Beauty of N.Z. orchids

Press, 19 December 1981, Page 18

Beauty of N.Z. orchids

A Field Guide to New Zealand Native Orchids. By Dorothy Cooper. Price Milburn, for the Wellington Orchid Society, 1981. 103 pp. Illustrations. $9.95. (Reviewed by Hugh Wilson) Orchids have a powerful fascination for plant-lovers for several reasons. For example, some are prized for their spectacularly beautiful and uniquelyshaped flowers and are therefore keenly cultivated. Another attractive aspect of the orchid flower is the variety of ingenious mechanisms for insect pollination. Dorothy Cooper refers to unpublished correspondence in which Charles Darwin carefully describes to Huxley a pollination contrivance in Catasetum and receives the answer, “Do you really think I can believe all that?" Some 18.000 known species are

distributed over most of the land surface of the earth, in a great range of habitats. They are diverse in size and form and life style, but all share a common floral design that places them in a single discrete botanical family, generally regarded as highly evolved. Their relationship to other families is not so clear although a comparison is made with the lilies.

New Zealand has more than 70 species, many of them small and inconspicuous. For some a lens is needed to show clearly that they, too, display that basic and remarkable orchid flower pattern: this itself is a curious attraction. Some others are colourful and handsome enough. This excellent little field guide mentions them all; every species is at least briefly described, and a large number are fully described and illustrated. The information is refreshingly accurate and yet not dauntingly technical. If I had to make a criticism it would be that the descriptions are perhaps too detailed for a popular guide. Perhaps, too, the line drawings tend to be a little stiff and lifeless, but they are fully satisfactory for identification purposes. They are supplemented by an attractive group of colour photographs. A good introduction touches on some of the most interesting features of orchids. There is a good glossary, a bibliography, and index. A nice touch is a concise chart of flowering times, which should prove useful to people looking for particular species. The need for careful conservation of native orchids is stressed. Field guides need to pe sturdy and small. This is a slim paperback of suitable weight and .with sections stitched as well as glued, so it should stand up to field use. It makes a pleasing contribution to the popular literature on New Zealand plants.