also sent a large set of his collections to Kew, where many were identied by Robert A. Rolfe. Lehmann travelled by trail and by boat for much of western Colombia and Ecuador, and made a brief plant- collecting trip to Costa Rica and Guatemala. Between 1880 and 1902 he made 7 trips to Ecuador. On those trips he collected live orchids and shipped them to Europe to be sold in the great auction houses such as Hugh Low & Co., Steven’s salesroom and Sanders. The nurseries established the plants and sold them as soon as they owered at substantial prices. Some were sent home to Popayan where he grew them on to ower. He prepared dry herbarium specimens (collection numbers exceeding 10,000). He also produced paintings of excellent quality of outstanding species. The majority of his paintings have been housed in the orchid herbarium at Kew. Unfortunately, other than for visiting scientists and the staff of Kew, they have not been available to the public. Most have not been published until now. Lehmanns herbarium specimens were prepared in abundance so that he was able to sell sets to several of the major herbaria of Europe. The orchid specimen collections prepared by Lehmann in the Neotropics over a 25 year period have made a major contribution to the knowledge of the orchids of the region. Calaway Dodson Sarasota, Florida June 2004 referenCes Anonymous. 1904. The late F. C. Lehmann. Gard. Chron. Third Series, 35: 121. Masters, M.T. 1904. F. C. Lehmann. Obituary including notes from F. Kraenzlin. Gard. Chron. Third Series. 35: 106-107. Reinikka, Merle A. 1995. A History of the Orchid. Timber Press, Portland, Oregoon. Wolf, Theodor. 1892. Geograa y Geologia del Ecuador. Brockhaus, Leipzig (Reprinted, 1975, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Quito). LANKESTERIANA 10(2-3): 100. 2010. THE ORCHID COLLECTIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF CONSUL FRIEDERICH C. LEHMANN PhilliP Cribb Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Surrey, TW9 3AB, U.K. Preface. The Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is one of the largest and most signicant collections of the plants of the world, one of the few collections with a truly worldwide scope and a history of curation and improvement that can be traced back over a century and a half since it was rst brought together by Sir William Jackson Hooker, the rst ofcial Director of Kew. Its historical collections are incomparable, containing specimens collected by many of the most famous botanists and explorers of the past, including Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Alfred Wallace, Ernest Wilson and Richard Spruce. The associated Archives contain much of historical importance, placing the collections in perspective and often providing detailed accounts of the ACknowledgements. The improved accessibility to Kews incomparable archives and collections has been the inspiration for this project, the idea for this project having been many years in gestation. However, it only really became possible through the interest of His Excellency Sr. Alfonso Lopez, the Colombian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and Sr. Roberto Arango, the Colombian Consul-General in London. Both supported this project from its inception and have provided much- needed encouragement and contacts along the way. I would like to thank Professor Stephen Hopper, the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for permission to use Lehmann’s drawings and the facilities of Kew; and other Kew staff, especially Professor Simon Owens and Professor David Mabberley the past and present Keepers of the Herbarium at Kew, John Flanagan and Christopher Mills, the past and present Librarians, Peter Taylor, Alec Pridgeon, Mark Chase, Jeffrey Wood, David Roberts, Claire Moyle, Marilyn Ward, James Kay, Henry Oakeley, Kate Pickard, Michèle Losse, Gina Fullerlove and John Harris for access, facilities, help and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Andrew McRobb for photographing Lehmann’s illustrations; Justin Moat for the maps; and Dudley Clayton for kindly compiling the bibliographic notes. Leslie Garay rst introduced me to the signicance of Lehmann’s collections. Calaway Dodson, whose knowledge of the orchids of the northern Andes is incomparable, encouraged me in this project to make F.C. Lehmann’s collections and illustrations more widely known. I am particularly grateful to him for providing the Foreword. His magnicent series of books on Ecuadorian orchids have provided many clues to the identities of Lehmann collections as have the series on Colombia orchids, edited with Rodrigo Escobar, to which he contributed. Likewise, Dr Carlyle Luer has been immensely supportive, not least for his Icones Pleurothallidinarum series and other publications that have claried the taxonomy of so many Andean orchids. Previous curators at Kew, notably Robert Rolfe, Victor Summerhayes and Peter Taylor, named many hundreds of Lehmann’s collections. Many visiting botanists to Kew have also identied and named his collections and, to a certain extent, I have relied upon their expertise, especially in poorly studied genera. Notably amongst these have been Leslie Garay, Calaway Dodson, Carl Luer, Robert Dressler, Norris Williams, Eric Hagsater, Mark Whitten, Günter Gerlach, Gerardo Salazar, Gustavo Romero, Alex Hirtz, Rudolf Jenny and Eric Christenson. I would like to thank Juan Felipe Posada of Colomborquideas in Medellin, José Portilla and his family in Gualaceo, Ecuador and Alex Hirtz and Harry Zelenko in Quito for their support. The text would have been much the poorer were it not for the language skills of Maren Talbot who has translated from the German, often almost illegible, the letters sent by Lehmann and the Klaboch brothers to Frederick Sander. I am deeply indebted to her. Likewise, although I never met her, I have freely used the translation of Lehmann’s collecting notes made in the early 20th century by the late Mrs. Durham, of whom I have been unable to nd any biographical information. Alec Pridgeon has kindly and thoroughly edited the text, although any mistakes are the author’s. I have dedicated this account of Lehmann’s work to Peter Taylor, my predecessor as Curator of Kew’s Orchid Herbarium and my rst boss and mentor at Kew. His deep knowledge of plants and his skills as a botanists and botanical draughtsman are a constant inspiration to me. 2 LANKESTERIANA expeditions when the plants were discovered and collected. One of the most comprehensive of these collections is that of Consul Friedrich Carl Lehmann (1850-1903) who collected orchids and other plants in Colombia and Ecuador over a period of 27 years from 1876. Lehmann was by profession a prospector and commercial plant collector. However, he made extensive preserved collections of herbarium specimens and illustrations of the plants that he collected and these form one of the most signicant archives of the plants of the northern Andes.