The Wild Orchids of Hong Kong
The Wild Orchids of Hong Kong
by Gloria Barretto, Phillip Cribb and Stephan Gale
HKU Press
Half a century of persistent original scholarship, intensive research, and sheer love of place and subject illuminate this magnificent book. Few works on Hong Kong subjects can be considered definitive, but The Wild Orchids of Hong Kong is one of them.
The book's originator, the late Gloria D'Almada Barretto, was one of Hong Kong's rare true citizens. Her family settled here in 1842, and she was brought up at the family home in Fanling. City life was not to her taste: Barretto was a natural countrywoman.
Growing up in the-then completely rural New Territories, where she explored the villages near Fanling with her dog and galloped her pony along the Kowloon-Canton Railway line in hot pursuit of passenger trains, led to an interest and curiosity in the natural world, and eventually to a pioneering role in local conservation.
Starting off with a group of like-minded enthusiasts in the 1960s, Barretto formed a group dedicated to the search and documentation of local wild orchids. Her friends and mentors included J.L. Youngsaye, a pre-war naturalist, and Chinese University botanist Dr Hu Shiu-ying. Numerous orchid species hitherto unknown to science were discovered, classified and documented; some were unique, as far as is known, to Hong Kong. Other species that had been named and documented in earlier times, but whose only known habitats had subsequently been wiped out by development, were sometimes rediscovered in other locations.
Work on the wild orchid research gathered pace when Barretto retired from the Tai Po District Office in the early 1970s. In her 'retirement' she worked at the Kadoorie Farm and Botanical Garden as their botanical consultant on wild orchids, and only fully retired in 2003 at the age of 87.
The Wild Orchids of Hong Kong was in an advanced state of draft when Barretto died, aged 91, in 2007. The manuscript, comprising tens of thousands of pages of draft chapters, notes and other materials, was edited by Phillip Cribb from the Royal Horticultural Gardens at Kew, London, and updated and enhanced by Stephan Gale, a botanist specialising in orchids at Kadoorie Farm. In this demanding task he was ably assisted by Mark Isaac-Williams and Barretto's son Ruy and daughter-in-law Karen, all of whom shared her infectious enthusiasm for Hong Kong's natural world.
Despite its scholarly scope - the book comes in at just under 700 pages - this is a tome for the botanical generalist. Anyone who loves Hong Kong's magnificent countryside, and the surprising natural riches that can be observed within it, will enjoy this book. Both armchair and actual gardeners - and those who simply enjoy the cultivation of orchids - will be astonished at the variety of native species Hong Kong possesses.
Among the wealth of taxonomical details, there are fascinating stories of how certain orchids were discovered and in some instances rediscovered. As the work of a largely self-taught botanist, the enormous scientific detail in this book is truly extraordinary.
Illustrations range from superb 19th-century botanical drawings to detailed colour photographs taken specifically for this volume. For anyone intrigued by Hong Kong's natural world - and for those who never suspected that such a thing existed - The Wild Orchids of Hong Kong is an essential companion.
