ORCHIDS OF EUROPE

INTRODUCTION

 

 

Aceras anthropophorum X  Orchis simiaOrchids are one of the most fascinating flowers of the world. More than 20.000 different species are estimated. Most of them live in the tropical and subtropical ecosystems of the new and the old world. But also in Europe, especially in the Mediterranean region, and perhaps also in your direct environment wild orchids can be found.

More and more people take interest in orchids. A couple of books appeared on the market and in nearly every country orchid associations have been found. Without doubt it is a good thing to make people aware of the nature. On the other side the booming orchid tourism makes more and more problems, especially in regions where orchids can not often be found. So in case of doubt we have to do our hobby without taking pictures.

The subject of this work is not to tell you something about history or distribution of native orchids in Europe. We want to show you the Ophrys holoserica x Ophrys insectiferahybrids, one of the most fascinating aspects of wild orchids. Have a look at the pictures and you will see. We also describe genetic abnormalities like wrong structures and wrong colors, for example albinos. Naturally we can not show you every possible hybrid combination and genetic abnormality, but we will keep it up to date.

The use of our website is quite simple. Our intention is to show you a great number of qualitative good pictures. So we do it without a difficult structure, which would need a lot of capacity and therefore a lot of time to appear on your screen.

All pictures are taken with Nikon EM, Fe2, F301, F3, F4 with Nikkore 24, 35, 35-125mm and Panagor 90 mm macro. We used ring flash and fill-in flashlight as well as Kodachrome 25, 64, Ektachrome and Fuji Velvia. The pictures were made in the last 15 years during a lot of excursions in Germany, France, the Alps and especially the Mediterranean region.

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