"bald cypress tree... hosts a ghost orchid blooming this week in the Audubon Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary...
for the third time... ghost orchid... remains visibly in bloom... on the... western edge of the Everglades... the orchid displayed as many as a dozen blossoms variously in the last 12 weeks... it has three blooms at the moment... it reaches more than 50 feet high on the trunk of the now-500-year-old bald cypress... roughly 30 feet higher than other ghost orchids. ... George W. Bush's administration, represented by the U.S. Department of the Interior, in June convinced the United Nations to remove... Everglades National Park from its list of the most endangered sites... Although both the U.S. House and Senate passed a water preservation bill this year which includes an additional $2 billion for the Everglades, Bush has not signed it, and will likely veto it as unnecessarily expensive... Although the federal government promised to pay half of the $10.5 billion estimated at the beginning of the decade as the cost to clean up and restore the 'Glades by 2020... so far it's fallen... short: Floridians have kicked in about $3 billion... but the Feds have only anted up $300 million. ... although the U.S. Sugar Corporation donates some money to help clean up and restore the Everglades... the reality... is that Sugar officials have made no land available to the government for sale, and their acreage may be the key to the restored health of the existing 'Glades. ... It comes down to state and federal officials fully recognizing the impediment that the sugarcane fields represent in correcting the hydrological conditions that would restore the Everglades... Since the water has to flow south in natural cycles - and east and west out of Lake Okeechobee in natural quantities if any systems are to work right again - sugarcane fields have to be surrendered at some point... ... the state needs to designate the entire Everglades agricultural area as an area of critical concern.... The ghost orchid photographer R.J. Wiley shot in the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary... is a rarity among rarities: only about 1,000 of the flowers probably exist in the world, they're rarely seen, they rarely offer more than a few blooms, and almost never at a height of more than about 25 feet. This one, however, has been blooming since July with as many as a dozen blooms at a time; its root system extends up the trunk of a 500-year-old bald cypress tree more than 50 feet, which means the flower is more than 50 years old... You'd think that it would be easy to take a shot of something only 150 feet off the boardwalk. But no, especially not when the swamp's managers don't want you tramping around. "So I had to send to New York and spend $9,000 on a special lens," says Wiley. "Then I had to shoot the flower at exactly the right time of day, with the right light, from the boardwalk." So he shot morning and night, in and out of thunderstorms, mosquito swarms and wind. Finally, at 6:23 p.m. one recent evening, with the light coming straight out of the west behind him, he got the right picture. His camera was ratcheted and wired to the boardwalk. "With something this rare," he says, "you just want to do it right." You can look at a variety of his work at www. adayintheswamp.com " URL : http://www.florida-weekly.com/news/2007/1011/Top_News/001.html photo : [Dendrophylax lindenii] http://www.florida-weekly.com/news/2007/1011/Top_News/001p6_xlg.jpg map : http://www.florida-weekly.com/news/2007/1011/Top_News/001p5_xlg.jpg ************** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) orchids@orchidguide.com http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
