Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 15:29:16 +0800 From: "Gilles LARDY" <g.lardy@faiveley-fareast.com> To: cp@opus.hpl.hp.com Message-Id: <aabcdefg906$foo@default> Subject: Lecoufle auction
Hi all,
Being in Paris for a few days, I decided to go to the beautiful Plant Market
to have a look and get some cultivating material that are not easy to find
here in Hongkong. There I visited the in-town outlet of the famous orchid
grower Lecoufle, who is also known as a CP collector and writer...
The vendor had all the usual dutch cp crappies (some flappy VFTs, D. adelae
and Sarracenia and nep hybrids...), but still had in stock wonderful
sphagnum bricks, vermiculite and grinded tree fern. When I asked him if
Lecoufle greenhouses were still doing CPs, he said "don't you read the
paper, there's an auction in a few weeks...they are gonna sell Lecoufle's
collection plants...but it's not affordable by everybody". Indeed it is not,
having a look at the leaflet presenting the auction I noticed a N.
ventricosa mother plant (displayed in his book as burkei) whose starting
price was 15000FF (=2500US$!!!!!).
Apparently, most of the CP collection has disappeared since just a couple of
big plants were on sale along with a majority of orchids.
Remebering the time five years ago when I foung great cuttings of neps and
sarracenia in their greenhouses, I decided however to have a look to the
greenhouses by myself and took the train to Boissy-St-Leger...
What a surprise to see that the neps hanging over the orchid pallets were
not in really good shape... No cuttings anymore....
Outside were some sarracenias, and D. binata finishing their hibernation
period. When I asked if they had CPs to sell I was redirected to a shelve
with the same supermarket martyrs as in the small shop. Was that a joke ?
It was not, although some of the pictures in his book were not very
accurate, views of his greenhouses made more than one CP beginner dream of
N. veitchii, H. nutans...
But what we find now is an (however excellent) orchid grower that resells
CPs brought from foreign in-vitro flasks, who starts to mislabel its
products (how could you get confused between a mature N. alata and a N.
gracilis....)...
RIP
Gilles from Hk
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