Costa Rica's LANKESTER BOTANICAL GARDEN Tour — Ep. 405

Lancaster Botanic Garden is a 50-year-old botanical gem near Cartago, Costa Rica. Now, I hadn't been to Lancaster Botanical Garden in over seven years, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how much it expanded both its public-facing gardens and floral displays, as well as their greenhouses and state-of-the-art research facilities. With roughly 20,000 orchids in production and over 1,000 different species, it serves as both a critical research center for Costa Rican and Latin American orchids, as well as a spectacular botanic garden with a wide variety of plants for the public to enjoy. Director Adam Karamans walked us through the public-facing exhibits, so we'll take you through that and their extensive botanic gardens. And if you want to go behind the scenes of their private greenhouses and research facilities, then you'll have to sit tight for the next video. I'm Adam Karamans. I am director of the botanical garden, Lancaster Botanical Garden, which is a research center of the University of Costa Rica. We are open to the public every day of the year, and, well, we just turned 50 years old, so... Oh, congratulations! Your anniversary! It was in March. And so the reason that this has a very international name is because Charles Lancaster was an English naturalist that came to Costa Rica to work with coffee. And in Costa Rica, he turned into, as I mentioned, a naturalist and started loving plants in general and bringing different plants from all over the world to this farm at that time. Lancaster became very interested in orchids specifically and started sending orchid material to Kew in London and to Harvard in the U.S. And so that's how this place got the, you know, this history of relationship with orchid research. Right on. And why don't we just take a walk through and you could take us through some of the gardens. So this is 50 years old. How long have you been here? I actually arrived at the garden as a volunteer. Oh, really? Yes, when I was in high school. I was 15 years old when I started as a volunteer here at the garden. Did you live in Costa Rica or...? Yes, I grew up here. Oh, you grew up here, okay. I thought you were Dutch for some reason. I was born in the Netherlands, but I grew up, my family left Holland when I was one year old. Okay, so you practically are Tican. I am Costa Rican, yes. I started as a volunteer. I was very interested in orchids since the very beginning and I'll just, yeah, I built my way up to being the director. Oh, wow. Basically every possible step. Well, good for you. Yeah. I haven't been here for seven years, so you'll have to re-acclimate me to the environment that we're seeing here. This is like really well-maintained botanic garden, but you have more orchids. I remember being in the greenhouses. Do you have kind of also planted in the...? So, yes, we have the garden. You have to imagine that the garden is also a research center and so we have plants that are meant for tourists and we have plants that are meant for research. So our collections, our main collections, are all in greenhouses. They are labeled and they are cared for because we are doing documentation of those plants for research purposes. And we also have a lot of plants outside the greenhouses and those are more, you know, for decoration. Yeah, for oohing and aahing. Exactly. And, of course, also for educational purposes. Right. So this is examples. Like, do you then, whatever is flowering, you bring out here for display or how does that work? One of the main issues that we had when we opened the orchid collection is that most people expect orchids to be in bloom, right, because they're used to going to an exhibit. So they're always used to seeing orchids in bloom, but orchids are blooming only a short period of time per year. And so what we did is instead of allowing people to go into the collections all of the time, what we do is we bring out the orchids that are blooming into this area, which is a permanent exhibit. And so the exhibit is permanent, but none of the orchids here are permanent. They are always changing. We are always bringing plants that are blooming out and putting these back into the collection. Right. You change them out when they're flowering so that people could see the flowers. Exactly. I mean, we were even filming at another orchid place and people are like, where's all the orchids? Because they're not all blooming at once. So that's exactly the issue that we wanted to avoid. Yeah. People regularly expect that when they are going to see orchids, they're going to see flowers. And so what we do is we need to have the plants cultivated somewhere else in order to have them blooming and be able to show them when they're blooming to the visitors. We have accessory greenhouses to constantly be and change the plants that are here. We don't get rid of them. We just move them. Right. And do you specialize in orchids in Costa Rica and or Latin American general, or do you have others as well? So most of our collection is from Costa Rica and we also have a lot of plants from Latin America in general. We have also a few collections from Asia and other parts of the world that we have gotten through exchanges with other botanical gardens. Our biggest collection is Costa Rican orchids. And for example, the three that we're seeing right here are all native Costa Rican orchids. So this is our national flower. Oh, this is, I normally would see this as that color. It's typically purple, but there are white varieties and this is one of those white varieties. Interesting. And we have a combination also of hybrids that are artificially produced, but these three, for example, are native Costa Rican orchids. In fact, the white was one of the candidates to become the national flower as well. And it was at the end, they selected the purple because it was more typical, let's say. But the white is very well known and much sought after. Ah, fascinating. And that's our national flower. Right. This is the one that I'm familiar with most. Exactly. So that's the one. In fact, these are blooming early. We have a big collection of this species and this is very early for this species. Normally it blooms in February or March. How would you classify something like this? Because I used to know these as pleurothallus, but have these been changed over to something different now? It still is a pleurothallus. This one in particular is still a pleurothallus. It just hasn't gotten to the point where they've reclassified it yet? No, no. It's a true pleurothallus, in fact. Many orchids have been moved around into different genera, based mostly on DNA studies. How do you keep up with it? We are mostly the ones doing the changes. There you go. That's how you keep up with it. You're the one that does the changes. Often it's our own fault. We are sorry about that. Yeah. We have to change these all the time. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah. For example, this was transferred from pleurothallus to stellis. Oh, stellis now. Okay. It's our own doing. Now, this is an example of a non-native orchid here, right? Because this is always planted in the landscape, I see it. Right. Arundina or something? It's an Asian orchid that is extremely common in Costa Rica and in most tropical countries. Now it reproduces on its own in Costa Rica. I wouldn't call it invasive because it's not really like it's taking a lot of space or really becoming a problem, but it is now propagating on its own in the country. So, yeah. This whole exhibit, the last time I was here seven years ago, this wasn't here. You have like a little bit of a museum set up. I see what you're doing here. Yes, it is. I really appreciate it. Yes, because otherwise these things get lost in the masses of plants and some of them are very curious. This is a sexually deceptive orchid that is with the lip is mimicking a female bee and the males are copulating with this flower, for example. So there's interesting stories behind many of these orchids. Which one is that one? It's called Tricopilia. Tricopilia. I don't even know that one as a genus. And in fact, in Costa Rica, Tricopilias are very much appreciated. So that's a genus, a scientific name. And there is a brand of sweets called Tricopilia because of that. Does it taste like it? No. That one looks like it's pollinated at night as well. No, that's probably bee pollinated. Oh, bee pollinated, but it's white. It's white, but yeah. After touring the public orchid display house with Adam, we walked through the extensive 27-acre botanic garden, which is home to over 3,000 different species of plants. So we're working on some new group botanical trips. 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