Word: lager
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...flower is a work of art, an orchid is a masterpiece. A piece of the world's rarest single orchid plant bloomed last week in Summit, N. J. bearing three beautiful, pure white flowers. Two hard-bitten old orchid hunters, John Lager and Henry Hurrell, hastily summoned the Press to marvel...
Orchids grow from Alaska to Argentina in the Western Hemisphere. The best are hardest to find, in the jungled Casanare and San Martin regions of Colombia and Peru. A good man to find them was Swedish-born John Emil Lager, until the U. S. put an embargo on orchids in 1919 because they carry insects. From 1890 until 1908 he ranged South America for the wild strange blooms from which he has grown rare progeny ever since-huge single flowers for debutantes, dowagers and prima donnas; smaller ones for fancy gentlemen; orchids in long sprays, in tiny spidery spikes, some...
...John Lager found the world's rarest orchid in 1908. Of a batch of Cattleya Gigas he had shipped from South America, one astonishingly bloomed Albino. He sold it, the only one ever found, to Baron Firmen Lambeau of Belgium for $10,000. Lambeau managed to propagate it but it is still the world's rarest known orchid...
Rarer still but now unknown was a red Masdevallia orchid powdered with gold. Lager once found a single specimen of it growing high in a South American tree. He searched in vain for more nearby, later found some 500 mi. away. He shipped a lot to the coast where they somehow got sidetracked. In a seaport warehouse they lay until they were dead. No one has yet found any more gold-powdered red orchids like that...
Orchid Man Lager usually hunted alone with native bearers, sending his finds back to his Partner Henry Hurrell, now 78, by muleback, canoe and raft. Once a hostile Indian tribe led him into virgin orchid territory after he had cured a sick child with a dose of patent cough medicine. Another time, looking closely into a new orchid, he met the stare of a deadly little red coral snake. Once he camped on a little island in the great Orinoco River, his orchids all boxed on their rafts for the trip home. Flood, freshets boomed down the river, lifted Lager...