Down to work! New Reality Books
Orchids – in the species protection register and in the main distributor
A protected plant turns into a huge product, which in turn prevents illegal trade: the book by Noemi Harnickell from Bern shows such amazing connections.
Dr. read it. Elephant. Daniel Arnett
I probably ate one this summer, too: vanilla ice cream. Vanilla is still one of the most popular types of ice cream. When I think about it, a summer nearly 50 years ago comes to mind: At the time, our family was vacationing at Bettmeralp VS. And when I went to the village bakery to buy bread with my older brother when I was a kid, there was always Chübeli’s homemade vanilla ice cream – the best in the whole world!
Bernese historian Noemi Harnickell (30) wrote in her recently published book Disturbingly Beguiling, “Until the eighteenth century, vanilla was a popular spice in cocoa drinks, pastries, and meat sauces in many parts of Europe.” Teach that the plant is a kind of orchid.” Just like the English expression “you are so vanilla” means something average today and every gelateria offers various varieties, an orchid has turned into something ordinary.
The orchid is the rubber tree nowadays and can be found in many living and waiting rooms. “The best-known and best-selling orchid is Phalaenopsis,” wrote Harnickel. Originally from Southeast Asia, today it comes from German production and above all Dutch production and reaches customers via major distributors and Swedish furniture stores for shameful little money – a huge product.
Dutch botanist and orchid expert Rogier van Vogt (39) sees nothing to blame in this development – quite the contrary. Harnickel quotes him: “He is of the opinion that the best way to stop the illegal trade in endangered species is to dump the markets.” And from Swiss orchid collector Roland Amsler (54), I got an illustrative example of how endangered orchids are exposed: it tells of a newly discovered species on a tree in Brazil that was just there – and then a saw-trunk fell victim to it. flowers.
Orchids often grow on trees, which is why plants have long been believed to be parasites. They are strange creatures that reproduce best around fungi, have aerial roots and have the smallest seeds in the plant kingdom. Harnickell: “It’s as thin as dust, weighs one millionth of a gram and can be carried hundreds of kilometers by wind.” The author reports about a thousand genera of orchids with a total of about thirty thousand different species.
“Nothing goes against the idea that orchids are more boring than a book cover,” Harnickel wrote. You can see the colorful drawing “Orchids” by the German zoologist Ernst Hegel (1834-1919). Faced with such pictures, Harnickel for a long time agreed with the 65-year-old American botanist Sandra Knapp, who sees the orchid as a “loud guest at the party.” But that’s what makes this plant and this book about it so exciting.
Noemi Harnickell, «Annoying prankster. Under the Orchid’s Mantra, HarperCollins
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