Passionate pursuit
“Looking hard for rare species of orchids offers no guarantees that you’ll find them,” says Chung. “A lot depends on whether the gods of fortune shine on you.”
Lin Wei-min, author of A Field Guide to Wild Orchids of Taiwan, has had such good fortune. Once, after a typhoon, some friends happened upon a fallen tree in the mountains of Wulai, and they brought a log from it back to him with an orchid hanging off it. Under his care it bloomed, and turned out to be Luisia cordata, which no-one had seen for 70‡80 years.
As for his namesake Bulbophyllum albociliatum var. weiminianum, Lin discovered it one rainy, misty day in a deciduous forest along the Southern Cross-Island Highway, at an elevation of 1800 meters. “Because I noticed that there was something different about the plant, I brought a few sections back to cultivate.” The following year, Taiwan orchid expert Lin Tsan-piao confirmed that it was a unique variety of B. albociliatum.
Halfway into a career at the Central Weather Bureau, Lin Wei-min left to pursue his passion: searching for wild orchids. Chung caught orchid fever when he was in college and then gradually took steps to pursue his passion for taxonomical research. The blood, sweat and tears that the two of them have shed on behalf of orchids laid the groundwork for their illustrated guidebook: A Field Guide to Wild Orchids of Taiwan.
First published in 2003 by Big Tree Culture Enterprise, the book is a compendium of information about more than 100 orchid species that the authors gathered over 150 trips into the mountains. In 2006 they expanded it to cover 280 varieties of orchids in three separate volumes. Then in 2014 the Dr. Cecilia Koo Botanic Conservation Center published The Wild Orchids of Taiwan: An Illustrated Guide, which is an English-language book that covers the 428 varieties Lin had recorded by 2012.
In 2008 the Forestry Bureau and the Taiwan Society of Plant Systematics published Chung’s two-volume Chinese-language Wild Orchids of Taiwan. A first for Taiwan, the book includes 362 separate species and varieties of orchids, all photographed in the wild. In 2015, using Wild Orchids of Taiwan as a foundation, Chung expanded the material into The Hidden Treasures of Taiwan’s Wild Orchids (Owl Publishing), with photographed varieties reaching a total of 409. This year he has taken over responsibility for the eight-volume A Field Guide to Plants in Taiwan, which records 4700 plant species native to Taiwan, including 469 orchids. He anticipates that all eight volumes will take about one year to update and rerelease.
In the belief that “heaven rewards the diligent,” Chung Shih-wen, an orchid expert with the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, has spared no effort in his quest for orchids.