International Speakers Day
A Virtual Experience
October 31, 2020 12:30-5 pm EDT
All speakers live, via Webinar
$30 to Register
All registrants will be entered in a raffle for prizes donated by our sponsors and for memberships/renewals to the Orchid Digest. Non-members will receive a gift year’s membership to the Orchid Digest! Thanks to generous donors, all non-members will receive a complimentary one-year membership in the Orchid Digest. The event will be recorded, and all registrants will receive the next day an email with a link to the recording. So if you cannot stay for the entire day, you can listen to it all when you have the time.
Lourens Grobler, Afri Orchids, Pretoria, South Africa.
My 10 Favorite African Orchids
Lourens has been growing orchids since he was 10 years old and now co-owns Afri Orchids, a nursery that for 40 years has specialized in species from around the world. The collection includes approximately 4,000 species. Laurens is the co-author of the Field Guide to the Orchids of Northern South Africa and Swaziland. He is an accredited South African Orchid Council Judge and chaired the judging committee at the 21st World Orchid Conference.
Andrea Niessen, Orquideas del Valle, Cali, Colombia
Orchids in Nature in Colombia
Andrea Niessen, a native of Cali, Colombia, former virologist and Lifelong orchid-grower, has served as the president of the Asociación Vallecaucana de Orquideologia and judge of the Colombian Orchid Committee. A popular speaker, Andrea has given lectures around the world. With her husband Juan Carlos Uribe, Andrea owns Orquídeas del Valle, an orchid nursery that has been researching, reproducing and exporting Colombian orchids for over 25 years.
Lou Jost, EcoMinga Foundation, Baños, Ecuador
Orchids as Guides to the Conservation of Unique Biodiversity
Lou, an internationally renowned expert in molecular phylogenies, has made significant contributions to the protection of orchids and orchid habitat in the New World Tropics. Originally from the US, Lou was fascinated by tropical diversity, and worked in Mexico and Costa Rica before moving to Ecuador in 1994. He has described a number of new Ecuadorian orchid species, many found in unprotected areas. Lou formed the EcoMinga Foundation in 2006 to build large reserves to protect strategic biodiversity hotspots.
Alek Zaslawski, AWZ Orquídeas, Vitória, Brazil
Beautiful Brazilian Mountains (and the Orchids that Grow There)
Alek, an engineer, grew up surrounded by orchids, and traveled with his father to see and photograph orchids in nature. He joined his father to establish AWZ Orquiídeas in 1991, and they began to reproduce many of the species in their collection because of their rarity and disappearance from the wild. Now with over 20,000 plants from around the world, the nursery has some of the finest known varieties of Cattleya Alliance species.
Sunset Valley Orchids * Ecuagenera * H & R Orchids * Waldor Orchids * The Orchid Inn
Cal-Orchid * Tropical Orchid Farm * Woodstream Orchids * Paph Paradise * Andy’s Orchids * Santa Barbara Orchid Estate