<
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250925-the-race-to-save-the-worlds-rarest-orchid>
“As a child, Kingsley Dixon's favourite book was
Orchids of the West, about
the wild orchids of Western Australia, where he lived. There was one
illustration in particular that left him transfixed: an ink drawing of
Rhizanthella gardneri, commonly known as the Western Australian underground
orchid.
"From when I was tiny, I used to just look at this page and go: 'oh my, there's
an orchid, it lives underground, it doesn't have leaves, it doesn't have roots,
and it has this fabulous flower!'" Dixon recalls.
A self-described "little plant geek", he spent much of his time in the
Australian bush – the wild scrubland near his home in Perth – collecting
orchids and then growing them on at home. "By the age of 13, I had a large
collection of bush orchids, but the one sitting in the middle of the book, the
Western Australian underground orchid – that was the dream, the dream of my
life," he says. The closest he got as a child was seeing a preserved specimen
in a jar, during a special trip to a herbarium for his birthday. It would take
him years to finally spot one in the wild, during a field trip to the small
town of Babakin in Western Australia in 1982, when he was 24. "We stopped for a
cup of tea [...] and I wandered into the bushland and kicked some soil only to
reveal some coloured bracts [of the orchid]," he recalls. "It was an absolute
Eureka moment."
Today,
Rhizanthella gardneri is the one of the world's rarest orchids and
critically endangered due to habitat loss, with only a tiny number of plants
surviving in the wild. The number fluctuates from year to year and in recent
years has been as low as three or even none found at all, Dixon says, with
climate change adding further pressure on the species. "It went in my own
lifetime from [seeing] it, to watching this species slip away," he says. So
Dixon, now a professor of botany at the University of Western Australia and the
former director of Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Western Australia, has a
new dream: to save the underground orchid from extinction.”
Via
Positive.News
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
