Cattleya orchids from a Taiwanese-run orchid nursery in England won a silver-gilt medal at the annual London Orchid Show held by the Royal Horticultural Society on Saturday.
It is the second-highest honor for orchid breeders at the two-day show, which opened on Friday last week.
The award winner, Chantelle Orchids, is the only breeder from Taiwan taking part in the show.
Photo: CNA
It is the British branch of Hsiang Yu Orchid Nursery, based in Taichung.
Chantelle Orchids operator Shih Hui-feng (施惠鳳) said that British people love gardening, and that orchids are popular among horticulturists.
To show them the orchids bred in Taiwan, she puts on a display of the various species from Taiwan at the show each year, she said.
This year, Shih took a record high of more than 30 Cattleya species, which are rare in the UK, to the event, saying that all the orchids bred at the Chantelle Orchids garden are imported from Taiwan, and their orchids win awards at the show each year.
For this year’s show, Shih presented the Cattleya orchids in flower planters made in Taiwan, for the first time ever.
The new approach prompted both judges and spectators to express the feeling that they had found themselves in a new world, Shih said.
The Cattleya orchid blooms drew the most attention at the venue, with some visitors to the show saying they like the quality of Taiwanese orchids.
Cattleya is a genus of 113 species of orchids found from Costa Rica and the Lesser Antilles all the way to Argentina.
The genus was named in 1824 by John Lindley after William Cattley, who received and was the first to bloom a specimen of Cattleya labiata.
Chantelle Orchids has been running for more than five years in Warwickshire, England, and plans to expand to accommodate more orchid species from Taiwan, Shih said.
Nearly 20 British and foreign orchid nurseries were represented at the show.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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