orchids and orchidology in central america. 500 ... - lankesteriana.org

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Wallis published a few new species, presumably
based on material collected while he worked for
Linden, which resulted in a strong personal attack by
Linden (1875), who accused Wallis of being a corrupt
collector with little knowledge of plants. “I found him
penniless, unknown, abandoned. When he left me he
had a reputation, a small fortune [...]. I took him from
the Amazon Delta to the Isthmus of Panama, a journey
which cost me 125,000 francs: an enormous sum
compared with the paltry returns resulting from the
specimens arriving in poor condition...” (Ceulemans et
al., 2006: 146). Wallis answer was a letter of 18 pages
and consisted in citing previous letters by Linden,
in which he was congratulated for his work and
excellent collections (Jörgensen, 2003). In Panama he
suffered a bad attack of yellow fever, from which he
barely recovered. He continued working and arrived
in Ecuador, but a second attack, combined with
dysentery, proved fatal. “Letters from the collector
Edward Klaboch carried the news that Wallis died in
the hospital at Cuenca, Ecuador, on 20 June 1878”
(Reinikka, 1995: 235). More than 20 species of
Orchidaceae carry his name, among them Oerstedella
wallisii (Rchb. f.) Hágsater, one of the most beautiful
species of this genus.
Carl Ernst Otto Kuntze (1843-1907) (Fig. 41A),
the famous German botanist and naturalist, crossed
Costa Rica from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1874,
and complains in his book (Kuntze, 1881) that he
saw only six species of orchids. He had previously
explored the isthmus of Panama, between Colón and
Panama City. The results of his botanical explorations
were published by Kuntze in his Revisio Generum
Plantarum that appeared in several parts between 1891
and 1898. It contained a large section on Kuntze’s
nomenclatural system that became the source of a
great deal of controversy. In the third volume, Kuntze
replied to many of his critics and introduced much
new material. It was published in two parts in 1893
and 1898 and contains a lengthy summary of his
nonconformist system. For the rest of his life, Kuntze
was engaged in disputes with the botanical community
on the basic questions of plant nomenclature. An
enemy of Linné’s binomial system of nomenclature, he
spoke of the date of 1753 (when Linné promulgated his
system) as ‘a horrible fiction and mistake that I cannot
accept as a scientific and honest man’ ”(Anonymous,
LANKESTERIANA
LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
1907: 67). In his Revisio Generum Plantarum, Kuntze
describes over 1,000 new species of Orchidaceae. One
of his collections was dedicated to him by Cogniaux:
Campylocentrum kuntzei Cogn. ex Kuntze (=
Campylocentrum micranthum (Lindl) Rolfe - Bolivia).
According to some sources, Kuntze was in Mexico at
the beginning of the XX century, where he collected in
the states of Veracruz, Puebla and Oaxaca (Anonymous,
1906: 167). However, no records of collections of
Orchidaceae have been found from these travels.
As one of many German emigrants who traveled
to the tropics searching for fortune, Baron Hans
von Tuerckheim (1853-1920) (Fig. 41B) arrived in
Guatemala in 1877. He settled in the region of Alta
Verapaz, near Cobán, where he acquired the farm
‘Chicoyogüito’, thanks to a letter of recommendation
from the German Charge of Affairs Werner von Bergen
(Wagner, 2007: 178). There he lived, producing coffee
and studying the flora and fauna of the region. It is
said that he was disinherited by his German family,
because he married a Guatemalan dancer. From 1883
to 1895, von Tuerckheim substituted for the Charge of
Affairs at the German vice-consulate in Cobán, until
he decided to sell his farm and return to Germany. In
1906 he returned to Guatemala for a short period and
left finally Central America in 1914. The collections
by von Tuerckheim whose numbers start with “II” are
all from this last journey. In 1910 he made a short trip
to the Dominican Republic (March-June, 1910), as
German consul in that country. From this trip we know
of several collections (Pleurothallis appendiculata
Cogn., Tuerckheim 3233). When he started to have
financial problems due to the fall of the international
coffee prices, he began collecting plants and seeds at
a larger scale, which he exported to laboratories and
botanical gardens. At a certain point of his research
in Guatemala he received financial support from John
Donnell-Smith, the great North American botanist,
who distributed von Tuerckheim’s specimens to the
most important herbaria of the world (Maldonado
Polo, 1996: 135). Donnell-Smith published also his
Enumeratio Plantarum Guatemalensium, describing
von Tuerckheim’s collections in Guatemala, including
40 species of orchids (Donnell-Smith, 1889: 41.45).
His collections form the base for a more exact
knowledge of the orchid flora of Guatemala, mainly
that of Alta Verapaz, especially because he occupied