Yes, it’s the start of another great year of orchids with Tauranga Orchid Society and our first meeting of the year is (drum roll please) our open-to-the-public Orchid & Plant Auction on Tuesday, February 17, 7pm at the Wesley Church Hall in 13th Ave. The only T&C is that sales are cash.

If you haven’t been before, it goes like this. When you arrive please go the stage end of the hall and get a bidding ID number to wave at our auctioneer when something takes your fancy (not him though, he’s pre-sold). Our recorders will take your name so when you go to pay at the end, your total is easily found. It’s a good idea to bring boxes to carry away your purchases.

Thanks in advance to our members donating plants (orchids but also other interesting plants), gardening books, and gardening and orchid-growing gear. There are always bargains to be had, particularly for novice growers, but even the plants that spark a bidding war are generally obtained for less than retail value. And we even put on a supper at the end!

We look forward to seeing you there. If you have any questions, please email.

Dr Cyril Lockhart Cottle, a wealthy young scientist, has just left Liverpool on board the Malaya, a little auxiliary schooner of 90-tons, on a 3-year trip among the South Sea Islands, on behalf of Sir Jeremiah Colman, a famous collector. So read newspaper reports at the beginning of 1923, with one adding that the re-named Malaya had previously been used as pleasure craft by the wealthy Colman family (Colman’s English Mustard). The Malaya has been entirely refitted, being converted into a comfortable home for the party of 11 or more adventurers who will live in her. All sorts of alluring stores were crowded into her holds, including special cases to hold the priceless orchids which Dr. Cottle hopes to discover … Sadly, I have been unable to find any mention of whether any orchids were collected.

One of the 11 ‘adventurers’ was selected from the 2,000 young men who answered a newspaper ad seeking a steward for the expedition. In a little 90-ton ship, the Malaya, lying in St. Katherine Dock, is an 18-year-old London boy who dreams these nights of coconuts, cannibals, jungles, jaguars, and South Sea treasure. He is Hugh Craggs, of Ruskin Ave, Manor Park, London, who will sail with Dr. Lockhart Cottle, FRGS, and 10 men, on a 13,000 miles voyage of discovery and adventure … Hugh Craggs is straight from the hosiery business of Messrs Crowdry, London Wall … “I tried to go in the Quest with Shackleton, but was left … I’ve been longing to clear out of the hosiery business and go on a trip of adventure for years.” Within days of setting sail from Cornwall, the Malaya was battered with mountainous seas for 12 hours before seeking shelter in the Canaries.

Among the 11 on board were a cinematographer and Dr Lockhart Cottle’s new bride, 17-year-old Peggy – whom he’d known for only a fortnight before their marriage in Cornwall. The voyage ended in Suva in 1925 where the company parted ways, and at the end of the year Peggy gave birth to their only child in Samoa. Her husband extolled Peggy’s “magnificent courage and endurance”, recalling close encounters with scurvy, a 13-hour forced march to find water, and how she “fought hostile South American Indians”. In February 1926 the couple were living on a coconut plantation near Apia in Samoa, but by the September were in Cornwall. Cyril Lockhart Cottle died in 1930, aged only 38. Peggy died in 1982 in Cornwall, having never remarried.

Hugh Craggs, as a by-the-way, went on to have an extraordinary life, having several careers and living in several countries. Of interest to us are the descriptions of his home in Guatemala. From 1970. Near El Salto is the much smaller but equally interesting finca [plantation] of Hugh Craggs, an Englishman who is the leading orchid grower of Guatemala. He … showed us his greenhouses, holding some 8,000 to 9,000 orchids. From 1965: At the Finca La Providencia, owned by one of the world’s most outstanding orchidists, Hugh Craggs, you see rolling lawns set off by plantings of exotic jungle natives and greenhouses filled with rare Central American orchids and bromeliads. And from 1967: A progressive farmer who tells you how he has achieved the highest coffee yield in Central America … His handsomely landscaped estate is also well known to orchidists; many orchid hybrids have originated here for this and other plant breeding are hobbies of don Hugh. Was he bitten by the orchid bug because of where he lived, or because of his earlier adventures? Cattlianthe Hugh Cragg (C. Pacific Gem × Gur. aurantiaca) is presumbly named for him, despite the missing letter off his surname (registered in 1967 by by W W G Moir). Hugh Craggs died in the US in 1991.

In 1888 wealthy businessman and philanthrapist Sir Jeremiah Colman bought Gatton Park, a country estate in Surrey, and there amassed one of the largest orchid collections in Britain – at one time he was reported as having 30,000 orchids in glasshouses. Sir Jeremiah served as chairman of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Orchid Committee from 1917 to 1932, and was a hybridiser of note with the genus Colmanara named in his honour. In 1929 Sir Jeremiah donated a collection of orchids from British Honduras to Kew Gardens, perhaps some of the plants collected on the Lockhart Cottle expedition.

In the 1930s Christchurch Botanic Gardens embarked on an exchange programme with organisations around the world, resulting in the 1935 arrival of orchids from Sir Jeremiah Colman, estimated to be worth several hundred pounds. The plants came in three lots, with the March consigment comprising 27 varieties and the June package made up of 32 varieties. Sir Jeremiah promised to replace any plants that did not survive the trip. He wrote also that Den. Gatton Sunray was considered the most beautiful Dendrobium in the world. (Yellow orchids have been chosen as illustrations on purpose.)

The second consignment was noted in a newspaper as having travelled in the “potato hold’ of a ship where the temperature was a constant 6.7degC.