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Post by BarryRice on Mar 22, 2007 1:05:58 GMT
Wow.
In the face of eventual habitat destruction, which is the case all too often, this kind of relationship-building is amazingly productive. Fabulous!
So often, conservation is characterized (and thus easily marginalized) as greenies chaining themselves to bulldozers. Working with industry, before the conflict becomes critical, is far more productive.
Great success story.
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Post by roridula on Apr 8, 2007 20:12:30 GMT
Last week I went on a trip to the Huntington Botanical Garden in California. The Huntington has a good collection on bonsai. Our tour guide said that the actual age of many of the bonsai is not known, since most of the old ones had been collected from the wild. They may have been quite old in the wild when collected. For this reason bonsai age is described as "in cultivation since 1895" or "in training since 1895". I guess one could core the trunk and count the rings if one really needed to know the age.
Our guide said that collecting from the wild is now frowned on, but some growers still collect wild plants, with permission, from private ranch land.
Most bonsai plants are very common species. It is the plant's form, not the botanical classification that matters. The plants could have been sick or stunted in nature, and therefore doomed. Many of the plants would never be seen or appreciated until framed in a bonsai display.
On the other hand, collecting from the wild may involve collecting very old plants. There is a commercial market for bonsai that could drive over-collecting. The plants may have been natural runts, but also may have come from fragile high-elevation elfin forest. Mortality after collection can be high. Bonsai is an aesthetic art form, that may be best embodied by starting from scratch and training a small ordinary seedling into a bonsai specimen. Collecting a natural bonsai may be like "cheating", though there is doubtless technique needed to establish a collected plant, and to maintain bonsai of whatever origin.
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Post by Randy Zerr on Apr 30, 2008 0:32:34 GMT
Living in Sarracenia Central for 11 years now I've observed the effect of land development on CP habitats firsthand. Here's what I call an example of the 1% rule. www.geocities.com/pitcherplants/bogdamage.htmlI'm happy to say at least some of the plants are still around in the USF garden at Tampa and in some private bogs and collections.
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