It’s been decades since Dan Krauss was a child who rode his bike to the Toledo Zoo over the summer months to work in the greenhouses.
“I repotted these orchids and they were blooming and they smelled like cinnamon,” the now 75-year-old Ottawa Hills resident said of the memory. “I thought it was the job of a lifetime to be able to repot them.”
Mr. Krauss’ love for orchids never diminished and he spent most of his professional career in the florist business, so it probably wouldn’t be surprising to anyone who knows him that he showed up at the Toledo Zoo’s orchid show over the weekend with his daughter, Tory Schaffer, who also grows orchids.
The Toledo Zoo Orchid Show: Stories and Species of the Victorian Era, which features more than 1,600 orchids whose origins are worldwide, opened Friday and runs through Feb. 23 at the zoo’s ProMedica Museum of Natural History. There will be a public sale of many of the orchids on Feb. 24.
The show is free with zoo admission and the orchids are displayed throughout the museum, giving visitors additional visuals to see among the large-scale sculptures, murals, and live animals and plants that tell the story of Northwest Ohio’s wetlands and ecosystems, created after massive glaciers moved through for the last time more than 13,000 years ago.
“I love orchids and thought it would be a great place to see so many varieties in one place. They are so diverse, and come in so many different colors and varieties, and I love the challenge of getting an orchid to bloom again,” said Roberta Saling, of Tecumseh, Mich., who drove down to the show Sunday with her husband, Charles.
The zoo’s plant display is accompanied by free talks on orchid history and how to grow and care for the plants, along with several hands-on workshops including terrarium building and photography.
Ryan Walsh, the zoo’s conservation coordinator and organizer of the show, said he wants people to enjoy the beauty of the flowers, but also become educated about the orchid’s unique attributes in history.
Orchids grew naturally in tropical locations in Asia, South America, and Australia, and were introduced into European culture in the mid-1800s when someone in England grew one of the plants from materials inside a package he received from South America.
Today, more than 20,000 species of orchids exist in the world, and thousands of orchids can now be cultivated from tissue cultures from a single adult plant’s shoot, Mr. Walsh said.
“That’s why we can go to Home Depot … and get an orchid for about $20,” he said Sunday during a free talk on orchids, in which he also explained their unique reproductive process of sexual deception, a process in which orchids produce flowers that look or smell like female insects, usually bees or wasps, that draws males in to try to mate with the flower.
The zoo itself has a collection of about 100 species of orchids on permanent display in its conservatory. Most only bloom once a year, although some orchid enthusiasts have been able to make it happen more often.
“[My dad] is the only person I know who can get them to re-bloom multiple times. I send mine over to be saved,” Ms. Schaffer said of her personal orchid collection.
First Published February 9, 2020, 11:46 p.m.
