The World’s First Orchid Hunter
Image via Wikipedia
by Adam Fulford, InsatiableGardener.com
Olof Swartz was a renowned Swedish botanist of the late 1700s, widely regarded as the world’s first orchid expert. After studying sciences in his native land of Sweden, Olaf Swartz, at the age of 23, sailed across the seas in 1783 to the Caribbean and the Americas, and ventured into forests and tropical jungles, making diligent collections and notes of native flora.
In returning to Europe, Olaf went to England in 1786 to further his botanical studies in the Banksian Herbarium, then back to the world of academia in Sweden, studying a wide range of plants including those he brought with him from his travels. He was particularly enthralled by orchids, organizing them into new genera. He published renowned works with detailed descriptions and illustrations of flowers and their parts. He met his wife in Sweden, and they had a son and daughter.
In 1800, three years after tragically becoming a widower with a son and daughter, Dr. Olaf Swartz published a ground-breaking series of articles on orchids. He is considered to be first person (first European at any rate) to become an orchid expert. He single-handedly discovered and identified thirteen genera of orchids and twenty-seven different species. His most famous work is on the Orchidearum species of the West Indies and the Americas.
It was renowned this Swedish Botanist who first beheld the “Dancing Girls” in 1773, in the jungles of the Americas and immediately became infatuated with them. Circa 1800, he named them “Oncidiums” derived from “onkos,” the Greek word for “swelling.” The name was in reference to formations of the stem and a protuberance of the orchids’ lip.
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