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Major Groups, Families and Genera
Orchidaceae
The history of orchid research at Kew
Orchids have been cultivated at Kew for more than two centuries,
and systematic work on them dates from the time of Joseph Banks
at the close of the 18th Century. When William J. Hooker
became Kew’s first Director in 1841, he greatly expanded the living
collection and supervised the description and illustration of new species
in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and A Century of Orchidaceous
Plants. His preserved collections and those of George Bentham
formed the core of the Herbarium, later supplemented by the valuable orchid
herbarium of John Lindley, often called the “father
of orchid taxonomy”. Lindley’s collection comprises about
7,000 specimens, most of them types of new species. Succeeding his father
as Director in 1865, Joseph Dalton Hooker edited Curtis’s
Botanical Magazine and continued to describe new orchid species and
develop Kew’s Orchid Herbarium. He published Genera Plantarum:
Orchideae with George Bentham in 1883 and was author of the orchid
part for the Flora of British India.
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| Sir Joseph Banks |
William J. Hooker |
John Lindley |
Robert Allen Rolfe, the first curator of the Orchid
Herbarium (1888-1924), founded The Orchid Review, the longest
surviving orchid journal, and co-authored the first catalogue of artificial
orchid hybrids. He also wrote the orchid accounts for Flora Capensis
and the Flora of Tropical Africa. He was succeeded in 1926 by
Victor Summerhayes. Summerhayes developed Kew’s
expertise in Old World orchids and was the author of the orchid account
for the Flora of West Tropical Africa and the first volume of
that of the Flora of Tropical East Africa. His book, Wild
Orchids of Britain, (New Naturalist, 1951) is a classic.
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| Robert A. Rolfe |
Victor Summerhayes |
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