Joined: Jun 27, 2020 Last Active: Oct 8, 2024 iNaturalist
I am a biochemist by training, but spent a lot of time during my childhood hiking the Swiss Alps. My father, a Geologist interested also in plants and reptiles, together with his good friend, a botany professor from Zurich, guided me through the beauty of the area explaining me plants and rocks, and how they interact. The botanist also introduced me to the Orchid family of plants, which has been fascinating me ever since with its amazing variety of shapes, colours, and habitats.
For the past 2.5 years I had been living as an ExPat in CT, and spent a significant amount of my weekends looking for orchids native to the Northeast of the US. The final two months of our stay we then spent on a Road trip across the US, which has been an absolutely fabulous experience. In the meantime I have returned to Europe, to the South Eastern corner of Germany near Austria and my home country. While not as novel to me as the US, there are a lot of interesting Orchids growing along the Alps, also species that I hadn't seen previously in Switzerland.
I would be very happy to be contacted on any of the above and share experiences hunting orchids etc...
I am a member of the Native Orchid Conference, and have published two articles in their journal, one on my confusion on how to properly identify Platanthera species, subspecies/variants, and hybrids: (https://www.nativeorchidconference.org/_files/ugd/8170e0_eabbf1f4f7804db287b32bbc3141a1c5.pdf),
and the other on our road trip through the US:(https://www.nativeorchidconference.org/_files/ugd/8170e0_476d9df645bc405ba58e0b11cb96410d.pdf).