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

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Henry Teuscher and the Montreal Botanical
Garden. The Montreal Botanical Garden was born
of the dream of the man with both a religious and
scientific vocation, Brother Marie-Victorin, born
Conrad Kirouack (1885-1944). Passionately inspired
by nature, he had founded the Botanical Institute of
the Université de Montréal in 1920 and dreamed of
creating a great botanical garden for Montrealers, a
plan he made public in 1925. Six years later, after much
hard work to convince both politicians and members
of the local scientific community, his plan finally took
shape. When the Garden was founded in 1931, Québec
was in the grips of one of the worst crises in its history.
Thousands of Montrealers were out of work and,
rather than simply paying these relief money, Mayor
Camilien Houde came up with the idea of employing
them to built the Garden
With the assistance of Henry (Heinrich) Teuscher
(1891-1984) (Fig. 56B), a landscape architect of German
origin trained in Europe and the United States and a
renowned horticulturalist and botanist, Brother Marie-
Victorin’s dream finally became a reality. A man of many
talents, Teuscher drew up the first plan of the Garden.
In 1936, he was officially appointed Superintendent and
Chief Horticulturalist, and later Curator of the Garden, a
position he held until his retirement in 1962. He also laid
out several of the exhibition greenhouses and assembled
some of the Garden’s major plant collections. His ideas
as a botanist and garden architect were best expressed
in his “Programme d’un jardin botanique idéal” (1940).
Always trying to expand the Garden’s collections,
Teuscher traveled in search for orchids to Ecuador (1951
and 1956) and to Panama in 1964. One of his collections
in Ecuador gave birth to a new genus named in his honor:
Teuscheria Garay, with the type species Teuscheria
cornucopia Garay (Teuscher s.n., Ecuador). Teuscher
corresponded frequently and received material from
the best collectors in our region, such as Harry Dunn in
Panama, and years later Clarence Horich in Costa Rica.
In addition, he traveled to Venezuela, Ecuador, Trinidad
& Tobago, Jamaica, and Hawaii. Several orchid species
were dedicated to Teuscher, among them: Epidendrum
teuscherianum A.D. Hawkes, Rodriguezia teuscheri
Garay and Telipogon teuscheri Garay. Between 1952
and 1977, Teuscher published 287 articles in the most
important orchid journals of his time. The most beautiful
plant in the annual orchid show of the Montreal Orchid
LANKESTERIANA
LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
Society is awarded with the “Grand prix d’excellence
Henry Teuscher”. Henry Teuscher will remain, for
many orchidologists across the glove, as the symbol of
Montreal’s orchidology (Boutot, 1984: 4).
The Flora of Guatemala
“The exceedingly varied types of soil and
topography and diverse geological history of
the country, ranging from ancient mountain
masses connected with North America to
relatively youthful volcanic areas, combined
with marked altitudinal and climatic variations
- hot desert to cold alpine regions - have given
Guatemala the richest flora in all Central
America with an estimated total of 8,000
species of vascular plants”.
(Standley & Steyermark, 1945: 275)
The project of the Flora of Guatemala became
one of the most ambitious enterprises of the Field
Museum of Natural History in the 1930s. It was again
the prolific Paul C. Standley who in 1938 undertook
this enormous work. Standley was later joined in the
project by Julian Steyermark, who joined the Museum
staff in 1937 and not only made numerous valuable
collections in Guatemala, but contributed also to the
published flora. Finally, Louis O. Williams joined the
staff in 1960 and supervised the completion of the
Flora of Guatemala (thirteen parts, 6,528 pages). The
treatise of the orchids for the Flora was written by
Oakes Ames and Donovan Stewart Correll, a work that
would not have been possible without the contribution
of an important number of collectors who must be
mentioned as precursors to what is still today the main
published work on the Orchidaceae of Guatemala.
Margaret Ward Lewis collected in Guatemala from
1928 to 1942. “When I first came to the tropics some
twelve years ago it was to live in a little Fruit Company
headquarters town where the seven houses were
arranged in a hollow square and every front porch was
a potential observatory. Exploration of the surrounding
‘bush’ was the only escape to a private life... I thought
collecting in one family was all I could encompass as
a beginner and I had unique opportunities to collect.
My husband was at that time Chief Engineer for the
[United] Fruit Company and I was in on all felling
for a railroad across Montúfar Flats. In a little while