Missouri Botanical Garden Orchid Show 2007

• 1# – Welcome from Dr. Peter Raven

  voice: Dr. Peter H. Raven Welcome to the Garden and to our fabulous “The Art of Orchids” show. I’m Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Our talented horticulture and design staff works hard every year to bring you this beautiful display of winter-blooming orchids and I think you will find this years’ display to be truly exceptional. The new audio tour by cell provides even more opportunity to learn about this fascinating collection, as you enjoy their beauty first hand. Let us know how you like the audio tour. There will be a prompt which will allow you to tell us your thoughts. Thanks for visiting - and I hope to see YOU at the Garden again soon.

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• 2# – How is the orchid show at the Garden created?

  Voice: Pat Scace, exhibit designer I’m Pat Scace, the exhibit designer in the Floral Display Department. Would you believe it takes a full year to plan and prepare for this orchid show?! After we choose a theme, my assistant and I work closely with a team of volunteers to design and build props in our workshop behind the floral display hall. This year’s show presents the art of growing, illustrating and displaying the Garden’s extensive orchid collection. Among the hundreds of live specimens you will also see botanical prints from the Missouri Botanical Garden Press. Scenes in this classic conservatory were inspired in part by a still life watercolor painting. Each plant is part of our permanent collection, including the 7 18-foot ficus trees that we incorporate into each of our shows. We display the orchids carefully to appear as they grow in nature, whether they’re attached to tree bark or grow low to the ground. We detail the pots with moss and bark for a more natural appearance. When the show ends, everything is dismantled and the plants are returned to the production greenhouse until next year. If you’d like to see how it all comes together, check out the photos of the installation in progress on our Web site www.mobot.org.

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• 3# – How are the orchids cared for behind the scenes?

  Voice: Babs Wagner I’m Babs Wagner, the horticulturist in charge of the Garden’s orchid collection. Behind the scenes in the greenhouse, we tend thousands of plants. For the orchid show, I display as many different kinds as I can, so you can see the amazing diversity of our collection. The stars of this show are the winter bloomers. To get them ready on time, I juggle the greenhouse temperatures, starting in October. By doing this, I can force the flowers to bloom early or delay their bloom times a little. The variety of orchids you see here will change over six weeks. We start with about 800 orchids. I switch out approximately 50 to 100 as they start to fade each week and replace them with blooming plants from our greenhouses. First thing every morning, I slice off any faded flowers with a sharp razor blade, so everything always looks fresh and perfect. Do you know that vanilla comes from an orchid vine? Our vanilla orchid collection is one of North America’s largest. Look for the Vanilla planifolia. This plant is 102 years old, from 1904! Vanilla is extracted from the fleshy seed pod, called a vanilla bean. It’s actually a fruit that ripens gradually and eventually turns black, filled with thousands of tiny seeds.

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• 4# – How many orchids are in the Garden's collection?

  Voice: Jim Cocos, Vice President of Horticulture Resource: Public Relations fact sheet I’m Jim Cocos, Vice President of Horticulture. This Garden’s orchid collection is one of the largest and finest in the country. We grow more than 8,000 plants in our greenhouse area called the orchid range. These plants make up our largest living collection, representing over 2,500 unique species, varieties and hybrids. We grow a number of rare and unusual specimens. Some of them are over 100 years old. Many of the Cattleya hybrids in this show are no longer commercially available. They were created many years ago, and growers no longer produce them. Our collection emphasizes the types of orchids that can survive St. Louis’s hot summers as well as those that are winter bloomers. Their diverse colors and forms are valuable for our displays and educational exhibits.

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• 5# – What is the history of the Garden's orchid collection?

  Voice: Andrew Colligan, archivist and historian Resources: Public Relations fact sheet, Bulletin articles, Kemper Center handout I’m Andrew Colligan, the Garden’s archivist and historian. The Missouri Botanical Garden has collected, grown and displayed orchids for more than a century. The first specimens were given as a gift to the Garden’s founder, Henry Shaw, in 1876. Mr. Shaw was especially fond of orchids. At his death in 1889, the Garden’s collection, though small at the time, was one of the country’s most complete. The collection grew steadily, and in 1918, the largest public display of orchids ever held in St. Louis made it’s debuted at a Christmas Show. In 1923, George Pring, an orchidologist on the Garden staff, spent six months collecting plants in Panama and Colombia. He returned with eight tons of orchids, including 5,000 Cattleyas. The Garden held its first orchid show the following year, in 1924. Eight-thousand visitors came! In 1926, the Garden set up a tropical field station in Panama and continued to collect orchids there. Meanwhile, back in St. Louis, industrial smoke and pollution threatened the orchids…so, they were moved 30 miles west to Gray Summit, to what is now the Shaw Nature Reserve, where special greenhouses were built for them. An orchid seedling department was started in 1927 and the collection continued to grow in size and prominence. By 1958, air quality in the city had improved and the orchids were returned to the Garden. They have remained here ever since.

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